Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part II, Churning the Ocean of Milk

You may have heard of Creatio ex Nihlo (creation out of nothing), but have you ever heard of Creatio ex Lactis (creation out of milk)?  That’s my subject for today – the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is usually understood as a creation story but has much more to it than that.  It is a bit more elaborate than the Gajendra story, so please pardon the length of the post.  First, my synopsis (complete text here):

            Picking up where we left off in my last post, the paradise-like mount Mandara (Meru) floats in an ocean of milk.  After the Gajendra tale we discussed, the devas (“shining ones,” or Gods) and the asuras (demons) end up fighting a terrible war.  The Supreme Deity (Brahman the absolute, symbolized here as Vishnu) calls up Shiva and Brahma (the creator god, not to be confused with Brahman, the impersonal absolute) and suggests that to stop the war they convince both sides to join forces for a truly epic task:  churning the ocean of milk to find the mythic amṛta (pronounced ‘amrita’), or nectar of immortality.  Mṛta means death, and when you add an ‘a’ in Sanskrit, it reverses the meaning (like theist becoming atheist).  The amṛta then is the essence of life itself, the divine ambrosia which makes whomever drinks it immortal.  There are parallel European myths, such as the Norse Idunn with her youth maintaining golden apples, and more closely the ambrosia of the Greek Gods, with which there is a clear linguistic connection.  

            Who doesn’t want eternal youth?  Demons and gods both are excited about the prospect, so the war is quickly suspended and both the good guys and bad guys team up to churn the ocean.  Vishnu’s great serpent (called ananta, or "endless") uproots the great mountain so that they can use it as the dasher to churn the milk, and he also acts as the rope they use to rotate the mountain.  The mountain immediately starts to sink, but Vishnu is there in a pinch and holds it up by becoming a giant turtle.  The assembled forces then begin to churn the ocean.

            The first thing that happens is that an intense heat is generated, so that the gods can barely continue.  Also, the churning awakens the various nasties living in the milky “waters” – crocodiles and serpents especially.  The workers appeal to Vishnu, gives them the strength to persevere.

            Now the churning starts to bear its fruit.  Although in the story 14 different things come up, I'm going to limit myself to talking about the main three.  First comes the hālahala, a terrible fatal poison which threatens to spoil everything and poison every living thing on earth.  Desperate, they turn to Shiva, who, being so holy, and so self-contained and perfected, offers to drink all the poison up.  When he does so, it turns his face blue permanently.  A few drops of course spill, which become the venom of poisonous animals. That’s just how these creation myths go.

            Now that the poison is gone, the crew gets back to work, churning away for thousands of years.  The next thing to come is Lakshmi, the great goddess of fertility, wealth, and essentially all worldly goods and material happiness.  Immediately everyone gets distracted, presumably because of her sheer sexiness.  Most forget the amṛta entirely, even starting to fight over her.  Vishnu solves this problem, upraising Lakshmi to his side as his wife.  With her enthroned in heaven, everyone can get get back to work.  

            Finally, the amṛta comes out in a pot carried by the divine god of medicine, and no sooner does it arise than it is stolen by the asuras, which of course starts another war.  The devas eventually win, destroying the asuras and the nectar is rescued and the gods become immortal.  Creation also arises out of this churning (Lakshmi, etc). 

            Now lets get into what all this means.  Swamiji’s narrative was what got me started on this, so I’ll give that first:  the churning is yogic meditation, which first brings up poison, or impurities and complexes, to the surface of the mind which can only be absorbed by a yogi whose non-attachment, austerities, self-control, and self-understanding are like unto that yogic archetype Shiva.  Then comes Lakshmi, which represents the Siddhis, the “perfections” or “powers” that come to the yogi as he nears the goal.  These are traditionally said to be distractions from the path as it is tempting to use them for worldly gain and can lead the yogi to a great fall.  We see this in the churners forgetting their work when they see the beautiful Lakshmi.  The worldly powers must be offered up to higher ideas and wedded to God; in other words, used only for spiritual purposes, if at all, so that the churning can continue.  Lastly comes the nectar itself, knowledge of the Self, the immortal part of us, which we might call the immortal soul. 

