Psychedelic Dogma

Please note: This initial post is significanlty ammended by the discussion with Pinchbeck and others below, and is further continued here. Daniel and I even hung out a bit, so please keep this first go at engagment in perspective.

Every once in a while, not without a good deal of caution, one might sample the Zeitgeist straight up - unfiltered through church or academia - if only to see how Christianity measures up. And so it was that in exploring the Chelsea gallery scene last Saturday night I came across one of the packed lectures at a Manhattan art gallery known as the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. For $20 you too can get a first hand account of whatever became of the Sixties. The lecture involved modern day shaman/artist Alex Grey interviewing Daniel Pinchbeck. Dreadlock camoflauge, I should add, certainly facilitates on such occasions the role of Christian spy. Continue...

Pinchbeck is of impressive counter-culture stock. His mom dated Jack Kerouac, his dad was a Beat as well. He made his way in the literary world, but after disillusionment with materialism, spurred by an existential crisis, Pinchbeck did what any normal person would do: Pray. I'm sorry... I mean regress to the his college drug phase and go to Gabon to get rubbed down with red paint and marched into a river by natives who can initiate him into the shaman realm. The trips continued in every sense of the word until Pinchbeck became a new generation's Timothy Leary, our very own psychedelic guru, author of Breaking Open the Head and most recenlty 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

I was almost an hour late, but that's okay, so was Pinchbeck. Maybe this was a consequence of the shamanistic idea of time he often referenced throughout the evening, which is so much more interesting that our western constructs. The interview was conducted with an LCD projector flahing LSD inspired images across both speakers, perhaps to keep the, shall we say, less "focused" members of the audience enthralled. At one point in the converstaion we were told by Alex Grey, quoting philosopher/guru Ken Wilbur, that the reason traditional religion fails is because it debates the myths of dogma. Religion is all about belief, you see, and that's its problem. Call me crazy, (you're crazy millinerd!) but while listening to the interview I seem to have detected a strand of belief, or, to use the term Pinchbeck insists on in his response to criticisms: "hypotheses."

I tried to piece together this druggie doctrine, or to be more courteous, the psychedelic catechism, below. Should you wish to follow along, prepare to be convinced of G.K. Chesterton's dictum that those who stop believing in God will not believe in nothing, but anything.

1. Sacraments: Of course in the pschedelic creed, drugs come first. But LSD is so 1967. Now there's dimethyltryptamine, otherwise known as DMT, nicknamed "Direct Magical Transport." It is the most powerful pschoactive substance available, and according to Pinchbeck is "the doorway you can step through to greet the beings who run the cosmic candy store." Alex Grey was quick to buffer the conversation when it led in this direction. Grey assured us that he can handle entheogens, but others aren't so fortunate, whether they be those who make their home in Bellevue's mental health wing, or some of Pinchbecks less stable colleagues. One knows a movement is out there when even Rolling Stone applies the brakes. "Two followers who posted frequently on Pinchbeck's online discussion board - both of whom made pilgrimages to New York to meet him - committed suicide in the past few years." And those are the ones we know about.

2. Origins: But such costs are worth it because, simply put, drugs are everything. Civilization, both East and West, are founded on entheogens. Alex Grey regurgitated standard (if unprovable) counter-culture wisdom that Plato and Aristotle must have been trippin' in the Eleusinian mysteries, for how else could they have been so bright? Even the computer chip, we were informed by an enthusiastic audience member, can be traced to a drug hallucination. In fact, according to Terrence McKenna, the entire human race goes back to shroomin'. In short, everything of significance can be traced to a trip.

3. Fall: After origins, the psychedelic metanarrative even has its own version of Genesis 3. Religion and government alienate us from nature and suppress the third eye with things like witch-hunts and repressive drug laws. As Terrance McKenna's said in 1983,

"Ignorance forced the mushroom cult into hiding. Ignorance burned the libraries of the Hellenistic world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge, shattering the stellar and astronomical machinery that had been the work of centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition."

That McKenna's ideas are alive and well in Pinchbeck was illustrated when someone asked Pinchbeck about Santo Daime, the bizarre Brazilian blend of psychedelics with aspects of Catholicism. You'd think this might be an acceptable brand of Christianity for this crowd, but - wait for it... Even Santo Daime is too attached to traditional faith to be permissible. "I agree with Mao Tse Tung, religion is poison," announced Pinchbeck. Yet he was very proud of himself for having moved a bit past his prejudices to learn from the traditional-tainted faith enough to go a trippin' with them in Brazil.

