Stages of belief

No one comes upon the truth all at once. This is as true in religion as in any other sphere of intellectual activity. Religious belief typically progresses in stages.

Stage 1 is the simplistic or naive belief found in childhood. At this stage, religious images are interpreted literally. The child believes that God is a white-bearded man on a throne in the clouds. Some people stay in this Stage for life. Examples of the Stage 1 mentality are those "God-fearing" folk who see God as a tyrant who must be continually appeased, or who view him as an insecure giant who is needy enough to require constant, lavish praise.

(To be clear, I am not lumping all religious fundamentalists into the Stage 1 category. Some fundamentalists, or Biblical literalists, have a very sophisticated grasp of scriptural material. They find multiple layers of meaning in Bible stories, with one layer being the literal, factual truth, but with other layers that can be mined for deeper meanings and insights. For instance, the story of Jesus walking on water can be interpreted literally, but also symbolically as a demonstration of God's power over the forces of chaos, which are symbolized in Middle Eastern imagery by water.)

As the child grows up, he will very often rebel against Stage 1 belief. He will realize that the idea of a God as an old man on a throne is childish and silly. Seeking to assert himself, he will reject this image and declare himself to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or a skeptic.

If he remains a skeptic for the rest of his life, his view of religion usually will not progress beyond the Stage 1 interpretation that he rebelled against. In their polemical writings, atheists often disparage religion as childish, simplistic, and naive. What they reveal by these criticisms is not so much the nature of religion, but the nature of their own arrested (Stage 1) development. They are the people who say that religion is only for the "weak" or the "simple," or that it is an "opiate of the masses." They belittle religion by treating it as a fairy tale or a mental illness, or they expend tedious effort to prove that there are inconsistencies or logical impossibilities in the Bible (on the premise that the text can be understood only in the most literal fashion). Or they engage in the psychologizing of religious believers, asserting that such people are seeking a "father figure" (i.e., they are children seeking guidance). In my essay "A Thumb in God's Eye" I discuss a specific case of this sort of skepticism.

But of course not everyone remains stuck at Stage 1, either as a believer or as a skeptic. People who progress to the next stage - Stage 2 - begin to see the metaphorical side of religion. God, they realize, is not a white-bearded man on a throne; this is only an image, a metaphor, a symbol. As they realize that the images of religion can be interpreted metaphorically, they move beyond the naive, childish approach that characterized Stage 1. They look for deeper meanings. They begin to read religious texts as signposts toward a greater truth that mere words, interpreted literally, cannot adequately convey.

This grasp of religious imagery as metaphor leads some people to see similar metaphors in other religious systems besides their own, and to realize that all these systems of metaphor and symbol serve the same essential purpose. Aldous Huxley dubbed the universal truths of religion "the perennial philosophy" in a book of the same name. To see all religions as reflecting the same fundamental truths is to reach Stage 3.

Is there a further stage of development? I think so. It is reached by those few who no longer need the metaphors - those few who can experience the divine directly, without the need for mediating symbols. Mystics who have trained themselves to achieve a high degree of control over their state of consciousness are generally the only ones who can attain Stage 4 on a regular basis, although other people may achieve such insights sporadically in what the psychological theorist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences." 

We have come a long way from Stage 1 at this point. We are no longer bound by the literal interpretation of religious symbolism. We are not bound even by the complex exegeses of religious metaphors. Having put away childish things, we are not seeing as in a glass darkly; we are looking at God face to face.

The trouble with atheists and skeptics is not that they reject Stage 1. Rejecting Stage 1 is a normal and healthy part of anyone's spiritual development. The trouble is that they never get beyond Stage 1 in their thinking about religion. Their rejection becomes an obstacle to further growth, and to the attainment of Stages 2, 3, and 4.

