...from the point of view of our contemplative traditions... and this is to reduce them all down to a cartoon version that ignores the rather esoteric disputes between them... our habitual failure to recognize thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is a primary source of human suffering, and when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available. Now the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone else's contemplative tools to test it. You have to develop your own tools.
Imagine in the science of astronomy, if you couldn't even observe whether there was a phenomenon worth looking at unless you built your own telescope: This would be an immense barrier to establishing astronomy as a science. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of our investigation, but it would be an immense impediment. To judge the claims of contemplatives, we have to build our own telescope. In judging their metaphysical claims and their philosophical claims we can use thought itself: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy on their merits. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible, and if possible, desirable, we have to able to use our own attention in the requisite ways, if only for a few moments.
Now one problem with atheism, it seems to me, as a category of thought, is that it's almost synonymous with not being interested in such phenomena, almost synonymous with not being interested in what the Buddha (or Jesus) may have experienced in his life. It seems to me that many atheists, though perhaps not all, reject such experiences out of hand as being undesirable or impossible. Another common mistake is to imagine that whatever experience these contemplatives have had, they're identical to experiences we're all familiar with -- they're identical to scientific awe or aesthetic appreciation or artistic inspiration. Let me just say as someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, when someone goes into solitude for months or years at a time, and trains himself in meditation for fifteen to eighteen hours a day, doing nothing but observe the contents of his own consciousness and try not to be lost in thought: not reading, not writing, not talking, just making an effort moment to moment to pay undivided attention to the arising of thought and the arising of sensory experience, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not familiar with, unless they've made the identical introspective efforts. And these experiences have something to say about the plasticity of human experience itself and the possibilities of human happiness. So apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I want to say that our neglect of these phenomena as atheists puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them. And these experiences are often the most important and transformative in their lives. And if we by definition ignore them because of their entanglement with religion, we appear less wise than even our crazy religious opponents.
Now, I don't know if, as J. B. S. Haldane said, the universe is not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose, but I'm pretty sure that it is stranger than we as atheists, tend to represent while advocating atheism. I mean, as atheists we tend to give people the sense, and even give ourselves the sense, that we are well on the way to purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know mystery is going to be with us for quite some time. In fact there are good reasons to believe that mystery may be inerradicable from our circumstance. Because however much we understand the universe, it seems there might well always be brute facts which we can't explain, but which we must use to explain everything else. Now, this is not a problem for human life. It is not a barrier to human happiness. But we are faced with the task of convincing a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that you don't have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with iron-age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don't think there's any intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts. But it seems to me that we should not, in this effort, fight in well-ordered ranks like the red coats of atheism.
It's worth thinking about what victory will look like. Again, the example of racism seems instructive to me. What will it look like when we finally conquer the evil of racism, should that happy day ever dawn? It's certainly not going to be a world in which a majority of people profess themselves to be nonracist. It will very likely be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning. I think if we win this war of ideas with religion, we will find ourselves in world in which the concept of atheism is nonintelligible. It'll be a concept like non-astrology. Now I think this is absolutely worth fighting for. I think in fact this may be the only future compatible with our survival as a species, and this'll be a world where people simply cease to praise one another for believing things, or pretending to believe things, for which they have no evidence. But the only path between now and then, that I can see, is for us to be unremittingly honest, and to advocate intellectual honesty. It seems to me that intellectual honesty will always be more durable and deeper and more easily spread, than atheism. Thank you very much.
Long but worth the watch;
BTW 'Buddha' translates as 'thought'
