Spirituality and Anecdotal Evidence

A person who's had spiritual experiences and tells people about them is typically met with attack. There are some people who define reality as what can be proven. By that standard nothing is real because nothing can be proven to everyone (try proving something to a person with brain damage or to a person who thinks that dinosaur bones are there to test people's faith in the Biblical worldview). Reality however is not what can be proven; it exists regardless of people's opinions about it. Reality is not rightly defined as what can be proven but rather as something that exists, whatever people's views about it may be.

The scientific approach does not accept anecdotal evidence. But what is anecdotal evidence? It is someone's stated experience. The things that somebody has experienced would be seen as anecdotal, but it does not make them any less real. Something is not made not real because it didn't happen in a lab. It may not be enough for a scientist; it is enough for the person to whom it has happened.

One fad, which names itself skepticism but is more correctly named bullying, has been to discredit the people reporting spiritual experiences. This has resulted in abuse - in many cases severe abuse. That is an inevitable result of such attitudes. You think that nothing spiritual can exist, you think that the people reporting spiritual experiences are crazy or stupid, you become an abuser against them. It is a logical outcome of the underlying belief.

And yet spiritual experiences continue to exist, as they have always existed. The real issue is figuring out what they mean. Some claim these things to be proof of Christianity or Islam; others claim them to mean any number of other things. Genuine scientific inquiry into this matter is necessary in order to provide a solid contextual framework that is required to actually understand the forces involved. Otherwise people who have spiritual experiences will leave rationality altogether and will join entities like the Christian Right that militate against science as such.

The biggest difference between the skeptic and the scientist is that the scientist actually bothers to investigate things, whereas the skeptic does not. There are any number of real scientists who have either had or observed others having spiritual experiences, and I am acquainted with a highly accomplished scientist who has both personal and academic knowledge on this matter. Real scientists are also open-minded and are less likely to dismiss things without investigating. Finally no real scientist uses the ad-hominem fallacy that is the meat and potatoes of the abusers' modus operandi.

One is not made a credophile by having spiritual experiences, nor is one made by them a conman, a psychotic or an idiot. For most history most people believed in something spiritual or other - indeed that also is the case now - and it is arrogance and stupidity to claim that all of these people are delusionary or dumb. In the traditional societies, the smartest people became shamans. These were in no way stupid people, and much of what they came up with has benefit even in the contemporary society.

As does what comes from contemporaries who likewise have had spiritual experiences or been availed of one or another spiritual truth.

The abusive "skeptics" are the biggest problem on this matter; but there are also problems in the academia. It is extremely hard to get funding for research into spiritual and telepathic experiences, and then there's the claim that "an extraordinary claim requires an extraordinary level of proof." For the life of me I see nothing extraordinary at all about something that most people believe in. It is extraordinary to the materialist fundamentalist; it is not extraordinary to most people in the world.

Is science wrong? Absolutely not; but bigotry is. And what we see with attacks on the people who have spiritual experiences is bigotry. These attackers haven't had spiritual experiences themselves and don't know what they are talking about. That something hasn't happened to you doesn't mean that it hasn't happened to anyone else.

Another line of attacks comes from people who think that spiritual experience is of the Satan. By that standard, every Hindu, every Muslim, every Buddhist, every Jew, every secular person, who does not name Jesus his lord and savior, is of the Satan and is hell-bound. And that leaves one in a very large and distinguished company. Most spiritual experiences that transpire do so outside of the Christian framework; and among Christians themselves we also see some having spiritual experience and others not having spiritual experience - not at a visibly lesser or greater rate than among non-Christians. Is Satan really so strong as to delude the vast bulk of humanity - and God so weak as to allow him to do that? I think not. Whoever is the author of these experiences, it's not Satan; any more than are the dinosaur bones there in order to test people's faith.

The person who has spiritual experiences has to sail between the Scylla of ignorance and the Charybdis of intolerance - between materialist fundamentalists who deny spirituality altogether and the Christian Right who take it into a toxic place. As a result, it is a difficult place to inhabit. However the more real knowledge is accumulated about such matters, the more is there to make that life bearable and productive. The more this is done, the more humanity stands to benefit from the people who have spiritual experiences and the better will be the lot of humanity.