This Week in God
By Steve Benen, Washington Monthly
Posted on December 26, 2009, Printed on December 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/144812/
In the last TWIG edition until the new year, the God Machine took note of E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column this week on the ways in which religion and politics didn't cause as big a stir as in previous years.
It is 2009's quiet story -- quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did.
In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture.
Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health-care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues -- notably economics and the role of government -- trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars went into recession along with the economy.
The most important transformation occurred on the right end of politics. For now, the loudest and most activist sections of the conservative cause are not its religious voices but the mostly secular, anti-government tea party activists.
It's important not to overstate the case. Clearly, the religious right still exists, and conservative activists still rely on matters of faith to deny gay Americans basic civil rights and to restrict American women's reproductive rights. Sen. Ben Nelson's (D-Neb.) often incoherent demands about indirect abortion funding very nearly killed health care reform.
But overall, Dionne's analysis sounds right. The U.S. embrace of the culture war becomes more notable when the country is in otherwise fine shape. That hasn't been the case for several years, and as a result, even Republicans are shifting their attention away from a religio-political agenda. Note, when GOP leaders started a rebranding effort, they ignored culture-war issues entirely, and when Republicans talk about trying to retake Congress, it's not because they intend to work on school prayer and Ten Commandments displays. The religious right's threats no longer seem to scare GOP leaders as they once did, giving the movement less influence.
It prompted Dionne to conclude that "the cultural and religious conflicts that have persisted were debated at a lower volume" this year. God bless us, everyone, indeed.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* A woman jumped a barrier and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI before he delivered his traditional Christmas Day greetings, raising a new round of questions about the Vatican's security procedures.
* Former President Jimmy Carter hopes to make amends with the Jewish community, and issued an apology this week. "We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel," Carter said in the letter. "As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het [a prayer said on Yom Kippur] for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so."
* Former Sen. John Danforth (R) of Missouri, who is also an ordained Episcopal priest, has created a new Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University. "Chancellor Mark Wrighton said the center, which will open in January, would seek to deepen the academic understanding of the connections between religion and politics and encourage civil discourse in which people 'in a respectful society' can hold different views."
* And I was pleased to see that L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, considers "The Simpsons" acceptable entertainment. "Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well."
Monday, December 28, 2009
Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much?
Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much?
By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News
December 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144818/
When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”
Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.
In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.
I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.
Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.
I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.
As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.
Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles.
Invoking “Gott Mit Uns” didn’t work just on the uneducated, brain-washable and obedient citizens and conscripted soldiers of Germany. The slogan also convinced most of the educated Protestant and Catholic clergymen to comfortably proclaim from their pulpits that Hitler’s wars were endorsed by the Christian God, and therefore every military action could be justified and carried out without guilt.
Most Germans wanted to believe that Hitler’s wars had to be fought for some higher purpose, a master plan that they trusted would benefit them all by creating “Lebensraum” (living space), which would mean security for the pure Aryan race.
Aggression as Defensive
In the Nazis’ up-is-down world, the propagandists convinced average Germans that Hitler’s wars were purely defensive (“the sword has been forced into our hands”). The terrorizing of foreigners in a neighboring country, in order to steal their land, was the patriotic thing to do.
Convincing the German public to engage in murder for the state took a lot of diligent work from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
Goebbels had to persuade the Germans that their neighbor’s land and oil and mineral resources could legitimately be taken by any means necessary in order to realize the Fuhrer’s dream of the “Thousand-year Reich,” where perpetual peace for the privileged German people would finally be realized.
The “collateral damage” done to the innocent civilian-victims of Europe and the Soviet Union, was felt to be unavoidable, and the “disappearances” of the non-Aryan “Untermenschen," mentioned above, was orchestrated with conscienceless bureaucratic efficiency.
Bishops, priests and pastors, most of whom had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler, told their parishioners that it was their Christian duty to join the military and fight and kill for the Fuhrer.
Resentment also played an important role in the swastika-waving terror. Most of the street-fighting militias loyal to the Nazi party’s politics were WWI veterans who had been rendered unemployable by years of horrific trench warfare experiences.
They were justifiably angry about their joblessness, poverty, physical disabilities, mental ill health, traumatic brain injuries, hunger, all worsened by the hyperinflation and impoverishment that go hand in hand with the huge costs of having standing armies and fighting perpetual wars.
Many of these unemployed veterans rushed to join the militia groups for the food, shelter and camaraderie, perhaps not realizing that they were helping to create the chaos that would destroy the liberal democratic Weimar republic, an action that would lead the world into another world war that would ultimately turn out to be suicidal for Germany.
Most German churches cooperated with, or at least did not vocally oppose, Hitler’s agenda. Pastors cheered the Fuhrer from swastika-draped pulpits or they stood by silently as the concentration camps and prisons filled with those suspected by the Gestapo of not being supportive of the regime.
All efforts to resist came too late, for the people who objected to the dictatorship were leaderless and unschooled in any nonviolent resistance actions. They had no Gandhi or Martin Luther King and were totally unprepared to act en masse.
Blessed Wars
Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.
In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.
Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.
Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.
Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”
My Veterans for Peace friends are of the opinion that modern war amounts to legally sanctioned, highly organized mass murder and that basic training is psychological rape with serious, often permanent consequences for everybody involved: the victims, bystanders and maybe especially the soldiers.
And today, the killing is not just done by soldiers on the ground who can see the “whites of their eyes.” War is now often done from a safe distance by the high-tech “soldiering” of high-altitude bombing, supersonic jet fighters, long-range missiles (many of them computer-guided from unmanned drones), and radioactive DU armor-piercing ordnance that will continue killing for many centuries into the future.
The victims of this kind of lopsided modern warfare (for which the human targets have no defense) regard these tactics as cowardly acts.
Bureaucracies of Death
These days, wars are started and perpetuated by a huge conglomeration of war profiteers: corporations (and their lobbyists), government bureaucracies (that obediently follow orders from above), the handlers of pro-war politicians and the financial underwriters of their campaigns, the ruling class, and the Department of War/Defense which has, as job # 1, the planning and orchestrating of current and future military conflicts, whether originating from real, imaginary or invented threats.
A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”
If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?
Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust.
While the churches have played key roles in the promotion and cover-ups of these brutalities, the churches have not been alone. Whitewashes and excuses have often come from politicians, pundits, “embedded” journalists and co-opted history-writers, especially the authors of high school textbooks.
Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”
And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders.
Christ’s Teachings
How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?
Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.
Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.
The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.
Today however, it is obvious that the vast majority of professed Christians have been misled, intentionally or unintentionally, into believing that they can immerse themselves in un-Christ-like realities like war and killing and somehow still be following the gentle Jesus.
Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.
The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.
The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing.
Those PTSD-afflicted ex-church-going combat veterans who lost their faith in the wars, along with their traumatized families, found out much too late that they had not been warned by the very institutions that theoretically should have courageously and faithfully taken on the heavy responsibility to teach private and public morality.
Many Germans who survived the wars felt betrayed by their churches and therefore had no inclination to try to reclaim their lost faith. The churches sank toward irrelevancy.
The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.
By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News
December 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144818/
When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”
Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.
In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.
I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.
Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.
I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.
As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.
Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles.
Invoking “Gott Mit Uns” didn’t work just on the uneducated, brain-washable and obedient citizens and conscripted soldiers of Germany. The slogan also convinced most of the educated Protestant and Catholic clergymen to comfortably proclaim from their pulpits that Hitler’s wars were endorsed by the Christian God, and therefore every military action could be justified and carried out without guilt.
Most Germans wanted to believe that Hitler’s wars had to be fought for some higher purpose, a master plan that they trusted would benefit them all by creating “Lebensraum” (living space), which would mean security for the pure Aryan race.
Aggression as Defensive
In the Nazis’ up-is-down world, the propagandists convinced average Germans that Hitler’s wars were purely defensive (“the sword has been forced into our hands”). The terrorizing of foreigners in a neighboring country, in order to steal their land, was the patriotic thing to do.
Convincing the German public to engage in murder for the state took a lot of diligent work from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
Goebbels had to persuade the Germans that their neighbor’s land and oil and mineral resources could legitimately be taken by any means necessary in order to realize the Fuhrer’s dream of the “Thousand-year Reich,” where perpetual peace for the privileged German people would finally be realized.
The “collateral damage” done to the innocent civilian-victims of Europe and the Soviet Union, was felt to be unavoidable, and the “disappearances” of the non-Aryan “Untermenschen," mentioned above, was orchestrated with conscienceless bureaucratic efficiency.