           

            I must say, I love this interpretation, as it certainly follows the process of meditation, but reading the actual text I feel the need to add to it my own thoughts.  I've been reading a lot of Jung lately, so it's going to be heavily psychological.  You may recall from last time that the Ocean of Milk can be seen as the Unconscious, and that its an ambivalent symbol containing both our primal fears and issues (crocodiles and other reptiles), as well as the nectar of immortality itself.  The mountain is an earth symbol, stability, and here also I’d say consciousness, which is dislodged from its thrown by the serpent of wisdom, and nearly drowns.  Only the intervention of God (self surrender), saves it.  The serpent can also be a connection to the idea of kundalini, the shakti or power of consciousness dwelling in the spine.  It is kundalini which rises up to activate each of the chakras.  The churning first brings uncomfortable heat, as anyone who has ever examined himself, or for that matter practiced hatha yoga, knows.   The heat can also represent tapas, or austerity, the 'heat' generated by the purification of the body and mind.  It is characteristically unpleasant and difficult. Only faith in the process gets us over that first hurdle.  We get used to it and then we are able to start churning in earnest.

            The first things that come up are the complexes, the “issues” we all have under the surface.  Complexes are defined by Freud as essentially knots in the Libido, the sum total of our mental energy.  These knots “tie up” this energy, and when we work them out, whether through therapy or meditation, the release the energy back into the whole.  Jung adds to this that it is as if these complexes (and other psychic contents) seem to act autonomously, and he suggests that consciousness has invested them with a bit of itself.  By that logic, undoing these knots is reclaiming and unifying consciousness.  Clearly, this isn’t easy, and there’s a reason the poison was said to spread in every direction to destroy everything it touched.  Aren’t our own inner demons kind of like that?  Think of an irrational fear you might have and how that can poison an otherwise good experience.  Think of how jealousy can poison a beautiful relationship.  Without self-control and non-attachment, reclaiming these things (“swallowing” them), is nearly impossible. 

            Ah, but what rewards there are for those who are willing to do the work!  Lakshmi herself, all worldly good, comes out of the churning next.  In my opinion, the Siddhis of yoga are the increased mental (and physical) power that is unlocked as we work out our physical and mental knots.  The more mental (or physical) energy we reclaim, the more “powerful” we become.  Of course, if we began the process frustrated with the world, our new-found power may cause us to get lost in it.  Suddenly, the things that seemed unattainable become easy to the yogi, be it finding a healthy relationship (now that we’ve left our issues at the door), being physically able to enjoy the body in sports and recreation, or having the concentration and mental power to make lots of money.  The temptation is to stop at this point to enjoy our results. It's very common to use yoga as a way to merely “fix” ourselves, or help us function better in the world of men.  I don’t honestly believe that there’s anything wrong this – we should be glad for any yogi who is able to digest his own poison.  However, this text (and the whole tradition) is emphatic in its teaching that there is more yet available for those who can take their worldly power and dedicate it up to God (marrying Lakshmi to Vishnu).  This giving up of the fruits of our labor is called karma yoga, sublimating our worldly activities - work as prayer.  We can also consider this in terms of universal archetypes.  Lakshmi is the divine mother, the earth goddess, which here ascends to heaven as a divine consort.  We see something similar in the Catholic notion of the Assumption of the Virgin.  Jung makes a big deal of this in numerous works, and for good reason.  Mary, the earthly woman in whom Christ gestates, can be considered the “shadow” of the Holy Trinity which so conspicuously lacks a female component – Christianity’s blind spot we might say.  The Assumption of the earthly woman, bodily rather than in spirit, to heaven, has been depicted in art and literature for centuries, but it was not a part of official church doctrine until the 1950s, and then only in response to popular belief, not the church fathers.  See Jung’s Answer to Job for a more complete discussion of this.

            The last thing is of course the nectar itself, the symbol of the goal, which creates a war again between the devas and asuras.  I encourage you to glance back at an older post of mine, “Daddy, why do the Demons Howl,” for a bit about what the asuras represent.  We can liken the devas, the “shining ones”, to the opposite, the uplifting and virtuous thoughts of the mind.  We may take this war as a final conflict of the opposing forces in the mind, provoked by the end being in sight. It’s a fierce battle, and at its climax, the demons create a terrible illusion of a mountain from which falls burning trees, rocks, etc, and this nearly causes the lines of the devas to break and run.  But at the last moment, the supreme Lord himself appears on the battlefield, and the illusion instantly vanishes.  It’s an intriguing moment:  the illusion is specifically a mountain, which seems again to be a symbol of stability, and probably the ego itself.  We can call this the illusion of a stable ego, which the demonic forces exist only in relation to.  You can look at it this way – “demonic” ideas, as symbolized by the asuras, are given power only because we mistake the ego as the whole Self (taken either in a Jungian or Vedantic sense).  The thought to steal or possess is only possible in relation to the ego, which feels itself special and deserving of possession. In other words, we can look at the egotic asuras as selfish motivations and the limited attitude of the individual ego.  We can only justify selfish behavior when the ego appears dominant and stable.  If the ego is seen as illusory, then how do we justify gratifying its desires?  So too here, as the Lord, i.e., the true Self in the religious sense, or as a symbol for the totality of the psyche (in the Jungian sense), destroys at last the illusion so cherished by the asuras, and allows the gods victory.  

