On Delusion, Illusion, and “Dillusion”
On a ten-minute walk home from my first cousins’ house at age twelve, I was “godsmacked” by a lightning bolt to the brain. I lost my bearings, and my marbles, as I obsessed over the infinity of time (and God). A few years later, I learned the term “first cause.” Again my head spun. The old quandary: How can there be a first cause without a previous cause to create the first cause? Was wise, old Parmenides wrong? Can something come from nothing? There I was back at infinity.
It didn’t make any sense, but my years of church-going assured me that miracles happen and that God can do anything, no matter how seemingly impossible. (That’s what William Jennings Bryan said in the Scopes trial—and won, sorta.) That’s why God is God. Keep the faith. Don’t go crazy!
Fast rewind. At about age seven, I convinced myself that I had valiantly defended the honor of a girl I liked. I had proudly smote a classmate who said something cheeky about my first crush. I can still recall the boy (whom I liked) and the very spot on school grounds where the joust occurred.
Much later on, I realized I must have imagined or dreamed the triumph. Being the runt of my family and my classmates, I generally steered clear of physical confrontations. So if my victory was a fantasy, why has it remained fixed in memory?
These two instances illustrate why I am fascinated with illusions and delusions. Sometimes, like now, I even don my armor and defend them as therapeutic defense mechanisms that ready the mind for facing painful truths. They can help us maintain balance or provide shelter when conditions beyond our individual control challenge our perceptions, truths, or deeply held beliefs. In reality, we live in the constant shifting, merging, uncoupling, crisscrossing, recoupling currents of illusion and delusion. Ask any psychologist. Or anyone going through a divorce.
We typically think of illusions as mirages, fantasies, deceptions but not necessarily harmful trickery. They are not actual realities, but realities wished for, hoped for, often even planned for.
Delusions delude, they fake us out. They trick, they fool, they deceive—maybe even steal our selves from ourselves. They, too, are not realities, but obsessively wished for realities with zero possibility, save for supernatural intervention, realities that a fixated or traumatized mind grabs hold of for dear life.
Here’s what I’m getting at. Sometimes we are tempted to conjure the alchemy of both illusion and delusion in a hallucinogenic state I call “dillusion,” which carries us away from realities too shocking or shameful to admit. For a time, dillusion allows us to carry on, to envision hope—which itself is a dillusion. Hope and faith and irrational optimism are dillusion’s rudiments. (That’s why I’m a pessimistic-optimist.) As comforting illusions, these three elements can be antidotes to despair. As substitutions for reality, they are delusions. Hence, the portmanteau “dillusion.” Dillusion is a state of mind or consciousness that merges the illusion or delusion of a reality with unrealistic, irrational hopes or expectations.
Illusions are sensory or psychological perceptions that can be objectively disproved or otherwise explained as unreal. Think of the optical illusions that photographers captured in the smoke billowing from the burning World Trade Center. Some people saw Satan’s face (https://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/satans-face/). Some saw the shining figure of an angel (https://nj1015.com/angel-captured-in-911-lights-optical-illusion-or-something-else/). Think back to the puzzling optical illusions that reveal one image from one perspective and a different image from another perspective (http://www.brandstoryonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/rubin-vase.jpeg). And how can we forget the illusions we had about at least one love in our life? Romance novels and romantic movies continue to thrive because of their fanciful illusions and heart-breaking delusions. So do divorces.
Not all delusions are always harmful, but delusions of grandeur, paranoia, mind control (a frequent symptom of schizophrenia), or bodily illnesses (psychosomatic illnesses or Munchausen syndrome) can imperil the sufferer as well as others. Delusions of grandeur need not include a belief that one is (a reincarnation of) Napoleon or Christ or Elvis. Sociopaths and psychopaths with narcissistic tendencies simply believe that they are head and shoulders superior to others and so are unaccountable to anyone else. All of us know or know of at least one person who fits that bill.
Religion may be the most universal and seductive agent of dillusion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The ancient Greeks believed in and made offerings to their several gods, who often meddled in human affairs. Their meddling gave us drama, comedy, and something in between—satire—which can be annoyingly confusing to dualistic thinkers. No two ways about that.