Bishops, priests and pastors, most of whom had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler, told their parishioners that it was their Christian duty to join the military and fight and kill for the Fuhrer.
Resentment also played an important role in the swastika-waving terror. Most of the street-fighting militias loyal to the Nazi party’s politics were WWI veterans who had been rendered unemployable by years of horrific trench warfare experiences.
They were justifiably angry about their joblessness, poverty, physical disabilities, mental ill health, traumatic brain injuries, hunger, all worsened by the hyperinflation and impoverishment that go hand in hand with the huge costs of having standing armies and fighting perpetual wars.
Many of these unemployed veterans rushed to join the militia groups for the food, shelter and camaraderie, perhaps not realizing that they were helping to create the chaos that would destroy the liberal democratic Weimar republic, an action that would lead the world into another world war that would ultimately turn out to be suicidal for Germany.
Most German churches cooperated with, or at least did not vocally oppose, Hitler’s agenda. Pastors cheered the Fuhrer from swastika-draped pulpits or they stood by silently as the concentration camps and prisons filled with those suspected by the Gestapo of not being supportive of the regime.
All efforts to resist came too late, for the people who objected to the dictatorship were leaderless and unschooled in any nonviolent resistance actions. They had no Gandhi or Martin Luther King and were totally unprepared to act en masse.
Blessed Wars
Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.
In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.
Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.
Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.
Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”
My Veterans for Peace friends are of the opinion that modern war amounts to legally sanctioned, highly organized mass murder and that basic training is psychological rape with serious, often permanent consequences for everybody involved: the victims, bystanders and maybe especially the soldiers.
And today, the killing is not just done by soldiers on the ground who can see the “whites of their eyes.” War is now often done from a safe distance by the high-tech “soldiering” of high-altitude bombing, supersonic jet fighters, long-range missiles (many of them computer-guided from unmanned drones), and radioactive DU armor-piercing ordnance that will continue killing for many centuries into the future.
The victims of this kind of lopsided modern warfare (for which the human targets have no defense) regard these tactics as cowardly acts.
Bureaucracies of Death
These days, wars are started and perpetuated by a huge conglomeration of war profiteers: corporations (and their lobbyists), government bureaucracies (that obediently follow orders from above), the handlers of pro-war politicians and the financial underwriters of their campaigns, the ruling class, and the Department of War/Defense which has, as job # 1, the planning and orchestrating of current and future military conflicts, whether originating from real, imaginary or invented threats.
A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”
If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?
Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust.
While the churches have played key roles in the promotion and cover-ups of these brutalities, the churches have not been alone. Whitewashes and excuses have often come from politicians, pundits, “embedded” journalists and co-opted history-writers, especially the authors of high school textbooks.
Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”
And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders.
Christ’s Teachings
How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?
Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.
Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.
The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.
Today however, it is obvious that the vast majority of professed Christians have been misled, intentionally or unintentionally, into believing that they can immerse themselves in un-Christ-like realities like war and killing and somehow still be following the gentle Jesus.
Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.
The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.
The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing.
Those PTSD-afflicted ex-church-going combat veterans who lost their faith in the wars, along with their traumatized families, found out much too late that they had not been warned by the very institutions that theoretically should have courageously and faithfully taken on the heavy responsibility to teach private and public morality.
Many Germans who survived the wars felt betrayed by their churches and therefore had no inclination to try to reclaim their lost faith. The churches sank toward irrelevancy.
The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Old Testament and the War Crime in Gaza
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/the-old-testament-and-the-war-crime-in-gaza-by-gilad-atzmon.html
The Old Testament and the War Crime in Gaza
Gilad Atzmon
GiladAtzmon.html
Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:12 EST
To mark one year to the Israeli Christmas Massacre I re-post a text I wrote in early January 2009.
"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you."Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9
"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy."Deuteronomy 7:1-2,
"...do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16
There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwagerhas found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.
As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF was using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to 'destroy' the Gazans while showing 'no mercy' whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself as a secular state. Ehud Barak is not exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi's wife. Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn't actually Judaism per se that directly transforms Israeli politicians and military leaders into war criminals. Moreover, early Zionists believed that within a national home Jews would become 'people like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical.
In that very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic secular Jews may have managed to drop their God, most of them do not follow Judaic law, they are largely secular, and yet 94% of them interpret their Jewish identity as a genocidal mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry. They are there, in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the land and to lock up, starve and destroy its indigenous habitants.
Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza were following Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave alive anything that breathes." And yet, one question is left open. Why should a secular commander follow Deuteronomy verses or any other Biblical text?
Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within the left are insisting upon telling us that Jewishness is not necessarily inherently murderous. I tend to believe them that they themselves consider their words as genuine and truthful. But then one may wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no comparison?
The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As far as we can see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and political Jewish collective around and as it happens, it has proved once again that it is genocidal to the bone. As far as genocide is concerned the difference between Judaism and Zionism can be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the Zionist context, Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of themselves i.e., the 'Jewish people'. This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution. It taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the Jewish state. 'The Israeli' is Israel's God.
Accordingly, the Israeli kills in the name of 'his or her security', in the name of 'his or her democracy'. The Israelis destroy in the name of 'their war against terror' and in the name the 'their America'. Seemingly, in the Jewish state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as soon as he finds a 'name' to associate with.This doesn't really leave us too much room for speculation. The Jewish state is the ultimate threat to humanity and our notion of humanism.
Christianity, Islam and humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal fundamentalism and to replace it with universal ethics. Enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation allowed Jews to redeem themselves from their ancient tribal supremacist traits. Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been breaking out of their cultural and tribal chain. Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull many Jews back in.
Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice available for Jews. The merciless offensive against the Palestinian civilian population does not leave any room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace. Clearly the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving an emerging volatile racially orientated identity an opportunity to set itself into a national state. However, the nations' duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state before it is too late. We must do it before the Jewish state and its forceful lobbies around the world manage to pull us all into a global war in the 'name' of one banal populist ideology or another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so on). We have to wake up now before our one and only planet is transformed into a bursting boil of hatred.
The Old Testament and the War Crime in Gaza
Gilad Atzmon
GiladAtzmon.html
Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:12 EST
To mark one year to the Israeli Christmas Massacre I re-post a text I wrote in early January 2009.
"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you."Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9
"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy."Deuteronomy 7:1-2,
"...do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16
There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwagerhas found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.
As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF was using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to 'destroy' the Gazans while showing 'no mercy' whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself as a secular state. Ehud Barak is not exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi's wife. Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn't actually Judaism per se that directly transforms Israeli politicians and military leaders into war criminals. Moreover, early Zionists believed that within a national home Jews would become 'people like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical.
In that very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic secular Jews may have managed to drop their God, most of them do not follow Judaic law, they are largely secular, and yet 94% of them interpret their Jewish identity as a genocidal mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry. They are there, in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the land and to lock up, starve and destroy its indigenous habitants.
Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza were following Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave alive anything that breathes." And yet, one question is left open. Why should a secular commander follow Deuteronomy verses or any other Biblical text?
Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within the left are insisting upon telling us that Jewishness is not necessarily inherently murderous. I tend to believe them that they themselves consider their words as genuine and truthful. But then one may wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no comparison?
The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As far as we can see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and political Jewish collective around and as it happens, it has proved once again that it is genocidal to the bone. As far as genocide is concerned the difference between Judaism and Zionism can be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the Zionist context, Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of themselves i.e., the 'Jewish people'. This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution. It taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the Jewish state. 'The Israeli' is Israel's God.
Accordingly, the Israeli kills in the name of 'his or her security', in the name of 'his or her democracy'. The Israelis destroy in the name of 'their war against terror' and in the name the 'their America'. Seemingly, in the Jewish state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as soon as he finds a 'name' to associate with.This doesn't really leave us too much room for speculation. The Jewish state is the ultimate threat to humanity and our notion of humanism.
Christianity, Islam and humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal fundamentalism and to replace it with universal ethics. Enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation allowed Jews to redeem themselves from their ancient tribal supremacist traits. Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been breaking out of their cultural and tribal chain. Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull many Jews back in.
Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice available for Jews. The merciless offensive against the Palestinian civilian population does not leave any room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace. Clearly the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving an emerging volatile racially orientated identity an opportunity to set itself into a national state. However, the nations' duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state before it is too late. We must do it before the Jewish state and its forceful lobbies around the world manage to pull us all into a global war in the 'name' of one banal populist ideology or another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so on). We have to wake up now before our one and only planet is transformed into a bursting boil of hatred.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Objects-of-Our-Devotio-by-Judith-Acosta-091217-229.html
December 17, 2009
The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing
By Judith Acosta
"I totally don't know what it means. But I want it." Jessica Simpson
A survey was just conducted to gauge the religious and spiritual propensities of Americans. As one might have guessed without having spent all the money and time, we are a fairly religious country. Diversely so, but religious nonetheless. The vast majority of Americans believe in a Supreme Being or higher power whom they call God.
