Delusions
Critic:-
There is no proof of God. This is a delusion.
Comment:-
In order to find proof you need to open your eyes and look in the right direction and be willing to search and accept. It depends on your motives and the actions you take to seek and understand, and your power of perception and understanding.
Alternatively you need to study and understand what is being said. This will take time. It also requires appropriate abilities, motives and actions.
We define Allah as the Ultimate and fundamental self-existing Reality from which all other things derive, including matter, energy, order, life and consciousness. If He does not exist then nothing else does.
The Science of Psychology has made sufficient progress even in the West to inform us that there are all kinds of causes for refusing to see, understand and accept things. There are rationalizations, fantasies, distortions, excuse making, justifying ones own perversities, desires or weaknesses and so on. Yes, it applies also to beliefs and this must be guarded against. So spare us shallow naiveté.
The mind is selective in the data it admits and that it organizes this according to its desires, fantasies, prejudices. Rationalization means exactly this that reason is used to reach the conclusions which are convenient for the person and will serve his ego, comfort him or can be used for whatever his purposes might be.
Critic:-
Actually, if nothing, psychology has shown us that it is far easier and common to "see" things that aren't there: Fantasies, hallucinations, phobias, desires, longings, delusions, hypnosis, visions, patterns. Religious visions, as well as the so called "supernatural" phenomena and many other similar conditions are easily and naturally explained by such all too common mental disorders ("short-circuits" or "background noise"). It is no surprise that religious "understanding" comes under conditions when one's mental faculties are greatly reduced by repetitive chanting, dancing, praying and other similar acts of worship, when one's in a trance-like state and highly suggestible and self delusional. This is also why such religious rituals as repetitive praying, dancing, singing, preferably in a group (thus external positive feedback), are so strongly supported and mandated by religions.
Comment:-
A little knowledge about Psychology is insufficient to base a judgement on, though it may be convenient.
Religious techniques, like knives, which can be used for bad ends, can also be used for good ends. These techniques are not essentially different from those used in training for anything else including the sciences, politics, business, industry, the military etc. Hypnosis can make people see what is not there but also not see what is there. Hypnosis is a widespread phenomena. The educational system, advertisements and propaganda, the media, the whole of the culture produces hypnosis.
But there is a difference in aim. In religion the inner state of integration, stability, expansion of consciousness, conscience and control, the actualization of potentialities is more important. In secular systems the emphasis is in external application usually for the purpose of increasing wealth, power or prestige, which of course end when the individual dies.
However, it is true that religions have been high jacked throughout history by the ignorant and stupid power seekers, fanatics, and hypocrites who wish to control and regiment people for the formers own advantages. On the other hand, even the knowledgeable and sincere when they get involved in worldly matters and crowd hysterics, unless also wary and very able, will get corrupted by it or will be forced to use the same methods. That is why spiritual or psychological progress can only be very slow, requiring constant efforts to overcome the lower, primitive animal nature.
But the critics of religion are usually those who have never actually practiced any of its techniques or understood them, but are more likely to be motivated by the wish to find excuses to escape from a difficult discipline.
If a situation, practice or technique causes abnormality, then this could either be sub-normality or super-normality or simply a difference from the norm. A state of disease is one which causes distress, debility, non-adjustment or mal-adaptation. This is to be avoided. But the norm produces mediocrity and stagnation. The progress of mankind depends on those who depart from the norm. Evolution means that those few who depart from the norm multiply and become a separate group and may even replace the former norm.
When you see an object, say the computer before you, the light coming from it and the pressure because of touch etc., causes electrical and chemical processes in the brain which results in certain images.
Are these hallucinations?
Critic:-
No. That it is not so can be verified through experiments and observations, and it is not that which is being discussed.
A hallucination is something that has no objective basis.
Comment:-
How do you judge whether something is objective or not. You cannot perceive anything that is not an affect on your consciousness.
If a person P1 sees an object O1, he has experience E1(O1) and names it N1, then if some other person P2 uses that name then he supposes that he is referring to the same object O1. But for P2 it refers to an experience E2 (O1). The fact is that the name (as heard or read), too, is an experience. The words or names have different connotations or meanings for them according to their different experiences. For P1 it is E1(N1) and for P2 it is E2(N1). We must distinguish between the name or word and its meaning, M. The Meaning of N1 for P1 is M1 and for P2 it is M2. M1 is different from M2.
Apart from this raw experiences are also processed by association, analysis, abstraction of common elements and synthesis.
Obviously, the decision whether something is real or not depends on the reinforcements created by confirmation by (a) the repetition of the same experience, (b) corroboration from other people (c) the self-consistency of the system in which the experience forms multiple links.
If P1 sees something, which P2 does not, then either (a) P2 is not looking where P2 is or (b) P2 lacks the capacity to see, or (c) P1 has misinterpreted what he sees.
If a person sees something which contradicts his own system of experiences or ideas then he will himself doubt it and this doubt will cause him to investigate further, to try to confirm, amend or reject the experience thereby restoring the self-consistency of the system of experience. He will look again and again or ask others. But there may be a set of people who agree with P1 and another who agree with P2. In that case it can be concluded that there are two different sets of people with different capacities for perception.
An ape might suppose that the only thing real is that which it understands while the whole of human sciences and culture are so much delusions and hallucinations. One can excuse the ape. In a sense, of course, the ape is right (Human beings have many delusions and fantasies and create Art based on these), but this can only be discerned by a higher level human than those who accept these as realities.
But it is probably futile explaining further - people believe what they wish and according to their capacities, even if they have to create barriers and censors to form many different separate "complexes" of ideas.
Critic:-
No. That it is not so can be verified through experiments and observations, and it is not that which is being discussed. Religions, or rather, religious experiences, are different: There is not a single objective verification (through experiments/observations) of the thousands, millions of such claims.
Comment:-
When scientists, say in a nuclear physics laboratory, make experiments then they these experiments and their interpretation depends on the fact that they all have had the same training, use the same concepts and do the same things in the same environment and that is why when they agree this agreement is taken by them as truth.
It is not the raw data but the interpretation which has importance.
The case with people having religious experiences is the same. They do have the same conceptual system, do the same things in the same kind of places or situations and have the same kind of experiences. There is something held in common in all religions, but the framework of reference or conceptual system in which they interpret these experience do vary.
Facts, data, by itself is useless. It has to be evaluated, interpreted and organized. Indeed, human beings create facts not only by inventing machines and instruments and by organizing, but also by inventing concepts and systems. The theories of Relativity and Evolution etc., are not objects given to the senses, but are things apprehended by the intellect.
Although millions of people have lived in the same world and, being human, have something in common and their environments also have something in common, the fact still remains that knowledge makes progress. The world as seen today by science was not seen that way in the past, and there may well have been different ways and even more sophisticated ways of seeing and interpreting the world in the past.
We are, therefore, concerned mainly with how things are understood.
----------<O>----------