BOOK REVIEW : Atheism : The Dumbest Religion on Earth by Monk E. Mind

The first thing you should know about this book is that it was not written by a religious believer. We have probably all heard someone who identifies as a Christian claiming that atheism is really just another religion. And those whose worldview is founded on the concept that their religious belief is wisdom might well judge atheists to be foolish. So when you see a book with this title, the natural expectation is that it will be the work of a religious person who has become sick of atheists labelling them as the dupe of an irrational belief system and is indulging in an “I know you are but what am I?” comeback.

What we have here is an ex-atheist - he says he is countering arguments he himself used to make. For him, God is not a matter for belief or disbelief. Because belief and disbelief are for matters which can’t be definitively settled.

It’s all about semantics for Monk E. Mind.

All words he says refer to either objects or concepts. Objects have shape. Concepts describe the relationship between objects. To exist is to be an object with a location. Only objects exist. The universe and space are concepts, therefore they don’t exist. God would only refer to something existing if that something had a shape and a location.

The name Monk E. Mind seems appropriate for the author of this book as his authorial voice suggests nothing so much as a noisy little primate scampering around pulling mocking faces and hurling his faeces at anyone who comes close. His faeces in this case being his pseudo-reasoning and pedantry.

Monk E. Mind was also the author of a book called Rope Hypothesis and Thread Theory. The Rope Hypothesis is a physics model proposed by an engineer named Bill Gaede, who first came to public attention as an industrial spy for the Cubans. When I did a bit of reading and watched him on YouTube, I found that his philosophy is the same as that presented by Monk E. Mind in this book. Is Monk E. Mind a pseudonym for Gaede, or for a disciple of his? I don’t know. Gaede used his own name for his magnum opus Why God Doesn't Exist.

One of the key qualities needed by anyone who wishes to pursue a deeper understanding of any subject is humility. Boldness can be very useful for breaking free of unhelpful patterns of thought, but only the individual who has humility will be on the look out for their own errors and learn from them. Monk E. Mind is so full of the idea that his vision is superior - dancing and crowing about how remarkably stupid scientists are for believing in things like black holes - that he can’t see the obvious fallacies on which his arguments are based.

“People that do not define are using word magic,” he says. But what about those who make up their own definitions? Monk E. Mind has built a house of cards out of his own personal definitions for words.

Clear effective written communication requires that the writer and the reader agree on the definitions of the words being used. Dictionaries are there to help us to get on the same page. There is a kind of democracy about dictionaries in that it is in the best interest of the lexicographer to match what is meant by the majority of individuals when articulating a definition. People kicking up a fuss because they feel a word has not been defined in the way in which they intend it would hurt the reputation and sales of the dictionary.

If someone comes up with their own personal definition which doesn’t appear in any dictionary then the onus is on that definition to have, for us, an obvious advantage over the definitions used by as many as 1.5 billion other individuals (if we are communicating in English).

The argument Monk E. Mind presents rests entirely on his own definitions for words.

“Object : that which has shape.”

An ideal triangle doesn’t exist, but, by definition, it has shape. It’s a triangle. Shape is all it has.

Google’s definition is “a material thing that can be seen and touched.”

Of course you could object that objects can’t be seen by a blind man or that an object on the surface of the moon can’t be touched because it is too far away. But that would be silly, and lets not be silly.

“Concept : the relation between objects”

A concept isn’t necessarily a relation between objects. It can an relation between other concepts. A mathematical formula is a concept which is a relation between numbers. Numbers are concepts.

Google’s definition is “an abstract idea”.

So how do they define “abstract”? “(E)xisting in thought or as an idea but not having physical or concrete existence.”

So theories about gravity are abstract, but gravity itself is physical (it effects the movement of physical objects.) According to Monk E. Mind’s definition, gravity itself would be a concept presumably.

“Exist : object with location; something somewhere; physically present.”

So relationships between objects don’t exist? The planets exist, but the solar system doesn’t?

Google say that to exist is to “have objective reality or being”.

They define “objective” as “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.”

Now remember Monk E. Mind is saying that only objects can exist and that objects are what have shape. Google allows the solar system to exist, because it isn’t dependent on the mind, even though it is not an object but a relationship between objects.

Gravity is not an object, but does it depend on the mind for its existence? If you jump off of a tall building you will splatter on the pavement whether you believe you will or not.

Most of us use the term “exist” to refer to relationships as well as objects. For us laws exist, even though they may have originated in the human mind. They exist because they can have consequences on our actions and the actions of others.

And most concepts of a monotheistic God can be understood as a universal system of law. For a pantheist like myself these are natural laws potentially accessible to science. To religious individuals God’s law may be moral in nature. But unless someone worships something like a golden calf, one’s God is a relationship rather than an object.

Bringing it closer to home - are you an object or a relationship? The human body has a border, but we are not simply our body. We are the whole process which animates that body. In the same way to speak of God is to speak of the whole process which animates the universe.

One may have the view that the universe has no such coherent process, and even if we do have the view that it does, we may disagree greatly on the nature of that process, especially the degree to which it resembles a human personality. I don’t see an insistence that such a process doesn’t exist because it isn’t an object doing anything to silence debate on this topic.

“Because matter and motion are eternal, there was no first cause to motion or creation of matter, therefore no Creators are possible!”

Would Monk E. Mind tell a painter… a sculptor… an engineer… an architect… a movie maker… that creation is impossible? They know that they don’t create their own raw materials, but creation is the arrangement of raw materials into a new and meaningful whole.

Mr. Mind claims that matter can’t be created. I’m not particularly well-informed on science, but I do remember being taught at school that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We were also taught that matter is made out of energy and can break down to release that energy. So it makes sense to say that energy can’t be created, but if it changes and can have the form of elements which react with each other to form different kinds of matter and might lead to forms of matter which are alive and eventually living forms which are intelligent, then it seems to me that creation is something that can take place. Something more complex and meaningful can arise from something pre-existing. We see it in our own culture when individuals come together to form an organisation which is, in some way, more than the sum of themselves as parts. For creation to be the theme of life does not necessarily require that it ever had a beginning. One might believe in God as the eternal creative theme of a universe which has always existed.

