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Body as spirit I  Body as spirit II Body as spirit III  Outline and bibliog Body as spirit supplementary notes Celtic birth Customs Tara MacAnTSior & Branfionn MacGregor from: By Sundown Shores - Studies in Spiritual History, Fiona MacLeod Spirituality Without Faith and Towards a Naturalistic Spirituality Thomas W Clark Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire Ruth Stein Celtic birth customs by Tara MacAnTSior & Branfionn MacGregor, from Gaelic Celtic Culture 6 Immediately after the child was born the mid-wife placed three drops of water on the new born's head. (The Three of Power were the Sky, the Land and the Sea.)   The little drop of the Sky On thy little forehead, beloved one.   The little drop of the Land On thy little forehead, beloved one.   The little drop of the Sea On thy little forehead beloved one.   To aid thee from the fays, To guard thee from the host;   To aid thee from the gnome, To shield thee from the spectre;   To keep thee for the Three, To shield thee, to surround thee;   To save thee for the Three, To fill thee with the graces;   The little drop of the Three To lave thee with the graces.   The nurse then administered the "baisteadh breith" or birth baptism. This was done as a part of the child's first bath. The bath water itself invariably had placed in it either a silver or gold coin, as these relate to the powers of the Moon and Sun respectively. Holding the child over the bath, the nurse would fill her palm with water nine times and rub it over the child while singing the incantation of the birth baptism. (There are indications the the water used was spring water.) While several versions of the blessing given during the birth baptism can be found in a couple of different places, they all address the ancient concept of "the Nine Waves". A typical one might read:   The little wavelet for thy form, The little wavelet for thy voice, The little wavelet for thy sweet speech. The little wavelet for thy means, The little wavelet for thy generosity, The little wavelet for thine appetite. The little wavelet for thy wealth, The little wavelet for thy life, The little wavelet for thine health. Nine little palmfuls for thy grace (in the name of) the Three of Power.   Then the child was handed back and forth across a flame three times, from the mid-wife to the father. Prayers for blessing were then made under the breath to the Power of the Sun by the midwife. The child was then carried deosil around the flame three times by the father.   The thing done is found in in "Scela Eogain", which is found in the Irish Texts Society volume "Cath Maige Mucraime". It tells of how when Cormac was born, Olc Aaiche put five protective circles about him. They were against wounding, against drowning, against fire, against enchantment and against wolves. The 5 concentric circles theme shows up consistently, from the floor plan at Emain Macha (evan mah) to the 14th century feige find glyph in the "Book of Ballymote". This was an approach to protecting against every evil. Erynn Laurie, the well known student of Irish texts and their symbolism interprets these as:   wounding danger in battle drowning danger in travel fire = spiritual dangers enchantment = magical dangers wolves = natural dangers   -   The Carmina Gadelica-Hymns and Incantations Collected In The Highlands and Islands of Scotland In The Last Century, Alexander Carmichael, Lindisfarne Press, c. 1994, ISBN 0-940262-50-9 By Sundown Shores - Studies in Spiritual History, Fiona MacLeod, George Loring Press, Portland Maine, Thomas B. Mosher, c. 1902, (only 425 copies) The Silver Bough Vol. One, F. Marian McNeill, Lewis Reprints, c. 1977, ISBN 085335-161-9 History of Religious Ideas Vol 1, Mircea Eliade,University of Chicago Press, c. 1978, ISBN 0-226-20401-4 History of Religious Ideas Vol 2, Mircea Eliade,University of Chicago Press, c. 1982, ISBN 0-226-20403-0   -   From: "By Sundown Shores - Studies in Spiritual History" by Fiona MacLeod, pp. 90-94.   "From the fisherman's wife with whom I lodged I learned that her daughter had recently bourne a son, but was now up and about again, though for the first time, that morning. We went to her, about noon. She was not in the house. A small cabbage-garden lay behind, and beyond it the mossy edge of a wood of rowans and birches broke steeply in bracken and lonroid. The girl was there, and had taken the child from her breast and, kneeling, was touching the earth with the small lint-white head. " "I asked her what she was doing. She said it was the right thing to do; that as soon as possible after a child was born, the mother should take it - and best at noon, and facing the sun - and touch its brow to the earth. My friends (like many islanders of the Inner Hebrides, they had no Gaelic) used an unfamiliar phrase: "It's the Old Mothering."   I am convinced that the Earth Blessing is more ancient than the westward migration of the Celtic peoples.   "I have both read and heard of another custom, though I have not known of it at first-hand. The last time I was told of it was of a crofter and his wife in North Uist. The once general custom remembered in a familiar Gaelic saying, the English of which is "He got a turn through the smoke." After baptism, a child was taken from the breast by its mother, and handed (sometimes the child was placed in a basket) to the father, across the fire.   "I think it is an ancient propitiatory rite, akin to that which made our ancestors touch the new-born to earth; as that which makes some islanders still baptise a child with a little spray from the running wave, or a fingerful of water from the tide at the flow; as that which made an old woman lift me as a little child and hold me up to the south wind 'to make me strong and fair and always young, and to keep back death and sorrow, and to keep me safe from other winds and evil spirits.'" http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua1.htm Spirituality Without Faith Thomas W Clark Tom Clark has created the Naturalism.Org website and is the founding director of the Center for Naturalism in Boston. What would it mean to naturalize spirituality? How can naturalism inspire spiritual experience and provide us with a satisfying cognitive context within which to address our ultimate concerns? By avoiding the dualism of many spiritual traditions, naturalism shows our complete connection with the world and its natural wonders, among which are to be counted ourselves. These remarks are based on a talk given for the Humanist Association of Massachusetts in June of 2001 and were published in the Humanist, January, 2002. Sections: Characteristics of spirituality - Traditional spirituality - Difficulties with traditional spirituality ­Naturalism - Naturalistic spirituality - Limitations of naturalistic spirituality - Spiritual practice   To what extent can secular humanists be spiritual? Can those of us with a more or less naturalistic view of the world, one that doesn't involve spirits, gods, or ghosts, legitimately seek spiritual experience? There seems a prima facie difficulty here since traditional notions of spirituality often posit a non-physical realm categorically separate from the world described by science. Such dualism is of course the antithesis of naturalism, which understands existence to be of a piece, not split into the natural and supernatural. If for humanists the ultimate constituents of the world don't include immaterial essences, souls, or spirits, then it might seem that spirituality is off limits.   If you look up the etymology of the word "spiritual," you'll find that it derives from the Latin "spiritus," meaning "wind" or "breath." Standard dictionary definitions of spiritual contrast it with physical or material, so dualism is more or less built into the ordinary conception of spirituality. But I will argue that just as we can be good without God, we can have spirituality without spirits. Even within the monistic view of the cosmos entailed by a commitment to scientific empiricism, we can avail ourselves of spiritual experience and take an authentically spiritual stance when appreciating our situation as fully physical creatures embedded in a material universe. I hope to show that in its dualism, the traditional notion of spirituality in effect sets up problems of existential alienation and cognitive dissonance that religions have wrestled with, more or less unsuccessfully, for millennia. At a stroke, naturalism cuts these problems off at the root, providing an emotionally satisfying and cognitively unified basis for feeling completely at home in the world.   Many humanists, of course, will not necessarily want to access what I will call the "spiritual response." Even if I persuade them that there's nothing conceptually incoherent about a naturalistic spirituality, they might be constitutionally disinclined to indulge in emotions or practices that even temporarily disengage the rational mind set. I won't argue against such reluctance, since each of us has his or her own tastes in aesthetic experience, and varying "comfort levels" in letting go. But the spiritual response is there for those who wish to experience it. It's intrinsically rewarding in its own right, and a valuable resource in getting us through tough times.   What would it mean to naturalize spirituality? What precisely would a naturalistic spirituality look like? Before turning to these questions, I want to briefly touch on some basic aspects and functions of spirituality, whatever its type, and then see how traditional spirituality fulfills (or tries to fulfill) these functions. This will set the stage for exploring how naturalism might work as well or better in grounding spiritual experience and in addressing our ultimate concerns.   Characteristics of Spirituality   Authentic spirituality involves an emotional response, what I will call the spiritual response, which can include feelings of significance, unity, awe, joy, acceptance, and consolation. Such feelings are intrinsically rewarding and so are sought out in their own right, but they also help us in dealing with difficult situations involving death, loss, and disappointment. The spiritual response thus helps meet our affective needs for both celebration and reconciliation. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, we have an "appetite for wonder," an appetite for evoking the positive emotional states that are linked to our deepest existential questions.   But what might evoke these states? Spirituality often involves a cognitive context, a set of beliefs about oneself and the world which can both inspire the spiritual response and provide an interpretation of it. Our ideas about what ultimately exists, who we fundamentally are, and our place in the greater scheme of things form the cognitive context for spirituality. By contemplating such beliefs we are temporarily drawn out of the mundane into the realization of life's deeper significance, and this realization generates emotional effects. But equally, the spiritual response thus generated is itself interpreted in the light of our basic beliefs; namely, it is taken to reflect the ultimate truth of our situation as we conceive it. The cognitive context of spirituality and the spiritual response are therefore linked tightly in reciprocal evocation and validation.   A third essential component of spirituality is what is ordinarily called spiritual practice. Since the intellectual appreciation of fundamental beliefs alone may not suffice to evoke a particularly deep experience, various non-cognitive techniques can help to access the spiritual response. Activities such as dance, singing, chant, meditation, and participation in various rituals and ceremonies all can play a role in moving us from the head to the heart. And it is in the heart, or gut, after all, where we find the most powerful intrinsic rewards of spirituality, as profound as its cognitive context might be.   Although the emotional content of the spiritual response - feelings of connection, significance, serenity, acceptance ­ is common to all spirituality, the background beliefs and specific practices vary tremendously. Almost all of us have the biological capacity to feel spiritually transported, but the cognitive context of those moments and the techniques to induce them are a matter of our culture. A fascinating variety of spiritual traditions have arisen, ranging from the rigorous, ascetic regimes of Zen meditation to the ecstatic communal celebration of a Sunday morning gospel service, and each tradition has its own conception of the world and the individual's place in it. Stemming from these beliefs there are a multiplicity of spiritual objects of veneration, of deeper realities to be encountered: God, Earth, Nature, Emptiness, angels, devils, ancestors, previous incarnations, the Force, you name it (for a current, pop-cultural sampling of these, visit Beliefnet). For each tradition, spiritual experience is taken to be the direct appreciation of the ultimate truth about the world, a way to transcend one's limited everyday perspective in the quest for meaning, unity, and serenity.   