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According to Beliefnet's spiritual type test, I'm a period.

A We try not to talk about your Uncle Semicolon production

I like these quiz things, always have. I suspect they fulfil something innate in human beings — both the experience of being recognized and counted¹ , and the experience of finding your proper tribe. This one had both — apart from the chance to have someone else's opinion on just what sort of a critter you are spiritually, after you get through it, they classify you, and there are these message boards where you can exchange opinions with others of your supposed spiritual type. Lovely.

So I tried it out. And must note in retrospect that, apart even from the score the system gave me (I'm not sure, but I think a CGI script just tried to tell me I don't exist), the most notable thing about it for me was the very uncomfortable fit I found the multiple-choice answers available on the questionnaire had with my personal set of beliefs. It was a little frustrating, a little annoying, almost disenfranchising, somehow, I'd say.

I'm not sure what to make of this. While I'm used by now to the idea that being a comparatively hardcore atheist, I'm probably in the minority in a lot of ways on such questions, I think it's a bit much to swallow that I'm so far off the mainstream that standard test questions often don't have any answers that really fit me. And I know there are other people who would probably have the same problem — as I've spoken to them.

What follows, is my reaction to the test, the questions, and my 'score', as it were. I wrote it mostly in reaction to that rotten taste I get in my mouth whenever I have to answer a multiple choice question on which I think all the answers are wrong (or the question itself beside the point). These, then, are the answers I'd have given, if they were there.

Faith

Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of questions about faith, and it's a word I've never been comfortable using to describe any aspect of my own belief system. Though ultimately I believe the safest place to put my confidence is in my own reason, my own ability to work out what's going on in the world², do note that I use the word 'confidence', not faith. Faith is by definition belief without material evidence, and I just don't go there.

The test to its credit did provide a question that allowed me to express this opinion, making me feel a little more like the test might actually get to know me, but on the way there were too many questions that frankly had no really good answers from my point of view on the subject of faith, just usually one least objectionable one. It also seemed to me there was something dreadfully polarized in those answers when it got close to where I might comfortably make an answer.

My position, in my own words: faith, in my view, is generally just not something I can manage — my nature demands and craves evidence I can examine, material I can label exhibit A and B and so on in my own internal courtroom, and push and prod with every forensic tool to my heart's content for the rest of my life if I so desire. But I don't regard having faith as entirely and unfailingly unhealthy in those who can manage it. The most damning thing I might say about it is that it may be a costly prosthetic aid for a human consciousness — the cost being that it can encourage a certain credulousness, a willingness to suspect rational judgement in certain areas that may thus spread to others, this having its own attendant risks, and more about that in a moment — but that it may well have its place in some people's lives. Many I know avow they cannot live without it, that it makes them happy. Who am I to tell them they're wrong?

This answer, really, wasn't on the test, nor was this position particularly well-reflected in the answers available to me, so far as I could tell.

The answers available to one question, on the importance I ascribe to faith, were:

1. Faith is important because it helps us cope with the struggles and hardships of life
2. Faith is important because it makes the world a better place, by encouraging love and moral behavior
3. Faith is not important
4. Faith is important because it fulfills God's wishes and protects our souls

Not a lot of help. I wound up selecting "Faith is not important" on this question, something I absolutely would never say in real life. Because I can't deny for a moment that it's important, in the sense that it's significant in the experience of many people I call friends, and has been to many throughout human history, and I'm far from so cavalier about the matter in talking to people of faith. It's just that the other answers to the same question were even more wildly further from my viewpoint.

Also annoying, we had a question about what bothers me most about faith. The answers offered were:

... and I feel like I've fallen down a rabbit hole, where the deeper questions are taught by a vacantly smiling saccharine-sweet woman in a floral dress with a grade two education. I want to pencil in "(5) that paradoxically, though it may have its therapeutic place, and though many profess that it has enriched their lives, the faith I so often hear professed makes me wary, in that I fear it is too easily manipulated by demagogues, effectively sidestepping the rational, critical faculties of the human mind, leaving it at the mercies of those who might manipulate it to satisfy their own hunger for power, and in that I fear it can make a creative intelligence more vulnerable to hijacking by ideologies that become means unto themselves rather than reflections of any wise social purpose — and that that unexamined faith may ultimately cheapen deeper human experience, exchanging for life lived deeply and well an imagined higher purpose, this purported purpose itself often ultimately a tool of a belief set that is first and foremost a self-perpetuating and self-serving structure, its benefits, if any, accidental, and ancillary to its real purpose of self-preservation."