The author claims that matter can’t be created. Can he prove it? And, if he can’t prove it, why should we not simply ignore his argument?

Ah, but science is not about proof, he insists. It is about explanation only.

“science: rational explanations for reality”

But how do we arrive at these rational explanations?

Google defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”

So that definition tells us how we can arrive at our rational explanation - “through observation and experiment”.

Monk E. Mind says :

“…you need to get over…the idea of facts, truth, proof and evidence. Reality is having none of it. These things are founded on the limited sensory system and the beliefs of man. They are opinions. Facts are the opinions from authority. What is true for you may not be true for your neighbor. Proof, which is based on evidence (observation), at best confirms what the person already believes.”

Only objects exist, according to the author. So love, energy, waves, circles, squares, magnetic fields, motion, the universe, numbers and the mind don’t exist, but rocks do. But on what basis does he make the claim that rocks exist if he doesn’t recognise facts, truth, proof or evidence (observation)? He can see them and feel them, but that is nothing but unreliable observation. And if truth is a useless concept, what, in his view, differentiates his ideas from those of others he rejects?

So he wants us to arrive at our goal - “rational explanations” - but rejects the method by which we are trying to get there. Maybe his rational explanations are going to come to him by divine revelation.

One fallacious form of argument is the argument from authority. That an idea is expressed by a person who has some form of social acknowledgement of expertise in an area doesn’t, in itself, make the idea more worthy of credence. It has to work in and of itself, regardless of the source.

The author says that there are no authorities, and challenges the reader to reject his explanations because he is “a Wal-Mart greeter” who “learned this from a shoe shine boy.”That would be all well and good if his explanations were sound and illuminating, but we need to be just as rigorous with the thinking of a Wal-Mart greeter as we would with someone like Richard Dawkins. If his new definitions of words are not useful, his lack of academic credentials won’t make them so.

“Any one person with the willingness to do so has the ability to learn anything that another human can learn.”The problem is that learning requires time and access to information. The ideas about physics expressed by someone with a PhD. in the subject may not be completely reliable, because humans are fallible and science is a process of elimination of unsatisfactory explanations, but the advantage they have over the average Wal-Mart greeter is that the time they have been able to devote to their study is not severely limited by the time requirements of supporting themselves with a low paying job, and they have been able to engage in discourse with others knowledgeable in the field. They may also have had the chance to do experiments. Having said that, if the Wal-Mart greeter can express something that makes the physicist slap his head and cry “How could I have missed something so obvious?!?” of course we will pay attention.

Let’s get to the title of the book. On what basis does Monk E. Mind come to the conclusion that atheism is a religion? Unsurprisingly, he starts by making up his own definition for the word “religion”.

“religion: irrational explanations for reality”

What do we mean by “explanations”? According to Google, an explanation is “a statement or account that makes something clear.”

Given how mystical many religions are and the degree to which their dogma, rather than making things clear, tends to need its own explanation, this hardly seems a satisfactory definition.

Google gives us : “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”.

Sounds more like the religions I’ve come in contact with.

Ah, but how to troll the atheists without finding some dishonest way to equate them with that which they reject?

To demonstrate his contention that atheism is a religion he points to a Supreme Court judgement and a dictionary definition. This indicates that some people consider it a religion, but unless they can produce a reason why they consider it a religion which is based on a definition on which we can all agree, this is an empty argument from authority. The soundest argument he has here perhaps is that official forms often have a question about the person’s religion which give one option “Atheism” and another option “No Religion.” The existence of such forms proves nothing, but if someone who identifies as an atheist ticks the “Atheism” box rather than the “No Religion” box, one could reasonably ask why they are accomodating the false listing of atheism as a religion when they have the option of having nothing to do with this error by simply ticking “No Religion.” This is a small point.

Now I’ll indulge in a little armchair psychoanalysis. Monk E. Mind is contemptuous of atheists, who he presents as hypocrites for criticising others for having a faith-based belief system when that is what they have themselves. He lumps atheists together and he lumps scientists together, claiming that they believe in magic. The individual in a state of severe denial often projects the disowned aspect of their own psyche onto the world around them, showing a diminished acknowledgement of differences between individuals within the groups onto which they are projecting. Monk E. Mind is arguing that we should seek easily visualisable explanations for what happens in the world around us and that we not bother to test these explanations experimentally. That is what religious people did in a pre-scientific era. Perhaps his exasperation with others is a projection of his subconscious fear that his game of semantics may be “the dumbest religion on Earth.”

I don’t think we need to trouble ourselves much with this book. It is full of ideas. Ideas are not objects. Ideas are concepts. Only objects exist. Concepts don’t exist. There’s nothing to see here.

[This review has been heavily revised as a result of feedback from the author.]

A Big "What If?"

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What if there were a framework of understanding which could unite the perceptions of the mystic, the fundamentalist and the atheist into a single whole?

This is very much a “what if” experiment. Ride with it and see where it leads. For simplicity’s sake I’ll state speculations as if they were fact.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is a structured form of that energy. Energy is eternal. It changes form, but it never ceases to exist. 

Energy is conscious, but it is a formless consciousness, lacking the kinds of limitation needed for the structured consciousness we call thought or sensation.

The universe is a place where structure arises from formless energy. The ways in which this happens may be mysterious to us, but our existence is evidence of just how complex and meaningful the products of that process can be. Apparently there are more connections in our brain than there are atoms in the universe. We’re pretty complex.

We are highly structured systems of energy which persist for an average of about seventy years. We have bodies which shape raw consciousness in a way we experience as physical sensations, ranging from pleasure to pain. And we have a brain which shapes raw consciousness into images and words.

The universe is a meaningful place. Complexity arises through relationship and meaning lies in relationship. The meaning of any part is defined by its relationship to the whole.

As individuals we sometimes identify with our separateness and sometimes with our connectedness to the whole. When we are in a loving relationship we identify more with the bond we share with the other person than we do with our seperate existence. Or an artist may think more of the meaning which is coming into the world through his art than he does of where his next meal is coming from.

