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Religion versus Atheism - it's all in the mind

The divide between religion and atheism is one that is becoming increasingly prominent in today's world, and also one that often appears to be absolutely irreconcilable. However, an under-the-surface look reveals that the chasm between these two positions is largely a result of our overreliance on our mental faculties, and that many staunch athiests and religious conservatives are more alike than either would care to admit.

There is a part of very human being that craves some kind of organising principle to make sense of the world. The Western world has always held the mind to be the most developed part of our being, and so this organising principle tends to get formulated on a mental level, accompanied by a constant search for justifications and arguments to back that position up. Personality psychologists have detailed the process of how we form a narrative of self-constructs which we idify with as being 'us' (including belief in or lack of belief in God). George Kelley, pioneer of this 'personal construct' school of thought, wrote "Man looks at his world through transparent templates which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed." Kelley also noticed how these constructs often have a dichotomous nature - the nature of the mind is to dwell on extremes, and being "for" something often means you are "against" something else (indeed, it might be argued that the "against" forms a much more potent part of people's constructs than the "for").

Over time we are too attached to these constructs to change them if they happen to conflict with reality, and we get incredibly defensive if someone else challenges them, because we do not want to undergo the painful process of changing our view of the world: "Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself" wrote Carl Rogers, another pioneer in the field of personality theory. Most of the arguments between athiests and religious people are characterised by this rigidity, and people on both sites often respond extremely defensively to any percieved criticism because they feel that their very sense of self is being threatened.

However, if one were truly to approach the issue of the existence or non-existence of God from the purely mental level, then the only conclusion you could reach is to be an agnostic. God is certainly not something that can be rationalised or argued into existence, as the pale attempts of Western philosophers down the centuries dramatically show. However, on the other hand, atheist attempts to mentally hammer the last nails in God's coffin invariably have a 'straw man' feel to them, attacking a caricature of God as some kind of overseeing dictator which many God-believers simply do not recognise from their experience. On the mental plane, there is simply no clinching evidence one way or another - the human mind is certainly useful in many fields, but not in this one, it appears.

The key to resolving this dilemma, in fact, lies not within the mind but in something much deeper. As mentioned before, it has been a shibboleth of Western thought down the years that the mind is at the apex of our being, and this is something that has largely gone unquestioned over the years. However, when we look at all the finer impulses of human nature - empathy, love, kindness - and observe ourselves to see where they come from, we see that they come from that space in the middle of the chest we often call the heart. This 'heart' is what we generally point to when we refer to ourselves; it seems to be more 'us' than any part of our being. But what is it? It is, quite simply, another way of seeing the world. Whereas the mind works by dividing and categorizing, the heart instead empathises and 'stands in the shoes' of that which it is focusing on. When we see someone in trouble, this is the part of our being that reaches out to him. When we view a beautiful sunset, this is the part of our being that becomes one with the beauty and silence (before the mind butts in and ruins it). When we act from this part of our being, we feel our awareness expanding - we are no longer in the narrow confines of some ego-construct and begin to see the world free of these filters.

And it is here and only here that the question of belief or non-belief in God can be decided. Many people who pray or meditate enter into this part of their being, and as their familiarity with being in this space grows, they feel a growing sense of human interconnedness and being part of some higher reality that cannot be put into words. On the other hand, the finer impulses behind the humanist movement also comes from the heart, such as its faith in the ultimate nobility of the human spirit and its ability to do the right thing independent of religious dogma. We see inside the heart the answer reveals itself according to the temperament and level of inner development of each person - for some this reality has a very personal aspect which they can feel a very deep and intimate connection to, for others relate better to viewing it as some kind of universal force without any personal attributes, and then others just want to leave any sense of God out of the picture, and just explore the vastness of being. "We say that someone is an atheist because he says that there is no God", meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy writes. "When he goes to that extreme, he will see that his negative feeling itself is a form of positive feeling. At the extreme, he says that there is nothing. But what he calls nothing is, for us, something; and that very thing we call God."

The problem is that many (perhaps most) people on either side of the debate never have this heart experience. And the people without this experience tend to be the most vocal and drown out everyone else, simply because bereft of experience, they have to keep talking to convince themselves and maintain their ego-constructs in place, like the shark that must forever keep swimming just to stay afloat. On the other hand, people who have had these experiences of the heart are more secure in their belief (in fact, belief is hardly the proper word, since these kind of experiences change 'belief' to 'knowing'), and tend less to focus on criticizing what others believe and more on seeing what they can do to improve themselves and be of greater service to their fellow world-citizens.

Unless one enters into the heart, any debate over the subject of God's existence is like two blind men arguing over what colour the sky is.

(Photo: Pranlobha Kalagian)

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