Traditional Spirituality   Many, if not most of these traditions, as well as some "New Age" beliefs, involve the idea of a distinct spiritual realm, something set apart or above the everyday physical world (some types of Buddhism being notable exceptions, of which more below). The varieties of spirituality are thus to a great extent varieties of dualism, at least in their cognitive contexts (belief systems). But why should this be the case? What drives the intuition that we and the world we inhabit are of two natures, one physical and one immaterial?   Part of the answer lies in our instinctive fear of death, which many religions allay by positing an immortal soul or spiritual essence which survives bodily dissolution. We gain ultimate security by virtue of being, in our true selves, something other than the physical, something that joins with a larger, non-physical and changeless realm after death. Overcoming death, pain, and loss is thus the emotional driver of traditional religious spirituality. We want cosmic reassurance, to be exemptions from mere material, changeable nature, and our spiritual nature functions to connect us with that which is changeless and immortal. Thus the fear of death and its standard religious solution produce the dualism of body and spirit, of the natural and supernatural. Such dualism, of course, is central to religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism which have held sway for millennia in much of the world. (It should be noted, however, that some contemporary theologians have questioned this dualism, reaching nearly naturalistic conclusions about human nature, if not God's. See, for instance, Whatever Happened to the Soul?, edited by Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, Fortress Press, 1998.)   Not just religion, but the Western philosophical tradition too has shaped the more or less commonsense view that we exist as bodies inhabited by souls, spirits, or mental agents. Cartesian mind-body dualism, although widely rejected in the current academic philosophical and scientific communities, is still the norm in lay culture. Such secular dualism comports well with the comforting tenets of religion, even if it no longer has a scientific basis. Moreover, it has to be conceded that it certainly feels, at first blush, as if we are more than strictly material creatures. Who is it, after all, that is looking out at the world, having feelings, thinking thoughts, and making choices? Surely it can't just be my physical brain that does all that. Given these historical and psychological factors, it's perhaps not surprising that varieties of dualism still dominate in both the secular and spiritual arenas.   Another salient characteristic of traditional spirituality (Christianity, for instance) is that it reads purpose into the universe: existence has a goal or teleology which gives us a role to play. The cosmos has been designed by a purposeful agent (God), and by dutifully fulfilling our mission in his cosmic drama we discover life's ultimate meaning. Given our tendency to look for agents and intentions in ordinary life, to figure out who's doing what and what things are for, it's natural that we might seek to assign a purpose or intent behind all of creation, and this we do by supposing, literally, that it has been created. Part of the cognitive context of Christianity is that there is something essentially personal or agent-like in (or above) nature, something that has us "in mind," so as we suffer in this vale of tears we find consolation in knowing we're part of the grand design. Life has meaning, finally, because a supernatural agent endows it with meaning.   Spiritual experience, in Christianity and other non-naturalistic traditions, is interpreted as putting the individual in direct contact with the agent/creator, or with at least some aspect of the spiritual realm. The feelings that arise during spiritual practice are construed as evidence of the realm's existence; they are the quasi-perceptual apprehension of God or Spirit. Thus, in this traditional cognitive context, spiritual experience is taken to be a special way of knowing ultimate truths about the world, a way quite different from ordinary empirical modes of knowing. The individual sees directly the face of God, and needs no further corroboration. Nor could any be forthcoming via normal sensory channels, since after all these are only capable of detecting physical appearances.   Difficulties with Traditional Spirituality   As much as the characteristics of traditional spirituality provide answers to the questions of death and meaning, two major drawbacks are evident. The problem of death is solved by splitting ourselves into two substances - one material and perishable, the other spiritual and immortal - but as a result the material becomes inherently inferior in its changeability. The physical becomes the merely physical - it assumes a second class metaphysical status. This in turn leads to alienation from our physical selves and indeed from the material world as a whole. Gross matter is denigrated in comparison to subtle spirit, and the material only has value to the extent that it is animated and directed by spirit. It can't accomplish anything of significance on its own. But of course we are embodied, and our world is material, so from this alienated perspective most of our lives is an unfortunate entanglement with crass physicality while awaiting the better, immaterial world to come.   Added to the dualism of substance is the dualism of having two types of knowledge, ordinary empirical knowledge derived from the senses and confirmed intersubjectively (e.g., as in science) and the knowledge gained from the personal revelations of spiritual experience. Despite the arguments of some, such as Stephen J. Gould in his book Rocks of Ages, that these constitute "non-overlapping magisteria" which can't conflict since they have fundamentally different concerns, the fact remains that both sorts of knowledge make claims about what ultimately exists and they reach different conclusions. Science gives us no reason to believe in the supernatural (there is no scientifically admissible evidence for such a realm), while the firm intuition of spiritual experience, as interpreted within its traditional, non-naturalistic cognitive context, is precisely that a separate immaterial reality indeed exists. If I make use of both methods of knowing, then eventually it is likely I will confront some basic cognitive dilemmas: which method, and therefore which conclusion, is correct? In deciding the momentous question of what fundamentally exists, on what grounds do I choose science over spirituality, or visa versa? When do I stick with my spiritual intuitions, and when do I stick with science?   The upshot is that these two dualisms, one metaphysical, one epistemological, put adherents of traditional spirituality in a poor position to achieve, in this world, the apprehension of fundamental unity, even if they are promised salvation in the next. And unity, of course, is the essence of spirituality. Being of two natures and two minds, the traditional spiritualist is torn between the physical and immaterial world and unified with neither. Naturalists, I believe, suffer no such handicaps in their approach to ultimate concerns.   Naturalism   To see how naturalism might improve on traditional religious and secular dualism as a basis for spirituality, I want first to outline briefly its essential characteristics. Standard definitions of naturalism often contrast it with supernaturalism, meaning simply that naturalism denies the existence of a separate, categorically different supernatural realm that exists outside the natural world. As seen above, the supernatural realm often is taken to involve an agent, or agency, that acts as a first cause. Such an agent is causally privileged, in that from its supernatural vantage point it gets to influence events in the natural world (e.g., create it) without being at the effect of that world. God, typically, is unconstrained by the physical laws and constants that we find everywhere in nature. Naturalism denies that there are any such causally privileged agents or entities; rather, anything that exists is entirely embedded among other existents which account for its origins and characteristics. Nothing gets to cause without being caused in turn; nothing gets to be unconstrained by its context. In Buddhist philosophical terminology, this is called "dependent arising": all phenomena are ineluctably relational, there are no causally independent monads at any level of being.   This of course rules out the traditional Christian God and his supernatural cousins of other religious traditions, but it also rules out any personal spirit, soul, or inner agent that possesses a special originative capacity not found elsewhere in nature. There is, as philosopher Gilbert Ryle put it in The Concept of Mind, no ghost in the machine of the human body, nothing mysteriously spiritual or mental that rides above the physical. Naturalism is fully inclusive of human affairs, even in their most complex manifestations.   The underlying unity and causal interconnectedness of all phenomena under naturalism is a direct consequence of the naturalist's commitment to scientific empiricism as a mode of knowing (a commitment I won't try to defend here; see my Humanist articles "Faith, Science and the Soul" and "Relativism and the Limits of Rationality" for more on this). In building up knowledge about the world, science inevitably situates objects of understanding in a wider, relational context. To understand things, whether neurons or supernovas, just is to delineate their place in this context. Although there are many scales of description within science, from the sub-atomic, to the human, to the cosmic, the world in toto is of a piece, a naturalistic whole that includes whatever entities and laws science discovers to exist. As an epistemology, therefore, scientific empiricism guarantees an underlying unity or interconnection of phenomena and so places all things within a single world, quite the opposite of traditional supernaturalism. The ultimate constituents of this world are those described by the standard model of particle physics, and although the scientific conception of these constituents may change as physical theory progresses, the necessity of their inter-connection will not, since the demonstration of such connection is what science does. This is why, as much as Intelligent Design theorists argue otherwise, science will never countenance "theories" that posit a separate supernatural realm containing causally privileged entities. As Stephen Schafersman puts it in his essay of the same title, "naturalism is an essential part of science and critical inquiry;" see http://www.freeinquiry.com/naturalism.html.   Given its inherently unifying mode of knowing, we can understand science as the history of naturalizing one phenomenon after another, of bringing within the orbit of empirical understanding things that used to be explained by supernatural agency, special powers, or special immaterial stuff. Cosmic origins have been naturalized by understanding them as the sudden expansion of a space-time singularity, not an intentional act of intelligent design. The origin of species was naturalized by Darwin as being the outcome of the differential survival of organisms with varying inherited traits, not the deliberate creation of biological orders and phyla ex nihilo. Recently life itself was naturalized by the discovery of the mechanics of DNA, which once and for all spiked the notion of elan vital or protoplasmic essence, thought by some as necessary to animate inanimate matter. Today, work proceeds apace on the project of naturalizing ourselves, that is, seeing how both consciousness and behavior can be explained without recourse to an inner, supervising agent-homunculus with special non-physical powers.   In all these examples, the project of naturalization inherent in science has demonstrated (or aims to demonstrate) that these phenomena consist entirely of the ultimate constituents of the universe described by physics, organized and elaborated via empirically derived laws at several distinct levels of description into astoundingly complex patterns, some of which are persons. In none of these cases, and nowhere in science, is there a need to posit any essence, agency, spirit, or "spooky stuff" to make things happen. Rather, everything, down to the last detail, is a matter of functions and operations on basic elements, functions and operations that happen on their own, without supervision. This is the remarkable fact at the heart of naturalism (remarkable, at least, when compared to supernaturalism): there is no need for intentional agency or spirit as an explanatory postulate. The physical world is, on its own, sufficient to generate the marvels of life, consciousness, and human culture. From this perspective, to bring in a spirit or deity to do any explanatory work seems like a cheap trick, an easy out, and only vitiates the wonder of the fact that, to repeat, all these phenomena arise on their own.   