So where did the road bend and twist? When did Americans go from a devotion to God to a devotion to things? In advertising circles, which is essentially the crank shaft of our economy, it is a truism that the American is a demanding consumer. "Give us what we want," is the credo. But it appears that what they want is a product. We have gone from one nation under God to one nation under Wal-Mart. We worry about extending youth and bodily life instead of considering the importance of making our limited time here meaningful. And the worst part as I see it and the point of this article is that we have come to believe that meaning and having are, if not entirely equal, then at least run parallel. This is a profound and pervasive delusion that is also both simultaneously destructive and systematically distracting. So much so that corporations have put their billions into marketing campaigns that specifically target and capitalize on these delusions.
The delusions are:
1) The product can save me.
2) The product has meaning and therefore can give my life meaning.
3) The product can help me belong to a tribe.
4) The product or service or brand can make me lovable.
Of course, none of the products on the market today and none of the products anyonecan possibly conceive of will ever meet the deeper needs of a human being (which are distinguished from basic needs such as food, shelter, clean air and clean water) because those deeper needs are for love, belonging, and meaning. Who in their right mind would consciously believe that a pair of shoes or a car or a skin cream could ever do that? Yet, we buy and behave as if we did believe it.
Naturally, the marketing experts know this. They reach into our hearts to pull on the strings of our deepest longings so that we buy what they have to sell, knowing it will never satisfy those longings, secretly happy in that knowledge because it means we'll have to keep buying, scooping up more and more in a fruitless search for salvation that can never, ever come from this world. Ever.
I am not a theologian. I'm a psychotherapist near Albuquerque, NM. But I think this is idolatry in the purest sense of the word. In watching and treating people who suffer from profound anxiety, ennui and depression, I have come to the conclusion that God did not forbid idolatry because He was petty or needy. An Omnipotent Being does not need our worship or devotion. He prohibited idolatry because it is, in fact, delusional, and it will make us miserable. It will never satisfy us or make us happy in the way He wants us to be deeply happy, which could never be accomplished with a short shot of dope. If my assumption is true, then what we are missing is not just happiness but a contentedness and emotional sure-footedness that is bone-deep and fills us with joy on each inhalation. What we are accepting in exchange for this soul satisfaction is a house full of gadgets we have no time to use, closets full of designer labels and lives littered with broken relationships.
But we keep saying "no" to joy and "yes" to stuff. It is more than ironic. It is befuddling and tragic. But it is true and made possible by an exceedingly savvy and complex understanding of human nature in marketing executives who keep leading us into their stores and away from the Promised Land. I would like to make clear, here, that I do not believe that devotion to God and a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. I think an economy based on deception and delusion, however, is.
How do they do it? There are principles that apply almost universally in board rooms around the world. Marketing a new product is approached in just about the same way whether the group is meeting in Tokyo or New York.
Become the atmosphere: This is a phrase used to describe the infusion of brand recognition into our culture, to surround people with "Nike," for instance, so that when they think they need new sneakers, the first thing they'll think of is that brand. It has unfortunately become increasingly difficult to take command over the general economic "atmosphere" because of the quantity of clutter in the environment. There are so many products and so many messages, we are surrounded by such a huge amount of information that the task for marketing managers and creative directors is now much more sophisticated and complex.
One woman in the documentary, The Persuaders, said "Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them and spray them." Eventually, she explained, they become inured so you have to do something radically different to make them roll over.
Advertisers are shameless creatures. I know this not only because of their general reputation but because I worked as a copywriter. They are willing to do almost anything to break through the clutter of advertising and product promotion that they themselves created, fabricate any plausible untruth to attract our attention, take advantage of any scandal so long as it shocks and sells. That is the bottom line.
Create a culture of need: This is market-ese for inventing a culture around a product, an image that not only creates a pseudo-need, but promises a new way to meet it. That brand new ailment restless leg syndrome is a perfect example of that. Who in human history has not experienced some restlessness due to stress, lack of exercise, too much exercise or overtiredness? It is a newly identified "syndrome" that people are easily convinced is a real disease that they must have because they're restless, too, and now they must convince their doctors to prescribe the only drug that actually treats this new condition. And so it goes.
Give products texture and life: By imbuing ordinary toiletries and household products with emotional energy (happiness, softness, kindness, sexuality, sensuality, friendliness, availability, etc") the advertisers are able to make that product resonate with people's emotional lives and secret needs. What differentiates one product from another now is not for the most part quality or some massive technical advantage. How much difference is there between high-end hiking boots or between a pair of jeans made by Levi's and one made by Wrangler's? Besides the occasional issue of fit, it is hugely emotional. It's not what the product does. It's what it means and by extension what it says about us to the world.
Create a culture of fear: The media (news, editorial and advertising) has been promoting viral fear for many years, both subtly and overtly. We are told to be afraid of attack, mega-volcanoes, being unattractive, body odor, illness, death, asteroids, wrinkles and social rejection (to name but a few). If we are sufficiently afraid and are presented with a possible solution, a way to banish the demons of anxiety and self-doubt, we'll buy it. Many of us become so afraid we are willing to put ourselves into irreversible debt to deflect it. And the thing we are most afraid of not belonging, being shunned, being seen as inferior or unworthy is precisely that which they are best at manipulating by making the product an extension of the self, thereby giving the illusion of value to a fragile and porous self that must continually seek out external buttresses to give it cohesion.
I used to think this use of fear to send us careening into retail stores was a manifestation of abject sociopathy, that the conscious manipulation of viral fear was intentional, malicious and controllable. But the other day I realized something that literally made me run into the other room for my pen and paper (yes, I still use them). These advertisers and marketers honestly can't help themselves any more than they can help selling fear because they're fearful. They are as much a product of the culture they created as everyone and everything else. (This reminds me of something I wrote in The Worst is Over: Be careful what you say. You're listening.) They sell fear because that's what they buy. Advertisers can't stop spreading viral fear because, in one marketer's words, they're terrified of being eaten alive by the competition. It doesn't get more limbic than that, does it?
Market to the American soul: It might amuse you to know that marketers actually use the term "Pseudo-spiritual marketing." What does this mean? Here are some terrific examples of spiritual marketing strategies and creative concepts that were illuminated in the documentary, The Persuaders. Nike: mystical transcendence through sports and sports attire. Starbucks: community similar to the one we see in the show, Cheers, not home and not work, yet sympathetic, warm and companionable. Benetton: diversity and cheerful coexistence. When they sit around a table banging out strategies and campaign slogans, they use expressions like "making a spiritual bond with a product" and "channeling the inner brand." The brand becomes the church and the product the icon.
Give the product an IMAGE: This means that campaigns will skillfully and persuasively present the product as more than it is. It's not a bitter tasting drink, it's a social lubricant. It's not a just a washer/dryer, it's a part of your real sophisticated yet practical self. It's not just a car, it's an integral demonstration of your personal narrative, which may translate thus: I drive a Hummer, therefore I am"And I am successful, tough, yet refined. A complex being, I am, I am. Such a complex being I am. The product is no longer a product but redefined as mystery, as intimacy, as meaning, as cult, as success, as comfort, as our due.
Facilitate entitlement, no matter what a person's financial means: Offer loans, no pre-payment options, leases with hidden clauses, no interest deals for three years, no payments for two years. Make it easier than it should be to buy luxury items for which they have no real need and make the consumer feel they not only need the product, but that it is their right to have it. If a product is identified with the "self" then it we don't have far to go to feel fear about not having that product.
Entitled to be Happy: The Pursuit of the Ridiculous.
One of the most significant of the American pathologies is our confusion over the American creed. We have taken "pursuit of happiness" to mean the right to "be" happy. Since Romanticism's debut on the American intellectual game board and the Utopian notion that perfection is possible here on this earth, we have been entranced with a false sense of mortal power and, subsequent to that, of entitlement. If we can have it, then shouldn't we? Because we've additionally confused products with self and having with happiness, we find ourselves in the mess we are now in. We are so entitled and so afraid of not getting that to which we believe we're entitled we go into debt to get it. Or we steal. Or we sue.