We are not just our body. We are also meaning. We are not just the instrument, but also the music which plays on that instrument.

But we have a problem. To a significant degree we have become cut off from our source of meaning.

The creative principle of the universe is manifested by the emergence of more complex wholes from a meaningful relationship between less complex parts. This looks like the part selflessly surrendering to the needs of the whole.

We know that we are selfish, not selfless, so are we in a state of rebellion against the theme of the universe, against that which created us?

It is within the context of this question that religion arose.

Aware of our sinful, i.e. selfish, nature we could not look upon the face of God, i.e. acknowledge the theme of the universe which gave birth to us. We feared God and sought redemption through sacrifice and prayer.

To the degree that we were insecure, we needed the comfort provided by picturing a God with a human face.

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 12, 2016: The fresco God the Creator by unknown artist from end of 19. cent. in the church Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore. Copyright: sedmak / 123RF Stock Photo

In the Old Testament there is an emphasis on laws. If selfishness were not to lead to the collapse of the society there needed to be laws. Such laws are a compromise. They don’t solve the underlying problem, and they are based on the prejudices prevalent in the society, hence the absence of such current day laws as : “Thou shalt not own slaves.”

The New Testament seeks to address the underlying problem of the need for redemption from the selfish state into a state in which we love our neighbour as our self. That is to end the separation of humans and God.

The Bible relates stories. Our state of insecurity determines our relationship to those stories. Just as our insecurity may require God to have a human face, so it may require the stories related in the Bible to be literally true.

What matters in a story is its meaning. We read fictional stories and respond to them as if they were real. Do we weep for Little Nell? Or do we weep for ourselves, because we know what loss is like? We fear Dracula, not because vampires are real, but because we fear death, or something worse than death.

The stories we read in the Bible are profoundly meaningful, because they are stories about what we fear and about what we crave most deeply. We fear that we may lose that which makes the suffering of life bearable, and we hope to find that which redeems us from our state of fear and trembling in the face of the absolute.

We could argue forever about whether or not a story is literally true. A fundamentalist will insist that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. An atheist will insist that all of these things are impossible.

Meaning is to a story what the soul is to the body. If we get too caught up in the worldly - and whether or not something happened literally is a worldly question - then we can lose that which has a higher value. In meaning we find the transcendent. Through meaning we participate in the eternal.

Having separated ourselves from the worldly to find the meaning, we then come back to the world to make it real. What matters is not whether Jesus fed the hungry with seven loaves and a fish, but whether we ourselves feed the hungry.

KRAKOW, POLAND - DECEMBER 19, 2010; Christmas Eve for poor and homeless on the Central Market in Cracow. Every year the group Kosciuszko prepares the greatest eve in the open air in Poland. Copyright: praszkiewicz / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is the knot that needs to be untied for us to feel at home in the universe that gave birth to us, for us to be re-united with God. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or otherwise suffering individual. Hit your thumb with a hammer and you’ll have trouble thinking about anything else but your thumb. In the same way, our insecurity turns us inwards. It can be a negative feedback loop. We behave selfishly. We feel guilty about behaving selfishly. The pain of the guilt directs our attention even more strongly toward our self. This makes us even more selfish. Thus the knot tightens.

Assurances that God forgives our sins may ease the problem, but they are founded on faith rather than rational understanding.

If we try cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and find that it produces a better result than trying to force ourselves to be less selfish, or punishing ourselves, then we learn through our own direct experience what it means to find redemption.

The relationship between Hell and Heaven can be understood in the relationship between the body and meaning. 

The body makes suffering possible. Meaning makes that suffering bearable. Pleasure is experienced in the satisfaction of bodily needs or the easing of bodily suffering.  The psychological insecurity which comes from being cut off from meaning may interfere with our ability to feel satiated by the satisfaction of these needs.

What is bliss? It isn’t a thought, though it may accompany a thought. It isn’t a physical sensation, though it may accompany a physical sensation. Bliss is loss of self-consciousness. Bliss is when we are so enraptured by something that we forget ourselves.

If the universe is conscious energy, perhaps bliss is it’s default state. The limitation provided by a body and mind increases its ability to manifest meaning, but carries with it the price tag of suffering, something which can be increased or decreased depending on the thoughts that form in that mind. So, from bliss we come and to bliss we will go. And while we are alive, the secret to bliss is love, the meaningful connection that allows us to forget ourselves in a union like that from which we came. This may be love with another person or love of an activity.

So the concept of eternal life is one of identification. Do we identify with the body or ego, which are temporary, or with the process in which we participate? If our consciousness is that of the universe limited by a temporary form, then we are at least as much the eternal as we are the temporal.

Concepts of life after death often revolve around the idea of the persistence of the personalty into a post-death realm, either of punishment or reward. Like the focus on stories being literally true, this is an indication of how insecurity makes us cling to what we know. We fixate on that which we can’t fully accept, and so, not truly accepting our personality we can’t imagine leaving it behind.

So let’s cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and find out whether doing so blissfully realigns us with the creative principle of the universe.

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Can We Assess The Effectiveness of Religion in Containing the Impulse Toward "Sin"?

Copyright : Katarzyna Białasiewicz : https://www.123rf.com/profile_bialasiewicz

I’ve been thinking about religion as a form of discipline. For some people a central part of their religion is rules and regulations and a strong belief in reward or punishment to help them abide by those rules and regulations.

This aspect of religion can be a cause for conflict between some religious people and some atheists. A religious person for whom this aspect of religiously-reinforced discipline is very important may ask an atheist what is to stop them from committing terrible violent crimes if they don’t believe there is a God who would punish them if they do. The atheist may point out that they don’t want to commit terrible violent crimes anyway. The implication is that the religious person is either making up the whole issue or is a terrible person because they feel they need some form of faith and discipline to keep them from committing acts of rape or murder.

There is a very serious issue here which needs close examination. It is important that we don’t arrogantly jump to conclusions about other people’s psychological state, about the role that religion plays for particular individuals and whether we have something to offer which would work better for them.

