Anosmia?

The full term paper topic would be "Anosmia and Agnosticism, Accepting the Intangible."

Last time I checked, medical terms were specifically excluded from the SATs and other standardized tests. Nor would it likely be referenced in any literature or scholarly writings. So for those unfamiliar with the term:

Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary
Main Entry: an·os·mia
Pronunciation: (an-oz-mee-uh)
: loss or impairment of the sense of smell

That's me. An Anosmiac. As a child I had an accident that resulted in my nose and nasal cavities being crushed. My sense of smell is so diminished that effectively I have none. As a rule, unless you are sensing a burning sensation in the back of your throat, I am sensing nothing. Ammonia, Alcohol, Mint and Eucalyptus oils, those register as distinct sensations. Gas, Flowers, Garlic, Fecal Matter, Perfume, Cookies, those are all lost on me completely.

The first question folks always ask is, "Does that mean you can't taste anything?" The answer is "No." Remember that chart from kindergarten? It usually is a poster with cartoon drawings of Eyes, Ears, Nose, Mouth and Hands, representing the *Five* senses Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste and Touch. I have *Four* senses, Taste is one of them.

The confusion comes from the sensation of "Flavor" that is derived from food. Flavor, is an experience derived from the combined sensations of Taste and Smell. For me, it is limited to just Taste. What I experience as Flavor is considerably different from other people. I love garlic, curry and spicy foods. I can't tell a Coke from a Pepsi and all coffee tastes the same to me.

A side effect of my condition is called Phantosmia: smelling an odor for which there is no stimulus, a ‘phantom smell’.

Its similar to what happens to you when you close your eyes. You don't "See" anything, but there are amorphous images that your brain usually ignores unless you focus on them. I sometimes have a vivid sensation of smell that nobody else is smelling. It seems real to me, but anyone I ask denies any knowledge of it. It can be humorous when I am asked to describe the smell since I have no frame of reference. What am I supposed to say? "It smells like purple."? Folks would sometimes accuse me of lying about what I was smelling.

Time for the connection to Agnosticism. I will present it here as a single coherent thought pattern, though in reality, my perspective evolved over several years.

I was born and raised as a true atheist (note the lower case letter "a"). I never considered religion in any way. I knew it existed, but to me it fell in the same category as sports teams or TV shows, something people did together to entertain themselves. It never dawned on me that there were some people who actually believed was an real unseen being that had created everything in the universe and hung around to listen to their problems.

Up through middle school I was educated in a very specialized semi experimental subset of the public school system. I pretty much ran with the same crowd for the duration. We all had similar views, essentially no view. In high school that all changed. I was exposed to the mainstream of belief systems. I was astonished to find that the overwhelming majority of Americans believed literally in the "Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ" and the "Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ", (Conveniently juxtaposed with the childhood icons of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, respectively.) They were not particularly tolerant of my, rarely expressed, views on the subject either. My teenaged angst and newly flowing testosterone asserted themselves and I became an outspoken Atheist. (again note the now capital letter "A"). Most of high school and through most of college I would take any opportunity to expound at length on the irrationality or outright evils of religion. All of the standard arguments were set forth with vigor and vitriol.

All of the above was a gradual change of orientation and belief over the course of years. What followed next was not. It was an epiphany. Specifically, it occurred on a Spring morning at the International House of Pancakes on Ventura Boulevard, while waiting to be seated. I was flipping through the paper and came across a small classified add announcing a meeting of the SFV Atheists Society. The add was in the religious section nestled amongst all of the weekend's postings by the local churches, mosques and temples with the times and dates of weekend services. There it is was in black and white. Atheism was a religion. It required no greater and, more importantly, No Lesser, leap of faith.

My experience with Anosmia came immediately to mind. All of my life, I had been face by this invisible, intangible force that I could never experience, but everyone around me insisted was "real". I had a great deal of anecdotal evidence, having gotten into plenty of trouble committing adolescent offenses and getting tripped up by the smell detected by my parents. (These usually involved fire). To me Smell was like ESP, but I didn't doubt that it existed. I just believed that I was the only guy around without ESP.

This was different though. With the exception of a few historically notably religious figures, nobody claimed to "smell God". They all "believed" in God, but they did not have first hand experience. Spiritually speaking , Everyone was an Anosmiac. It was entirely based on Faith. Moreover, looking at the world overall, they didn't simply believe in God. They believed in many different versions of a god. Some interpretations were wildly different than others. People went to war and committed genocide over these differences of opinions about something they had never actually physically experienced.

Nobody has a sense of Mystical Truth. All of these different interpretations of the One True God seemed more like my experience with Phantosmia. In the face of a lack of sensory input , human minds were constructing vivid experiences of the Mystical. But I couldn't know, nobody could, it was truly Unknowable.

At the time, in school, I was deeply involved in the statistics of prediction and probability theory. There is a concept referred to as Schrodinger's Cat. Put a cat into an impenetrable box along with a device that has a fifty percent chance of delivering an instantly fatal poison to the cat. Seal the box. The thinking is, that until the box is opened and the state of the cat is observed, the cat is neither alive nor dead. It exists in a state of uncertainty. In a sense, it is 50% alive and 50% dead. You could fiddle with the device and adjust it so that it is very unlikely that it will trigger. The cat will therefore be "almost certainly alive.", but still, "it might be dead."

Taking this concept and applying it to the Unknowable Nature of Mystical Truth spawns the concept of Probabilistic Polytheism. All belief systems existing, ancient or yet to be conceived are neither True nor UnTrue. They all exist in a state of uncertainty, Possibly True. Throw in the mystical equivalent of Phantosmia and one realizes that mankind will be continually coming up with new and interesting ways of looking at the Mystical world. It is an exciting way to live. It allows for Santa Claus, Immortal Souls, Divine Benevolence, Brimstone and Unicorns.

Anosmia!