Talking Naturally ala Tom Flynn

by Gary Berg-Cross

The 50+ lucky people who attended Tom Flynn spirited, no animated talk at WASH recently got something extra and above his spirited, no energetic talk about ""A Radical View on Church and State." (That was about the possibility & value of a "naked public square."

We also got a nice cheat sheet handout on Tom Flynn's "95 Ways Not To Say Spirit."  It's about fictional concepts, in this case from the spirit way of thinking.

Tired of expressions like, "the flag stands for the spirit of the US"? Tom sure is and has provided some help. It's in the spirit ,well approach, of handling the emotional & biases language of spirited, well heated conversations. 

 One thinks of J. Bentham's most famous remark regarding fictions:"To language, then -to language alone- it is that fictitious entities owe their existence; their impossible, yet indispensable existence." 

A workable solution is to replace all fictions & value judgments in the conversation with neutral or grounded terms.
For example, if some claims that someone in a political debate is lying replace 'lies' with 'claims'.  It there is a claim that pols are robbing us, then replace 'rob' with 'tax'.

For those not attending you can see the basic idea of removing the S-word from the conversation in Tom's much earlier article in Free Inquiry.  This is from the  Summer of 2002 which divides the "spirit" idea into broad categories of meaning and then applies secular concepts to these.

So if you missed the talk and have lost track of your 2002 copies of Free Inquiry & want to start your new year filling in secular concept-words for the old ghostly spirit world inspired one, here is something you can use.

A start is the meaning of spirit as life as in:

‟Spirit” in the sense of LIFE has these synonyms: animation, consciousness, dash, energy, essence, feeling, spark, vitality, vivacity

Similar to the Life-Spirit idea is the use in the sense of NATURE: character, drift (as in; ‟You get my drift”), essence, gist, quintessence, substance

Spirit is used here and elsewhere a bit like the idea of a soul as if we can attribute human life to an inhabiting supernatural vapor-like soul..  For a critique of the soul idea see Julien Musolino's "The Soul Fallacy" book & also my blog on his Lecture

Spirit” in the sense of VIGOR, as in "I admired her spirit" has alternatives of: ardor, enthusiasm, gusto, liveliness, resolution, spunk, zeal

Obviously a word like "liveliness" is also somewhat in the Life sense too, but we get the idea.  I can go for this substitution with gusto.
‟Spirit” in the sense of COURAGE ("I like John Wayne's spirit."): audacity, dauntlessness, determination, firmness, fortitude, resolve, steadfastness, tenacity

Some folks that I know have a brave/courageous psyche and are lively too.  For the new year putting some of these together to describe a person seems like a good step to take.  Of course we may be talking about the nature of a person who is cowardly, anxious and fearful.  These seem to be more the spirit of some people now a days, but I digress unless we are talking about ‟Spirit” in the sense of MOOD as in, "Her spirits were low."

We can substitute for spirit the words attitude, disposition, feeling, frame of mind, humor, temper, tenor.

‟Spirit” in the sense of THE SUBLIME has the longest Tom-List which goes like this: 

admirable, affecting, amazing, astonishing, attractive, charming, dazzling, elegant, elevated, enticing, excellent, exciting, exquisite, grand, harmonious, imposing, impressive, inspiring, lofty, magnificent, majestic, marvelous, matchless, moving, noble, outstanding, overwhelming, peerless, piquant, poignant, provoking, radiant, resplendent, seductive, sensual, sparkling, splendid, stately, stimulating, stirring, stupefying, superb, thrilling, touching, unsurpassed, venerable, virtuous, wonderful, wondrous

All of the above may help get us a bit away from the supernatural slipping into conversations the way it had been ensconced in the Pledge. It is all part of a lazy language with old metaphors envisioning extra natural Life Forces or Spiritual Energy flowing through the body as a basis for the body's natural self-healing ability. As Tom says, its time to put such ideas on the shelf along with obsolete notions like the pervasive ether and phlogiston.

Notes on Julien Musolino's "The Soul Fallacy" Lecture

by Gary Berg-Cross

Dr. Julien Musolino,  a Franco-American cognitive scientist, was one of the speakers at the recent WASHCON15. These are some notes (and pictures) from his talk. 