The containment of the impulse towards sin is one of the central roles of religion. In order to assess how successfully this goal is met in any particular individual we have to first consider what we mean by “sin”. Sin is the religious word for selfishness. (Religions sometimes consider some things sinful which those of us who do not share their framework of belief would, quite reasonably, not consider to be selfish, but the principle still holds because these are things which seem selfish to them within that framework. If they believe that God forbids something then clearly anyone who does it is putting their own desires before God’s wishes and is thus being selfish.)

Selfishness can be inwardly directed or outwardly directed. Greed and gluttony are examples of inwardly directed selfishness, while outwardly directed selfishness covers hostility towards others. This runs all the way from deliberate rudeness and attempts to dominate all the way through to rape, torture and murder.

Let’s simplify things for the moment by ignoring the distinctions between different kinds of selfishness and the fact that each of us differs with regard to which forms we are most prone to feel or act upon. Let’s reduce this all to a single factor - the impulse toward sin.

The strength of the impulse toward sin is bound to vary enormously across the range of individuals. Selfishness originates in suffering and in the insecurity of the ego. Some of us have suffered tremendously and others have not. Some of us are secure in our ego and others are not. What are the key factors? Experience and the conceptual framework - to what degree we have been loved or abused and the way we think about our experience and life in general. In reality this is very complex. Some experiences wound us and others encourage our healing, and our conceptual framework changes through our life. The key point is that nobody is to blame for the strength of their impulse toward sin and we cannot know what lies in the psyche of another.

If someone suggests that belief in God is the only thing stopping them from committing rape or murder, there are a number of possibilities :

1. They may be deliberately exaggerating the seriousness of the battle in order to make a point. 

2. They may fear that they might commit rape or murder without their faith in God because they feel the impulse toward sin so strongly, even though they wouldn’t actually act this way if their faith was to disappear. (This is like my experiences with OCD where anxious thoughts that I might do great harm to myself or someone else were part of the mechanism of repression of my angry feelings.) 

3. They may genuinely sometimes experience a powerful impulse to rape or murder. We shouldn’t discount this possibly. If we look at the incidence of rape and murder across cultures and across history and consider that the number of times when someone experiences the impulse to commit that act is bound to be far greater than the number of times that impulse is actually carried out, we should not be too quick to dismiss a person’s assertion that they need their religious faith to keep them from committing such an act.

To give a very simple example of the importance of the conceptual framework, two individuals may both be subjected to mistreatment by the same person - one may have acquired a stoic philosophy in which his self-image is dependent on showing himself to be unmoved, while the other may feel that his self-image is dependent on getting revenge. The person who sets out to get revenge may find that the effect of the original offence magnifies over time as the revenge, even if successful, brings with it other problems and, perhaps, other emotional wounds. Again, this is ridiculously simplistic, but that is necessary to see the issues at the heart of infinitely complex experiences.

A person’s religion is a major part of their conceptual framework. There are different religions of which there may be different variations, and everyone has their own personal framework which may take some bits and ignore others, interpret things differently and place different emphases. 

If we are really going to assess the success of an individual’s religion in helping them to contain their impulse toward sin, or make progress in healing the wounds which lie at the root of that impulse, we first need to know how strong that impulse is in them. And we are unlikely to find this out because admitting to having a particularly strong impulse toward sin means opening oneself to criticism as a bad person, something which is completely unjustified.

Those who’ve followed me for some time will know that I have been influenced by the ideas expressed by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith but that I am also a trenchant critic of those ideas. One of Griffith’s strengths is that he acknowledges this key question. He uses the term “upset” for what I have described as “the impulse toward sin,” but he makes the point that none of us wants to think of ourselves as a “bad person” or be perceived that way by others, therefore the whole issue of how screwed up we are inside is off-limits. And, yet, this off-limits problem is our most important one.

To be fair to the atheist critic of religion, it is possible that many, even all, religions might be essentially destructive conceptual frameworks. Rather than helping us to contain our impulse toward sin, or heal it, they may amplify it.

I can think of a couple of examples of how this might happen. Take sexuality. Some religions tend to encourage sexual repression. To a degree there is good reason for this. Promiscuity and infidelity can bring problems for the individual and for the wider society. But repress sexuality in the wrong way and erotic urges can be transformed into sadistic ones.

One thing I’ve talked about a lot is how idealism tends to undermine self-acceptance and with it the capacity for feelings of love toward others. This can be a major part of religion. The religion says we shouldn’t be so sinful. This makes us feel guilty. Our feelings of guilt make us self-directed and sap our capacity for generous feelings toward others.

There are other aspects of religious belief though. Faith can be a comforting influence and many no doubt find a supportive community through religion.

It is hard to assess the effectiveness of religion because we don’t know what it is working with. If we see a religious person behaving badly, how do we know whether the religion has turned a person with a low impulse toward sin into a person with a high impulse toward sin or whether it has taken a person with an extremely high impulse toward sin and succeeded in turning them into a person with a moderate impulse toward sin?

Another problem is that religion is a massively complex and diverse social phenomena. When we look at it it is a bit like looking at a blot test. A person who thinks religion is evil will see all of the wars and intolerance and hypocrisy and won’t see the individuals who have been spiritually enriched, inspired to community service or redeemed from a destructive lifestyle. And the religious will likewise tend to see the positives associated with their own brand of belief and few of the negatives.

I would like to think that the philosophy I express in How to Be Free can help us to achieve a conceptual framework which, with or without religion, enables us to heal our wounds and reduce our impulse toward sin. It may be too hard for us to talk about our own personal battle for fear of judgement, but we can still benefit from anything that helps us with it.

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Why Do We Quarrel? : (The Example of the Religious Person and The Atheist)

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Sometimes something someone else says gets under our skin. We feel compelled to express our contrary view.

This is not a sign that we have confidence in our ideas. Quite the contrary. Confidence in an idea gives an individual the viewpoint which Jesus expressed in the parable of the mustard seed. A valid idea will bring forth a good harvest when it falls on fertile soil, so the best strategy is to spread it as widely as possible and waste no time on cursing the rocks who are immune to it or the barren soil incapable of giving it sustenance.

If we feel the need to enter into a quarrel it is because there is a threat to the security of our beliefs from within.