Preceding even the Greek panoply of gods were the Proto-Indo-European panoply, which over the course of two millennia intertwined to coalesce in Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion with competing forces: one for good, an opposing one for evil. Through tens of centuries’ interactions with traders, travelers, and outside warring factions, the predecessors of Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Those influences bring us to the essential conundrum of religion: the co-existence of good and evil.
Let’s focus on Christianity, the religion most favored in the Americas. For believers, it offers a firm moral and social ethic and a profound source of comfort and hope. Like other religions and world myths, it also offers a creation story with an explanation for the source of evil and suffering in our lives. At least equally important, it offers a clear path to achieve spiritual redemption and its own version of Hollywood’s Field of Dreams, ancient Egypt’s Field of Reeds, and ancient Rome’s Elysian Fields—Heaven. In short, for its adherents, Christianity provides sustaining comfort and hope for eternal (abridged infinity this time) life and happiness.
Yet most Christians, or believers of any faith, wonder why God allows so much suffering. How can a loving, omnipotent God allow good people to experience suffering’s agonies? Let me be real with you.
In the last several weeks of my mother’s life—her mind so divided and confused that her face and voice conveyed the horror of her existence—I often wished her suffering to be over. During her very last days, lying in a nursing home/palliative care bed, unable to get to a bathroom or to eat or to drink or to talk, she lived in a nether world. Cheeks sunken, hollow mouth agape, eyes wide in terror (or awe?), arms reaching upward, climbing hand over hand . . . climbing Jacob’s ladder or out of the pit of Hell to which predestination had damned her . . . I didn’t know. Unable to communicate with her verbally, I could only guess what her dreamlike illusions might have been. She was a deeply religious person, active as a Sunday School teacher in her church for more than 30 years. I attended the same church with her and our family through my late teens. My paternal grandfather had been a minister. I knew the verses and the clichéd condolences recited by my community and family. For the first time, I felt a tsunamic rush of rage whenever I heard someone mention the ways of “the good Lord.” I saw nothing at all good about my mother’s undignified, confused, terrifying, invalid existence. A “good Lord,” I reasoned, could not inflict or allow such suffering. My experience isn’t special or unique, but in fact so ordinary as to be mundane.
Many might even call my mother’s a “good death” in comparison to chilling life-ending atrocities. She didn’t die in the horrific 9/11 attacks. She wasn’t assaulted and psychologically tortured before being killed. She was not ripped apart by machine gun fire or explosions in combat. In any case, “Rejoice. God has called them home.”
Let’s delve a little further into this illusion-delusion-dillusion business concerning God and good and evil.
In Suffering and the Search for Meaning, Professor Richard Rice carefully analyzes seven responses to the question “Why does God allow suffering?” All responses have one commonality. They all offer dillusions justifying suffering. Please note: My intention is not to attack religion or religious faith. Dillusions, mind you, can pull us through devastating anguish and hopelessness.
As Rice puts it, “A theodicy is an attempt to justify, or defend, God in the face of evil. . . . Its only goal is to show that the presence of evil in the world is not logically incompatible with God’s existence”: the same goal as that of the forerunners of Zoroastrianism more than 3500 years ago (Rice, Richard. Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain. Intervarsity Press Academic, 2014, p. 20).
Perhaps the most widely known defense of God is the “Perfect Plan Theodicy,” which holds that everything happens according to God’s plan. Whether our experiences are “pleasant or painful,” they are “exactly what God intends, and God never makes mistakes” (p. 37).
Another widespread belief is “The Free Will Defense,” which answers the common question, “Why, if God is supremely powerful, does God allow suffering in the world God made?” (p. 44). This defense points back to the Garden of Eden and The Fall. More pointedly, it posits that God gave Adam and Eve free will to choose, and they chose to disobey God’s command and so instantiated evil in the original Paradise. Since then, humans have misused their freedom of will and action. We humans, not God, are the source of Earthly suffering.
