"Build your own telescope" (Sam Harris)

[kogi]

The Problem with Atheism

This is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007.

(un texte sur lequel je viens de tomber par hasard via le forum JREF, via Google à propos d'un mail reçu pour une formation aux "Applications of Quantum Mechanics in Psychology, Neurologic and Psychiatric Sciences")

[kogi]

J'ai envie de citer quelques passages qui m'ont vraiment interpelé, entre Lao-Tseu, le Dalai-Lama et moi (carrément ). Je dois dire que je suis un peu surpris (euphémisme), et dans le bon sens, d'avoir lu ces mots écrits de la plume d'un new atheist comme il se présente lui-même, je ne connaissais que quelques saillies de Richard Dawkins dont certaines m'avaient carrément fait froid dans le dos --le célèbre « what if I'm wrong » en particulier. Vivre avec L'dieu ou sans, chacun fait comme il veut à condition de laisser l'autre faire de même. M'enfin c'est ce que j'en dis, moi. Alors je suis pas tout à fait convaincu (euphémisme) par l'idée d'une réponse prosélyte extrême aux prosélytismes extrémistes. Plutôt pour la liberté de pensée et la cohabitation pacifique, moi.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

J'abonde à 200%, c'est vrai non pas sur l'athéisme et le scepticisme en particulier, mais plus largement sur tout ce qui finit en "-isme" : c'est complètement différent de juste se coller une simple étiquette, rapidement superficielle et vide de sens, ou bien de réinterpréter, quasiment au sens théâtral du mot, sa définition à chaque instant. À mon sens ça fait un bel écho au premier aphorisme de La Voie et sa vertu, de Lao-Tseu : « Le nom qu'on saurait nommer, n'est pas le nom pour toujours. »

Well, rather than declare ourselves "atheists" in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in general.

« There is no religion in general »... Je trouve ceci d'une justesse !! Ranger le bulldozer au garage et sortir le sécateur.

[For] thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.

No comment, selon lui « il y a un choix à faire ». Il s'agit d'un choix, d'un choix. Clin d'oeil Ildefonse.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Comment faire un autre constat ?

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

Là c'est carrément incroyable... J'ai l'impression de lire un statut du Dalai-Lama sur FaceBook !! Ça me laisse sans voix. Il n'y a donc pas que des "mangeurs de moines" chez les athéistes, euh pardon, chez « les gens décents, responsables, qui détruisent les mauvaises idées partout où ils les trouvent. »

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

C'est moi qui surligne. Clin d'oeil Jean-François.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

Voilà qui explique certainement la portée parfois dalai-lamesque des propos du bonhomme. Ça me donne envie de m'y remettre.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

No comment. « Notre négligence de ce domaine de l'expérience humaine nous met dans une situation rhétoriquement désavantageuse. »

[Denis]

Salut kogi,

Je n'ai rien contre la méditation introspective. Se mettre le mental proche de "off", de temps en temps, ce n'est pas une mauvaise idée.

Des fois j'envie les vaches qui ruminent dans les prés et qui, je suppose, sont presque toujours dans cet état.

Je le dis au premier degré, je t'assure.

La méditation n'est pas dans la liste des thèmes canoniques du forum. "Éprouver sa propre existence" n'y est pas non plus.

Et Dieu n'y paraît que via la liste des attributs que certains tordus lui accolent (bonté, volonté, intelligence, politesse, etc.) et via La Parole de Dieu.

Je n'ai rien contre l'idée d'un Dieu bouche-trou sans attributs, ni parole révélée.

Denis