A person secure in their own religious faith may try to spread it, but will not feel the need to argue with members of other faiths or with atheists. However, for some, religion is a way of trying to maintain discipline over what is perceived as sinfulness. This is an insecure position, and in the extreme, if reason appears to threaten the structure of restraint, then reason itself must be denied and argued against. (Religion need not be like this. Some religious people do not feel at all threatened by the contrary views of others. And some of the great contributors to the progress of reason have been religious.)

Once again, when we come to atheists, there are some who are secure and some who are insecure. Reason has two main roles - 1. As a strategy for pursing understanding of ourselves and the world which gives us greater capacity to manage both. 2. As a defence against the irrational aspects of the human psyche. Emotions are not rational, and rational arguments have a limited ability to quell them.

If an atheist and a religious person are quarrelling, then each is also shadow boxing with his denied self.

If the denied self of the quarrelsome religious person is doubt in the reality of his system of belief or in its effectiveness to maintain his state of self-discipline, then what might the nature of the denied self of the quarrelsome atheist be?

Here are a couple of arguments made by atheists against religion :

1. It is irrational.

Someone using the discipline of reason to try to quell irrational feelings of fear or guilt, may see in the religious person an ally for such feelings, especially since attempting to inspire fear or guilt is a major strategy of the insecure religious individual.

2. It falsely claims moral superiority.

None of us are really morally superior, but it may be very important to our conditional self-acceptance to convince ourselves that we are. Deep down we know that it is a sham in ourselves and this is why we would rather attack what is, to us, the more obvious sham of another.

A religious individual may believe that an atheist is mad. An atheist may believe that the religious individual is mad. Believe me, as a person who has actually been clinically insane, you do no good arguing against insanity, because it is a defensive mechanism the purpose of which is to protect the individual from reality.

What lies at the heart of insecure individuals, be they atheistic or religious? Fear and guilt. Fear is sometimes useful to alert us to real dangers and motivate us to take action against them. But when the danger is not real, fear may paralyse us or drive us to counter-productive action. And guilt is useless. It pretends to be a corrective, but all it does is cause us pointless suffering and thus make us more selfish.

Unconditional self-acceptance is the solution to such feelings of guilt or fear. Freed of them, the believer can be a more appreciative servant of their God and the atheist can be immune to the compulsion to argue with the rocks who refuse his seed.

Oppressive Religion Among the Poor

Reading the following article about an atheist man who has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom because of the danger that he would be persecuted for his lack of religious belief if he returns to his native Afghanistan led to me thinking about how the cultures of many nations where the people are mostly poor and the living conditions harsh have developed in a way which is so socially oppressive :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10569748/Atheist-Afghan-man-granted-asylum-in-UK-to-protect-him-from-religious-persecution.html

The first thing we have to take into account is that the evolution of culture is not linear. There is a chicken or egg element to it. At the heart of the evolution of destructive symptoms in the human system is always the negative feedback loop. So we need to look at what drives specific strategies and what negative effects they have without worrying too much about where it all started.

I don't know a great deal about the specifics of Afghani history and culture so I'm going to try to be very general. What I'm saying could also apply to other countries with other religions, such as a poor Catholic country in South America.

Most of the people who live in Afghanistan are very poor and their living environment is very harsh. One of the ways we humans have developed to bear our lives of quiet desperation is to hope for something better after we die. If our life on this earth is going to be overwhelming one of suffering, then way not just kill ourselves now? Because maybe this is a test we have to undergo to get a decent life after death. There is no factual evidence for such a belief, but it enables people to keep going and society to keep functioning.

Where there is poverty some people turn to crime. And the frustration of poverty can lead to political violence which, in turn, brings retaliatory violence in just one of many interlinking negative feedback loops.

The more desperation and resentment there is the more discipline is needed to hold society together. Religion, as well as holding out hope for something better beyond the grave, provides a structure of discipline for such a society. Where there is hope of reward if one obeys society's laws, there is also fear of punishment if one transgresses them. Many of these laws are about not compromising the religious coping strategy itself.

One element of this situation about which I won't go into much detail here, as I've dealt with it more generally in a number of other articles, is that of sexual repression. All hierarchical patriarchal societies have a fundamental fear of the anarchic power of the erotic. This fear preceded patriarchy and law-based religions, being a major contributory factor in their development. And the more discipline-based a religion becomes, generally the more sexually-repressive it becomes. If it is patriarchal then the emphasis is on denigrating and controlling female sexuality and homosexuality. There is also a focus on the difficulty for the male in restraining his sexuality (a struggle which is emblematic of the patriarchal society's struggle against its natural urges generally), and thus a tendency for some in such societies to excuse rape. (It should also be acknowledged that rape is itself a form of repression of the erotic, a revenge against the one who, usually unintentionally, disturbs the repressed individual's precarious equilibrium.)

Why is apostasy – abandonment of the faith of Islam – considered such a serious crime? Because so many Islamic people have no faith. What do we mean by "faith"? Faith is the kind of trust in something which lends confidence and minimises fear. Faith is not necessarily about believing in something for which there is no evidence. You may have faith in your ability to meet a challenge because you have met so many similar challenges in the past. The fact that you have done so is evidence of a kind, but this is still faith.

We can assess another person's faith by observing their behaviour. If someone makes a big song and dance about a belief this suggests that they are trying to convince themselves, that they are whistling in the dark.

A lot of religions have rituals. What are rituals? Sometimes they are ceremonies which provide the context for a shared and enriching ecstatic or cathartic experience which may be community-building and/or emotionally healing. But some religious rituals are more comparable to the rituals engaged in by those who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder – strictly adhered to, often repetitive activities, the performance of which reduces anxiety.

When, through a negative feedback loop, a society's religious strategy becomes particularly oppressive – discipline leads to frustration leads to the need for more discipline leads to more frustration – it becomes a form of shared obsessive compulsive disorder.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a pathological lack of faith. We may feel that a loved one will die if we don't obsessively tidy our home. Performing the ritual provides some temporary relief but only at the cost of increasing the anxiety when we are not tidying. By contrast, to have faith is to believe that, as long as we take due care of practicalities, things will turn out as well as they can. Faith is that which takes the pressure off.

