当心祈祷也会上瘾

Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Addicted to Prayer
By T. M. LUHRMANN August 10, 2013
特邀专栏作者
当心祈祷也会上瘾
T·M·拉赫曼恩 2013年08月10日
AS evidence accumulates about the many health benefits of religious practice, prayer is looking better and better. [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] have even gone public with their own [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] practice.
有越来越多的证据显示，宗教修习对健康有很多裨益，于是祈祷也看上去越来越迷人。一些无神论者甚至也公开表示，他们为了健康目的而祈祷。
Take Sigfried Gold, the subject of a [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] in The Washington Post. He’s a thoughtful, articulate man who lives in Takoma Park, Md., and turned 50 yesterday. He is passionate about philosophy and long ago decided that there was no stuff in the universe that was not physical — no supernatural, no divine.
比如《华盛顿邮报》(The Washington Post)最近一篇文章中的主人公西格弗里德·戈尔德(Sigfried Gold)就是这样一个例子。他是一个有思想、口才好的人，住在马里兰州塔科马公园，昨天刚满50岁。他非常喜欢哲学，很久以前就坚定地认为：宇宙中没有非物质的东西——没有超自然的东西，没有神。
But he also smoked too much, and more than anything else he ate too much. He was worried that his weight — a good 100 pounds of excess fat — would kill him. So he joined a 12-step program to control his food addiction. One of the steps is to turn your problem over to a higher power. So Mr. Gold created a god he doesn’t believe exists: a large African-American lesbian with an Afro that reached the edges of the universe. (Those who find this ridiculous, if not offensive, should read [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] by William P. Young, in which the Holy Trinity is a black housekeeper, a Hebrew handyman and a mystical Asian gardener with windblown hair. “The Shack” was a runaway New York Times best seller.)
但是他也抽了太多的烟，最糟糕的是，他暴饮暴食。他担心体重会要了自己的命——脂肪超标足有100磅。于是他参加了一个课程，希望通过12个步骤来控制他的食瘾。其中一个步骤是把你的问题交托给一种层次更高的力量。所以戈尔德创造出一个他相信并不存在的神：大个子的非裔美国女同性恋者，留着爆炸头，头发一直长到宇宙边缘。（如果你觉得这很荒谬，甚或有不敬之嫌，你可以读一下威廉·P·杨[William P. Young]的《棚屋》[The Shack]。在这本书中，“三位一体”是一名黑人管家，一名希伯来勤杂工和一名神秘的、头发飞扬的亚洲园丁。《棚屋》是《纽约时报》非常成功的一本畅销书。）

