FROM huffingtonpost/tanya-luhrmann/when-god-talks-back_b_1373277.html Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the fundamentals of religion are undergirded by our cognitive structures, so that the idea of an invisible agent automatically seems plausible. But it is one thing to feel intuitively that there might be a God, and another to sit down across from an empty table setting for a conversation and believe that you are not talking to the empty air. What I saw as an anthropologist was that experiencing God vividly required work. It required skill and it required practice. People had to practice imagining that God was present again and again. This does not mean that God is imaginary: the senses capture only the material world, not an immaterial one. It does mean that those who sought to use their imagination had to learn to take what they imagined seriously, and not treat it as ephemeral thought. What I found so striking as an anthropologist is that prayer changed people, not so much morally or emotionally, although prayer might change people in these ways, but in their capacity to imagine. Prayer changed the way people used their imagination and it changed the quality of their imagination, so that what they imagined felt more real to them. They became able to feel God beside then as they walked. They experienced God as talking back. They needed to use a new theory of mind to do this -- they needed to be taught that what happened in their imaginations could be real. But when they practiced taking what they imagined seriously, they began to feel that they had evidence that God was real and responding to them. It is important to recognize the trained imagination at work in evangelical prayer because otherwise this style of faith can seem incomprehensible, even foolish, to onlookers. It is neither. These evangelicals are using a style of faith practice used by the desert fathers and medieval monks and -- in different forms -- by different faith communities around the world. They use these practices because these practices make God more real. In a world full of secular skepticism, that can be useful.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 05:22:03 +0000