Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  “In these cases, religious behavior is not worship of the god but rather coercion of the god, and invocation is not prayer but rather the exercise of magical formulae.”5 During the earliest stages of religious development, the one who was best able to coerce the gods was the shaman, a charismatic and liminal figure in the group who was closely associated with the spirit world. “In their initiations shamans may spend long periods alone in the bush. They seek visions, sometimes facilitated by illness or fasting, which can involve death, dismemberment and rebirth. Shamans’ ventures into the bush and mystics’ retreats into the desert are examples of journeying into the wilderness. Shamans and mystics put themselves outside society, at least temporarily. Shamans contact ancestors and other spirits in séances; they serve as a bridge between this world and the next.”6 Being the tribe’s connection to the spiritual world, the shamans held great power and respect and were allowed a greater freedom to act outside the norms of tribal life. However, the shaman did have to produce magical-spiritual-economic results. The shaman had to be able to produce rain, game, crops, and good weather through his interaction with the spirits. Thus, the shaman had to develop certain rites and rituals in order to ensure his effectiveness. “Every purely magical act that had proved successful in a naturalistic sense was of course repeated in the form once established as effective. This principle extended to the entire domain of symbolic significances, since the slightest deviation from the ostensibly successful method might render the procedure inefficacious. Thus, all areas of human activity were drawn into this circle of magical symbolism.”7

  This development elicited two results: firstly, the development of dogma, a set of rituals and behaviors meant to elicit good favor in the spirit world, and secondly, it gave the shaman more control over the tribe or people; if the shaman performed a rite and there were no results, he could say it was because the people of the tribe had somehow offended the spirits through particular behaviors. Thus, the shaman’s negative results could be scapegoated onto the people. The shaman could much more easily coerce the people than the gods. Dogmatic rituals and behaviors allowed the shaman to rise to a position of great power and set the groundwork for the enormous power that priests, rabbis, imams, and churches in general would wield throughout history.

  In essence, one’s connection to the divine or spiritual world was demonstrated by one’s ability to control and manipulate forces of nature—in effect, to work miracles. It was the greatest of these miracle workers, men who not only influenced the natural world but seemingly controlled it, who inspired the major religions. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed each enacted such incredible miracles at their very command that they superceded all other mystics, shamans, witch doctors, and wizards before them. The miracle is the proof of divinity, and that divinity would not have been believed without it. Thus, religion is based on the power of an individual to coerce and manipulate the natural world through unknown or supernatural abilities, i.e., a connection to God.

  Who would Moses have been, and of what use would he have been to the Israelites, if he had not been able to call down God’s wrath in the form of the 10 plagues, or if he had not been able to part the Red Sea? Who would Jesus have been had he not healed the blind and raised the dead? Who would Mohammed have been had he not split the moon? They would merely have been another mystic, another shaman for the people. It was their connection to God and their ability through God to work miracles that made them divine, and subsequently, drew people to follow them, spawning three major religions of the world. Religion is built on the belief that there is a spiritual world and that man can interact with, influence, and be influenced by that spiritual world. It is something unseen by the human eye, yet it can be felt, and, on rare occasion, manifested. This belief system comprises belief in the paranormal. If communication with the God of Good can influence the world and the people in it, then certainly communication with Satan can do the same through the presupposition that the spiritual world can interact with the corporeal world. Thus, witchcraft, magic, soothsaying, Satan worship, and other nefarious activities are a direct result of the rise of religion. If influence on the spiritual world can be used for good, then it can also be used for evil. Our world is caught in the middle.

  But alas, we don’t see many miracles these days as told in the Bible. There have been no seas parted, moons split, or water turned to wine. Today’s miracles, along with today’s expectations of the divine, have shrunk considerably. Modern man no longer expects that God will move a mountain or split an ocean. The church does not seek such miracles on its own behalf, either. Religious expectations are much different today than in previous days. We no longer rely on divine intervention to be sure that we are fed; in fact, we recognize that divine intervention has little to do with whether or not there is an earthquake, disease, drought, rain, flood, good crop yield, or availability of meat. We have taken the divine out of the equation through science and technology. We no longer seek out priests, rabbis, and mystics to intervene on our behalf for survival (though we often do in cases of disease). This is what Weber calls the “rationalization of the world.” Science and technology have replaced what used to be mystical intervention with the divine. We are no longer mystified by unseen maladies like disease. We know them now. We intercede on our own behalf. This has led to a great “disenchantment” with religion, and this disenchantment has been growing for some time; in essence, much of the magic is gone. “The rise of Protestantism was one step in the global rationalization process, and its contrasts with Catholicism are instructive. Catholicism has the stronger mystical component, whereas Protestantism largely disavows mysticism and monastic orders. Protestantism has no priests who serve as mediators between God and humanity. In the Catholic Mass with transubstantiation, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but in Protestantism, they are only symbols.”8