            Interestingly, this victory is not as complete as it first appears.  Even after the asuras are slain, the Supreme One causes them to be revived.  There will be later wars between the two factions, and this appears to be God’s desire.  The lesser gods have faith in that plan, but don’t always understand it.  The demons don’t get it at all, even possibly thinking God on their side (like all egoists) and they continue on their destructive path.  I’m not going to go too far into it, but after the churning story, Bali, the greatest of the demons, even invades heaven, taking over earth and heaven.  He is tricked into giving Vishnu in one of his forms 3 footsteps of his new realm, whereupon Vishnu reveals to Bali his true celestial form, with one step covering the whole earth, with another heaven.  Bali, enlightened by the vision, offers his own head (ego), “a man’s most prized possession” as he puts it, as a place for his third step.  He becomes changed thereby, and tells the rest of the demons to retreat.  To paraphrase “The same Supreme Lord that helped us before (revived us) now wishes for our defeat.  We cannot therefore win by any means, and we must therefore retreat until the time is right for us.”  This is a wonderful change of events.  Bali, the demonic general, comes to a new understanding of himself and his type in the relationship to the whole (psyche).  Both the devas and the asuras are changed by this conflict, and a new order is given to the world.  To me, this can be just as easily read as saying a new order is given to the mind.

            In a way this esoteric interpretation is actually a full reversal of the popular meaning.  Meditation and many forms of mysticism actually seek to reverse the process of creation, and if you think about it, that’s really what this is describing.  The undivided Ocean of Milk is not the primordial unconscious, but the unconscious we start with when we begin to meditate: a mixture of poison, power and nectar.  Through the churning we separate out what the years have added to the psyche, trying to get at the immortal primal self or soul that underlies it.  The power and the poison are like nature and nurture, creating the content of the ocean, while the nectar is our bare essence.  If anything, we start with the amrita, and acquire the poison through our experience.  This “creation” myth esoterically interpreted is actually its opposite, a myth of “uncreation.”  I can’t help but think of the gnostic ascent, in which as the soul ascends upwards it sheds the influence of the planets (symbolical of the personality traits), getting lighter and lighter until only the bare soul stands before God.

            As I’ve covered most of this Canto, so its fitting that I end with its final image: Vishnu incarnated as a giant fish.  I’ve been reading Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, and he dedicates some space to fish symbolism, emphasizing the unblinking quality of its eyes.  This appears in two forms, either the constellated form (many eyes, often appearing as stars), and a singular form (the eye of God).  Given the aquatic nature of this whole chapter, and thereby its connection to the unconscious, we can describe the various forces of the psyche that appear in it as the constellated unconscious; the autonomous complexes and forms which have to be resolved, i.e., fight it out, that their energy may be reclaimed.  If you’ve seen the movie Inception (which I heartily recommend), you may remember the moments where the unblinking eyes of the “projections” turn upon the dreamer – that’s the constellated unconscious.  The ocean of milk here is separated (as light from darkness) into the poison, the powers, and the nectar.  The differentiation requires a new order to be created; paradise cannot be regained once we have tasted the fruit and we have to find a new wholeness, and perhaps a new relationship with ourselves.  A battle must be fought in the mind for dominance, aka unification, of the world. And at the end the text presents as its last image of the chapter something that seems to have little to do with the rest of the story – God incarnating as a giant fish, with its unblinking eye, the eye of God.  This, as Jung would no doubt agree, is a symbol of the Self, the totality, now swimming dominantly in the ocean of the unconscious, whose unblinking gaze the newly reconstructed ego (like the enlightened Bali) can never again hide from.  The Self has become One whole, One mind, One God, and though the battles go on, even the generals of the forces of evil now know that there is a place for the good and the evil in the hands of God.

Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part I

            There’s a fascinating Hindu creation story in the Bhagavata Purana which Swamiji recently brought to my attention.  The Bhagavata is a rather long Vaishnava work, mostly detailing Vishnu’s (as Krishna) various incarnations but containing a wealth of other stories.  The 8^th Skanda, or Canto, called “Withdrawal of the Cosmic Creations” is particularly interesting to me, as it contains the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.  You may have heard of it before, but I’d like to analyze it in a bit more depth.  It’s an important story, often told in a simplified form to children, but it is also a rich source of traditional exegesis, as well plenty of fodder for my own more modern interpretation.  I’ll retell part of the story here, and hopefully we’ll get at some of the underlying archetypal currents.  Before I get to the Milk story however, I’d like to start with the opening of the Canto, which superficially seems to have rather little to do with the rest of it (other than establishing the setting), but is very valuable in its own right.

            The Canto begins with the depiction of a setting much resembling Paradise, or the Primal Garden.  It is a mountain of three peaks rising out of an Ocean of Milk.  In this “garden” there is perfect harmony, lots of beautiful flowers, and peace among the inhabitants.  This peace is largely due to the power of the Elephant King Gajendra, who protects the small animals from the larger.  One day, he comes across a pool of refreshing water, and being a family man, brings his family along for a dip and drink on the hot day.  Being lost in the thoughts of his family, his foot is grabbed by a crocodile in the water.  All the other elephants come to help, but they can’t drag Gajendra out, as none is as at home in the water as the Crocodile.  Gajendra, realizing that no one can help him, surrenders himself to the Supreme One, and in so doing so is saved, the Crocodile being cut in half by the Lord’s power.  He then goes about the island praising the Lord, doing mantra and sacrificing, etc.  He then receives the further grace of remembering his past incarnation (something not normally allowed to animals) as a ascetic yogi who in meditation failed to rise to greet an ancient Rishi (seer), and was thus cursed by him to incarnate as an elephant.  He is then taken up as an associate of Krishna, and is allowed to ride upon the back of Garuda, the King of the Eagles.

            The story completely shifts course after this, but before I go further, I want to take apart what we’ve already seen.  Firstly, the Garden is the primal creation, the world before the Fall in the Abrahamic religions. It represents a state of innocence, and we can interpret the myth of the Fall as an awakening to consciousness - the eating from the tree of knowledge, prompted by that wise old serpent (that's the gnostic interpretation anyway).  In the Bhagavata, there's a similar "bliss in ignorance" (as we see, the elephant does not really know his own nature at first), and everything appears harmonious and without conflict. 

            As we have seen, the harmony is partially based on the efforts of Gajendra, the elephant King.  Things appear orderly, but we know there's more in the world than the innocent elephants know, and not all of it is good. The elephant is the traditional Indian symbol for the earth element and the root chakra, being large, physically powerful, and as immovable as a mountain. The elephant is stability, has ties to our roots (an elephant never forgets), and here the King of the Elephants is also described as a house-holder, connecting him with family life (the in-group, or tribe).  It is this that gets him in trouble, the text tells us.  By enjoying his family he is distracted and fails to notice the danger in the water.  He is, we might say, unconscious of it.  Water here is a crucial symbol, one which C.G. Jung never fails to connect to the unconscious and the irrational part of us that lurks under the surface.  It is an ambivalent symbol, as the unconscious is so incomprehensibly vast.  It is the nourishing, sustaining, life-giving water, the font of renewal (baptism), the creative power, as well as the keeper of our secrets, the place where our Shadow dwells, and can be full of unexpected dangers, symbolized by the Crocodile.  Gajendra brings his family to the water to rest and relax, to restore from the hot day.  Water also represents the feminine or relational quality (usually unconscious in men), which appears as Gajendra’s distraction by the familial relationships.  He is unable to see what lurks under the calm surface.  We may remember the Greek Narcissus, who caught his own image (the reflection in his unconscious, his persona) in the water, was fascinated and drowned.  Here, the elephant, the strongest of beasts, is caught as well, and begins a mighty struggle to extricate himself.  But, not being a water animal (the conscious ego is not the native inhabitant of the unconscious), he can’t free himself under his own power.  Neither can outside forces help him.  It is only by surrender to a higher power, a Redeemer, which Jung would call the image of the complete Self (not in the sense of the soul or atman, but in the sense of the totality of the psyche, conscious plus unconscious), that he is able to get free.  We might say that he then “gets some religion.”  His further grace of remembering his past incarnation is also worth commenting on.  He was once human, and because he was too lofty a yogi (who couldn’t even bother to pay attention to his surroundings – life on Earth), was given an animal form, specifically the symbolic animal of the Earth.  In other words, he is made to descend.  But by his struggle in the waters, he is uplifted, and his ego is understood and transcended. He ceases to identify merely with the conscious ego, but with more of his whole Self.