There is an expression that goes something like, "that which you gaze upon, you become." This is certainly true in motorcycling, where it is understood at least in racing circles that you (and your bike) go where your eyes are pointed. I remember many years being warned by a friend, "If you ever see me go down, keep your eyes on the road and pull over slowly. Don't let yourself watch an accident." I never forgot that and have applied it to all areas of my life. What we see all day at the supermarket checkout, on packaging, on television, on cable and in movies is fame, beauty and money. A study was done with young people to find out what was most important to them and they reported the results we should have expected and hardly needed to go to all that trouble studying: fame, beauty and money.
There are two problems as I see it:
1) Americans don't just want what they see, they covet it. As a result they feel they should have it, that it is their right to have it and if they don't have it then something is vitally wrong with them. Their fear, once again, is that someone will find out they are "less than" ( less than perfect, less than expected, less than beautiful, successful or sexy) and that they will then be shunned, chased out of the pack and left for dead.
2) It has become an iconic need, a substitute for meaning, God and love.
We are saturated with more distraction than any other creature in history. We are surrounded by more cures, more opportunities, more checkouts and more choices than ever before. We are told that this, that or the other thing is the answer we've been waiting for. Until the next one comes along. But instead of answering our questions or satisfying our needs, all that they have succeeded in getting us to do is avoid the first and most important question of all: What does it mean and why do we want it? I sincerely doubt that Nike has anything to offer on that score.
December 17, 2009
The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing
By Judith Acosta
"I totally don't know what it means. But I want it." Jessica Simpson
A survey was just conducted to gauge the religious and spiritual propensities of Americans. As one might have guessed without having spent all the money and time, we are a fairly religious country. Diversely so, but religious nonetheless. The vast majority of Americans believe in a Supreme Being or higher power whom they call God.
So where did the road bend and twist? When did Americans go from a devotion to God to a devotion to things? In advertising circles, which is essentially the crank shaft of our economy, it is a truism that the American is a demanding consumer. "Give us what we want," is the credo. But it appears that what they want is a product. We have gone from one nation under God to one nation under Wal-Mart. We worry about extending youth and bodily life instead of considering the importance of making our limited time here meaningful. And the worst part as I see it and the point of this article is that we have come to believe that meaning and having are, if not entirely equal, then at least run parallel. This is a profound and pervasive delusion that is also both simultaneously destructive and systematically distracting. So much so that corporations have put their billions into marketing campaigns that specifically target and capitalize on these delusions.
The delusions are:
1) The product can save me.
2) The product has meaning and therefore can give my life meaning.
3) The product can help me belong to a tribe.
4) The product or service or brand can make me lovable.
Of course, none of the products on the market today and none of the products anyonecan possibly conceive of will ever meet the deeper needs of a human being (which are distinguished from basic needs such as food, shelter, clean air and clean water) because those deeper needs are for love, belonging, and meaning. Who in their right mind would consciously believe that a pair of shoes or a car or a skin cream could ever do that? Yet, we buy and behave as if we did believe it.
Naturally, the marketing experts know this. They reach into our hearts to pull on the strings of our deepest longings so that we buy what they have to sell, knowing it will never satisfy those longings, secretly happy in that knowledge because it means we'll have to keep buying, scooping up more and more in a fruitless search for salvation that can never, ever come from this world. Ever.
I am not a theologian. I'm a psychotherapist near Albuquerque, NM. But I think this is idolatry in the purest sense of the word. In watching and treating people who suffer from profound anxiety, ennui and depression, I have come to the conclusion that God did not forbid idolatry because He was petty or needy. An Omnipotent Being does not need our worship or devotion. He prohibited idolatry because it is, in fact, delusional, and it will make us miserable. It will never satisfy us or make us happy in the way He wants us to be deeply happy, which could never be accomplished with a short shot of dope. If my assumption is true, then what we are missing is not just happiness but a contentedness and emotional sure-footedness that is bone-deep and fills us with joy on each inhalation. What we are accepting in exchange for this soul satisfaction is a house full of gadgets we have no time to use, closets full of designer labels and lives littered with broken relationships.
But we keep saying "no" to joy and "yes" to stuff. It is more than ironic. It is befuddling and tragic. But it is true and made possible by an exceedingly savvy and complex understanding of human nature in marketing executives who keep leading us into their stores and away from the Promised Land. I would like to make clear, here, that I do not believe that devotion to God and a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. I think an economy based on deception and delusion, however, is.
How do they do it? There are principles that apply almost universally in board rooms around the world. Marketing a new product is approached in just about the same way whether the group is meeting in Tokyo or New York.
Become the atmosphere: This is a phrase used to describe the infusion of brand recognition into our culture, to surround people with "Nike," for instance, so that when they think they need new sneakers, the first thing they'll think of is that brand. It has unfortunately become increasingly difficult to take command over the general economic "atmosphere" because of the quantity of clutter in the environment. There are so many products and so many messages, we are surrounded by such a huge amount of information that the task for marketing managers and creative directors is now much more sophisticated and complex.
One woman in the documentary, The Persuaders, said "Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them and spray them." Eventually, she explained, they become inured so you have to do something radically different to make them roll over.
Advertisers are shameless creatures. I know this not only because of their general reputation but because I worked as a copywriter. They are willing to do almost anything to break through the clutter of advertising and product promotion that they themselves created, fabricate any plausible untruth to attract our attention, take advantage of any scandal so long as it shocks and sells. That is the bottom line.
Create a culture of need: This is market-ese for inventing a culture around a product, an image that not only creates a pseudo-need, but promises a new way to meet it. That brand new ailment restless leg syndrome is a perfect example of that. Who in human history has not experienced some restlessness due to stress, lack of exercise, too much exercise or overtiredness? It is a newly identified "syndrome" that people are easily convinced is a real disease that they must have because they're restless, too, and now they must convince their doctors to prescribe the only drug that actually treats this new condition. And so it goes.
Give products texture and life: By imbuing ordinary toiletries and household products with emotional energy (happiness, softness, kindness, sexuality, sensuality, friendliness, availability, etc") the advertisers are able to make that product resonate with people's emotional lives and secret needs. What differentiates one product from another now is not for the most part quality or some massive technical advantage. How much difference is there between high-end hiking boots or between a pair of jeans made by Levi's and one made by Wrangler's? Besides the occasional issue of fit, it is hugely emotional. It's not what the product does. It's what it means and by extension what it says about us to the world.
Create a culture of fear: The media (news, editorial and advertising) has been promoting viral fear for many years, both subtly and overtly. We are told to be afraid of attack, mega-volcanoes, being unattractive, body odor, illness, death, asteroids, wrinkles and social rejection (to name but a few). If we are sufficiently afraid and are presented with a possible solution, a way to banish the demons of anxiety and self-doubt, we'll buy it. Many of us become so afraid we are willing to put ourselves into irreversible debt to deflect it. And the thing we are most afraid of not belonging, being shunned, being seen as inferior or unworthy is precisely that which they are best at manipulating by making the product an extension of the self, thereby giving the illusion of value to a fragile and porous self that must continually seek out external buttresses to give it cohesion.
I used to think this use of fear to send us careening into retail stores was a manifestation of abject sociopathy, that the conscious manipulation of viral fear was intentional, malicious and controllable. But the other day I realized something that literally made me run into the other room for my pen and paper (yes, I still use them). These advertisers and marketers honestly can't help themselves any more than they can help selling fear because they're fearful. They are as much a product of the culture they created as everyone and everything else. (This reminds me of something I wrote in The Worst is Over: Be careful what you say. You're listening.) They sell fear because that's what they buy. Advertisers can't stop spreading viral fear because, in one marketer's words, they're terrified of being eaten alive by the competition. It doesn't get more limbic than that, does it?
Market to the American soul: It might amuse you to know that marketers actually use the term "Pseudo-spiritual marketing." What does this mean? Here are some terrific examples of spiritual marketing strategies and creative concepts that were illuminated in the documentary, The Persuaders. Nike: mystical transcendence through sports and sports attire. Starbucks: community similar to the one we see in the show, Cheers, not home and not work, yet sympathetic, warm and companionable. Benetton: diversity and cheerful coexistence. When they sit around a table banging out strategies and campaign slogans, they use expressions like "making a spiritual bond with a product" and "channeling the inner brand." The brand becomes the church and the product the icon.
Give the product an IMAGE: This means that campaigns will skillfully and persuasively present the product as more than it is. It's not a bitter tasting drink, it's a social lubricant. It's not a just a washer/dryer, it's a part of your real sophisticated yet practical self. It's not just a car, it's an integral demonstration of your personal narrative, which may translate thus: I drive a Hummer, therefore I am"And I am successful, tough, yet refined. A complex being, I am, I am. Such a complex being I am. The product is no longer a product but redefined as mystery, as intimacy, as meaning, as cult, as success, as comfort, as our due.