Since naturalism rules out the existence of entities, like God, that are causally privileged, it also rules out the possibility that the universe could be the intentional creation of a being or agency that stands outside it in some respect. This means that under naturalism the universe can't be construed as having an ultimate purpose or goal attached to it ­ it exists, strangely enough, for no reason. Suppose we found evidence that we are indeed artifacts of some super-being's intentional design (see the last page of Carl Sagan's novel Contact for a scenario in which it's discovered that the expansion of pi contains a message from the Cosmic Architect). Immediately, questions would arise about the characteristics and origins of this being, and were we lucky enough to interview It, we could sensibly ask "Why are you here?". Even if It had something in mind in creating us, the question of ultimate meaning still arises for It and the larger universe of which we and It are a part. It turns out, then, there is no possibility of discovering a final goal or teleology to the universe, precisely because we can always legitimately conceive of it as including any presumptive creator.   As much as we are driven to discern or impute purposes, to ask the teleological question "why?," we will always find that question unanswerable when applied to the largest scale of things. Naturalism also leaves us with the irreducible mysteries of why things should be precisely the way they are and not some other way, and why there should be something rather than nothing. Steven Weinberg addressed these topics in the New York Review of Books in a May, 2001 article entitled "Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?" (at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20010531047F)   Finally, it seems clear that we will never be able to explain our most fundamental scientific principles. (Maybe this is why some people say that science does not provide explanations, but by this reasoning nothing else does either.) I think that in the end we will come to a set of simple universal laws of nature, laws that we cannot explain. The only kind of explanation I can imagine (if we are not just going to find a deeper set of laws, which would then just push the question farther back) would be to show that mathematical consistency requires these laws. But this is clearly impossible, because we can already imagine sets of laws of nature that, as far as we can tell, are completely consistent mathematically but that do not describe nature as we observe it.   Without a supernatural creator conveniently by to justify his handiwork, there is literally no reason for the universe to have the characteristics it does, or for anything to exist at all. For better or for worse, naturalism inevitably frustrates our ambition to make ultimate sense of things.   While traditional faiths hold that spiritual experience answers ultimate questions of meaning, naturalism holds that such experience is simply a function of brain states or processes, not contact with a non-material realm. Considerable research is underway to pin down the neural correlates of the spiritual response, for instance by imaging the brains of meditators and describing the neural effects of hallucinogenic (or "entheogenic") drugs in generating experiences of ecstasy and unity. Researchers in Canada have successfully induced psychological states akin to cosmic consciousness in laboratory subjects using a device which stimulates the brain using magnetic pulses. Preliminary findings suggest that the sense of trans-personal connection arises when neural networks responsible for our sense of orientation in the world are shut down, and the sense of deep significance and conviction seems to have a neural correlate in the temporal lobe. In their book, Why God Won't Go Away, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili describe several "association areas" in the cerebral cortex they believe are the neural basis for cosmic consciousness.   All in all, the spiritual response (what Newberg and D'Aquili call the sense of "Absolute Unitary Being") can be accounted for, naturalistically, as an experience which is at bottom identical to specific sorts of brain activity evoked by various sorts of stimuli. Understanding spiritual experience to be physical in this sense is just a special case of the reigning naturalistic hypothesis that drives current consciousness research: the mind and brain are one thing, not two. Furthermore, under naturalism the subjective sense of deep conviction characteristic of spiritual experience is not evidence for the truth of any belief. However special such experiences may seem, they are not a reliable way of knowing or of establishing facts about what exists; that privilege is accorded only to scientific empiricism and its intersubjective method of corroboration via experiment and evidence. Experiences, including spiritual experiences, are quite real of course, but they don't necessarily refer to anything real, however much it may seem they do when we have them. They are data to be explained and incorporated into our theories.   At every turn, it seems, naturalism denies just those things that give most comfort to the traditional spiritualist and that appear, at first glance, most necessary for a viable spirituality. There exists no personal soul or spirit, no supernatural God or creator, no purpose that can be attached to existence, no ultimate meaning to life, and no special first-person way of knowing that puts the individual in direct contact with a deeper reality. The most profound experiences available to us are, like the most trivial experiences, a matter of brain states, nothing more. From the traditional perspective, all this seems a crushing blow to our existential hopes, a catastrophic leveling of the transcendental ambition to escape from the mundane into the exalted and eternal. But as we have seen, the traditional perspective has deep flaws inherent in its dualism, and although naturalism can't give us everything we might wish, it hardly represents a catastrophe for spirituality, in fact rather the opposite.   Naturalistic Spirituality   From the description of naturalism offered above, it's perhaps not all that difficult to see how it might serve as a basis for spirituality, both to inspire the spiritual response and to provide a plausible cognitive context for our ultimate concerns. First, it is clear that under naturalism connection with the world is built in to every aspect of our being, not a hoped for eventuality in the life to come. We're joined to the cosmos and the everyday world as described by science in countless ways: the elements composing our bodies are the products of the Big Bang and stellar evolution; most of our DNA is shared with other beings; our perceptions and sensations are all mediated by processes involving photons, electrons, ions, neurotransmitters and other entirely physical entities; and our character and behavior is fully a function of genetics and environment. We are, therefore, fully linked with our surroundings in time, space, matter/energy, and causality. In fact, no more intimate connection with the totality of what is could be imagined. So, from a naturalistic perspective, there is an empirically valid referent for the sense of cosmic consciousness encountered in spiritual experience. The feeling of unity generated by (actually, identical to) the quieting of the orientation mechanisms in the brain mirrors the objective state of our complete interconnection with the world.   Second, in its denial of ultimate meaning and purpose, naturalism, strangely enough, may equal traditional faiths in its capacity to inspire the spiritual response. When we confront the startling fact that existence isn't subsumable under any overarching interpretation, but simply is, we are left with an irreducible mystery about why we are here, or exist at all; and mystery serves at least as well as purpose to inspire spiritual experience. Unable not to ask questions about ultimate purpose and meaning, but rebuffed by the logic which shows such questions unanswerable, we are caught in a cosmic perplexity, a state of profound existential astonishment. The realization that existence inevitably outruns our attempts to assign meaning and purpose can have the impact of a true revelation, stunning the discursive mind in the manner of a Zen koan. Like a koan or other practices in which thinking confronts its own limitations, such a cognitive impasse can serve as the gateway to the direct, non-discursive experience that the present is sufficient unto itself. After all, there is no place to get to, no goal toward which Being is moving. In her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough expresses this eloquently:   The realization that I needn't have answers to the Big Questions, needn't seek answers to the Big Questions has served as an epiphany. I lie on my back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances, the impermanence, the fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the fact of photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high temperatures. I take in the abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me like Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not mattering because the words are so haunting. This response is quite different, obviously, from that of the Sartrian existentialist, for whom the discovery of no ultimate intrinsic purpose makes the universe "absurd." The absurdist interpretation mistakes the absence of meaning for meaninglessness, failing to see that the universe necessarily transcends the meaningful/meaningless distinction. (This is why Stephen Weinberg was mistaken to say "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.") Instead of sliding into existential angst or ennui, we can savor the surprise and excitement of participating in an unscripted drama, one in which meaning is created locally against an inscrutable cosmic backdrop. This, I submit, is a far more interesting fate than the boring security of being a bit player in an end game scripted by God. (Some might say all too interesting, as in that understated Chinese curse, "May you have an interesting life".)   Besides connection and mystery, naturalism leads to wonder. It's truly a marvel what matter and energy can do when left to their own devices. It's a marvel that the lifeless, insentient elements of creation give rise - via mechanisms, operations, and functions - to life in all its astounding variety and to consciousness in all its sensory and emotional richness. Somehow, the concatenation of neural activity in our brains ends up constituting awareness, intelligence, and wonder itself. To see, transparently, how highly organized matter and mind are precisely one thing, not two, is the spiritual significance of the mind-body problem. To penetrate it would be to leave behind the last vestiges of dualism. No longer could we be alienated from matter as "mere" matter, rather its properties and susceptibilities to organization are, wonderfully, the basis for all that we are as bodies and minds. And of course, far beyond our parochial selves lies the incalculable vastness of the cosmic arena from which we spring. Wonder, although not the only possible response when contemplating the immense scale of matter, space, and time, is surely appropriate once we realize we belong to something so very far beyond us. Such naturalistic wonder and awe counts as deeply spiritual, even though no spirits are involved. (I highly recommend Chet Raymo's book, Skeptics and True Believers, for an engaging account of how wonder and science are not in the least at odds. It's reviewed on this site.)   Because naturalism conceives of experience as identical to some sort of material organization (consensus on just what sort of organization may be decades away), spiritual experience doesn't count as a special way of knowing, but rather a special way of being. Knowledge about what ultimately exists is a matter of reaching intersubjective consensus via theory and experiment grounded in our fallible capacities for perception, whether aided or unaided.   The intrinsically rewarding sense of ultimate unity, awe, and significance isn't a perception, it's a feeling, one of a near infinity of possible brain states of which we are capable. Nevertheless, this feeling reflects the scientific facts of our embededness in nature. Naturalism doesn't have to posit a special route to the spiritual truth which could conflict with scientific empiricism, rather it understands spiritual experience as a materially instantiated non-cognitive affirmation of what is actually the case. Thus naturalism is entirely monistic in its interpretation of spiritual experience: there is one world and one way of knowing it. By avoiding metaphysical and epistemic dualism, naturalism naturalizes spirituality, and in so doing provides a cognitive context for spiritual experience that reinforces its essential non-dual quality.   