Julien is an author, and associate professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he holds a dual appointment in the Psychology Department and the Center for Cognitive Science.  Born and raised in France, Julien studied at the University of Geneva, in neighboring Switzerland, the University of North Wales, Bangor, in the United Kingdom, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania.

His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and some of this is captured in his recent book:

•The Soul Fallacy: Applied Sentience Interview with Rutgers Professor Julien Musolino

•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39in90DPj_0

Dualism is obviously an old belief and deeply embedded in old philosophies and common sense language.   It's a perennial topic but not often critically addressed. (But see Lives Without Selves: Owen Flanagan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POXTdHTKTL0 for some philosophical discussion on the nature of person.) 

But combining Self, aka Soul, as distinct from the body but interacting with it raises lots of questions, at least from a scientific point of view.  For example, there’s the problem of how something “immaterial” could interact with matter to produce results (the “psychological potency”idea that the soul influences how we act.).

We can ask Why isn’t belief in various gods, considered delusional? We do have some diagnostic categories for these types of things and what have been described as "visions" may just be hallucinations.  Professionals may think about this, but it is atouchy subject with the layman and invested religious professionals.  "Was Moses hallucinating?" is not a good topic in a temple, church or mosque.

As Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz observe in their book “The Soul Hypothesis,” “Most people, at most times, in most places, at most ages have believed that human beings have some kind of soul.” And the National Pew surveys suggest that belief in immortality is about 70%
It is clear that this hypothesis or "intuition" also plays a central role in most religious doctrines.  after all Pope John Paul II famously articulated the idea in a message delivered to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, in which the Holy Father declared that the human body might originate from preexisting living matter, but the spiritual soul is a direct creation of God.

Further, explaining the mind as a product of evolution, claimed the pope, was incompatible with the truth about man.

But Julien argues that the soul is a scientific claim in that it is an existence and influence claims. 

“Belief in an immaterial, psychologically potent, and detachable soul that can function apart from the body after we die amounts to a series of claims about physics, biology and the sciences of the mind,” 

This claim that can be investigated using the tools and methods of rational inquiry and science gives us every reason to believe that humans don’t have souls. It's one of those soul-in-the-gaps problems where things previously attributed to soul turn out to be explainable by brain science, Physics and the like.

For more on this come to the the WASH MDC meeting held in the Wheaton Library (11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD), Saturday, Oct 17th (10:45-12:45) where this and other topics from the WASHCon15 meeting will be discussed. 

As time permits we will provide updated information on Reason Rally 2016 planned for June, 4, 2016 as provided us by Sarah Morehead at the conference. Snapshots also from talks by Andy Thomson (Happiness in a Secular World), Ron Lindsay (The Necessity of Secularism) Jason Heap, Justus Cade (Are SAtheists hurting Humanism) and more.

See http://www.meetup.com/humanism-218/events/225993201/ for more details.

BTW, Julien now does twitter @JulienMusolino

For example:

Julien Musolino ‏@JulienMusolino  Oct 9

Found this (Bible) in my hotel. Returned it to the front desk. Next time I'll request a non-smoking and non-religious room. 

Wrestling with Spiritual Concepts

By Gary Berg-Cross

Spirituality and religion are often conflated. In conversation there are terms like “soul” that gets used in each, but some freethinkers are bit more comfortable believing in some spiritual concepts than religious ones like god. This was recently discussed as part of a movement from religion to a non-god spirtual realm by the Nones.  Spirituality lacks a definitive definition, but the general idea is that it is a realm of existence set apart from the ordinary (think - the natural world as shown by science) and worthy of special attention. That is, more attention should be given to these special, transcendent ideas than the mundane, material world that science gives us. In a word spirituality leads us into a supernatural realm.

As the Wikipedia entry suggests, religion and spirituality were largely synonymous for a long time. But in about the 11th century this identity began to break. Spirituality began to denote the mental aspect of life, in between the material and sensual aspects of life and pure spirit. In other words a socio-psychological distinction began to be part of "spirituality" and indeed it might be considered the more foundational piece to explain religion. William Irwin Thompson puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

 "Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather religion is the form spirituality takes in civilization."

Sure, if we can agree on what those elements of spirituality are and that religion is a construct. 