Sadly, pencils do not work on my computer screen, and I would have had to write it awfully small to make this answer fit in any case. I chose three, but felt it was widely missing the point, and not really an answer to the question asked.

Morality

Morality. That word again. There was a lot on the test about morality, another word I avoid at all costs in self-description. Morality, to my mind, is a term that frankly begs for trouble, in that it implies (to me, at least) a system of behaviour not found on one's own, but impressed forcibly from without, by some purportedly higher power. Ethics, a term I favour in contrast to this one, appears nowhere in so many of these questions. My valuing ethics is from my own experience — it is my observation that treating others decently and consistently, and with healthy regard for their well-being as for my own seems to ease our respective passages through this world — it is a good way, a human way to live — but I do not consider myself a moral person, and would hesitate to tell anyone else how to live — this is moralizing. I consider myself ethical at most. And that only on my good days. So I grimaced on several questions, choosing effectively as I could the available "we should be moral just because we should" position, though I've never thought much of this sort of answer either.

Evil

My difficulty with the framing of the questions on evil were of a similar type — the sense that my position really wasn't terribly well-reflected in the answers available. My difficulty again with the term evil is that it is a loaded term. In a certain sense, I think I would almost argue that evil is effectively a mythical construction, just as are gods — an umbrella or catch-all explanatory framework for phenomena that tax our ability to understand the world on its own terms.

So we call the bombings of Cambodia, the massacre of the citizenry by the Khmer Rouge, the invasion of Afghanistan or the euphemistically-termed 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia evil³, but what does using this term tell us about the situation except that it is something we personally abhor, and that we wish it were not so? We call people evil when they do and say evil things, and though I suppose some really mean to imply by this there is something supernatural and sulphurous behind their motivation, it tells me terribly little. Except, again, and only in some cases, that as some need a divine explanation for aspects of reality they themselves cannot otherwise explain, some need a diabolical one.

Personally, I like neither explanation, and find neither useful — I argue we best address what we fear or abhor by attempting to understand its cause, and to prevent its recurrence in the future. I would take little comfort should someone I love die in an automobile accident if someone were to tell me the devil cut the brakelines — rather I would like to know if I might be wise to warn anyone else driving the same vehicle, or anyone else having their vehicle serviced at the same shop.

Evil, then, is useful to me as a descriptive adjective that connotes the depth and passion with which we abhor a circumstance, and outside this use becomes a loaded term. Given this, on the face of it, from the answer set here —

Evil is present in the world because:

1. Of human failings; evil has no supernatural component
2. God or a Higher Power wishes to test people
3. It is impossible to have free will without evil
4. Humanity is sinful by nature

Human beings do not cause earthquakes, nor is it always human stupidity that places them in harm's way in such an event. Wars are dreadful phenomena, and though sometimes there are clear villains, frequently, viewing the tangled human web of causes up close, it is difficult to find evil predominant in the motivations of either sides — just a desperate struggle over limited resources, a struggle sometimes cloaked in ideologies seeking to justify either side, sometimes less so. I chose answer one, to make my position on the 'supernatural' aspect of the question clear, but it was uncomfortable, again.

Worse still, was the question:

Answer four, the only one not logically inconsistent with an atheist position (and only by virtue of the fact that it's the only one that doesn't contain in its premises the assumption that there is a god) is frankly offensive to me — it reads like a bad parody of atheism, as written by someone who has only read about atheists in evangelical Sunday school comics. Consider my above position on what we call evil itself, and I'm guessing it should be clear enough to you why I find this not only a poor set of answers, but actually a thoroughly rotten one. I do not base my lack of belief in the existence of god on the occurence of tragedies and disasters themselves explicable as the product of natural causes. This would have a strange, tortured logic to it to my way of thinking. Write in, please, "My basic reaction is entirely specific to the situation, and invested in the realities of this world. If it is the collapse of a bridge, I react that it is unfortunate that such and such a third world country's infrastructure is so shaky, and ponder what might be done differently in the future to correct this. If it is a mass execution, I wonder what in my own country's foreign policy might affect this situation, or what might already have lead indirectly to it, and make a note to apply it against my next vote. I may mourn, but I will, if I can, look for a way to work for change."