A child might look at the Statue of David and see it only as man showing his private parts. This level of comprehension (which corresponds to Stage 1) is understandable and normal in a child. But if an adult expressed the same opinion, we would probably regard him as having a rather undeveloped notion of esthetics. And if an art critic attacked the David as being nothing but a man exposing his genitals, and therefore unworthy of serious consideration, I doubt that many of us would take his views seriously, much less as authoritative.

Why, then, do we listen to critics of religion whose own views are no more evolved?

Comments

[a4g]

I suppose by your reckoning I would be in Stage 2 - in that I've cast off my 'angry atheist' youth and moved on to appreciate the complexity and beauty that the inheritance of thousands of years of religious contemplation has to offer.

I'm interested in your Stage 3. To see "all religions as reflecting the same fundamental truths" seems like indifferentism, is this where you were going? Or was this more a statement of the idea that God has written truth on all men's souls, and that each expresses at least some part of this divine inheritance?

Of course, the idea that fascinates me about religion is not that all of them might be true, but rather that one of them might be. To accept all religious truth as equal seems awfully close to non-committal form of atheism to me.

[DH]

Another great post. I linked to you.

[Michael Prescott]

a4q,

You asked, "Or was this more a statement of the idea that God has written truth on all men's souls, and that each expresses at least some part of this divine inheritance?"

That's about it. It's like the five blind men who encounter an elephant, each one describing some separate part and imagining that he sees the whole. The alternative is to say that there is only "one true faith," and all the others are lies or delusions. If so, what happens to all those poor souls who had the misfortune to be born in the "wrong" part of the world or the "wrong" era? I find it more credible that the infinite nature of God can be best be expressed by a variety of symbols and systems, none of which captures the full truth.

I also think that, at root, all major religions are about the same thing: the transcendence of mundane, petty, worldly concerns, or to put it another way, overcoming the ego. Whether you transcend/overcome the ego by praying to Jesus, by meditating on the aspects of divinity represented by Hindu gods, or by sitting in contemplation under a Boddhi tree seems less important (to me) than your effort and the intention behind it.

I think this would be true even of religions that are now extinct. Apuleius' comic novel The Golden Ass, written in Roman times, includes a marvelous evocation of the goddess Isis as seen by the hero in a transported state. No one worships Isis anymore (except maybe a few New Agers), but the impulse behind the worship was valid then and is still valid now.

Someone might say, Well, then, do you think Isis was "real"? I would say she was real in the sense that the color red is real. Where is red? It exists at the meeting point of the light from an object and the visual apparatus that perceives it. It does not exist purely "out there" (without eyes to see, there would be no red) nor purely in the mind (the object must be of a certain nature to produce or reflect those light rays). It exists at the crossroads between external reality and the consciousness that observes it. In the same way, Isis "exists" at the intersection of (one aspect of) God and the mind that recognizes it. Our mind translates this aspect of God into a form that makes sense to us. Isis herself is not really there, but that which gives rise to this impression or experience is there. So Christians will see apparitions of Jesus or Mary, while the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration saw Moses and Elijah, and Apuleius (or his stand-in in the book) saw Isis. We're at the borderline between objective and subjective here, just as we are with colors (and sounds, and tastes, etc.).

That's my (tentative) opinion, anyway. I could be wrong! : )

Harry,

Thanks for linking! Harry's posts are found at Jackson's Junction - http://treyjackson.typepad.com/ . Check it out! One of his latest pieces is a link to the stupefyingly negative reviews of J Lo's latest piece of ..., er, I mean, her latest movie. What is it with J Lo? Her gangster comedy Out of Sight was good. That movie where she enters the mind of a comatose person, whatever it was called, was pretty good. But those came out years ago. Has she done *anything* decent since then? Does this woman even have a manager? Sheesh.

[DH]

Even the poster for "Monster in Law" stinks. They're all over L.A. It's just J-lo and J-Fo pointing at each other and angry. The colors are awful...

"Drunken crazy mother in law tries to stop her son from getting married." It's a good logline, easy to sell, and J-Lo probably didn't bother to read the script.

That's how movies are made today.