Is spirituality a faculty?

staple

Imagine you were deaf from birth and never heard music. Wouldn't you be entitled to deny the existence of music? Wouldn't you observe the phenomena of sawing on strings and banging on skins and think it absurd? You'd feel tremors now and again, but that does not prove anything. Wouldn't you be disturbed by the thousands of people flocking together to musical events and their emotion generated by something that does not exist? Wouldn't you seek to persuade these musicians and fans to stop wasting their lives on something that is not real? As a reasonable person you'd be offended because it just doesn't exist yet people are too stupid to see that.
On the other hand, if you were a Hearist, you'd be a bit bothered by the vehemence with which the existence of music was denied, and be at a loss to prove there is such a thing.
To spell out the question, perhaps there are people who are simply not spiritual and therefore insist that the spiritual is non-existent or meaningless, only the rational or empirical counts. Is there any way that you can prove to a person without a faculty (a) that the faculty exists but they do not posess it? and (b) with this faculty you perceive things very differently?

(If I may head off some digressions: this thread is not supposed to be about being deafist; nor about whether religion does more harm than music nor about any of the phenomena of religion; nor is it about spiritual people who don't believe in God. It is about hardcore atheism and the existence of God. If I am giving a well-rehearsed argument that has been rebutted, please do just give a reference)

Stercus Accidit

Why would god make somebody unable to be spiritual as you described above, if it meant they would inevitably becomes atheists and end up in hell?

Let alone the comparison of music to the "spiritual" world, where music has evidence for its existence, can be measured as sound waves for example, it is rational to believe in music, not because everyone else does, but because you can hear it, and even if you were deaf, there would be plenty of real evidence of its existence easily backed up by scientific experiments and findings that you could seek out for yourself.

Spirituality on the other hand, is purely just belief because everyone else does. In a world full of the spiritually deaf, no-one hears the spiritual music, but plenty will claim they do.


Of course, I am much more interested in how spirituality could be a faculty someone would lack, effectively damning them from birth. Is this actually an original argument for spirituality? Regardless of how laughably weak it is, it is amusing to an extent.

So, atheists have no faculty for spirituality, hence are damned from birth.

If this god guy exists, what an asshole!

Zillah

I entirely accept that people have spiritual experiences. Where we disagree is the origin of such. I think it is the brain, they think it is magic.

Your deaf person analogy is entirely useless, because I can demonstrate to a deaf person that they are objectively missing a sense which I possess. This can be demonstrated in any number of ways, such as passing a message to another person using my voice and their hearing.

If two spiritual people could make a similar demonstration, such as conveying a message to each other via an angel, then I would concede that I lack a sense that they possess. Surprisingly enough, extensive studies into such things have entirely failed to ever demonstrate that people claiming to have some variety of spiritual or supernatural sense are anything more than confused or lying.

Dades

So to follow on what Zillah has said, 'hearing' is a demonstrable faculty. Simple experiments can show it's existence. To suggest spirituality is a faculty like hearing is a pleasant analogy, but there are simply no grounds to believe it to be true.

The idea also falls down when you look at the enormous variants in spiritual experience. People claim to experience communications with any one of hundreds of gods, the dead, angels, demons, UFOs, trees, etc. They clearly can't all be using the same "faculty", therefore it's only reasonable to assume that most if not all of them are simply predisposed to believing they are having spiritual experiences.

stevejazzx

Dades wrote: »

So to follow on what Zillah has said, 'hearing' is a demonstrable faculty. Simple experiments can show it's existence. To suggest spirituality is a faculty like hearing is a pleasant analogy, but there are simply no grounds to believe it to be true.

The analogy is very poor. It is a bit of a loaded question because it assumes that atheists simply don't or can't get 'spirituality', a much maligned word. It is better to admit that we don't know something than to believe in a something, however tempting that may be. This doesn't rule out the possibility that a human being may be something more than the sum of his/her parts after all, we are, each of us, made from the stars:).

aidan24326

Dades wrote: »

So to follow on what Zillah has said, 'hearing' is a demonstrable faculty. Simple experiments can show it's existence.

Deaf people can also feel the vibrations of bass notes and bass drums if it's loud enough, so could possibly get a feel for rhythm even if that isn't music exactly.

And personally I feel the words 'spirit' and 'spiritual' are just makey-up words that don't really mean anything.

Goduznt Xzst

staple wrote: »

Imagine you were deaf from birth and never heard music. Wouldn't you be entitled to deny the existence of music?

Zillah has already effectively rebutted this argument but as a digression, it reminded of a guy I went to Uni with who was color blind. He adamantly argued that we were actually viewing the wrong spectrum of colors and that referring to his faculty of vision as a form of blindness was incorrect. He reasoned that he merely had alternately tuned photoreceptors, and argued that, due to it's continued pervasiveness in the species(') that there must be some discernible evolutionary advantage to it (I believe some studies have shown that there is). He said that the term "color blind" should be changed to maybe "Oculus Superior".

The difference though with the argument presented in this thread is that my color blind friend may actually of had a leg to stand on in defending his opinion. The one presented in the OP does not.

bnt

If there is something out there, it must be detectable or measurable in some way, or there is no point in positing its existence: the proposition is unfalsifiable. You can posit anything if you are willing to ignore all other considerations.

You can take a profoundly deaf person, put him or her on a cushion (to absorb physical vibrations) ... but with a microphone and (say) a computer, he or she can do things that generate sound (e.g. clap), and watch the noise being generated. That is, the source of the sound is explicable.

So, these "spiritual" people ... what are they feeling? If it's something from outside them, how is it getting to them? Something is being transmitted, and being picked up by their physical bodies ... or are you going to tell me that their bodies have a non-physical "component", to pick up a non-physical transmission? (Another proposition backed by zero evidence.) Or, as is more likely, are these people generating their own "spirituality" in side their heads, as part of our genetic heritage, as some research suggests?

kiffer

re: colour blindness... Rampant Hypothesis: At night and low light conditions colour blindness is less of a disadvantage... Colour vision is more important for fruit gathering rather than for hunting.
It could just be that it's not enough of a disadvantage in men to be heavily selected against...

Teaching a deaf person about music would be a lot easier than teaching a totally blind person about colour...