And this goes back, again, to my view of the weaknesses in the use of the very term evil. The term, I fear, distances phenomena we may ultimately find a way to change from the reality of our day to day existence. It places them in another world, conjures up horns and a tail, where sound responses, and measured reason, are most desperately needed.

Science and religion, again

Finally, a question presents me with:

To expand — while such luminaries as Einstein have left us with such rhetorical statements as "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details" — a sentiment that does have the flavour of a quest for ultimate truth about it, I'd argue science is more a practical device to appreciate and understand the world as it presents itself to us.

Wise scientists, I'd suggest, only rarely suggest they're looking for the ultimate truth, and certainly never claim absolute certainty they've found it. Good science is about the journey. If/when the physicists of the world come up with a unified field theory that unifies our model of the basic forces that govern our universe at the physical level, they will have not achieved an ultimate enlightenment, and the journey will not be over; rather, they will have constructed a marvellous model out of which we can further advance our investigations, and which we will continue to test against our observations. It may yet be refined, it may yet be modified, we may yet find a better way of putting things. This is science — it is open-ended by its very nature.

It is, I feel, more the stuff of religion (and, to be fair, only some religions) to speak of ultimate truths, and this is one of the things I rather dislike about religion — An ultimate truth that cannot be questioned is a dangerous tool in the hands of demagogues, again, but enough on that — see again my statement on concerns over faith.

Moreover, I feel I should make this point because I think this is one of the things the more simplistic among us confuse when the methods and language of real science confound their expectations — look again to those still trying to espouse creationism as a 'model' against the theories of evolution and natural selection. Science qualifies its certitude, and this is healthier, I think, for the human mind on such questions, than the dogmatic assertions of the allegedly divinely inspired that they've had the truth presented to them in a vision, or written in a holy book for all time, so the rest of us need look no further.

And as to answer one, well, again, this is sadly, wildly out of the courtroom for me. To my taste, it's almost a meaningless assertion. Though science occasionally does call upon the carpet the more dogmatic material assertions of sects so foolish as to make this possible (such as the claims of fundamentalist groups unsatisfied with interpreting the Genesis creation myth as a metaphor, and thus bound and determined to overturn every physical law they must to somehow 'disprove' evolution and natural selection), more often, comparing the spheres of science and religion is like comparing apples and oranges. The answers religions attempt to provide most often seem quite irrelevant to me, yes, but this does not quite give me license to say I can prove all religious belief 'wrong' in some final, sweeping, unequivocal fiat. Dealing in scientific proofs or disproofs with the allegedly supernatural aspects of religious experience is sometimes technically possible, and sometimes, where fraud is involved (reference Randi on Popoff), even of some value to the potentially defrauded, but more often, I'm afraid, it's like dancing about architecture — technically possible, but rather an innately ridiculous enterprise. What possible material evidence can I or anyone marshal against the vague sense many of the people I happen to love have that somehow, there's some higher power out there that in some sense governs reality? I can tell them I do not share their view. I can hold forth at length on secular, sociological explanations of the phenomenon of the survival and propagation of religious systems, but that hardly directly addresses this aspect of their belief, does it?

Alien world views

The real problem, I think, is that whoever built this test really rather misunderstood the range of beliefs that occur in human beings, at least toward my end of the spectrum. Apparently, my world view is alien enough to me they're not quite so sure how to frame it in a test such as this.

I could claim with outrage on the weight of one internet quiz that took me five minutes to complete that I've now most unjustly been made an invisible minority. This, I feel, would be overstating. But I did have to note with amusement, when I finally, clicked submit, how the system classified me.

I scored 18. The bottom score for, apparently, the most extreme of 'hardcore skeptics', was 25. I wasn't even on the charts. Apparently, I'm not even on the radar, spiritual type-wise.

The system dutifully printed out at the bottom of the page, for me to email to whomever might be interested in the result, "According to Beliefnet's What's Your Spiritual Type?, I'm a . "

So I'm a punctuation mark, after all.

Oh my new tribe — oh huddled hyphens, oh conscientious commas, oh disenfranchised diacritics everywhere, I embrace thee.

— 15 November, 2000 / AJM