In a column for The New York Times, anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann examines why people believe in the supernatural.
She tells the story of a young man whom she calls Jack, who created a fox as a tulpa, which she defines as “thought-forms, or imagined creatures.” Jack was able to create the fox, but not able to keep it alive indefinitely. She writes:
The mere fact that people like Jack find it intuitively possible to have invisible companions who talk back to them supports the claim that the idea of an invisible agent is basic to our psyche. But Jack’s story also makes it clear that experiencing an invisible companion as truly present — especially as an adult — takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.
It may seem paradoxical, but this very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God. While the idea of God may be intuitively plausible — just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are atheists who have prayed for parking spots — belief can be brittle. Indeed, churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.
To experience God as walking by your side, in conversation with you, is hard. Evangelical pastors often preach as if they are teaching people how to keep God constantly in mind, because it is so easy not to pray, to let God’s presence slip away. But when it works, people experience God as alive.





According to John Michael Greer in his statement that I quoted above:
I suspect that the noosphere is language, the medium in which we think, remember, will, and imagine. Language creates such a powerful sense of reality that it can over-ride mere facts, and will, unless we guard against it. As for the theosphere, that would seem to be the stories we tell, explaining and elaborating on our experience. We really are stuck in bodies and in a physical universe, whatever glories we summon in language and story.
This is an extraordinary article to find on Episcopal Café — suggesting that invisible companions (such as the Holy Spirit or Jesus?) are mental constructs maintained by meditation and imagination. I’ve thought that promptings from the Spirit might be a part of the self somehow hived off, like a multiple personality. Not to deny the value of such promptings — the experience is real, although explanations may differ.
I question Ms Luhrmann’s theory that the human search for agency (causes) led to positing agency in the universe. It seems to me that the basic illusion misleading people is the sense that consciousness, awareness, animates the body — that we’re free-floating pilots sitting in a cockpit behind the eyes, controlling the organism. We now know that consciousness is produced by the organism; we don’t animate our bodies, our bodies’ physical processes produce consciousness. In fact, studies show that our minds are great rationalizers, producing reasons on demand for things that our bodies do on their own.
The problem with promptings of the Spirit is that their substance, and value, depends on the tradition in which they occur, and the interpretation of that tradition. A liberal Anglican and a devout Southern Baptist live under different assumptions. In all the discussions of Discernment, I fail to see any central direction. Each person gets their own guidance. Any common goal is supplied by community, or authority. We’ve had over a thousand years of Church (starting with Empire and dissipating with Colonialism), and humankind has blindly pursued growth and comfort at the expense of the larger biosphere. Has God really been indifferent to our crowding other creatures out of their habitats and poisoning the atmosphere and oceans? We were fruitful and multiplied — enough already!
Human population has bloomed with the exploitation of cheap fuel — coal, oil, and gas. That bonanza is coming to an end. The cost of producing those things is rising to equal the benefit derived from them. We aren’t going to run out of oil — we just aren’t going to be able to afford to run our civilization on it much longer. Oil is everywhere you turn — automobile fuel, road surfaces, all kinds of plastics (computer cases and supermarket bags!) When it turns scarce and expensive, our communities must become much more local and labor intensive. (Slavery was replaced by machinery — I wonder whether it might make a come-back sometime.) I hope the knowledge we’ve gained during the Industrial Age outlasts the depletion of resources that produced it. I also hope that the move away from fossil fuel burning comes in time to save the atmosphere from the catastrophic changes now becoming evident.
Where does the Church fit in the age to come? Not so much as an overall, imperial organization, but as a collection of communities, localities. John Michael Greer has been looking at possible roles for religion when globalization breaks down.
I suppose that, in many ways, my God is relatively impersonal.
…but not when I eat him. ;-p
[I noticed that Luhrmann’s piece focused on rational and/or scoffing atheists, and personal-relationship Evangelicals, w/ no mention of sacramental [small/broad ‘c’] catholics]
JC Fisher