Facilitate entitlement, no matter what a person's financial means: Offer loans, no pre-payment options, leases with hidden clauses, no interest deals for three years, no payments for two years. Make it easier than it should be to buy luxury items for which they have no real need and make the consumer feel they not only need the product, but that it is their right to have it. If a product is identified with the "self" then it we don't have far to go to feel fear about not having that product.
Entitled to be Happy: The Pursuit of the Ridiculous.
One of the most significant of the American pathologies is our confusion over the American creed. We have taken "pursuit of happiness" to mean the right to "be" happy. Since Romanticism's debut on the American intellectual game board and the Utopian notion that perfection is possible here on this earth, we have been entranced with a false sense of mortal power and, subsequent to that, of entitlement. If we can have it, then shouldn't we? Because we've additionally confused products with self and having with happiness, we find ourselves in the mess we are now in. We are so entitled and so afraid of not getting that to which we believe we're entitled we go into debt to get it. Or we steal. Or we sue.
There is an expression that goes something like, "that which you gaze upon, you become." This is certainly true in motorcycling, where it is understood at least in racing circles that you (and your bike) go where your eyes are pointed. I remember many years being warned by a friend, "If you ever see me go down, keep your eyes on the road and pull over slowly. Don't let yourself watch an accident." I never forgot that and have applied it to all areas of my life. What we see all day at the supermarket checkout, on packaging, on television, on cable and in movies is fame, beauty and money. A study was done with young people to find out what was most important to them and they reported the results we should have expected and hardly needed to go to all that trouble studying: fame, beauty and money.
There are two problems as I see it:
1) Americans don't just want what they see, they covet it. As a result they feel they should have it, that it is their right to have it and if they don't have it then something is vitally wrong with them. Their fear, once again, is that someone will find out they are "less than" ( less than perfect, less than expected, less than beautiful, successful or sexy) and that they will then be shunned, chased out of the pack and left for dead.
2) It has become an iconic need, a substitute for meaning, God and love.
We are saturated with more distraction than any other creature in history. We are surrounded by more cures, more opportunities, more checkouts and more choices than ever before. We are told that this, that or the other thing is the answer we've been waiting for. Until the next one comes along. But instead of answering our questions or satisfying our needs, all that they have succeeded in getting us to do is avoid the first and most important question of all: What does it mean and why do we want it? I sincerely doubt that Nike has anything to offer on that score.
God's Divine Sperm? Lib Church Shakes Up Story of Jesus' Birth
By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on December 17, 2009, Printed on December 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144643/
A progressive New Zealand Church wants you to know that not all Christians are lame. To that end, they've put up a billboard displaying a post-coital Mary gazing longingly at the sky (that's where God lives), while Joseph lays next to her looking dejected. It reads "Poor Joseph. God was a tough act to follow."
The purpose of the billboard, according to St. Matthew's website , is to highlight the absurdity of literal Biblical interpretation. "The Christmas billboard outside St Matthew-in-the-City lampoons literalism and invites people to think again about what a miracle is. Is the miracle a male God sending forth his divine sperm, or is the miracle that God is and always has been among the poor?" writes Vicar Glynn Cardy.
Here's some more really nice, smart stuff from Cardy:
The Christmas billboard on a local fundamentalist church sums up this thesis. It reads: “Jesus born 2 die 4 u!” His birth was just an h’orderve before the main Calvary course.
No doubt on Christmas Eve when papers print the messages of Church leaders a few of them will serve up this fundamentalist thesis wrapped in a nice story.
Progressive Christianity believes the Christmas stories are fictitious accounts designed to introduce the radical nature of the adult Jesus. They contrast the Lord and Saviour Caesar with the anomaly of a new ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’ born illegitimate in a squalid barn. At Bethlehem low-life shepherds and heathen travelers are welcome while the powerful and the priests aren’t. The stories introduce the topsy-turvy way of God, where the outsiders are invited in and the insiders ushered out.
Progressive Christianity doesn’t overlook Jesus’ life and rush to his death. Rather it sees the radical hospitality he offered to the poor, the despised, women, children, and the sick, and says: ‘this is the essence of God’. His death was a consequence of the offensive nature of that hospitality and his resurrection a symbolic vindication.
The site describes some of the tenets of progressive Christianity. Here's an interesting one:
Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including (including but not limited to):
o believers and agnostics,
o conventional Christians and questioning sceptics,
o women and men,
o those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
o those of all races and cultures,
o those of all classes and abilities,
o those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope
Pay attention creationists! And Catholic Church! And U.S. Evengelicals! And some of the really bitchy atheists that spit on all forms of religious belief!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
God is Running Short of Cash, I Got an Idea
http://www.opednews.com/articles/God-is-Running-Short-of-Ca-by-Grant-Lawrence-091214-464.html
December 15, 2009
God is Running Short of Cash, I Got an Idea
By Grant Lawrence
...The fallout from the pledge pinch already is being felt. United Methodist bishops volunteered for pay cuts. The Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Conservative and Reform Jews have had congregations fall behind in their payments, resulting in job cuts. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) dropped a radio program that had been on the air since 1947.....Source: Star Tribune.com
It looks as if the churches are cash strapped. Evidently they need more faith in the power of God to generate money.
But I get a little confused.
How can God help the churches get money when he always needs money for himself.
Churches are always telling us that it is the Lord's money, but he never seems to have enough.
I don't know. It seems to me if the Lord has all the money along with being all powerful, all knowing, and all everything then he shouldn't need for anything.
But the Lord is always wanting what little money we have. He always promises that if we just dig deep and give him 10% and up of our income, he will make things happen for us. The Lord will come through for us. I guess it is kind of like an IOU. We give him the money and he will pay us later 10 or even a hundred fold.
I got an idea.
Suppose all of the churches got together and gave each other all of the money they have. God will really like their faith and will surely give the churches 10 or even a 100 times more than what they give each other. Soon the cash strapped churches will be rolling in money just by giving each other what they have.
This simple act of Churches giving to God all that they have will surely be richly rewarded. It is like the Churches will be demonstrating to the world that they really believe in what they preach.
But you might be arguing that Churches giving to each other is just God transferring money from one pocket to the other. It isn't really giving God anything more than he already has.
Well, that is a good point. But if God has all the money anyway then why should he be upset if the churches show some great big faith in their own preaching by giving their money to other Churches? I am sure God will come through for the Church. He wouldn't hose the elect.
But that's another thing.
Even after we give God our money, he doesn't come through a lot of times. God talks a good game about giving us what we want if we just give him some cash. But, he likes to hold out a lot.
Now I am not calling God a liar or saying that he isn't all powerful, but I am just wondering.
I guess no one understands the workings of the Lord, especially when it comes to money.
December 15, 2009
God is Running Short of Cash, I Got an Idea
By Grant Lawrence
...The fallout from the pledge pinch already is being felt. United Methodist bishops volunteered for pay cuts. The Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Conservative and Reform Jews have had congregations fall behind in their payments, resulting in job cuts. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) dropped a radio program that had been on the air since 1947.....Source: Star Tribune.com
It looks as if the churches are cash strapped. Evidently they need more faith in the power of God to generate money.
But I get a little confused.
How can God help the churches get money when he always needs money for himself.
Churches are always telling us that it is the Lord's money, but he never seems to have enough.
I don't know. It seems to me if the Lord has all the money along with being all powerful, all knowing, and all everything then he shouldn't need for anything.
But the Lord is always wanting what little money we have. He always promises that if we just dig deep and give him 10% and up of our income, he will make things happen for us. The Lord will come through for us. I guess it is kind of like an IOU. We give him the money and he will pay us later 10 or even a hundred fold.
I got an idea.
Suppose all of the churches got together and gave each other all of the money they have. God will really like their faith and will surely give the churches 10 or even a 100 times more than what they give each other. Soon the cash strapped churches will be rolling in money just by giving each other what they have.
This simple act of Churches giving to God all that they have will surely be richly rewarded. It is like the Churches will be demonstrating to the world that they really believe in what they preach.
But you might be arguing that Churches giving to each other is just God transferring money from one pocket to the other. It isn't really giving God anything more than he already has.
Well, that is a good point. But if God has all the money anyway then why should he be upset if the churches show some great big faith in their own preaching by giving their money to other Churches? I am sure God will come through for the Church. He wouldn't hose the elect.
But that's another thing.
Even after we give God our money, he doesn't come through a lot of times. God talks a good game about giving us what we want if we just give him some cash. But, he likes to hold out a lot.