So it can be seen that oppressive religion of this kind is defensive in its nature. It is both a response to fear and a generator of fear. It is cultural character armour. When criticised we tend to feel the need to cling to our character armour all the more tightly. No-one actually likes living an armoured existence. It's horrible. But we are only liable to come out of that armour when we feel reassured that it is safe to do so. And, in repressive religious societies, the weaker people's faith becomes, i.e. the more their religion becomes a desperate and insecure strategy rather than a belief capable of quelling fear and lending confidence, the more exposed they feel by those who may be walking around naked of such armouring. Such individuals are a constant reminder of their own state of sickness. This is why Jesus was crucified. This is why heretics were tortured to death by the Inquisition. And this is why this Afghani man is not safe in the home of his birth.

Who will bring to the people of Afghanistan the feeling of safety and reassurance which will allow them to come out of the oppressive religion closet?

Group Identification Vs. Freedom

We are all individual human beings. Paradoxically, this is what unites us. Though our individual experiences are different, they are all human experiences and thus share many common features. We are capable of love but we are prone to fear. Sometimes we think that love and hate are the great opposites, but it is really fear which is the barrier to love, and hatred is just one of the masks which fear may wear.

When we feel truly safe, love is inescapable. It is our natural form of communication with others and the natural feeling we feel towards ourselves. To the extent that we put up barriers to loving communication, we do so because we are frightened. The barriers are protective. At least they are intended to be. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. If we are afraid, we close off. If we tell lies it is because we are afraid of what might happen if someone knew the truth. If our manner is rigid and stereotypical it is because we are afraid to set sail on the open sea of unending possibility. And if we are selfish it is because we are holding on to what we fear we may lose.

Sometimes we think that fear is simply the conscious experience of feeling anxious, but that is only its passive form. Whenever we take actions which are defensive or aggressive we are motivated by a sense of threat. We may not feel afraid. When we feel consciously afraid it is because we doubt our ability to meet a perceived threat. Even in the extreme danger of battle, soldiers often feel no fear while they are actually fighting. It is in periods of inactivity that anxiety is most likely to strike.

Image credit: evdoha / 123RF Stock Photo

The protective barriers which interfere with communication between individuals can take the form of character armour – fixed defensive habits. Sometimes we adopt some form of armouring to meet a specific current threat. If you accidentally knock over a motorbike and then a big hairy biker comes up and asks you if you saw who did it, you might consider it wise to put up a barrier to honest communication and say “Fucked if I know." On the other hand, armouring can be habitual. Past experiences where we “put our foot in it" may leave us with a chronic underlying fear which prevents us from being open and spontaneous in what we say.

One common form of armouring is group identification. Loving communication is something we can only practice from the basis of our individuality. To communicate in this way we have to perceive ourselves as individuals first and members of groups second. The only group we all belong to is the human race. We may have a gender, a race, a nationality, a religious affiliation, a sexual orientation... While these things are not always clearcut, most of us identify to some extent with some of these groupings. Sometimes, usually if we feel under threat in some way, we may think of ourselves as a member of a group first and an individual second. This will be a barrier to communication. If I communicate with you as one individual human with another then we begin with our common ground, and from there the fact that I identify myself as an Australian heterosexual male in his fifties with left-wing tendencies, a pantheistic belief system, and a love of movies, gives us rich subject matter for our interaction. Our differences become a source of great creative possibility. But if a perceived threat makes me think of myself as an Australian first and an individual second, then my mode of interaction is dualistically split into the “Australian" and the “not Australian". This may not pose a problem if I am communicating with another Australian, but it will if I'm communicating with someone who is not. Our common ground is compromised.

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Let's look at some examples of how this can happen. It should be emphasised that, when a threat is genuine, group identification is a natural reaction and may be an necessary step along the road to a healthier mode of interaction. Let's look at the Black Pride and Gay Pride movements. The threat which led to the development of these forms of group identification were and are very real. Violence and discrimination against blacks and gays in various parts of the world have been extreme. People have been treated as if the colour of their skin or their sexuality were a cause for shame. And long term prejudice of this kind easily becomes internalised. People can come to think less of themselves because of the way they are treated and viewed by others. So the declaration of pride in the characteristic of which we have been told we should be ashamed is a crucial step forward. But it cannot be the end in itself. Our sexuality or the colour of our skin is not the real source of the pride. Sexuality and race are characteristics on which we cannot place a value. It isn't better to have one sexual orientation than another or to be one race rather than another. The source of pride is the way we as individuals have dealt with the challenges and threats placed in our path. If we are black or gay this may involve many cases of prejudice. But the healthy state towards which we are headed is one in which we are individuals first and everything else second. And, in the end, a state in which our self-acceptance is so unequivocal that the very question “Am I proud of myself?" becomes meaningless.

Religion is another area in which group identification can take precedence over the individual. We may view ourselves first as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist and then as an individual. Or someone else may view us first as a member of one of these groups and only secondarily as an individual. Fear is the major factor in both cases. If we are insecure in our own beliefs then we will downgrade the doubting individual self and cling desperately to the group identification. And if someone has had bad experiences which prejudice them against our group then they may find it hard to see past our religious affiliation to the individual human who holds those beliefs. It is this insecurity which is the basis of religious intolerance and you can find it in many if not most religions and also amongst atheists. Insecurity about one's own belief system takes the form of an inability to agree to disagree. One finds minorities in Christianity and Islam whose fear won't allow them to enter into friendly communication with those of a different faith. Among atheists there are those who argue that even moderates of any faith should share the blame for things done by extremists because they are “enablers". I read a comment from one in which he said something along the lines of “Even a moderate Christian thinks you are going to Hell for your lack of faith." Now, leaving aside the fact that many modern Christians don't even believe in Hell, I ask myself “So what?" As long as I don't believe I'm going to Hell why should it worry me that someone else does? I would be most happy to be friends with such a person. I'm secure enough in my belief system that I'm sure we could agree to disagree on the whole Hell issue and still find much to talk about and productive things to do together.