Limitations of Naturalistic Spirituality   As much as naturalism delivers us from dualism, alienation from the body, and cognitive dissonance, and as much as it can inspire us with the concrete reality of connection and the marvels of physical processes, it obviously cannot give us the prize of personal immortality promised by traditional spiritualities. Naturalism cannot rectify, as some faiths claim they can, what seems the root injustice of being creatures with desires that necessarily outstrip their fulfillment. As naturalists, we must accept, as do Buddhists, the basic reality of impermanence, change, suffering, and death as the end of the person. There is no cosmic reassurance, rather we are enjoined to make accommodation with the facts of life, not to escape them in dreams of disembodied transcendence. This is the price (rather high, some would say) we pay for cognitive consistency and metaphysical monism.   So naturalism is tough-minded in this respect, and thus not a route many are likely to take in addressing ultimate concerns. But the argument could be put that in acknowledging impermanence, naturalism actually reveals the source of value to us. If we knew for sure that we had immaterial souls and would live forever, would we place as much value on being? Isn't it rather that we value things, including our own moments on earth, precisely because we know full well they don't last forever? Endless life, if it existed, would be like plastic flowers: permanent, yes, but something we quickly take for granted. As much as we dread our own extinction, therefore, immortality might not be quite the prize we suppose it is. In his book of the same title, Alan Watts called this the "wisdom of insecurity": we can't have both the ultimate security of the soul and true excitement and passion for life.   In discarding the possibility of a life hereafter, our values necessarily shift to this world, not the next. Our projects involve the joy and suffering inherent in being embodied creatures situated on a finite planet, facing the pressing challenge of material sustainability. We must create meaning for ourselves using our capacities for compassion, creativity, and aesthetics applied in situations that demand the utmost gravity and those that invite the most self-forgetful indulgent play. Naturalism, in denying our dualistic transcendental ambitions, gives us just one world and therefore assigns it greater value than do its supernaturalistic competitors. Since the intuition of significance is central to spiritual experience, naturalism heightens the spiritual possibilities inherent in everyday life by adding greater significance and weight to our existence at this very moment.   Spiritual Practice   Once we let go of traditional definitions of spirituality, naturalism becomes a powerful resource in evoking the spiritual response and providing a unified cognitive context within which it can be interpreted. By abjuring spirits and ghosts we discover our true place in the cosmos, in which Existence replaces Purpose, function replaces essence, and surprise replaces security. It turns out we are of one nature, not two, a nature shared by all we see and know.   But how, practically speaking, are we to feel all this? Abstractions are all well and good, but we might want the direct experience of connection simply because it's intrinsically rewarding, a refreshment from our ordinary ego-centered, goal-driven state of mind. Naturalism can help inspire us, but to substantially change how we feel we may need to participate in some sort of spiritual practice.   An explicitly naturalistic spiritual practice must evoke the spiritual response in the cognitive context of naturalism. Traditional religion has linked this response to sacred liturgies, with all their supernatural connotations, using music, theater, incense, architecture and other ritual elements that generate feelings of connection and wonder. There is no reason why such a link cannot be forged between naturalism and such feelings; it's simply a matter of finding (or designing) rituals and practices which pair these feelings with expressions of naturalistic beliefs. In his television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan accomplished this by telling a naturalistic creation story, set to some exceptionally beautiful music and stunning visual panoramas of the heavens.   There's much to choose from in terms of existing spiritual practice that might be adapted for a naturalistic spirituality. Some Unitarian services come close to an entirely naturalistic celebration of community, despite the fact that they often use theistic hymns and take place in buildings that look suspiciously like churches. Naturalists must infiltrate these congregations, form committees over coffee, and lobby for less God and more naturalism in the liturgy. The musicians and lyricists among them must collaborate on new, more explicitly naturalistic anthems (having tried this myself, I know it's damned difficult, but someone's got to do it). Sunday school must teach ethics and respect and humility before the mysteries of life without resorting to stale and incredible biblical tales. Rather, parents must search the literature (and the Web) for the Sesame Street and Zoom of secular spirituality, should it exist. If not, they must create it themselves. And as for venues, those with planetariums nearby might investigate the possibilities for creating a participatory naturalistic service, with sound and lighting effects. Finding out what works and doesn't work in all of this, is, of course, a matter of experimentation.   For those not inclined to communal practice, there are more private means of altering one's consciousness, meditation chief among them. Meditation, although not often advertised as such, can work dramatic changes on the brain via concentration or the non-judgmental awareness of mental contents. When thinking quiets down and sensory input is at a minimum, very different sorts of feelings can arise, some of which are extraordinarily unlike normal waking consciousness. Although meditation is not an easy art, the potential rewards are great for those who have the knack and put in the time. The states of consciousness accessed, naturalistically understood, are just more brain states, but they can have directly felt qualities of unity and acceptance that mark them off as subjectively quite special, and that correspond to empirically-grounded cognitions. Because many varieties of Buddhism are inherently naturalistic and emphatically this-worldly, humanists interested in exploring meditation could do worse than joining a local Zen center or vipassana (insight meditation) group.   A naturalistic spiritual practice, of course, need not announce itself. Rather, it can shade into and blend with ecstatic and artistic pursuits in which no mention or thought arises of any philosophy or world view. The point is simply to gain the sense of connection, joy and immediacy, that the moment is sufficient unto itself. In my own experience, I've found such moments in the silence of a Quaker meeting, in Zen retreats, drumming with friends on New Year's Eve, in the heat of a sweat lodge in Arizona, star-gazing in the dead of winter, in singing, running, and composing music. Such activities can be more or less passive, but some demand skill. As with meditation, which only comes through practice, arts such as dance, music, singing, chant, and yoga should be taught so that each of us has some basic techniques with which to engage the moment. Whatever their origins, we can adopt such skills and techniques without necessarily adopting the tradition within which they arose, unless, of course, we find that tradition to our liking.   Drugs, whether legal or illicit, are of course another route to altered consciousness. In their swift modification of perception and cognition they are proof of the pudding that mind and brain are one. Many spiritual traditions have made and continue to make use of drugs to induce transcendental states, and I see no a priori moral problem with this, as long as no significant health or social problems result. The difficulty, however, is that direct, repeated chemical impingements on the neural substrates of consciousness often do entail unwanted side-effects, after-effects, or long-term health consequences. Although it may take more work, behavioral routes to unitary states are a good deal safer (especially if you want to repeat the experience often), and because they require some effort, the end result may have more subjective value and be taken less for granted than drug-induced ecstasies.   There are, then, many choices available to the naturalist in discovering a congenial spiritual practice. Most, if not all of the practices mentioned above are ideologically neutral (or can be made so), and thus consistent with a naturalistic cognitive context for spirituality. By opening ourselves up to the spiritual response from time to time, we get a taste of what it feels like to be what we truly are: creatures fully integrated at every moment into the greater scheme of things. Yes, we are also fully individuated human beings living out our separate fates, but the realization of a deeper connection is necessary to set an authentic stage for our personal and collective strivings. Naturalism provides an all-encompassing perspective that can sustain us as well as any to be found in traditional spirituality, and it leaves behind the dualisms that can obscure the intuition of unity. Should we ever want recourse to the transpersonal, naturalism is there for us, not just as a philosophy, but as an inspiration to feel truly at home in the universe. http://www.naturalism.org/naturali.htm Towards a Naturalistic Spirituality Thomas W Clark   What follows is an outline of how naturalism can serve as the basis for an authentic spirituality.   A naturalistic understanding of spirituality   The spiritual experience - the experience of meaning, connection and joy, often informed by philosophy or religion - is, from a naturalistic perspective, a state of the physical person, not evidence for a higher realm or non-physical essence. Nevertheless, this understanding of spirituality doesn't lessen the attraction of such an experience, or its value for the naturalist. We naturally crave such feelings and so will seek the means to achieve them consistent with our philosophy.   The dilemma for naturalists   But the question for the naturalist arises: how, as someone who doesn't believe in transcendent, otherworldly connections, or in ultimate meanings or purposes, can I legitimately evoke such feelings? That is, how, consistent with naturalism as my guiding philosophy, can I find the same emotional resonance or the same sorts of consolations that my religiously or supernaturally inclined friends experience? What is spiritually uplifting about naturalism?   For naturalism to evoke spiritual states akin to those evoked by religion, the follower of naturalism must find that the conclusions of her philosophy have profound, positive psychological consequences. The conclusions must resonate with her basic human needs for connection and meaning, even though, paradoxically, naturalism tends to undercut the easy presumption of overarching purposes. What then, are some of the conclusions of naturalism, and how might they affect the person who holds them? Although the conclusions for the most part seem negative, in that they deny dearly held assumptions common to most religious views, it may be that the very act of freeing ourselves from these assumptions can generate the exhilaration and joy of freedom, of discovering a tough but liberating truth, in which uncertainty moves us in the same way that certainty does others. This is an experience which counts as spiritual, even though no spirits are involved.   The cosmic connection   Most generally, naturalism places us firmly within the natural realm, extending from quarks to quasars. The scope of this realm as depicted in our sciences is nothing less than staggering. It is a far more varied, complex, and vast creation than any provided by religion, offering an infinite vista of questions to engage us. What naturalism takes away in terms of a central, secure role for us in God's kingdom is more than compensated for by the open-ended excitement of being part of something whose dimensions, purpose and precise nature may never be known. In accepting a naturalistic view of ourselves, we trade security for surprise, certainty for an unending, perhaps unfulfillable quest for understanding, and easy platitudes about salvation for a flexible, mature accommodation to the often difficult facts of life and death.   