  Science and technology have brought about this rationalization. This, of course, isn’t meant to be critical, merely factual. The more that humanity has come to understand the world around them and the way it functions, the less inclined they are to accept supernatural explanations. Oddly enough, the abatement of the supernatural has not led to a decline in religious beliefs. Paul Kurtz ponders this absurdity and offers several ideas ranging from genetic predisposition to the idea that we are all a lot happier living an illusion; but all, by his own admission, seem to come up short. The magical-religious belief system carries on despite scientific evidence that has rendered much of it false. Logically, it doesn’t make sense, and it has infuriated those scientists and skeptics who insist upon a logical world. Erich Fromm writes in his work, Psychoanalysis and Religion,

  While we have created wonderful things, we have failed to make of ourselves beings for whom this tremendous effort would seem worthwhile. Ours is not a life of brotherliness, happiness and contentment, but of spiritual chaos and bewilderment dangerously close to a state of madness—not the hysterical kind of madness which existed in the middle ages, but a madness akin with schizophrenia in which the contact with inner reality is lost and thought is split from affect.9

  It would seem that Kurtz and others feel that the disenchantment, the rationalization, the scientific understanding—in effect, the “wonderful things”—would satiate our lives, create contentment and comprehension, but they have not. Instead, man is left at odds with himself in relation to the material understanding of the world. Fromm posits that the soul is unfulfilled despite whatever technological advances may be made—the world and the soul are at odds.

  And why wouldn’t they be? There is an intrinsic feeling that there is something more both within us and without; yet we are being told there is not, and our world functions as if there is not. Humanity is not logical, and logic is not the answer to all of man’s ills. That must come from somewhere else, whether it is religion or paranormal beliefs. This may be the answer to the persistence of religious belief systems in the face of scientific development and technological breakthroughs; it is t
hat they are only scientific developments and technological breakthroughs. Fromm writes,

  Self-awareness, reason and imagination have disrupted the “harmony,” which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again, accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes the powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence…10

  It is this dichotomy between the material and the immaterial that leaves open the door for magical-religious belief and thought, and they are not without merit.

  The divide between the material world and the soul, the scientific community and religion is wide, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Fromm’s statement that man was “cast into this world at an accidental place and time” is interesting in that it appears he is speaking in scientific terms of evolution and the universe. The world exists without meaning—everything being a beautiful accident. Kurtz posits that mankind invents illusions to avoid this difficult, existential fact.

  We live our brief lives in a particular slice of space-time history and in a specific sociocultural context. A relatively minor planet in one galaxy among billions, we are only an infinitesimal part of the total cosmic scheme … The world viewed from our individual vantage point is often ambiguous. The entire universe confronts us with its enormity, inviting us to unravel its secrets, yet resisting any easy interpretation into its mysteries. Yet since the inception of philosophical reason and science, we have made significant headway in this adventure.11

  We may have made significant headway in the understanding of the function of the universe—the “how”—but not so much in the reason of the universe or the “why.” That is perhaps one of the ambiguities that Kurtz mentions and is one of the torturous dichotomies that pervade humanity. But could there be a possible reconciliation between the two through the theory of chaos?

  MODERN MIRACLES AND CHAOS

  I spent my first year of college at a Christian college. At my parents’ urging I attended Eastern Nazarene College in North Quincy, Massachusetts. I was only there for one year, but it was a year that profoundly changed my views on God and Christianity. Until that point I had been raised in the First Assembly of God Church, a traditional Pentecostal church. However, during my first semester I attended a course on astronomy. The professor began the course by asking us, “How many of you believe that God led you here to this school and to this class?” Being good Christian youths, we all raised our hands. “Now, how many of you were brought here through a miracle in which you were transplanted from your ordinary life, across time and space, and basically ‘miracled’ into this classroom?” Not one raised their hand. The realm of miracles had changed.