Image credit: lsantilli / 123RF Stock Photo

One of the starkest examples of group identification is what happens in time of war. When our country is attacked we close ranks and become nationalistic in our thinking.

If fear is the basis for both defensive and aggressive behaviour, it is worth asking ourselves what is the basis for safety. Sometimes defensive behaviour, either personal or military, can preserve our life against a present danger. But can it be the source of longterm safety or freedom? There is always a price to pay in both freedom and safety from defensive behaviour. Sometimes the benefits are greater than the price, sometimes not. On the personal level we can see that our armour cuts us off from a life of creative loving interaction with all of our fellows. In the case of international conflict, nations often end up sacrificing personal freedoms by instituting conscription or imposing censorship, and there can be great loss of life, international reputation, mental and physical health of surviving combatants, etc. Defensive behaviour may be necessary when a threat occurs, but if we really want to increase our safety and freedom then we have to look at preventative measures. The social health of our community is like the health of our body. What makes us healthy? Is it the medicine we take when we are sick? Or is it the healthy food and exercise which makes us get sick less often?

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Communication is the key to freedom, happiness, safety and creation. All of these things grow out of communication. Freedom is the ability to do the things we want to do and not have to do the things we don't. Without communication we can do very little. Most of the things which make us feel happy involve some form of communication. Sometimes it is one way communication, as when we enjoy watching something or listening to something. Sometimes it is communicating with others, which can range from a chat over a cup of tea to engaging in an orgy. A large part of safety is knowing about potential threats. A lack of communication can have dire results. A young man sits alone day after day, not wanting to have any communication with others, and then one day he takes a bunch of guns and heads to the local pre-school. If we had been able to find a way to get him to talk to us we might have found out what was going on in his head and averted a tragedy. And, on an international level, imagine what the Cold War would have been like if Russia and the United States shared a language and had the internet. People from each country would have been conversing with each other on a daily basis. Tension between the nations would have been greatly lessened and the governments of both nations would have been held more accountable by their citizens. People will always go easier on their government if they feel they need them as protection against the “Evil Empire" across the other side of the world. But when some of our best friends are “evil ones" the picture changes. Plus, international communication of this kind makes national censorship impossible. Finally, most of our greatest creative endeavours are cooperative projects which require lots of communication. Even a lone artist gets ideas from others.

We have the image of the brave soldier who fights for our freedom. This can be one side of the equation when we are faced with a current threat. He or she may be the medicine when we are sick. But if we want to make the world safe for freedom, there is something we all can do, and it also takes tremendous courage. It has always been fear which has held love in check. We loved completely before we learned to be afraid. Perhaps the hardest thing in the world is to stand alone and naked. To be defenceless. But beneath our armour we are all alone and naked. That is what unites us. All we need to do is to be that naked self and to say “Hello".

The Gift by Lone Justice (from their album Shelter) with images of primatologist Jane Goodall

Deciphering the Jesus Fairy Tale - Part 2 : Faith

Without warning, a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Lord, save us! We're going to drown!" He replied, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, "What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!" Matthew 8:24-27, NIV, 1984.

We don't live in a Harry Potter world where an individual can command the elements and they will obey, so, assuming that this story had its origins in a real event, what kind of event might it have been?

To make sense of this we need to consider what Jesus may have meant by "faith". He says that his disciples have "little faith" and also that they are afraid. Whatever he means by "faith" it is something which would counter fear.

Faith is often viewed, both by religious believers and by critics of religious belief, as a belief in the existence of something of which we have no factual evidence. This is one kind of faith. Sometimes it counters fear. For instance a fearful person may temper their anxiety by clinging to the belief that they have a guardian angel. On the other hand this kind of faith can itself be a source of fear. The existence of a devil and a place of eternal punishment after death are also matters of faith of this kind.

But faith need not be a belief in the existence of something. It can be a belief in the effectiveness of a process. Most of us have faith in science. This doesn't mean that we believe that every conclusion a scientist comes to will necessarily prove correct. But we believe that the progress of science is toward a better understanding of the universe. Superstition made us fearful of the world. Science is the response. The fearless confrontation with and examination of reality. Such fearlessness requires faith that we can meet the challenge. And this, I believe, is the kind of faith to which Jesus was referring.

Of course he wasn't specifically talking about science. But he was talking about what is open to us if we can learn not to be afraid. If reality itself or life in all its potentialities can be viewed as a sea then the faith Jesus was referring to is the courage that allows us to cast ourselves out onto that body of water. To open up to all that there is in life and the world around us, rather than allowing fear to blight our life or drag us from the glory of creation into the pointlessness of conflict with our fellows.

Because at the root of all anger or conflict is fear. Fear that we may lose something if we do not strike back against that which inspires it in us. Of course it may not be the person who angers us whom we fear, but there is something about them or something they express which makes us anxious.

If we are full of insecurities and fears, our inner life and our outer life is liable to be stormy. We will be at war within ourselves and we will be prone to getting into conflict with those around us. The root cause of most of our insecurities and fears is a lack of self-acceptance. Our sense of our own worth is fragile and this leaves us fearful of aspects of our own psyche and makes us vulnerable to be upset by things which others do or say.

The presence of a person who accepts us unconditionally has a soothing impact on us. We know that nothing we are liable to do or say will trouble them or make them think less of us. When conflict breaks out, the presence of such a person, a person who has no allegiance to one side or the other, can have a calming influence. Deep down we know that our anger is a sign of weakness, and if someone is genuinely unmoved by it we are liable to defer to their inner strength.

The storm which threatened Jesus' disciples was no doubt of the psychological rather then meteorological variety. This story is a record, albeit in mythological form, of Jesus' ability to resolve conflict amongst his disciples.

If by "God" Jesus meant the creative principle of the universe, then he was talking about faith in a process, not in the existence of something. We might have faith in nature. This need not mean that we believe that fruit trees will grow spontaneously in the desert or that a tiger will not try to eat us. It just means that we trust to nature to provide for our needs as long as we appropriately acknowledge its limitations and its dangers. So to have faith in God, for Jesus, meant to approach life fearlessly, in recognition that the world is full of things and processes and people who will help us if we live in such a way.