That we are alive and sentient, with the capacity to form an understanding, however provisional, is the source of much amazement to the naturalist, since after all, none of what we consist of is sentient. Such amazement (and there are thousands of natural facts that can evoke it) can be the start of spiritual experience. That the stuff of our bodies came originally from the initial big bang, transmuted by stars and expelled in supernovas, seems a supremely satisfying connection to the most far flung corners (in both space and time) of the universe. This deep sense of connection forms a central aspect of spiritual feelings. The aesthetics of the natural world contribute as well, from the most sophisticated of the human arts, to the colors of Brazilian agate, to the grand structure of the great galactic wall. Best of all, though, is that naturalism shows that creation can't be tied up neatly by our understanding: we will always stand in wonder at the vastness of possibilities in nature, those realized and those unrealized, knowing that we comprehend just a fraction of what might be known, and knowing that there is no end to it. Faced with all this, the naturalist, if she is capable of letting go into a non-cognitive response, may discover feelings of profound awe, delight, and surrender, feelings typical of religious revelation but now felt in the context of a world view consistent with the most hard-edged empiricism. Although it is not widely known, the full appreciation of naturalism and its implications can be as intoxicating, perhaps more so, than any religion yet devised. Philosophy link: Faith, Science, and the Soul.   No ultimate purpose   It is easy to see that from a naturalistic perspective there cannot be any ultimate purpose to existence: as soon as any purpose is proposed, one can simply ask why that purpose should drive existence, as opposed to some other purpose. Even if God created us to glorify him and his works, we are still creatures that can ask why God himself exists. As questioning creatures, we will always be in the position of being able to second guess any overarching meaning someone attaches to the universe. In short, our intelligence guarantees that we will never rest secure in a comfortable interpretation of existence, since we can see that existence is always prior to its interpretation.   The initial psychological response to this dilemma is often the melancholy feeling that life is therefore devoid of meaning. Since we can never construe an ultimate purpose, what's the point, anyway? But on second thought, once we see the logic of the desire for ultimate meaning - that by its very nature it is an unsatisfiable demand - we can begin to laugh about it, and savor our position as a very curious one indeed. It turns out that smart creatures will never be in a position to satisfy themselves about meaning, at least of the ultimate variety. That fact itself is rather a compelling discovery about existence, one that prevents a complacent, boring acceptance of the status quo from ever setting in. There is no way things are ultimately meant to be, so existence becomes a work in perpetual progress (not towards a goal, however), whose outcome is never settled. We therefore stand perpetually surprised, curious, and wondering. We cannot easily set aside our demand for meaning, but instead of being disappointed about its frustration, we find ourselves free to play with existence (or to be its playthings, perhaps), to create local meaning in activities we find intrinsically satisfying, and get caught up in our human drama, knowing that the drama is set on a much larger stage whose dimensions may never be determined, and which exists for no reason. The direct appreciation of this "no meaning, no reason" aspect of existence can have a profound, and positive psychological impact: we are free of any confining purposes; we are free of the deadening certainty that we have a set role to play and a "correct" goal to achieve; we are liberated to be perpetually amazed at the sheer, startling fact that something exists, not nothing, and that we are part of it. Amazement, wonder and the feeling of connection are arguably central components of the spiritual experience.   No free will   A naturalistic understanding connects the human organism to the larger physical world in all respects, via genetics and environmental influences. Since we don't, on this understanding, exist as independent, immaterial agents directing our behavior from a causally disconnected vantage point, this means we don't have free will in the traditional sense. We cannot have done other than what we did in a given situation.   This means that persons are not first causes, rather they are links in the natural unfolding of the world in space and time. As much as we experience ourselves as separate egos, deliberating our fates one decision at a time, our very deliberations are entirely included in this unfolding.   This insight may at first disturb us, since we might suppose we are nothing more than passive puppets, moved at the whim of forces beyond our control. But we are not even puppets, since there is no one separate from the various forces, processes, and states that comprise the person-environment complex to be pushed around. We are, in fact, fully connected parts of the whole, identifiable as separate persons to be sure, but neither causal masters nor victims.   The psychological consequences of this realization are manifold. Without giving up the sense of our own identity and particularity (pretty much impossible, short of profound experiences of ego loss, which may themselves be of value in the right context) we feel a deep connection to the world around us, since that world is, after all, where each aspect of ourselves originates. A relaxation ensues from letting go of the illusion that we must continually "steer" ourselves through life, from realizing that our decisions themselves arise on their own out of the circumstances that constitute our body and its environment. We don't choose our character or motives from some independent vantage point; they are the creations of life and culture themselves, not the artifacts of a causally autonomous ego. Freed from the burden of being our own creators, we nevertheless don't passively resign ourselves to fate, since we understand that as creatures fully embedded in the world, our actions do indeed have causal effects which sometimes make all the difference. The naturalistic dismantling of free will frees thus connects us and liberates us: we are parts of the evolving whole that can witness the evolution and add interesting twists to the outcome by virtue of the capacities that life has given us. But since we are such parts, we can let go of the rather arrogant and ultimately disabling presumption that we stand outside creation. As Alan Watts said, You Are It, and the direct appreciation of this connectedness becomes part of a naturalistic spirituality. Philosophy link: Free will page.   Not knowing what's going to happen next: being surprised by life   As naturalists, we understand there are few certainties, either in how life will work out, in how we are supposed to behave, or in what to believe. There is no finally correct way to be and no master plan that determines our role, either as individuals or as a species. Instead, we are part of nature which unfolds on its own, in a grand experiment to no point or purpose. For us, this experiment involves pain and pleasure, these being aspects of nature in its form (our form) as semi-autonomous, sentient beings. So despite our best efforts, life will shock us with unexpected tragedy and if we're lucky, some triumphs. We can't help but act as we do, constituted as we are, but we can't, except within very broad limits, predict just what we'll do next, or what will happen to us. We don't know just what we'll think or feel or say in the very next moment, let alone the next day, week, or year.   This lack of certainty about life and its outcome adds an inevitably tragic aspect to the naturalistic stance, since things may not work out to our liking, and often don't. But equally, it adds the element of perpetual surprise and novelty: we don't ever know quite what's next. Both the possibility of tragedy and the probability of surprise add their distinctive flavor to a naturalist's spiritual experience. There is darkness as well as light, the unknown as well as the known, and the pull between them.   Consciousness and feelings as strictly physical states   Another conclusion of naturalism is that the mental and physical are one, that perceptions, feelings, emotions, thoughts and the rest all consist of suitably organized matter, the brain. As much as it may seem to be the case that our mental lives constitute a separate realm, science shows that there is nothing over and above the brain, or any similarly organized system, whatever its physical makeup, that needs to be invoked to explain consciousness.   This non-dual conception of consciousness gives us new respect for the "merely" physical, for our bodies and our fleshly existence. In what we call our mental lives, the material world evokes a representation of itself that takes on a rich set of qualitative characteristics determined by a massively complex functional architecture. From a naturalistic perspective, there is no insubstantial essence behind or inherent in such qualities, instead they arise mutually as a system of relations and differences that the brain uses to track the world. Although it isn't literally miraculous that the world of experience just is the physical brain, it is indeed a marvel that such is the case; it is quite an astonishing fact. That every nuance of feeling and every twitch of thought is the material world at play can spark a profound experience of wonder, and provides a satisfying, unified conception of oneself: the mental and physical bound together as a natural phenomenon. Philosophy link: Function and Phenomenology.   No self that survives death   Naturalism disallows the existence of the soul. There is nothing about a person that survives death, so we cannot hope for a better world in the hereafter, or for reincarnation in this world. But, there is no nothingness at death, either. One is not plunged into the void, to rest there eternally. Just as we don't experience any "nothingness" before birth, neither will we experience it after death. Therefore, we need not fear death as an ending that we can experience.   How should we feel about death, then, as naturalists? Although we still have our biologically programmed fear of death to contend with, and we may regret projects unfinished or the loss that our death might inflict on others, our death itself does not concern us directly at all. But if we still dread our ending, we should keep in mind that consciousness overall does not end, since others are still alive and being born. Death and birth actually insure the radical refreshment of consciousness, and that might be construed as a good thing (although some Buddhists, for instance, would just as soon consciousness stopped arising altogether, so this view may not give them comfort).   What we don't know, at the moment of our deaths, is what will be next (although it won't be nothingness, we know that). As naturalists, death confronts us with a total cognitive impasse, an ultimate limit on what we as individuals can predict or control. We may at first reflexively recoil at this prospect, but maybe we can jump in, and give ourselves up to this ending of knowledge and control with an enthusiastic curiosity. Not that we ourselves, as this particular person about to end, can ever know what's next, but that there will be a next moment for someone, at least, we can be assured. Our last moments, then, can be ones of profound anticipation and surrender, not to the void, but to the inevitable change in which we participate that sweeps all before it. Philosophy link: Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity.   No perfect or final knowledge   A corollary of being a fully integrated part of a naturalistic whole is that we cannot step outside the system to observe it. We look at the universe from a particular perspective, and even science inevitably reflects our particularly human constitution: we see what we are "designed" by evolution to see, even in our mathematics, perhaps. This means that our world views and philosophies, including naturalism itself, do not occupy a finally privileged position; they are subject to pragmatic change and improvement, and do not represent what the world might be "in itself".   