Every day Mr. Gold dropped to his knees to pray, and every day he spent 30 minutes in meditative quiet time. These days Mr. Gold, who calls himself a [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. And, at 5 feet 7 inches, he weighs 150 pounds.
每天，戈尔德都会跪下来祈祷，每天，他都花30分钟的时间进行静默冥想。如今，自称是“重生的无神论者”的戈尔德不抽烟，不喝酒，身高5英尺7英寸（约合1.7米）的他体重为150磅（约合68公斤）。
So is there a downside? Should we all drop to our knees and pray? In general, I have to admit I’m impressed with the evidence. But it’s also true that while I was doing research on evangelical spirituality, there were times when people got so engrossed with prayer that they seemed almost addicted — so compelled to pray that they could not stop. Some called this “puking” prayer.
那么，这有没有缺点呢？我们都应该跪下来祈祷吗？总的来说，我不得不承认，这样的证据让我十分钦佩。但是，在我研究福音派灵性的时候，发现有一件事也是千真万确的：有时候，人们如此专注于祈祷，他们看上去几乎是上了瘾——控制不住地想要祈祷，以至于停不下来。有些人把这叫作“倾吐式”祈祷。
I was most struck by the dangers of prayer when people got deeply involved with spiritual wa***re. Any Christian who treats the Bible as true in all it affirms needs to take demons seriously. In the Gospels, Jesus spends a lot of time confronting them. Many evangelicals conclude that humans live in a supernatural battlefield in which prayer attacks demons like a stun gun.
祈祷的危险给我带来的最大震撼，是在人们深度参与属灵战斗的时候。任何一个基督徒，只要认为《圣经》所言全为真实，肯定就会把魔鬼当真。在福音书(Gospels)中，耶稣花了很多时间来面对魔鬼。许多福音派信徒都认为，人类生活在一个超自然的战场上，祈祷可以像电枪那样攻击魔鬼。
There are, indeed, evangelical organizations that teach people (often young people) how to identify and destroy demons. I met one young woman after she came back from one of those summer camps. She returned to college with a sense of purpose, and would pray intensely for hours. She would walk into a restaurant and sense an immaterial, sulfurous evil and feel that she had to pray powerfully against it. It was as though the world were drenched in darkness that no one else could see.
的确有福音派机构传授人们（通常是年轻人）如何识别和摧毁魔鬼。我遇到过一名年轻女子，当时她刚参加了这样一次夏令营，带着一种使命感回到大学，常常数小时不停祈祷。有时她走进一间餐厅，察觉到无形的、来自地狱的邪恶力量，觉得自己必须大力祷告来抗击它们。这就好像世界被黑暗浸没，但其他人都看不出来。
Soon, she found herself crying while praying; she felt God’s love so deeply that she wept with the grief of being human. But this intense need to pray also began to frighten her. “It is so crazy,” she told me. “It’s like we’re addicted.”
很快，她开始在祈祷的时候哭泣；她感到神的爱如此深切，以至于她因身为人的不幸而泪流满面。但是，这种对祈祷的强烈需要也开始让她感到害怕。“这太疯狂了，”她告诉我，“就好像我们上瘾了。”
Eventually, she stopped. It was just too exhausting. Some weeks later, she remarked: “It’s so strange. You get into that zone, and you know that the students around you think about things completely differently, and you really do wonder whether you are crazy.”
终于，她停止了祈祷。这真的是让人精疲力尽。几个星期后，她说：“这太奇怪了。你进入那个地带，你知道周围同学的思考方式完全跟你不一样，你真的怀疑自己是否疯了。”
Whom does this intense imaginative immersion put at risk, and when? A study of the popular Internet game World of Warcraft suggests an intriguing answer.
这种强烈的、充满想象力的投入，会在何时让何人处于危险之中呢？对人气网络游戏《魔兽世界》(World of Warcraft)的研究得出了一个耐人寻味的回答。
World of Warcraft creates a landscape of craggy mountains, wastelands and castles, villages full of orcs and elves. Players create avatars who enter this world and interact with other avatars and fight monsters. It’s like finding yourself in “Lord of the Rings” and discovering that it’s your job to kill the huge venom-dripping spider that stands between you and your quest. At its peak, in 2010, there were more than 12 million players. (About half of all American adults play video games, and about one in five play almost every day or more.)
《魔兽世界》创建了一个世界：崎岖的山岭、荒地和城堡，遍布兽人和精灵的村庄。玩家创建化身，进入这个世界，跟其他化身互动，与怪物作战。这就像是在《指环王》(Lord of the Rings)中找到自己，发现你的任务是杀死流着毒液的、挡在你和你目标之间的巨型蜘蛛。《魔兽世界》在2010年鼎盛期时，玩家人数超过了1200万（约有一半的美国成年人玩电子游戏，大约五分之一的人至少每天都会玩）。
The anthropologist [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] and his colleagues set out to [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] this complex social world. They found people who were relaxed and soothed by their play: “Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music.” Others felt addicted: “Once I start playing it’s hard to tell whether or not I’ll have the willpower to stop.”
人类学家杰弗里·G·斯诺德格拉斯(Jeffrey G. Snodgrass)和他的同事们着手研究这个复杂的社会世界。他们发现，玩游戏让有些人感觉放松和平静：“有些时候，我只是在深夜登录游戏，独自在游戏世界里游荡，听它那令人心安的音乐。”另外一些人则感觉上瘾了：“一旦我开始玩，是否有意志力停下来就很难讲了。”
[要查看本链接请先注册并登录] was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed.
差异在于：人的主要自我意识是在游戏中，还是在现实世界中。当玩游戏显得比现实世界更加重要时，人们就感觉上瘾了；当玩游戏提升了人们对游戏之外现实的体验时，他们会感到平静安心。
Prayer works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the student, they feel bad.
祈祷发挥作用的方式与之类似。当人们用祈祷来提升在现实世界的自我时，他们会感觉很好。当它让人们跟日常生活脱节时，就像前面说的那个学生一样，他们会感觉很糟糕。
The imagination is a double-edged sword. It is, from a secular perspective, at the heart of what makes Mr. Gold’s god sufficiently real that he treats it as more than himself. But the capacity to make something real is not the same as the capacity to make it good or useful. That’s a caveat to bear in mind for any kind of prayerful life.
想象力是一把双刃剑。从世俗的角度来看，想象力是让戈尔德的神显得足够真实，以便他把它当作比自己更高层次的力量来对待的关键。但让某事显得真实的能力，跟让它成为好的、有用的东西的能力是不一样的。如果你过着某种经常祈祷的生活，应该把这个警告铭记于心。


[要查看本链接请先注册并登录], a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” is a guest columnist.
 




T·M·拉赫曼恩(T. M. Luhrmann)是斯坦福大学人类学教授， 著有《当上帝回答：美国福音教派与上帝的关系》(When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God)，她也是《纽约时报》特邀专栏作者。
本文最初发表于2013年8月4日。