Certainly frequent trippers would not be prone to paranoia, but in a recent blog post, he explains that with the next terroist attack "the Christian right could be planning to seize power," leading to "'punishment, detention and quarantining' of groups that they find objectionable." Sounds a bit more like the policies of Mao whom Pinchbeck quotes approvingly, but nevermind.

4. Aliens: Make no mistake, the drug culture is not about mere internal exploration. "Some would insist that these messages come from your own psyche," says Pinchbeck referring to psychoactivated communiques, but "I think it is possible that they come from another reality or, perhaps, a higher dimension." Pinchbeck related - with a straight face - how aliens revealed to a tripping Terrance McKenna that they are spores on meteors who travel to given planets and wait for life to evolve to the point where they can unite with them. Psychedelics just speed up the process, and Pinchbeck is very close indeed. "In the netherworlds of psychedelic domains," continues Rolling Stone, Pinchbeck

"claims to have met elves and goblins and eventually aliens, who assured him that they were not figments of his imagination but part of an 'entire sentient system' in the 'self-weaving cosmological firmament.'"

5. Eschatology: Soon Pinchbeck began to talk about the end. Indeed the word apocalypse was used, and the crowd really began to respond. The photographer of the event couldn't help himself, and chimed in with the suggestion that all the gods and goddesses are sure to "show up for the party." Is there a date? You betchya. Pinchbeck was keen to point out that he didn't want to get too hung up on details, "cause who knows?"... But mark your calendars folks: Quetzlcoatl is returning on December 21st, 2012, the last day of the Mayan calendar. No surprise ther, for in his book Pinchbeck tells us that this date was a transmission from God (who appeared in the form of Quetzalcoatl) to Pinchbeck, our hipster-prohphet-shaman whose tribe may just be "the whole human race." There's even a "Left Behind" aspect to the narrative.

"According to Pinchbeck, not everyone will be saved in 2012 - only the psychedelic elite and those who have reached a kind of supramental consciousness will make it through the bottleneck at the end of time. Or perhaps they can save the planet before the collapse of our socioeconomic system in about 2008, in which case they will transmit good vibrations to the rest of us, who will be saved too" (RS).

What was most disturbing about the evening was when the crowd pressed Pinchbeck for the admission that the end was near, and when he conceeded, there arose a stirring round of applause. No surprise there, because Pinchbeck also peppered the evening with several remarks about our disgusting society, and invoked the standard Leftist litany of condemnations - even Al Gore was excoriated. Why? Well because he ran with Joe Lieberman of course, who I assume, is too close to traditional religion.

The Mayans were the heroes of the evening, which is a bit scary, recalling what happened last time shamans ruled the Americas. Fortunately we have little reason to worry that the new psychedelic elite is going to capture the channels of political leadership, so no human sacrifices just yet. But the place was packed, and the gods and goddesses were frequently and unironically referenced (we learned that Chartres was not a Christian cathedral but a temple to the divine feminine). So be it noted that neo-paganism is alive and well in these United States.

It would be a mistake to to dismiss Grey and Pinchbeck as simply crazy. I assure you there were many very crazy people in the audience, but Grey and Pinchbeck are articulate, well-educated and intelligent. It is not that their experiences are illusions. They may be real - and because of that, only full-blooded Christianity that is all the more real can contend with with these relatively new competitors in the contest for hearts and minds that a democratic culture permits. Only real dogma - real claim on the nature of reality (which is after all what doctrine is) - can overcome psychedelic dogma, and only real spiritual (not political) authority can free people from the bondage that psychedelic culture so ingeniously conceals. I wonder if American Christianity has what it takes. If Philip Jenkins is right, at least African Christianity is more than equipped to handle the Pandora's box that Pinchbeck had to go to Gabon to open.

On the positive side, the phobia these figures have toward Christianity is only further assurance to me that the power of Christ is actual, for only Christ embodies the illusive physical/spiritual unity towards which Pinchbeck and his cohort tirelessly aspire; and whatever beings the psychedelic elite seem to be encountering - be they figments of the imagination or not - Christ rules them. In sum, what a sad and strange assurance to one's faith to see the maddening lengths to which people will go to replace it.