The naturalist, then, may not be as dead serious or dogmatic in how she espouses naturalism compared to how others espouse their philosophies or religions. This is another aspect, driven by naturalism, of not knowing what is ultimately the case, of being forced not to cling to any certainty. Part of the spiritual experience is to leave the realm of thought for a non-discriminative state (or at least a state in which cognitive distinctions play a lesser role). Being less attached to a particular conception of how the world necessarily is, or must be, may leave the naturalist more receptive to entering such a state. (Not that the naturalist abandons her cognitive style or preferences; such a feat is nearly impossible, short of brainwashing or drug overdose.) Fewer preconceptions about what a spiritual experience must be like, or involve in the way of dogma, make it possible for the naturalist to find wonder and enchantment in many ordinary aspects of life. The distinction between the sacred and the profane gives way to the possibility that a simple, unheralded moment might be the gateway to an immediate apprehension of connection. The here and now become primary, since there are no guarantees of a perfect truth to be attained or a salvation to come later. As much as we strive to achieve understanding, there is no final understanding to achieve (except perhaps this very insight), which means there is no point in putting off the celebration of the present, if we find we are so moved. Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire Ruth Stein http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_stein01.shtml keywords: verticality; desire; monotheism; father; sacrifice; patriarchy; God; secularization; death; femininity Ruth Stein is a New York psychoanalyst Introduction   This essay suggests that the binary oppositions (e.g., black/white; pure/impure) characteristic of fundamentalism pivot on their axis to become a vertical structure that expresses oppressive inequalities between man and woman, God and man, at the same time as it reveals a structure of mystical desire toward God.   Patriarchal monotheism has characteristic aspects, such as oneness, absolute (vertical) difference, invisibility (e.g., the taboo on making images of God). These aspects represent the contradictions of fatherhood in patriarchal culture: while the father engenders his son, the father's status and his love, are problematic, since his bodily tie to his son is invisible. The destructive consequences of this invisibility and absence are explored.   A clinical case is presented, where the analysand vociferously fights a personal God, who has been erected as protection against annihilation anxieties that plagued this aggrieved and bereaved person. The patient's relationship to his God and his dead father is compared to the terrorists' relation to God.   Increasing religious purging may parallel escalating destructiveness; this is the basic explanation of the deterioration of religious experience into fundamentalism and violent fundamentalism. The believer displays a "loving paranoia" a blend of 'love' and destructiveness, toward his paternal God.   *   I shall describe today a certain state of mind which, linked with cultural and group processes, leads to fundamentalism, and with further developments, to religious terrorism. I wish to emphasize that my perspective is psychoanalytic and more specifically, intrapsychic, that is, I focus on inner processes, rather than on the social, cultural and political aspects of fundamentalism which are usually the prisms through which these phenomena are discussed. This fundamentalist state of mind is characterized by a sense of utter certainty, a feeling of being in the right, and highly rhetorical repetitions of Truths. I describe how the simplification of emotional complexities into binary oppositions (basically of good and bad) not only creates order out of chaos and vagueness, but also constitutes a 'vertical' homoerotic quest for God's love. These processes of ordering and desire are supported by the need to sacrifice, by masochism and coercion, and are enacted by increasingly severe purification processes. I shall describe the continuous psychic transformations that take place as purification processes reach their zenith.   It is usually assumed that the religious quest is a search for meaning, but it is important to note that it is at the same time a series of transformations of fear. In this latter sense, the fundamentalist state of mind originate from what may be likened to an extreme and long-extended form of what we experience at those moments and hours when anxiety and fear, or shame, overwhelm us and reduce us to helplessness, a painful sense of smallness, and the feeling of being at the mercy of greater powers than ourselves.   Basically, there are two elemental types of fear leading to fundamentalist formations: (1) fear of death, or rather, of personal annihilation (see the works of Rank, Becker, or Lifton), and (2) the fear and rage in the face of the very existence of the other human being, whose presence and intentions are experienced as an obstacle to one's desires, (Hegel, Sartre, Klein in their works develop this predicament). Fundamentalism1 would then be the quest to omnipotently get rid of these experiences, or to violently transcend them. Human destructiveness and self-destructiveness is to a large extent the need to destroy these fears. Significantly, the destruction of fear and rage can be accomplished through processes of idealization and purification. The world is "furiously religious"   Recently, Peter Berger and Christopher Dykema have alerted us to an astonishing world-wide resurgence of religious conviction. The question is whether this religious upsurge, which is so often fundamentalist and prone to degenerate into religious terrorism, is a simple reaction to modernity. The view that magical thinking is to be found, on the contrary, in the concept of god-the-father, is view is endorsed by Christopher Rhoades D'kema's (2001). Thus, monotheistic religions, which almost by definition are patriarchal, may be no less (and possibly more) "enchanted' and "enchanting', no less magical and mystifying than polytheism or paganism. 2 D'kema's point that patriarchal monotheism is consistent and continuous with both coercive fundamentalism and with "the liberal religion of loving-kindness and compassion most of us would prefer' helped clarify my thinking on this subject. Patriarchal Monotheism: Abstractness, Oneness, Invisibility   The view of patriarchal3 monotheism as one of the last vestiges of enchantment, contrasts with the usual notion of monotheism as the peak of religious disenchantment held by many, among them Frankfurt School thinkers Adorno and Horkheimer (1944), who wrote approvingly on the "disenchanted world of Judaism", with its prohibition of pictorial representation of God (Bildverbot). In line with Freud (1939)4, for whom the monotheistic prohibition on images made Judaism into a religion of instinctual renunciation, Adorno and Horkheimer regard the prohibition on image-making as enabling the Jews to cross the threshold from sensory imitation (mimesis) to abstract ideas, from mythology to rationality, by enabling them to convert, or rather abolish, images into a series of duties in the form of ritual (see Rabinbach, 2000).   Fatima Mernissi (1992), a Moroccan religious feminist scholar, tells us that   Mohammed proposed to reduce the many to One, to abolish all idols and believe in one God. From the year he began to preach publicly, to the year of his conquest of Mecca, Mohammed succeeded in destroying the statues of gods and goddesses and in unifying the Arab world around al-wahid, "the One' (p. 98).   This was revolutionary, since henceforward,   Opposition to the One would forever have a negative color. Submission to the one is paid by immortality and the vanquishing of death (p. 97). Belief and Desire   Monotheism is about the One, about the one who is invisible,5 and it is usually patriarchal, that is, it has at its core the belief in a masculine and paternal deity. Regarding monotheism as masculinist and patriarchal, and as generating problematical forms of desire, poses a challenge to cherished beliefs regarding monotheism as the most evolved form of religion. It is usually assumed that patriarchal monotheism represents an advance over polytheism (or matriarchal religions) by virtue of its sanctifying a single, integrative entity. Challenging these assumptions may offer new knowledge as well as extend feminist critique to the religious realm.   In addition to the emphasis on the particular characteristics of patriarchal monotheism, the stance I offer here differs from most positions seeking to understand fundamentalism in that ' my position foregrounds the libidinal and perverted relations between a certain kind of believer and his God, in which the libidinal and the violent come together. Assuming that cultural forms reflect underlying motivations or structures of desire6, I suggest that 1. fundamentalism is based on a violent, homo-erotic, self-abnegating father-son relationship, and that 2. violent fundamentalism is a process of degeneration of the exalted paternal (inner object) into a murderously persecutory one, that is identified with in an experiential state of mind of utter awe and "love".     This abject state of love for the father is clearly discernible in Atta's letter, or in Bin Laden's poetry to his fatherly God (Stein, 2002). At the core of variously structured fundamentalist groups, we find psychodynamic processes involving transformations of hatred (and self-hatred) into idealizing, fanatical love and utter devotion. The idealization and "love' create tremendous power to annihilate all that stands in the way of the cult of the exalted persecutory object. These projections and transformations of hate achieve respite from fear of destructiveness and persecution (although the calm is temporary). Since what is involved is a large-scale transformation of a persecutory object into a loving one, this process cannot but be profoundly paranoid and destructive.   What is ordinarily stressed in discourses on fundamentalism is its cognitive style of black-and-white and the absolute certainty that shapes this state of mind. It has been said that fundamentalists do not want understanding, negotiation, compromise or even dialogue. For the fundamentalist lens nothing is opaque and truly puzzling, nothing needs further understanding (that is, understanding in other than pre-given frames of interpretation), there is nothing genuinely new under the sun; everything is self evident and self-identical. Such a style of thinking seeks order and certainty so as to create a patterned, predictable world-view, to feel safe and free of self-eroding doubt. Fundamentalism provides a sense of mastery and lucidity in the face of powerlessness and existential anxiety, and in the face of the will of the other and one's own will and desire.   By separating the good and the bad through strictly following religious fundamentals and creating clarity and order, fundamentalism functions as mind-control and as a tight holding, providing a kind of soothing iron belt7, a shielding carapace to keep away the confusion and fragmentation that come from a weakened, brittle self, from a looming sense of futility and failure, and an assortment of resentments at contemporary culture, whether experienced as rejecting and unattainable, as corrupt and hateful, or as frightening and predatory (and it often is not so far from these pictures!). To uprooted, frustrated, confused, lost, envious, sometimes degraded persons, the group construction of such a carapace seems the most natural and right way to collectively strengthen their sense of self. The stress put on the boundaries between the faithful inside this carapace and those outside of it, is a necessary concomitant of the protective process. 8 Submission, Verticality   The danger is conceived differently from within the fundamentalist group and from an outside interpreter's viewpoint. Most fundamentalists mourn the moral and social decline from better times to the present situation of corruption and license even (or especially) in relation to their own co-religionists. The danger they see is that of God's truth and righteous values are forgotten or have become confused and weakened. To outside observers however, the danger the fundamentalist mind shuns is perceived to be about annihilation anxieties, weakness and shame, as well as about personal confusion (Erikson called it 'identity diffusion'). Whereas for the fundamentalist combating the danger is what deepens one's religious faith, to the non-fundamentalist it is precisely this sense of danger that turns the religious spiritual sense of the sacred the sense that the world is suffused with invisible meaningfulness (cf. Eliade, 1968; Otto, 1958) into an absolutist, impenetrable, passionate religious cement fundamentalism. The shift from religious devotion to fundamentalism parallels the deterioration of the sacred into an alien, persecutory presence.9 Thus, whereas the religious10 sense of the sacred is the confrontation with the numinous (the godly) and the sublime by letting oneself go and holding no expectations, fundamentalism is a sense of 'being held tight', being enveloped by a comforting straightjacket. Whereas the sense of the sacred and transcendent is precious and many of us would agree that life is all the poorer without it, fundamentalism is the self-rejecting submission to an ideal authority that finally turns out to be submission to an alienated (projected), horrifying aspect of oneself.   