Like Kevin, I was puzzled by Shankar Vedantam’s remarks about religion last week.
As Kevin outlined, Vedantam’s NPR segment highlighted a handful of ostensibly normal people who claimed to hear voices in their heads. The interviewees said that the voices consoled them in times of trial, and softened their anger and bitterness. One interviewee spoke of an imaginary friend named “Cher,” who helped her overcome feelings of shame as a child. Another described supernatural experiences after meeting with an occultist. A third claimed to have heard the voice of Christ and to have engaged in regular dialogue with the Nazarene.
Vedantam claims that it doesn’t matter whether these “voices” were “real,” because their messages were salutary for the hearers: “If God tells you to go kill someone,” he said, “it’s worth asking if God is actually doing the talking. But when you are looking for a way to put down a long-held grudge, or are suffering from acute shame because you cannot read, it seems silly to question the comfort offered by the voices in our head.”
As Kevin noted, this treatment of religious experiences necessarily presumes that all religions are untrue. Indeed, as Vedantam later argued, “Too often, religious and non-religious people get hung up on questions of what is real.”
If you take various religious faiths at their word, however, how could you not get “hung up” on their basis in reality?
The Koran conceives of itself not a sort of Arabized Suze Orman book designed to help readers put long-held grudges behind them, but instead as the inerrant, unchanging word of God. This veracity of this claim, particularly in light of the Quranic injunction that unbelievers are destined for “a flaming Fire wherein they will abide forever,” is very much worth caring about.
The entire Christian worldview rises or falls on a simple matter of historical fact: Whether a Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead to vindicate His claims to divine personage. Without the resurrection event, Christ’s moral teaching, while perhaps still of interest to the anthropologist or the charlatan, ceases to become a divine command levied under pain of eternal damnation. It is impossible to be too “hung up” on whether that specific event happened or not, because, as Kevin says, “if God is real, then that fact is the most important fact in the universe, something that should be perfectly obvious even to a committed atheist.”
Perhaps Shankar Vedantam wishes the stakes of this question were not so high. Sometimes, so do I. As the essayist wrote, however, the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.