Lent Launch

Though not original to me, here is some of the Lent flavored wisdom that Diogenes Allen continues to dispense in his work as a priest associate at our church:

1. American Christianity is like a massive lake that's miles wide and an inch deep.
2. A tell-tale sign of this condition is when someone loses their faith after they encounter suffering, a response which is also the shadow-side of the prosperity gospel.
3. Persistence of faith through suffering and furthermore, the desire for justice, are some signs of Christian maturity.
4. "Justice" however is a frightening thing that most people approach too glibly. If we really knew what it was we probably wouldn't want it. It does not mean merely getting our piece of the pie.
5. Immanuel Kant's Three Critiques are an echo of Medieval Scriptural interpretation methods, which, simply put, sought to ask three questions of each passage: What should I believe (allegorical method/Critique of Pure Reason)?; What should I do (tropological method/Critique of Practical Reason)?; and What can I hope for? (anagogical method/Critique of Judgment)? Kant however, didn't quite realize this.

It all reminds me of a fine Lenten book.

It is a strong millinerdian tradition to, each year, unveil the truth about Valentines Day. Enjoy.

Psychologizing Atheism

When I first came to Princeton I worked at a coffee shop, where the village atheist (of which there are a few), explained to me over the whir of the milk frother, that my faith was something that could be fixed. With the proper counseling, he repeated week after week, I could be made to see that it was all a psychologically motivated illusion. But couldn't, I wondered, the same be said of him? With the proper counseling, couldn't he be made to see that his atheism was a mere illusion that could be psychologically explained?

It was just a thought though. Never would I have expected that an NYU-tenured experimental psychologist would venture to verify the theory, as Paul Vitz does in this talk, expanded upon in the above book. Socialization-theory may claim to explain away religion, Vitz admits, but it can also ably explain its abandonment by upwardly mobile individuals seeking to get ahead in a secularized society. Freud's Oedipus complex, Vitz relates, does a much better job of explaining why someone would be an atheist (projected patricide) than a believer. Then come the atheist case-studies:

1. David Hume's father died when he was two.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer's father committed suicide when Arthur was sixteen.
3. Ludwig Feuerbach's father left the family to live with another woman when Ludwig was just thirteen.
4. Sigmund Freud's father was a coward and sexual pervert who was a painful embarassment to the family.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche's father died when he was four.
6. Jean Paul Sartre's dad died before Jean Paul was two.
7. Albert Camus' dad died just before Albert was born.
8. Russell Baker's father died when Russell was five.
9. Madalyn Murray O'Hair tried to kill her father with a kitchen knife.
10. Albert Ellis' father abandoned the family early on.

And those are just the famous cases. Vitz complements such accounts with other powerful examples culled from his experience as a prominent psychologist. He understands that ad hominem arguments are not arguments, but also that the above pattern is difficult to ignore. He refuses to generalize, his tone is professional, and most importantly in such sensitive cases, compassionate.

I thought I'd check the theory out, and wouldn't you know, Daniel Dennet (the Snark hunter) fits the bill. Not that one needs to go there to dismantle his ideas, but his father died in an unexplained plane crash when Daniel was five years old.

The God Delusion Delusion

Maybe the Nobel Prize went to his head. By the end of his career, Erwin Schrödinger, one of the most accomplished scientists of the last century, started saying science had, well, boundaries:

"I'm very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient.. gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all that is really important to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight, it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God or eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we're not inclined to take them seriously"

That quote is listed here (or if you prefer audio here), along with other scientists who understand the limits to their expertise.

But still, walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, and there it is - the shiny silver book that claims to disprove God. But simply put, intelligent people are failing to take The God Delusion seriously. So I'd better post about it again before it becomes as dated as peg-leg jeans

Not that I would disregard my earlier advice, that religious people shouldn't bother themselves with debunking Dawkins. This of course because people with no overt claim to faith seem to be doing a fine job of it already. First professional Marxist Terry Eagleton went to town at the London Review of Books. Now biologist H. Allan Orr over at Fundamentalist Christian Weekly, I'm sorry, I mean the New York Review of Books does the same: Continue...

"Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow... The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote.

One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's determined to arrive.

...the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging - as when Dawkins asks 'who designed the designer?' - cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?

...though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.

The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry...

...the result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).

...his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced - religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence - with atheism as theory. Fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.

The God Delusion is not itself a work of either evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking."

Well it is silver though. And shiny! Maybe I should end on a positive note. Said R.R. Reno, "Give me the ardent atheism of Richard Dawkins any day over the pseudo-mystery and easy spiritualism of Paul Tillich."