What is achieved through this submission and tightening of boundaries and restrictions is not only safety; there is another precious imagined reward involved in this posture. I shall again turn to Moslem religious fundamentalism, which is currently the most active and dangerous form of religious fundamentalism.   Fatima Mernissi (1992) summarizes her researches into Islamic history of thought by holding that Islam gave the faithful immortality in exchange for submission and God-man inequality.   The Arabs (in Mohammed's time) were to become immortal. A great Beyond opened to them the royal road to the conquest of time. They would no longer die; Paradise awaited them. Because the child born of the womb of the woman is mortal, however, the law of paternity was instituted to screen off the uterus and woman's will within the sexual domain ' The new code of immortality was to be inscribed on the body of woman. Henceforth the children born of the uterus of a woman would belong to their father, and he is certain of gaining Paradise if he submits to the divine will (p. 128).   Thus, men are accorded (promised) security until the end of time, at the price of total repudiation of women and total submission to God. While woman is a repulsive reminder of mortality and the finitude of the flesh, God is the promise of immortality. Life and death become highly symbolized. Temporality, earthliness, feminine desire are all linked in the fundamentalist mind and must be obliterated. Devaluation of the present and a forcefully sustained hope for a glorious future is a hallmark of cults and totalitarian movements. In the fundamentalist world, desire is a dangerous subversive force. Islam promises peace at the price of sacrifice of desire (hawa), which is considered in the Moslem community as the source of dissention and war   Desire, which is individual by definition, is the opposite of rahma [grace, mercy ' RS], which is an intense sensitivity for the other for the group (Mernissi, p. 128). Non-Earthly Vertical Desire   What Mernissi did not attend to, however, is the desire that grows and luxuriates on the stump of the cut-off "earthly" desire. As Altmeyer and Hunsberger (1992) point out, Those who espouse [sic] this ideology have a special relationship with the deities (p. ).   It is this "special relationship" that is of interest to me here, since I assume that fundamentalism is not just strictness, rigidity, and literal adherence, but is suffused with a libidinal dimension of desire. For the fundamentalist, keeping the laws (1) is the Truth; (2) protects him; (3) gives him a special relationship; (4) "marries' him vertically. Verticalization of difference engenders vertical desire. Vertical desire is the mystical longing for merger with the idealized abjecting Other. On this view, the starkly opposing terms and polarizations with which fundamentalist thinking is suffused come to assume positions of higher and lower on a vertical axis. Since such binary oppositions, as we know (from deconstructionism, feminism, race theory, or colonial theory) always result in inscribing inequality, fundamentalism is not only a psychic mode of separation; it is also a psychic mode of inequality.11 Within this mode the non-believer is profoundly unequal to the believer, man is eternally unequal to God, and woman is unquestionably unequal to man. Fundamentalism is about inequality. When we think about fundamentalism, we tend to be aware of woman's inequality to man and the non-believer's inequality to the believer, but we tend to forget the believer's inequality to God.12 In fundamentalist regimes, God rules over men, while men rule over women. Being oppressed by God, oppressing women, fundamentalism is an oppressed oppression. Although so persistently present as to be invisible, so totallistically embraced as to be sacralized, this inequality generates a desire aimed at overcoming both the distinctions and the verticality. The striving to overcome verticality through mystical reunion and kill what stands as barrier to this trajectory can generate deep faith and powerful hope (cf. Stein, 2003).   Since certainty and fundamentalistic knowledge are linked to a desire that springs from the 'verticalization of difference': difference becomes scaled and graded perpendicularly. Whereas heterogeneity spreads and sprawls 'horizontally', encompassing different kinds and species, difference in the fundamentalist order is well-marked and sharply-circumscribed. In this vertical mode, there are purified, triumphant, superior believers, and puny, defiled, noxious nonbelievers. The exorbitant, absolute distance between the two, the extreme of exaltation and degradation, mark this verticality. It is the distance between self-loathing and adoration. Rather than the rebellious son fearing his castration by the father, it is the abjection to a lethal ideal, a regression to the archaic phallic father that is at stake, for   "whereas the ego submits to the superego out of fear of punishment, it submits to the ego-ideal out of love" (Freud, 1921; Nunberg, 1932).   What is a Father?   I believe we have not puzzled enough about fatherhood (cf. Stein, 2002b), and that the nature of fatherly love deserves a psychoanalytic appreciation of its problematics and complexity. Being generated in the flesh, from the father's body, yet invisibly so, being a tiny drop of the father's body, issued forth in a fleeting moment, father's love is neither mother's love nor an adoptive parent's love. The invisibility of the bodily link between father and child makes for a mystifying and unfathomable bond simultaneously abstract and concrete, and ungraspable. In a sense, 'father' is an elusive entity, engendering yet not containing in the body, close but connected through an act (of procreation) in the (un)conceivable past and hence through a law 'abstract, but terribly binding' Mustn't father arouse unique longings' Mustn't symbiosis with the primal father be no less, although differently, terrifying than symbiosis with the primal archaic "phallic mother" The complex 'abstract' closeness between father and child breeds idealization, tends toward the narcissistic domain and may involve a constant quest for transformation and for improving oneself to gain this love. But it must also pass through awe, the sublime, paranoia, impersonal Law and Justice 'all measuring one's self-worth in the face of another, one's "Last Judgment" meted by an idealized object.   David Lee Miller (2003) is a literary critic who likewise addresses the invisibility of paternity. He dwells on the 'bootstrapping' of the father:   Symbolically [fatherhood] ' is at once the origin, foundation, and summit of the family, the tribe, the nation, and the church. No member of a class can stand outside the class to which it belongs; no human person can be the Father.' The impossibility of embodying such a function is precisely what requires its personification as a deity (p. 16). The impossibility of embodying such a function is precisely what requires its personification as a deity.   The personification of the figure of the father as a deity, however, requires the complementary relation to a son. Patrilineal kin know that they are kin because they sacrifice together; they become patrilineal kin by so doing. To so create social and religious paternity is precisely to transcend a natural relation (p. 2). Blood sacrifices [equals] a technology of representation, a way to make paternity spectacular and so to foster its social reality. The son 'belongs' to his father by God's decree.   However, the blood sacrifice celebrated together is a pale version of the sacrifice of the son himself. Miller points to Western culture's oddest couple: the deified father and the sacrificial son, and speculates that the motif of filial sacrifice is the most striking feature shared by the canonical texts of English literature, along with their classical and biblical antecedents. He adduces numerous and rich examples showing that in classical, Hebrew, and Christian cultures, the son offered in sacrifice provokes worship, fascination, and dread.   There is a growing body of thinking pointing to the notion that patriarchal, patrilineal cultures recruit sacrificial victims as visible stand-ins for the fatherly body. The growing prominence in psychoanalysis of the Laius Complex to supplement the Oedipus Complex is one example. Sending of soldiers to war as a sacrificial gesture of the father and the group is another horrific instance.   Indeed, Richard Koenigsberg (2002, 2003) juxtaposes the texts of numerous writers who glorify the young men who were sent to war, texts which sound morbidly perverse in the adoring and cunning frissons they convey. These texts demonstrate that the most important point to be made about WWI is that the soldier's body was 'intended to be mutilated. The idea is that perhaps soldiers die not only because they are killed by the enemy; soldiers are sent to be killed by the leaders of the nations at war. War is a sacrificial ritual on a huge scale, and this may be its ultimate function.13 The kamikaze, the German soldiers, were all offering themselves to be slain. This is the essence of being a soldier, as Glynne Dyer says: "By becoming soldiers, men agree to die when we tell them to." War is an institution whereby sons give over their bodies to Fathers in the name of validating or valorizing the sacred ideal.   I believe that even after having exposed this cultural construct for what it is, its wellsprings originate in some deeply human psychodynamics. I have (cf. Stein, 2002a) written that the terrorist wants (unconsciously) to change the father from persecutor into an idealized love object, to reverse the rage and discontent (and the pain and the suffering) into glory and narcissistic enhancement. When I use the term 'regression to the father' to explain terrorist behavior and experience, I mean regression from the persecutory to the idealized father. The persecutory residues, however, remain, as we shall see later.   Religion guarantees salvation through the doing of good. Doing God's will, satisfying Him, is the thread running through the terrorists' utterances. Doing good, in religious discourse, is often synonymous with fighting the bad. The bad can have different faces: it can be in the nature of a diabolic temptation, of losing one's connection to God, or coming to doubt divine intention and goodness. These forms of 'sin'14 amount to the betrayal of God's goodness and mercy.15 Whether we are religious or not, psychoanalytic thinking conceives of "the' war between good and evil as an _expression of a psychic conflict between a sense of inner badness (that which brings suffering and pain), and a need for goodness, so as to attain a state of purity, righteousness, calm, and goodness. This can be achieved through being good to fellow humans, and/or through doing God's will. Although it entails extreme emotional reversals, the sequence leading from badness to goodness is quite simple, having basically to do with the perennial striving to transform bad feelings into good feelings. This basic psychic activity is mediated by the religious idiom of fighting an eternal war between good and evil. When this war takes place outside the person and within a group of like-minded believers, and when it is fought against non-believers, we have a religious war. Keyword in these processes is purification. Stages of purification   Unpacking this basic process of 'purification', by which one achieves 'goodness' or has the 'good' dominate the bad, reveals a process in three stages: (1) Separation of badness and goodness and purification;   (2) Elimination of the bad,   (2a) through reinforcement of inerrancy and renunciation of choice, and   (2b) through elimination of the bad, by vehement action;   (3) Achievement of the good through death.     