Both of these theodicies require belief that an all-powerful God exists, which is a matter of faith, and faith alone. The belief in such a supernatural being is a dillusion, a comforting illusion, without verification, that our lives are perfectly ordered according to an unverifiable predetermined plan. The Free Will theodicy takes away some of the omnipotence and omniscience, and thus onus, from that same God. God does not or cannot foresee the choices his “children” will make, so his power over and omniscience of their lives are significantly limited.
This limitation is expanded in the “Finite God Theodicy,” which holds that while God is the Creator, after the creation, God’s powers are limited by the “process” governing the natural laws of his creations: “God is unable to interrupt or intervene in the course of creaturely events. God cannot unilaterally bring about any specific state of affairs” (p.110). Critics of the “Finite God Theodicy” point out that “omnipotence as traditionally defined is not the kind of power that any single being could have, not even God” (p. 121). Then what about miracles that violate nature’s laws (the same ones that Bryan argued in the Scopes Trial)? Dillusion . . . maybe?
Rice presents other theodicies, but I want to backtrack a moment to The Perfect Plan Theodicy in the first chapter, titled “God Never Makes Mistakes.” Many of us have heard of Martin Luther’s teachings about eternal salvation coming only by God’s grace, not from our good works. John Calvin extended that tenet of faith in God’s merciful grace to include predestination. According to Calvin, God (or a lottery?) has predetermined which present and future souls will be redeemed and which will be damned to the eternal flames of Hell (up springs infinity again). So stop worrying, your eternal fate is already decided. Such unjust cruelty beggars rational belief in a God of love. Predestination—another dillusion, I hope.
Finally, I come to the master dillusion of so many religions, also the most comforting and perhaps necessary of beliefs: an eternal (another pop-up) afterlife. In his chapter on “Openness of God Theodicy,” Rice writes that no matter the trials and suffering we face, a loving God always works toward good, never letting “suffering have the last word” (p. 99). Rice continues, “Open theism also embraces the hope for ‘new heavens and a new earth,’ where righteousness is at home (2 Pet 3:13).’ Open theists look forward to a future when God will wipe away every tear, when death will be no more, when mourning and crying and pain will be no more (Rev 21:4)” (p.100). There, in Heaven, we will be reunited with loved ones and continue for eternity (abridged infinity again) in the light, peace, and joy of God’s radiating presence. Do we have any proof that such a place or state of mind and soul exists? Dare we admit that this belief is a dillusion . . . and then suppress it and go back to living, and suffering, happily ever after?
Here’s a reality. You can look it up. In mid-August 2021, a South Carolina politician who had championed the rights of people not to wear facemasks in public or to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unfortunately died of the virus. A former Navy chaplain and active-duty Marine, Commander Pressley Stutts advocated individual liberty and personal choice, free will if you will. Stutts reportedly wrote on Facebook that suffering from COVID was “hell on earth.” Even so, he had faith that God was stronger than the virus and reminded his family and friends that “God is in control.” Fact, faith, illusion, delusion, dillusion? To Stutts and his family, does the question or the answer really matter if the belief gives them solace and trust that all is right with the world?
People of strong faith would likely bristle at the words “delusion” and “illusion,” both of which seem to disparage religious beliefs and believers. That’s just one reason we could use a more precise and more neutral word. Religion is merely the most apparent example of belief systems that involve willful illusions and delusions.
And so I present for your consideration the portmanteau dillusion.
With a caveat. Some unexamined, habitual opinions and many controversial beliefs are indisputably illusions or delusions, and some of them are harmful, even lethal. We should recognize and point them out as such. Don’t go crazy!
Coda
“Spirituality is found in the way we live our daily lives. It means spending time thinking about others. It's not so hard to imagine that there is some kind of higher power. We don't have to know what form it takes or exactly where it exists; just to honor it and try to live by it is enough ... [sic] As these thoughts unfolded in the process of learning to live my new life, I had no idea that I was becoming a Unitarian.”
– Christopher Reve, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve#Religious_views. Retrieved 25 Sept. 2021.