Now I am not calling God a liar or saying that he isn't all powerful, but I am just wondering.
I guess no one understands the workings of the Lord, especially when it comes to money.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091210/lf_nm_life/us_usa_religion
Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology
By Ed Stoddard
Thu Dec 10, 9:23 am ET
DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – Although most Americans are Christian and many are devout it hasn't stopped some members of the flock from believing in astrology, reincarnation or the ability of trees to trap spiritual energy.
A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows a surprising number of U.S. adults claim to have had supernatural experiences such as ghost sightings or hold beliefs associated with the New Age movement or Eastern religions.
And some of them claim allegiance to more traditional faiths such as Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism.
"American religious folks hold a variety of views and there is overlap among their beliefs and practices. Many do not fit into simple boxes," said Pew researcher Alan Cooperman.
The poll released on Wednesday showed that three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with a dead person and 18 percent say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.
Other Pew surveys have shown that relatively few Americans would identify an Eastern religion or New Age spirituality as their core faith. But about a quarter of those surveyed say they believe in aspects of Eastern religions.
Nearly 25 percent said they believed in reincarnation and 23 percent said yoga was a spiritual practice. Twenty six percent said they believed "spiritual energy" could be found in objects such as trees.
A quarter said they believed in astrology, while 16 percent of U.S. adults think that an "evil eye" exists or that some people can cast curses or spells on others. Among black Protestants the evil eye figure is 32 percent.
The number of Americans who profess a belief in astrology is about the same as the number who claim to be Roman Catholic. Nearly 30 percent of Catholics surveyed said they believed in astrology. Among Catholics who attended church each week the figure was 16 percent.
Much of this would be jarring to -- among others -- many evangelical Protestants, who account for one in four adult Americans and take their Bible very seriously.
Still, 13 percent of white evangelicals profess a belief in astrology and about 10 percent accepted the possibility of reincarnation. Although the percentages are lower than in other groups, they are high enough to curl the hair of a Southern Baptist preacher.
Researchers said they were careful to stress that reincarnation meant being reborn again and again in this world and did not refer to, say, the resurrection of Christ.
Evangelicals, who place a heavy emphasis on spiritual conversions, are much more likely than most Americans to have had "a religious or mystical experience -- that is, a moment of religious or spiritual awakening," according to the poll.
About half of Americans claim to have had such an experience but among white evangelicals the number is 70 percent and for black Protestants it is 71 percent.
The nationwide survey of around 4,000 adults was conducted in August. Interviews were done in English and Spanish.
Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology
By Ed Stoddard
Thu Dec 10, 9:23 am ET
DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – Although most Americans are Christian and many are devout it hasn't stopped some members of the flock from believing in astrology, reincarnation or the ability of trees to trap spiritual energy.
A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows a surprising number of U.S. adults claim to have had supernatural experiences such as ghost sightings or hold beliefs associated with the New Age movement or Eastern religions.
And some of them claim allegiance to more traditional faiths such as Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism.
"American religious folks hold a variety of views and there is overlap among their beliefs and practices. Many do not fit into simple boxes," said Pew researcher Alan Cooperman.
The poll released on Wednesday showed that three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with a dead person and 18 percent say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.
Other Pew surveys have shown that relatively few Americans would identify an Eastern religion or New Age spirituality as their core faith. But about a quarter of those surveyed say they believe in aspects of Eastern religions.
Nearly 25 percent said they believed in reincarnation and 23 percent said yoga was a spiritual practice. Twenty six percent said they believed "spiritual energy" could be found in objects such as trees.
A quarter said they believed in astrology, while 16 percent of U.S. adults think that an "evil eye" exists or that some people can cast curses or spells on others. Among black Protestants the evil eye figure is 32 percent.
The number of Americans who profess a belief in astrology is about the same as the number who claim to be Roman Catholic. Nearly 30 percent of Catholics surveyed said they believed in astrology. Among Catholics who attended church each week the figure was 16 percent.
Much of this would be jarring to -- among others -- many evangelical Protestants, who account for one in four adult Americans and take their Bible very seriously.
Still, 13 percent of white evangelicals profess a belief in astrology and about 10 percent accepted the possibility of reincarnation. Although the percentages are lower than in other groups, they are high enough to curl the hair of a Southern Baptist preacher.
Researchers said they were careful to stress that reincarnation meant being reborn again and again in this world and did not refer to, say, the resurrection of Christ.
Evangelicals, who place a heavy emphasis on spiritual conversions, are much more likely than most Americans to have had "a religious or mystical experience -- that is, a moment of religious or spiritual awakening," according to the poll.
About half of Americans claim to have had such an experience but among white evangelicals the number is 70 percent and for black Protestants it is 71 percent.
The nationwide survey of around 4,000 adults was conducted in August. Interviews were done in English and Spanish.
Friday, December 11, 2009
The origins of human religious behavior,Organized religion & magical thinking:Part IV
I don't agree with this article but am posting it for others to think upon it.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-origins-of-human-relig-by-Abbas-Sadeghian-P-091210-45.html
December 10, 2009
The origins of human religious behavior,Organized religion & magical thinking:Part IV
By Abbas Sadeghian, Ph.D.
In dealing with the issue of religion one is always faced with the fact that there is a significant difference between a religion, teachings of it's' prophet, and the organized activity of that religion.
Transformation of social movements to institution
Since any critical reference to a religion is potentially offensive, it is considered good manners to avoid talking about religion or politics. It is quite obvious that if the masses of society do not get involved in political discussions, political activity becomes limited to those with power and money, whom do not necessarily have the best interest of the masses at heart. The same concept applies to organized religion.
One can make the argument that since the religious drive is instinctual, we should leave it to individual members of the society to apply their faith to their lives at their own discretions. However, in reality religions do not function that way and in every religion there is a lot of room for organized religion to gain momentum and power. The potential repressive power of religions could become so strong that it could cause massive and irreversible harm to society. Examples of runaway power of religion can be seen in most corners of the world. However, the grotesque forms of it are seen in countries of the Middle East and Africa. Even in a country as advanced and educated as the USA, a Mormon or a member of a religious cult has a better chance of getting elected to any office than an atheist.
If we assume that human religious behavior has organic causes, then we can assume that we would not need a church or a mosque to be religious. This is similar to the fact that going to restaurants is a way of eating and having a good time, while we know that we do not need to have restaurants to fulfill our need for food. Humans are as capable of cooking on their own, as they are able to worship on their own. In other words, if we are going to be religious anyway, and the source of the religiosity is within our own brain, why do we have to have prophets, temples, shrines, and the continuous struggle between religion and state?
The source or root of organized religion is almost identical in all religions. Religions usually begin as a movement. They are ideas which stand up against established governments and their accepted faith. They defy wealth, power, and regulations of the organized faith. Although every new religion has a prophet, either the prophet himself, or one of his followers pulls out a sword against the rich and the king and the chief clergy. If they are successful, there will be an Islam or Christianity. If they are not successful, they are usually devoured by bigger religions. With time religions have a tendency to lose their intensity and defiance. Religions become more conservative and turn into an institution. When religions are changed from a movement to institutions, they lose their beauty and the ability to provide assistance to the members. They begin to interfere with affairs of the state. Since they have an insatiable appetite for members and temples; they provoke the kings to use their military might to capture new territories and save new members. Within a short time the concept of "institution of a religion" turns into the "organization of a religion". Gradually, the original revolutionary idea turns into a large organization, which is expensive to run and hard to tame. Throughout the human history there have been many types of organized religion. The power of organized religion is a significant factor in that society. Although, periodically organized religion has had some minor benefits for a society; it is usually a severe drain on the resources of that society. As a rule, the function of a temple is not to be a charity society. The function of a temple is to protect and preserve that given faith. The maintenance expenses of organized religions are probably only second to the expenses of the armed forces of the world. Throughout human history, the best of the human brain and treasures have been wasted on organized religion. The most vivid example of these wasteful behaviors is the murderous practice of making the pyramids of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of slaves, building a totally useless structure, to make sure that the body of the pharaoh is protected. Considering the fact that grave robbers were able to get to most of these pyramids, speaks volumes about the efficiency of pyramids. Perhaps the only manmade object on planet Earth more useless, and more expensive than the pyramids, is the Sphinx. That odd looking statue was supposed to protect the pyramids. As if pyramids need any protection? Ironically, when it came to the devilish behavior of grave robbers, Sphinx couldn't do anything neither. If the practice of organized religion was limited to making places of worship to gratify the inner drive of religious people, then it would have been reasonably tolerable. However, those buildings, shrines, or temples are utilized to educate clergymen.