One may follow this growing distinction through the Enlightenment and into 20^th century thinking as Psychology grew as a science and discussed spirituality in more scientific ways.

After World War II spirituality & religion were further distanced as more ideas on the nature of spirituality arose.  New humanistic discourse developed, which including things like existentialism, humanist psychology, but also the import of mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions such as Buddhism. Quite a blend of efforts to talk about topics like the true self, true life, free expression, mindfulness and meditation.

I find this a bit of a strange stew and while some of the common language of spirituality is now a distance from religious dogma, it can seem arbitrary and unscientific in the hands of layman but also the spiritually inclined. It provides perhaps too much of an easy frame to experiences and thus may hinder deeper understanding. Take the idea of soul.  We can use it as shorthand for some inner complexity. We might agree that Morgan Freeman has great "soul."  But I might think of that not as some indwelling spirit, but as great presence, a calm confidence etc.  It might be OK to use the soul-shorthand, for some open discussions. Sloppy use may mislead at times. An example is a new (killer) phone App called GPS for the Soul.  What is that about - some higher level of being?  No it uses the phone to monitor "stress" levels.  How?  It measures your pulse. Here we have the physical pulse standing in as a proxy for a mental concept of stress/good living, but labeled for the soul.  Discuss children.

And all too often we start to jump from a simple word sense to a huge image via a false analogy. Consider this one about soul that uses an image of life as if we’re all at a swimming pool, with the water in the pool standing in for a Pool of Spiritual Understanding. Some are fully in the pool and exhibit a large, spiritual soul, while others are along the sides of the pool, are just dangling their feet in, and still others are sitting out of the pool on the lounge chairs, just watching and listening. Horror! Explaining complex phenomena with untestable hunches is the slippery slope of spiritual concepts that frightens me.

Giving spirit the central role is to imply that we are NOT human beings on a spiritual journey, but instead, we are spiritual beings who just happen to be on a human journey. This idea of primary spiritual beings pulls us back to this early idea of a spiritual source of life, the breath of god, for example.  We started to break away from this idea centuries ago, but keep getting tripped up in sloppy thinking and trapped in vague terms that remain in the culture like "soul".

Sure there is great mystery in the mind, and some oceanic experience of some unexplained connection to a larger reality greater than oneself, but we should not allow loose talk to cloud our understanding or explain away phenomena that we still don’t understand by labeling them too readily and believing that we are really having a meaningful conversations using them. Here I’m thinking of phrases like spirituality as a way of life, an inner path, inner peace or the overuse of the terms love, wisdom, virtue & tolerance. We see language examples from people like Deepak Chopra:

"...we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention."   Deepak Chopra 

 We may all agree on the importance and great value of concepts like love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, responsibility, harmony, and a concern for others, but are these spiritual concepts or better framed of as part of our humanity and psychology?  Give me good scientific studies of selfishness and altruism and I see the Enlightenment still progressively at work.  

Biology is the science that studies life, but nobody has a precise, general definition of life. We are still learning about the subject but I don't speak in terms of life vitality or design rather than evolution.  We do make progress by making careful and empirical distinctions even in everyday life with our common sense vocabulary to describe our experience. To paraphrase Elbert Hubbard - the spiritual (aka supernatural) is the natural not yet understood.

Talk about it in vague Buddhist terms (harmony & order etc.) and I see a good conversation but little progress. Worse yet, perhaps, is to collapse too easily into a mysterious belief that there are things unknowable or that can’t be expressed in some form of language.  There may be some, since we are cognitively limited, but I think we are not close to practical limits and do not yet want to cede a large territory to something vaguely reifiied and called spirituality.

 Some see spirituality in everything, and want to "walk in the spirit." As a reaction against naive materialism, I may have sympathy for this. But I prefer to try the path via sciences like Psychology. It's a surer path to where we'd like to go and makes for interesting conversation along the empirical way.

 Images

Mindfulness: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-mark-vernon

Bridging The Gap Between Psychology And Meditation: http://dailyheal.com/meditation-news/bridging-the-gap-between-psychology-and-meditation/

Mind control: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cultivare/2013/07/relax-neuroscience-is-not-going-to-destroy-your-faith/