In no way are they weak-minded, they are just over credulous and under sceptical, through no fault of their own.
Certainly no fault of their own.
Rhiannon's posts are always interesting and just a few days ago - certainly less than a week, I'm sure - she said something that I found especially thought-provoking to the effect that some people just seem to be born with a mystical bent, predisposed to find religious concepts not just plausible but believeable. If this is true, and I suspect it may very well be, the corollary of this is that some people are also born to be non-mystical, and I have to say that I would place myself in this group. The other night I was lying in bed leafing through Eknath Easwaran's
Classics of Indian Spirituality, a three-volume box set of the
Upanishads, the
Dhammpada and the
Bhagavad Gita. Maybe some remember that this was an item that I put on my list of essential desert island books recently. As interested as I am in Eastern ideas in a purely sort of academic way, as I was reading I was very conscious of the fact that I was experiencing not just an intellectual but very visceral,
temperamental rejection of what was being said about other spiritual realms and whatnot. It's not just the case (though it is the case) that the purely rational and intellectual arguments against this kind of thing are as far as I'm concerned watertight; it's also a instinctive, almost automatic rejection of ideas of different (and, it's assumed or sometimes explicitly stated, better) realms of being and people who believe in them. (Nietzsche called them
afterworldsmen). My current signature from the late, great American environmentalist Edward Abbey sums it up for me: to him and to me, to hold these ideas as true is an insult to the real, the true and the actual, right here and right now in the only mode of existence of which we can be entirely certain. I suppose I'm just one of those dullards to bound up in this life now to place any credence in concepts of anything and anywhere else. "Other world? There is no other world. Here or nowhere is the whole fact," as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.
Again, it's easy for me to say. I'm in good health, well-fed, well-clothed. If I get sick I toddle off to the GP for a short course of antibiotics and if it gets chilly I put the central heating on. While things were relatively tight whilst growing up, I've never known real hunger, want or deprivation in my life. Or really desperate tragedy either, come to that. Plenty do. The standard answer to that, in my view, is that even if you're starving and do know truly horrible poverty, want and deprivation, while the desire for there to be a God to believe in is perfectly understandable from a psychological point of view, that state of affairs doesn't somehow suddenly make the existence of the personal, personalistic, interested god of theism any more likely actually to exist.
It seems to me that if you consider yourself to be (for example) a Christian, you have one foot in this world but, if not a foot, then at least a toe - even if it's a little toe - in another realm where a miracle-working god-man born of a virgin who rose from the dead two thousand years ago is still somehow alive, where the regularities of nature can be suspended at the whim of a deity and all the rest of it. Christians would quite rightly counter that they live in the "real" world and get married, raise kinds, push the trolley round Asda and take the car in for an MoT exactly the same as anybody else. All true enough. But I don't see how you can regard yourself as a Christian or any other kind of theist in any tolerably traditional sense and not have this whole other raft of beliefs about what constitutes reality which find no support in science or, for me at any rate, in reason or logic. This - believing all this - is absolutely and utterly incomprehensible to me. Whether this intellectual and temperamental divide is basically genetic I have no idea; something has to explain it.