The first stage of purification attempts to separate good and evil through religious rituals, which ensure God's protection of the right and the just within a stable inner place, unassaulted and uncontaminated by evil ' not unlike our usual need to safeguard goodness and love in times of hardship and trouble. When these religious rituals (e.g., ritual bathing, prayer, fasting, removal of excremental symbols, circumcision) that function to segregate the good from the bad and to safeguard it, prove inadequate, the second stage is entered. This stage necessitates more rigid rituals and a further degree of concretization. Some device has to be established that will permanently prevent the return of the bad and its infiltration into the realm of the good. The second stage ' seeking warranties ' is that of fundamentalist formation. Although there is a world of difference between fundamentalism and violent fundamentalism, psychoanalytically speaking, they are still both motivated by the need to eliminate badness (errancy, betrayal of the divine, loss of faith in 'goodness') through fighting the bad outside (of oneself). What is required now is to eliminate the heretical, impure, inimical elements, that is, killing the infidels who do not believe in (my/our) God. However, the third stage in this separation of good and bad is psychoanalytically the most intriguing. Here a destructive counterpart is created to the killing of "God's enemies': it is the killing of oneself. Obviously the killing of oneself in the effort to kill the impure part of oneself, amounts to the total failure ' or total grim success ' of the process of purification. One purifies oneself to death, one purifies oneself out of existence, and one purifies the world out of existence.16 Psychoanalysts call it "the return of the repressed', by which they mean the observation that nothing can be willfully erased from the psyche without leaving some active residual process smoldering. Trying too hard to cleanse oneself from one's badness ultimately means being bad to oneself. Although self-destruction through suicide does not refer to the leaders who recruit the suicidal religious terrorists, both recruiter and recruited are implicated in a preparatory process whereby the mind of the recruited is taken hold of, "washed', shaped, steeled, and converted into an efficient tool of death. Tracing this sequence, we make the startling discovery that both the evacuation of the bad and the attainment of the good are perforce reached through death, in death. Death is a final solution and an arch-answer to troubles. Death is also a magical homeopathic device which in fantasy is a means to forestall a more eternal death.   I think that the notion of purification is an axis that can explain our puzzlement as to why religious belief is liable to deteriorate and become so vitiated as to attain the conviction that killing is considered good and righteous. Like so many phenomena that can be unlocked by a psychoanalytic key, the phenomenon of the transformation of the good and spiritual into the murderous, can be better understood when we realize that a simple human belief, namely that it is good to fight evil, or that doing the good means eliminating the bad, can become perverted. The progressive stages in such a process of increasing splitting, increasing binarism, appear when such a belief becomes translated into the thought that it is good to erase evil, and hence, it is good to "kill' something ' or someone ' who represents evil, that is, who must be destroyed totally. This belief now requires the ratification through a divine command to kill the bad ones, built up and supported by continuous processes of group dynamics, isolation and affiliation, and brainwashing.   Excessive processes of "projection' operate when, in order to deal with my woes and sorrows, pains and dreads, I "externalize' these experiences and make other people into carriers and experiencers of these emotions. These other people are then perceived by me as really such. According to this emotional logic,17 by rejecting, even (symbolically or physically) destroying the people who have become recipients and carriers of my bad, denigrated parts, I achieve the destruction of bad parts of my self, which is my deep goal, and brings me great relief. The trouble is that, as this process of projection goes on, the self becomes amputated and decimated. It can now be filled up or (artificially) restored only by inflating another part the psyche, which will function as prosthesis, the part that will be called "God." God becomes a filler, an imported goodness. But this goodness is defensive and compensatory. The God of a psyche impoverished by continuous projection and amputation of badness outside has to be endlessly powerful and superior to replenish, boost, and vindicate the diminished and depleted state of self.   Since the projective and identificatory processes described above become increasingly violent18 as they go on, God becomes increasingly harsh, demanding, and tyrannical. The all-powerful protector may be divine and hallowed by an aura, but it successively becomes a Dorian Grey-like inner picture of a blood-thirsty tyrant: the guardian turns into the persecutor. This change from God as protector to God as persecutor is often beyond the awareness of the troubled believer, who, in the depth in his psychic processes, has now a converted mind. The utter liberation from moral fetters and human compassion that this state of mind affords, which allows the believer to kill and destroy, is at the same time the ultimate enthrallment. This constitutes a complete failure and perversion of the intention and function of religion, although this is precisely what religion has set out to do ' being good by fighting badness. Here the psychoanalytic and the existential meet, in that religion also aims to contend with the human dread of death by embracing death and conceiving of it as the gateway to a new and better life.   This stage of the religious process of purification is the most perplexing and extreme of all. The attempt to magically annihilate suffering and feelings of badness about oneself, the attempt to exterminate defilement and infidelity, eventuates in the necessity to die together with the killing of others, as if the boundary between life and death, self and other, has been completely obliterated and swamped by the total destruction of all materiality. It seems that in the process of projecting the bad parts of the self to the Infidels and the idealized parts of the self to God, nothing is left. The splitting of sublime immateriality and base badness and lechery is complete. The remaining body of the terrorist, has unconsciously stopped existing. The remaining physical body, with its needs and desires, is now superfluous. Like a pencil that is reduced out of existence by becoming increasingly sharpened this body will find its redemption by becoming pure instrument of God's will, eventually by merging with God in a cataclysm of purifying fire. Becoming ashes is the ultimate act of purification and spiritualization: there is no more desire of the flesh to defile one's self image, and the desire for God has been given its most extreme and loving due.   References Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, H. (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Almond, G, Appleby, R., & Sivan, E. (2003) Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalism around the World. Chicago U Press. Altmeyer, B. & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest and prejudice. Intern. J. Psychol. Religion, 2: 113-133. Armstrong, K. (2001). The Battle for God. New York: Ballantine Books. Bataille, G. (1985). Visions of Excess : Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon Books. Becker, E. (1962) The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man. Penguin. ---- (1973). The Denial of Death. 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Grand, S. (2002). Discussion of Ruth Stein's Evil as love and as liberation. Colloquium, NYU Postdoctroral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, April 2002. Hoffer, E. (1951). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper. Hoodfar, H. (2002). Bargaining with fundamentalism: Women and the politics of population control in Iran. In: www.hsph.harvard.edu/rt21/globalism/hoofdar.html. Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. U Calif Press. ---- (ed.) (2003). Global Religions: An Introduction. Oxford U Press. Kaufman, G. (1980). Shame. The Power of Caring. Rochester, Vt: Schenkman. Koenigsberg, R. (2002). Great Thinkers. Email-communications. Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: IUP. Mernissi, F. (1992). Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World. Perseus. Miller, D. L. (2003). Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witnesss. Cornell U Press. Moss, D. (2003). 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Hating in the First Person Plural, Other Press, 2003.. ----- (2002b). Regression to the Father. Paper read at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Training & Research (IPTAR), New York, Nov. 2002. ---- (2003). Vertical mystical homoeros: an altered form of desire in fundamentalism. Studies in Gender & Sexuality, 4(1): 38-58. Notes: 1 Paper given at the International Interdisciplinary Conference on Terror, Fundamentalism, and Culture. Berlin, June 10-12, 2004.   2 Although Nazism is usually not regarded as a religion, and certainly not as patriarchal monotheism, it was a Father-Leader cult, where Hitler talked about Germany as the Vaterland and said: "We do not want to have any other God, only Germany."(Koenigsberg, Oct. 2002).   3 Almond et all (2003) call them also Abrahamic fundamentalisms.   4 Freud spoke in Moses and Monotheism of the "advance in intellectuality' achieved by abstinence and instinctual renunciation.   5 For the purpose of this essay, I make no essential distinctions between Moslem, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalism, although I focus mostly on aspects of radical Islam, since they help the political circumstances into making it a brutally violent politico-religious form.   6 In contrast to Anglo-American psychoanalytic terminology that makes little use of the concept of desire, I find it useful to follow the so-called Continental (mostly Hegelian-inspired, French, particularly Lacanian, psychoanalysis) that uses "desire' and takes it for granted that it subtends even the most abstract cognitive and cultural rational endeavors.   7 See Hanna Arendt's description of the structure of totalitarianism as the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of many the One who unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of the course of history or nature.   8 Karen Armstrong's (2002) shift of emphasis when tracing the development of American fundamentalism is an illustration of this collapse of meaning-seeking and fear-avoiding motives: In her account, she shifts from explaining fundamentalism as a quest for transcendence that has become empty of spirituality, to describing how deeply the fundamentalist mind is ridden with fear and anxiety that cannot be assuaged by a purely rational argument, as she puts it. There is a vast sociological literature on the sense of persecution, escalating anxiety and revulsion against the dangers of an outer world, and a certainty about impending doom that fundamentalist groups protect themselves against or prepare for (cf. Almond et al., 2003; Lifton, 2001; Mousalli, 1992).   9 This is why a simple thesis like Armstrong's, where fundamentalism would be a normal response to a world shorn of transcendence and spirituality is unsatisfactory.   10 Whether it involves the God of a particular religion, or "God' in its more generalized sense of the Numinous, the Holy (Otto) that is the experience of transcendence and spiritual meaningfullness, does not make a difference here, in my view.   11 Fundamentalism could be metaphorized as aiming at imitating God's creation of a new world by partitioning an earth and a heaven out of chaos, at the same time as locating earth down and low and heaven up and high, through separating them in an absolute manner.   12 Mernissi notes the complete break between the divine and the human that was established in Muslim religion, where supremacy and sheer power belong only to God and cannot be claimed by man.   13 Koenigsberg points out that Hitler was among the greatest devotees of the sacrificial religion of German nationalism. Koengisberg: In Mein Kampf Hitler stated that ' "thousands and thousands of young Germans have stepped forward with self-sacrificing resolve to sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland." Hitler explicitly declared that the war was if fought in order to provide the occasion for people to sacrifice themsleves for Germany. Hitler is saying, in effect: "There shalt be no other god before Germany." The Jews were sacrificial victims, but so were the Germans.'   14 Sin is defined in many religious texts as the forgetting of one's Covenant with God, leaving one's connection with the Divinity.   15 Cf. Shura the Koran.   16 Although he meant it in a somewhat different sense, we can still borrow Derrida's concept of "autoimmunitary suicide", See Borradori, G. (2003), p. 96.   17 See my Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect, Karnac, 1999.   18 Kleinian thinking uses the adjective 'violent' frequently to describe primitive mental processes and unconscious fantasies).      Body as spirit I  Body as spirit II Body as spirit III  Outline and bibliog