The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism. You can say, “You can’t criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it.” But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing. Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of
...more