To understand the nature of this concept of faith and see its wisdom we could consider the decisions we make in our lives as wagers not unlike the wager that Blaise Pascal proposed concerning the existence or non-existence of God.

First it should be pointed out that faith is no replacement for reason. If we jump off of a tall building we are most likely going to die no matter how much faith we have that we can fly. Faith should only come into the question after we have determined that a positive outcome is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

1. We don't believe we will succeed, so decide not to try.
2. We don't believe we will succeed, but we try anyway.
3. We believe that we will succeed, but we fail.
4. We believe that we will succeed, and we do.

We'll interpret a decision not to try as a failure. And, in the second case, our belief that we will fail is not a good basis for success and is liable to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So we will assume that that is also a fail.

So the results would look like this :

1. Fear Fail
2. Fear Fail
3. Faith Fail
4. Faith Success

If jumping 50 cars on a motorcycle was the thing which was being attempted, then 1. would probably be the most sensible choice, as there is little to be gained by success and everything to be lost by failure. But when we apply this wager to the everyday decisions of our lives, we find that we might as well have faith that things will go well. If we do find ourselves in a number 3. situation we know that we have lost nothing by having faith. We would have failed anyway. And faith almost always is a prerequisite to success.

To pick a practical example. We may fear to speak to strangers. You never know who's a serial killer these days, we may tell ourselves. Of course the statistical likelihood of meeting a serial killer is quite small. What we don't know is how our life might have been transformed for the better by friendships we may have made, or even ideas exchanged in casual conversation, with all those strangers. The same could be applied if we are afraid of flying. We might eliminate the possibility that we will die in a plane crash, but we also deprive ourself of the rich experiences which might await us in other countries.

Is the existence of God necessarily a matter of faith?

For many it is. For Jesus it was not. God is raw undivided reality unobscured by the abstraction of rational thought, the preconceptions of received dogma or the fracturing effect of the embattled ego.

The world "holy" comes from the same root word as the word "whole". Something which is "holy" is something which is undivided. When William Blake said "Everything that lives is holy" he was acknowledging that every living thing is an undivided whole and indivisibly connected to the whole of nature. The universe, the totality of all things, is also an undivided whole. That is what God is. That is what God means.

In our wounded paranoid state, this reality can become a mirror in which we see reflected the human face of an individual who shares our own prejudices or an embodiment of the torturing conscience programmed into us by our society. None of this has anything to do with the nature of God. And much of what Jesus had to say about God was aimed at destroying such misconceptions. He stuck with the use of terms like "He" and "Father" because he had to start with the language people were used to using when talking about God, but he also explained to them that "Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father." John 16:25, NIV, 1984.

Rational thought is a crucial tool for developing understanding of reality. But it is not rational thought which tells us whether or not something exists. It is direct experience which does that. If I hold an orange in my hand I know that it exists because I can see it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Rational thought combined with such direct sensory experience can help me to discover more about the orange. I can learn that it is good for me because it contains high quantities of Vitamin C. But I cannot use reason to prove the existence of the orange, because the a priori establishment via sensory perception that the orange exists it the primary datum for the reasoning process about its nature. In other words we have to decide whether something exists before we can begin to use reason to tell us anything about it.

And rational thought is an abstraction. It does not deal directly with reality. It deals with ideas about reality. It requires language. The word "orange" is not itself an orange. Its meaning for us is determined largely by our sensory experience of the real thing. And this is where we run into problems with the word "God". Because the direct sensory experience of the reality to which we assigned the label "God" is not as easily accessible to us, because of our neurosis, as direct sensory experience of a piece of fruit.

To perceive reality as an integrated whole we have to be able to temporarily turn off that part of our thinking which divides. If we are thinking in terms of us and them, good and evil, inside and outside, up and down, alive and dead, etc., we cannot perceive a reality in which there are no such divisions. Some see God when they take hallucinogenic drugs, because these drugs prevent the mind from maintaining its conceptual divisions. Others are able to achieve direct sensory experience of God through meditation, because meditation involves the cessation of all rational thought. And there are those who see God when rational thought is broken down by psychosis. And it is likely that as children, before we learned to think rationally and divide the world into separate bits, we lived in an awareness of God.

Keith Johnstone tells this story :

A Psychotic Girl

I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed 'mad' when she was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask – that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn't try to impose my reality on her. One thing that amazed me was her perceptiveness about other people – it was as if she was a body-language expert. She described things about them which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be true, although this was at the beginning of a summer school and none of us had ever met before.

I'm remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few minutes, so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would look after her. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said : 'Look at the pretty flower, Betty.'

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, 'All the flowers are beautiful.'

'Ah,' said the teacher, blocking her, 'but this flower is especially beautiful.'

Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming 'Can't you see? Can't you see!'

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expect to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I've noticed such behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.

Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone, Eyre Methuen, 1981.

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Matthew 11:25, NIV

This is not to say that we should abandon rational thought, only that we need to take a holiday from it occasionally if we are to remain in contact with reality. This is something which Einstein understood : “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” No doubt it was this approach which allowed Einstein to transcend the boundaries placed on our understanding of physics by the limitations of mechanistic enquiry. I'm sure we have all met individuals who are intellectually brilliant but seem to be emotionally dead inside, incapable of weeping in the face of beauty for instance. Rational thought is a essential tool, but it can also be used as a neurotic defence by the emotionally wounded. The mind has a built-in capacity for holistic thought, for integrating pieces of information into a meaningful picture of the whole, but any form of internal conflict disrupts this ability, therefore the most effective thinker will be one who is not just intellectually skilled but emotionally healthy.

If God is the creative principle of the universe then the task of science is to unveil God. To flee from that unveiling is to lack faith. Some fearfully cling to fairy story descriptions of the nature of the world written thousands of years ago. Others angrily deny the existence of God.

We are caught up in a storm. But some of us have faith that reason will prevail, that a clear understanding of our current situation, humble, free from dogma, free from judgement, can provide an island of calm on which refugees from the sinking boats of irrational superstition and rationalistic denial can all find refuge.