            The lowest chakra is the Muladhara, or "root support" Chakra, and in Hindu mythology the world is said to be supported by elephants, and they symbolize Earth.  The second chakra is connected to water, and is emotional and fascinating (sex is an important association).  So we see here Gajendra stepping up into the second chakra, symbolized by being pulled into the water.  After his struggle, he dedicates himself to spiritual work, what we might call tapas.  This is connected to the internal flame of motivation and purification (Sulphur in alchemy), and the fiery 3^rd or egotic chakra.  By grace he is given knowledge of past lives, which effectively overthrows the limited egotic point of view (psychologically, we might say he becomes aware of other 'selves').  He recognizes that he is a high soul, who, because of past karma, has been brought low (to the earth).  By this, he is upraised by Krishna, who is said to rule the heart, and is given the privilege of riding upon the back of the Eagle King Garuda, a clear symbol of air. Air is the element of the 4th or heart chakra.  We may say, in total, that the story of Gajendra is the story of a man who rises high spiritually, but who is forced to “come back down to earth” before he may once again ascend, this time higher than before.  For many of us, this is what working with the chakra system is like.  It makes you start at the beginning, to get humble and dirty down in the gritty earth, before we can rise up again on the back of Garuda the Eagle. 

            I bring up the chakras because I’ll be starting a 7 week Chakra Cycle in my Sunday 10am Open Level Flow with Meditation class next week (4/10).  I hope to include a post on each of the Chakras as we progress through each, and it is helpful to understand them as symbols associated with very real psychic contents.  Stories like the above can be very useful in understanding the psychic processes that can result from meditation on these powerful symbols.  As this post has gotten lengthy, I’ll break it up and discuss the Ocean of Milk next time. 

Religious Knowledge: Part II

Continued from Part I...

In classical philosophy the discipline of metaphysics was a very popular way to try to understand the universe and our place in it.  Literally meaning “after physics,” the word comes from the untitled section of Aristotle’s work that follows the section entitled “physics,” hence ‘metaphysics’.  Metaphysics, as the word is used in philosophy, refers to an attempt to formulate a comprehensive, all-inclusive theory of reality, defining and describing its nature.  Prior to the development of the scientific method, this included “natural philosophy” (the old name for science) as a sub-section.  The primary method for creating a ‘metaphysic’ is inductive reasoning – drawing general conclusions about the world from a finite amount of experiences.  Wikipedia gives us a great example of an inductive reasoning:  Every life form we know of depends on water to live (an observation.)  Therefore, every life form depends on water to live (an inductive conclusion).  Clearly the second is not necessarily true based on the observation, although based on what we know, we might assume that this will hold true, even on other planets.  But that’s an assumption, not a fact.  We can call induction, and thereby metaphysics itself, nothing more than an ‘educated guess’. 

            The problem with induction, and metaphysics as a whole, is that it relies on pure reason to take a stab in the dark about unobserved phenomena.  If we accept a particular metaphysic and its inductive reasoning, we tend to limit our thinking.  For instance, if we reason that, based on observed life (life on earth) needing water to live, all life, including that on other planets, needs water to live, then we think of potential life in a limited (although reasonable) way.  When looking for life on other planets, we look for water first.  That may or may not work out for us, but if life forms exist somewhere out there that do not require water, we are less likely to find them. 

            We use induction constantly.  We assume that because gravity has held true for all of known history, it will continue tomorrow, although there’s actually no certainty of that (no empirical observation).  We assume that, based on the fact that we are alive today, we will be alive tomorrow, although there’s clearly no guarantee.  Metaphysicians of the past have used induction to ‘prove’ the existence of God (Spinoza), a Platonic world of ideas, and the division of nature into mind and matter (Descartes), but thanks to the advent of empiricism and the scientific method, modern philosophy regards their conclusions as suspect.