Clergymen:
All religions have a group of experts in that religion, whose job is to persuade the followers of that faith to practice certain behaviors and pay their hard, earned money to the temple. This is to ensure that they go to a garden in the skies that has never been seen. In order to be able to sell such a tall tale to millions of people, one cannot be a crook or a charlatan, he must really believe in what he is saying. It is the sincerity in the belief, which causes the followers to take the clergy so serious and to follow their lead. The majority of the clergymen of the world are well educated and intelligent, which makes it very difficult to keep them away from politics. They have been quite successful in imposing theocracy on many countries throughout history. Countries which have lived under theocracy, and tasted the brutal methods employed by religions, have a tendency to be less religious. The highest numbers of atheists in the world are in South Korea and France, about 20 percent. Countries like Italy have more atheists than countries like the U.S. Although, since Renaissance in 15th century, there has been a significant attempt to push the gene of the clergy back to it's' place. They do have a tendency to survive, and modify the faith, in order to adapt to the needs of the time. For example, although it is strongly advised not to modify the writings of the Bible; when referring to creation, we clearly see that a reference to "one day" has been changed to "one period". Before Darwin's teachings of 19th century, all Bibles would refer to days one through seven, as a regular day, from sunrise to sunset. While the Bibles which are printed in the last 50 years, mostly refer to a day, as a period. This minor modification makes it possible to defend the idea of creation, against the scientific facts of evolution.
One of those rare occasions when organized religion has been a source of help, rather than hindrance, is with the case of the Amish community and their vast web of churches. Even though the practice of being Amish is badly primitive, and defies any logic; the existence of the Amish church has protected the Amish people during the last 100 years. The Amish people were terribly mistreated and taken advantage of during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century in Europe and Russia. Their intelligent behavior of immigrating to the United States; buying land and growing crops, was quite effective in getting them out of harms' way. Additionally, the concept of donating the earnings of one
Days' worth of work, a week, to the community fund, has helped them to receive proper medical care; and to build strong enough of a lobby, to not have to go to combat during the war as conscientious objectors. The Amish lifestyle, although very primitive, is quite similar to the socialist system that many intellectuals of the world are striving for.
God's spokesmen:
Unfortunately, the intensity of human emotions regarding their faith is so strong, that it is next to impossible to hold a reasonable discussion regarding people who are referred to as prophets of god. If a person is a little inquisitive, he probably would have a few legitimate questions regarding the issue of prophets of god. The simple question is that, "Why does god need spokesmen, after all, he is the creator of the universe, with such tremendous power and unlimited creativity; why does he need human beings to transfer his message? If we assume that our hypothesis of religion as an innate drive; then the issue of the prophets changes entirely. The prophets would not be god's spokesmen; rather, they are people who think that they are messengers of god. And, they think that there is a problem associated with the mechanism of religiosity, which has caused them to make such grandiose claims. In one case, "Muhammad" the prophet of Islam, I was able to render a diagnosis and provide the support for the notion that he suffered from complex partial seizures. In the case of older prophets, the documentation is sketchy and unreliable. The more recent ones are easier to read, but they do not have such a following, to make it necessary to spend years of research to figure out. However, if we broaden our scope, and look at the common denominator among them; we can see some similarities, which might be able to answer some of our questions. The main prerequisite to be able to claim that one is a prophet, is the ability to perform miracles. Although, the biggest miracle is the fact that there are people who still believe that there is such a thing called a miracle.
What is a miracle?
Miracles are supposed to be the ability to conduct behaviors that other humans can not do. The prophets can wish things to happen that others can not (turning a staff into a snake). In the case of Muhammad, he claimed that the Quran is his miracle, that no one else could write such an eloquent book. This lays the ground work for Shakespeare (in English), and Firdausi (in Persian), and Garcia Lorca in Spanish, to make similar claims.
(1)The idea of miracles is quite similar to the consepts of magical thinking, in clinical psychology. Magical thinking refers to "causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, and correlation mistaken for causation"; for example, in most religions there is a belief that religious leaders, prophets, and saints, have a tendency not to decay after they die. Many of these intact bodies could be found in Europe and Asia (Saint Bernadette in France). However, when their bodies are checked properly, we easily detect different embalming methods. Ironically; the bodies of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who are founders of communism, and are all renound atheists, are totally intact and have been on public display for decades. In the practice of psychology, magical thinking is specifically used in the differential diagnosis of patients that suffer from Schizotypal personality disorder. The other common denominators among prophets are:
(2) Hearing the gods messages, teachings, and orders (auditory hallucinations)
(3) Seeing things that other people cannot see (visual hallucinations)
(4) Strong sense of mission, and the belief that the person is the only one who has the truth at hand (delusions of Grandeur)
(5)The first contacts with god are made at younger ages, mostly before 30 (genetic nature of the illness).
If we take all these characteristics and put them in the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders, we can quickly come up with schizophrenia and its' different variations. Those mental health professionals who have worked in state hospitals are quite familiar with a high number of schizophrenic patients, who claim to be god or a prophet of god, and stop these claims once they receive the antipsychotic medications. The main exceptions to schizophrenic prophets are those suffering from seizure disorder. In my book, Sword and Seizure; we were able to show how Mohammed's seizure disorder caused him to believe he is a messenger of God, and founded a faith which includes 25% of the population of earth. More astonishing of this phenomenon, is the behavior of the devout followers of polytheist religions. For example, if we were in India, we could observe people who would go to a grocery store, buy a can of cow urine, and wash their face with it as well as have a few sips. Considering the fact that at least one billion people on planet Earth believe in Hinduism, one wonders what makes a person believe in such an irrational behavior. Each one of these behaviors, drinking the cow's urine, worshipping statues, building pyramids, and believing in after life, are different forms of magical thinking.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-origins-of-human-relig-by-Abbas-Sadeghian-P-091210-45.html
December 10, 2009
The origins of human religious behavior,Organized religion & magical thinking:Part IV
By Abbas Sadeghian, Ph.D.
In dealing with the issue of religion one is always faced with the fact that there is a significant difference between a religion, teachings of it's' prophet, and the organized activity of that religion.
Transformation of social movements to institution
Since any critical reference to a religion is potentially offensive, it is considered good manners to avoid talking about religion or politics. It is quite obvious that if the masses of society do not get involved in political discussions, political activity becomes limited to those with power and money, whom do not necessarily have the best interest of the masses at heart. The same concept applies to organized religion.
One can make the argument that since the religious drive is instinctual, we should leave it to individual members of the society to apply their faith to their lives at their own discretions. However, in reality religions do not function that way and in every religion there is a lot of room for organized religion to gain momentum and power. The potential repressive power of religions could become so strong that it could cause massive and irreversible harm to society. Examples of runaway power of religion can be seen in most corners of the world. However, the grotesque forms of it are seen in countries of the Middle East and Africa. Even in a country as advanced and educated as the USA, a Mormon or a member of a religious cult has a better chance of getting elected to any office than an atheist.
If we assume that human religious behavior has organic causes, then we can assume that we would not need a church or a mosque to be religious. This is similar to the fact that going to restaurants is a way of eating and having a good time, while we know that we do not need to have restaurants to fulfill our need for food. Humans are as capable of cooking on their own, as they are able to worship on their own. In other words, if we are going to be religious anyway, and the source of the religiosity is within our own brain, why do we have to have prophets, temples, shrines, and the continuous struggle between religion and state?
The source or root of organized religion is almost identical in all religions. Religions usually begin as a movement. They are ideas which stand up against established governments and their accepted faith. They defy wealth, power, and regulations of the organized faith. Although every new religion has a prophet, either the prophet himself, or one of his followers pulls out a sword against the rich and the king and the chief clergy. If they are successful, there will be an Islam or Christianity. If they are not successful, they are usually devoured by bigger religions. With time religions have a tendency to lose their intensity and defiance. Religions become more conservative and turn into an institution. When religions are changed from a movement to institutions, they lose their beauty and the ability to provide assistance to the members. They begin to interfere with affairs of the state. Since they have an insatiable appetite for members and temples; they provoke the kings to use their military might to capture new territories and save new members. Within a short time the concept of "institution of a religion" turns into the "organization of a religion". Gradually, the original revolutionary idea turns into a large organization, which is expensive to run and hard to tame. Throughout the human history there have been many types of organized religion. The power of organized religion is a significant factor in that society. Although, periodically organized religion has had some minor benefits for a society; it is usually a severe drain on the resources of that society. As a rule, the function of a temple is not to be a charity society. The function of a temple is to protect and preserve that given faith. The maintenance expenses of organized religions are probably only second to the expenses of the armed forces of the world. Throughout human history, the best of the human brain and treasures have been wasted on organized religion. The most vivid example of these wasteful behaviors is the murderous practice of making the pyramids of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of slaves, building a totally useless structure, to make sure that the body of the pharaoh is protected. Considering the fact that grave robbers were able to get to most of these pyramids, speaks volumes about the efficiency of pyramids. Perhaps the only manmade object on planet Earth more useless, and more expensive than the pyramids, is the Sphinx. That odd looking statue was supposed to protect the pyramids. As if pyramids need any protection? Ironically, when it came to the devilish behavior of grave robbers, Sphinx couldn't do anything neither. If the practice of organized religion was limited to making places of worship to gratify the inner drive of religious people, then it would have been reasonably tolerable. However, those buildings, shrines, or temples are utilized to educate clergymen.