  The Bible claims that God is all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful. God can move mountains, but has anyone ever seen it done? The miracles that are described in the Bible—the parting of the Red Sea, turning water into wine, the raising of the dead, the sun standing still—are no longer witnessed by mankind. Our miracles today are different. They are smaller; in essence, less miraculous. Or are they? No one today has witnessed the deliberate moving of a mountain by God. However, we witness on a daily basis the literal moving of mountains by construction and road-building teams. This amazing feat of human ingenuity is actually the result of a mistake made by ninth-century Chinese alchemists looking for an elixir for immortality and instead developed gunpowder. Thousands of years of coincidences, interactions, loss, failure, success, and curiosity have led man to the point where he is literally able to move mountains at his command. It did not happen overnight, but considering all the things that could have occurred in those centuries, the fact that it happened at all is a miracle.

  In fact, the chances of life occurring on this floating rock in the middle of space are so infinitesimal, that it alone can be considered miraculous. Ancient man was right to assume that there was something greater than himself—the mistake may not have necessarily been to personify that assumption, but to make it dogmatic. There are certainly forces greater than our own at work in the universe.

  John Briggs (a former professor of mine) writes in his work Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, “The scientific term ‘chaos’ refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists in apparently random events. Chaos science focuses on hidden patterns, nuances, the ‘sensitivity’ of things, and the ‘rules’ for how the unpredictable leads to the new. It is an attempt to understand the movements that create thunderstorms, raging rivers, hurricanes, jagged peaks, gnarled coastlines, and complex patterns of all sorts, from river deltas, to the nerves and blood vessels in our bodies.”12 In essence, the study of chaos is attempting to understand the underlying order behind these seemingly chaotic events, the events for which early man had no explanation other than belief in a god or gods. Early man recognized that there was some existing order that lay behind these chaotic processes, and attempted to explain and simplify this understanding through personalization of the order in the form of a god or gods. Shamans and witch doctors attempted to understand this underlying order and influence it to the benefit of the tribe. In chaos, the most minor of actions can influence the largest of events. It is often characterized with the expression, “A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and creates a hurricane in East Asia.” In chaos the very subtle can influence the cosmically large. That is why large systems are so subject to chaotic change; the subtle, in great numbers, influence the larger systems, which then interact and influence each other in a myriad of interactions based on billions and billions of smaller subtle actions. But acting beneath all of this is an underlying order, which is not necessarily supernatural, but its effects are, nonetheless, miraculous, not merely coincidental. It is this underlying order of interacting systems, of “coincidences,” that led to the Chinese inventing gunpowder, which, through many, many years and interactions, became capable of moving a mountain that previously blocked a roadway. God at work.

  One of the more commonly heard miracles these days involves the mysterious curing of a dreaded disease such as cancer. Take, for instance, a cancer patient named Tommy, 53 years old and father of two, recently divorced. Tommy has an inoperable brain tumor and doctors have given him zero chance of recovery. Tommy’s friends and family are praying for his recovery, but things look dismal. Tommy has never really been one for church, and has led a less-than-admirable life; indeed, his family has also never really been believers, but now they turn to God for help. Three weeks later, the tumor is gone, the doctors are baffled, and Tommy goes on to live a long and productive life.

  On the other hand we have Mandy, a 14-year-old girl diagnosed with a similar tumor. She is young and innocent, and her family attends church regularly. Within four months she has wasted away to practically nothing, is delirious from the disease, sickened, weak, and bald from the chemotherapy. Then she dies.

  Tommy’s case would be considered by the religious to be a miracle, but to the scientific community—a mystery. Mandy’s case, however, is justified by the religious as being God’s ultimate plan, while the scientists bemoan their inability to treat such an innocent victim. If the traditional Christian notion of God were true—that he is a human-like sentient being that exists with his hand guiding the course of human endeavors, these cases would not really make much sense. Religious people justify this by intimating that God works in mysterious ways and that his plans are not ours to know. But what of that plan? What is the ultimate plan that God has in mind for this world, particularly if he plays an active role in the day-to-day happenings? This is a question that theologians have struggled with for centuries.

  What if this underlying order, the “interconnectedness�
�� of the world, is the plan by which the religionists view the miracles and tragedies of the world? The events and intricacies that led to Tommy’s miraculous recovery would be so infinite that it would be beyond both comprehension of man and science as well as the spiritual understanding of the religious. Likewise, Mandy’s death would be the result of millions of intricacies and events that make up part of that underlying interconnectedness of the world. Both miracle and tragedy can be understood through the interaction of an infinite number of people, places, things, systems, and natural occurrences. In either case, it is seen as an act of God in accordance with his plan.