            Turning back to religion, we find that their founders had certain religious experiences that we can equate with observation in science.  A certain uncommon thing (something different than average day-to-day experience) was experienced by a person, and this person tried to make sense of it.  In other words, the religious founder had an uncommon experience which impacted his current understanding of the world in one way or another, and in order to create a new worldview incorporating the new information, created a sort of metaphysical theory by inductive reasoning.  I know, I’m being extremely vague and general, but only because I want to include all major religions.  Each founder reacted differently, may have experienced differently, and certainly induced different conclusions.  Lets use the Rishis as an example:  Consciously searching after truth beyond the appearance of the world (based on what they heard from others), they used various methods (yoga, hallucinogens, etc) to bring about certain experiences.  They described these experiences as Indra, Brahman, Shiva, etc.  From this basis, they induced a metaphysical corpus which includes everything from moral law, social law, physical theories, even medical theories.  As each of these seers described things in different ways, their accounts were later organized by others into 4 Vedas, which were then connected to later commentaries and inductive speculation (the Upanishads), integrated with fictional epics (Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita), and refined by a commentarial tradition into Vedanta (meaning literally “The end, or conclusions, of the Vedas”).  Over thousands of years we come to a rich body of religious and cultural information we call Hinduism. 

            While we may look at this rich tradition and admire its complexity and beauty, we cannot ignore the problems.  The inductive reasoning that postulated that different types of people should follow laws appropriate to their role in society (dharma) became crystallized into the unfortunate caste system of the India.  Further, the deep cultural respect for tradition discouraged any attempt to look beyond what is in the scriptures (like only looking for life on water-rich planets), creating a setting in which thousands of years of guess-work based on limited spiritual experience defines one’s world view.  Intellectual life for a long time in India included logical debates which were less about reality or truth than about the clever ability to manipulate the massive scriptural corpus to prove one’s point.  My guess is based upon your guess, like a castle on a cloud. 

            The same certainly holds true for Christianity.  After the initial spate of religious experience among Christ and the Disciples, quite a few Gospels turned up around the ancient world.  Eventually the four we know became canon, around the time of St. Augustine (4^th century).  Many Gospels were rejected to make room for those four, most because they were either suspect in authenticity, or they conflicted with the metaphysics of those with the most influence.  The “Church Doctors” then put together their metaphysics based on the canon (and really, the New Testament doesn’t give us a lot of actual information about the world), and this became the Christian tradition.  The dogmas of a church are really just metaphysics, but regarded as infallible by tradition. Heresy is really just when one person’s inductive reasoning conflicts with the standard metaphysic.

            For this reason, empiricists tend to regard metaphysics and religion both as a waste of time, even calling religious or metaphysical statements “meaningless”.  David Hume wrote of classical metaphysics:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [Hume’s empirical principals], what havoc must we make?  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?  No.  Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?  No.  Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and illusion.” – Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 

When we also consider the difficulties of knowledge and perception, we become even more skeptical that such grandiose conclusions, such as offered by metaphysicians and theologians, can ever attain to real knowledge.  Consider further the fact that if the speculations of metaphysically inclined ‘natural philosophers’ could be so wrong in their conclusions about the physical world that everyone can touch and see without any special effort, then what is the likelihood of any metaphysic being accurate in describing the nature of what is not seen by all?  I’d say it’s not bloody likely. 

            While most empiricists call for rejecting religion as a whole on these grounds, this seems to me a bit hasty.  As top-heavy as religious doctrine becomes, it is still based on human experience.  People have spiritual experiences all the time, to varying degrees of intensity, and I myself have had quite a few.  As skeptical as I am about most theology, I cannot doubt what I have experienced, just as you don’t doubt that the earth exists under your feet.  We also cannot doubt that unlike a perception of political rights, the scientific method, or written language, religion is a truly universal cultural phenomena.  Religious experience, in its primary sense, is universal to humanity, in the same way as spoken language, an upright walk, and music exist wherever there is man.  For a modern atheist to proclaim that there is no God is bad inductive reasoning.  He makes a negative observation: “I have never experienced God” and by inductive reasoning concludes “there is no God.”  By that same logic we might go from “I have never seen Transformers 2” and therefore “Transformers 2 doesn’t exist.”  As much as I wish that were the case, just because I lack experience of it, does not make it not exist.  Mr. Atheist might then say “but Dave, you can read reviews of Transformers 2, hear about it from others, and even go rent it yourself and watch it.  You can verify its existence, but you can’t do that with God.”  To which I must respond that there are no shortage of churches out there who profess God’s existence, you can hear about him from people who’ll even come knock on your door to chat, and according to the mystics (like the yogis), you can even train yourself to eventually experience God.  While that might take years, it also takes quite a bit of training to personally verify most scientific claims.  Most atheists, secure in their own inductive reasoning, are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to even attempt having a religious experience.  We might liken this to the fact that, despite the efforts of those who might insist on its existence, I’m unwilling to sacrifice my time, intelligence or sanity to verify the existence of Transformers 2 by actually watching it.  

Cont. in Part III