Clergymen:
All religions have a group of experts in that religion, whose job is to persuade the followers of that faith to practice certain behaviors and pay their hard, earned money to the temple. This is to ensure that they go to a garden in the skies that has never been seen. In order to be able to sell such a tall tale to millions of people, one cannot be a crook or a charlatan, he must really believe in what he is saying. It is the sincerity in the belief, which causes the followers to take the clergy so serious and to follow their lead. The majority of the clergymen of the world are well educated and intelligent, which makes it very difficult to keep them away from politics. They have been quite successful in imposing theocracy on many countries throughout history. Countries which have lived under theocracy, and tasted the brutal methods employed by religions, have a tendency to be less religious. The highest numbers of atheists in the world are in South Korea and France, about 20 percent. Countries like Italy have more atheists than countries like the U.S. Although, since Renaissance in 15th century, there has been a significant attempt to push the gene of the clergy back to it's' place. They do have a tendency to survive, and modify the faith, in order to adapt to the needs of the time. For example, although it is strongly advised not to modify the writings of the Bible; when referring to creation, we clearly see that a reference to "one day" has been changed to "one period". Before Darwin's teachings of 19th century, all Bibles would refer to days one through seven, as a regular day, from sunrise to sunset. While the Bibles which are printed in the last 50 years, mostly refer to a day, as a period. This minor modification makes it possible to defend the idea of creation, against the scientific facts of evolution.
One of those rare occasions when organized religion has been a source of help, rather than hindrance, is with the case of the Amish community and their vast web of churches. Even though the practice of being Amish is badly primitive, and defies any logic; the existence of the Amish church has protected the Amish people during the last 100 years. The Amish people were terribly mistreated and taken advantage of during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century in Europe and Russia. Their intelligent behavior of immigrating to the United States; buying land and growing crops, was quite effective in getting them out of harms' way. Additionally, the concept of donating the earnings of one
Days' worth of work, a week, to the community fund, has helped them to receive proper medical care; and to build strong enough of a lobby, to not have to go to combat during the war as conscientious objectors. The Amish lifestyle, although very primitive, is quite similar to the socialist system that many intellectuals of the world are striving for.
God's spokesmen:
Unfortunately, the intensity of human emotions regarding their faith is so strong, that it is next to impossible to hold a reasonable discussion regarding people who are referred to as prophets of god. If a person is a little inquisitive, he probably would have a few legitimate questions regarding the issue of prophets of god. The simple question is that, "Why does god need spokesmen, after all, he is the creator of the universe, with such tremendous power and unlimited creativity; why does he need human beings to transfer his message? If we assume that our hypothesis of religion as an innate drive; then the issue of the prophets changes entirely. The prophets would not be god's spokesmen; rather, they are people who think that they are messengers of god. And, they think that there is a problem associated with the mechanism of religiosity, which has caused them to make such grandiose claims. In one case, "Muhammad" the prophet of Islam, I was able to render a diagnosis and provide the support for the notion that he suffered from complex partial seizures. In the case of older prophets, the documentation is sketchy and unreliable. The more recent ones are easier to read, but they do not have such a following, to make it necessary to spend years of research to figure out. However, if we broaden our scope, and look at the common denominator among them; we can see some similarities, which might be able to answer some of our questions. The main prerequisite to be able to claim that one is a prophet, is the ability to perform miracles. Although, the biggest miracle is the fact that there are people who still believe that there is such a thing called a miracle.
What is a miracle?
Miracles are supposed to be the ability to conduct behaviors that other humans can not do. The prophets can wish things to happen that others can not (turning a staff into a snake). In the case of Muhammad, he claimed that the Quran is his miracle, that no one else could write such an eloquent book. This lays the ground work for Shakespeare (in English), and Firdausi (in Persian), and Garcia Lorca in Spanish, to make similar claims.
(1)The idea of miracles is quite similar to the consepts of magical thinking, in clinical psychology. Magical thinking refers to "causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, and correlation mistaken for causation"; for example, in most religions there is a belief that religious leaders, prophets, and saints, have a tendency not to decay after they die. Many of these intact bodies could be found in Europe and Asia (Saint Bernadette in France). However, when their bodies are checked properly, we easily detect different embalming methods. Ironically; the bodies of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who are founders of communism, and are all renound atheists, are totally intact and have been on public display for decades. In the practice of psychology, magical thinking is specifically used in the differential diagnosis of patients that suffer from Schizotypal personality disorder. The other common denominators among prophets are:
(2) Hearing the gods messages, teachings, and orders (auditory hallucinations)
(3) Seeing things that other people cannot see (visual hallucinations)
(4) Strong sense of mission, and the belief that the person is the only one who has the truth at hand (delusions of Grandeur)
(5)The first contacts with god are made at younger ages, mostly before 30 (genetic nature of the illness).
If we take all these characteristics and put them in the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders, we can quickly come up with schizophrenia and its' different variations. Those mental health professionals who have worked in state hospitals are quite familiar with a high number of schizophrenic patients, who claim to be god or a prophet of god, and stop these claims once they receive the antipsychotic medications. The main exceptions to schizophrenic prophets are those suffering from seizure disorder. In my book, Sword and Seizure; we were able to show how Mohammed's seizure disorder caused him to believe he is a messenger of God, and founded a faith which includes 25% of the population of earth. More astonishing of this phenomenon, is the behavior of the devout followers of polytheist religions. For example, if we were in India, we could observe people who would go to a grocery store, buy a can of cow urine, and wash their face with it as well as have a few sips. Considering the fact that at least one billion people on planet Earth believe in Hinduism, one wonders what makes a person believe in such an irrational behavior. Each one of these behaviors, drinking the cow's urine, worshipping statues, building pyramids, and believing in after life, are different forms of magical thinking.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Web searches for religious topics on the rise
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/ps-wsf120709.php
Web searches for religious topics on the rise
A'ndrea Elyse Messer
Penn State
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:24 EST
Religion is not just for churches, synagogues or mosques anymore -- it's a topic that is being actively searched for online, according to researchers at Penn State.
The researchers examined how people use search engines to locate religious information online. They analyzed more than 5.5 million searches collected from three Web search engines between 1997 and 2005 to investigate attributes of religious searching on the Web.
The religious landscape within the United States has been described as increasingly secularized and factionalized. However, Jim Jansen, associate professor, information sciences and technology and his colleagues, Andrea Tapia, assistant professor, information sciences and technology and Amanda Spink, professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, found from looking at religious Web searching behaviors that no evidence of secularization exists, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream.
They also found that the results dispelled the stereotype that religious people are not as accustomed to technology as non-religious people.
"Our results showed that people searching for these religious topics were just as tactically skilled as the general Web population," said Jansen. "This actually fits well with the historical use of technology by religious groups and organizations."
There was a general increase in religious searching over time, which may be due to the advancement in technology, increased availability of religious content online and a change in the Web population.
"In the days of the earlier data sets, there were limited topics online," Jansen said. "As the Internet and Web became more main stream, a cornucopia of topics emerged -- religion was one."
Jansen also evaluated how well search engines delivered relevant content in response to religious queries, finding that the search engines preformed poorly.
"I don't believe it is an intentional bias on the part of the search engines," he said. "It is probably due to the localized nature of many religious Web sites. Small businesses face similar issues in trying to get ranked within the search engines."
Web searches for religious topics on the rise
A'ndrea Elyse Messer
Penn State
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:24 EST
Religion is not just for churches, synagogues or mosques anymore -- it's a topic that is being actively searched for online, according to researchers at Penn State.
The researchers examined how people use search engines to locate religious information online. They analyzed more than 5.5 million searches collected from three Web search engines between 1997 and 2005 to investigate attributes of religious searching on the Web.
The religious landscape within the United States has been described as increasingly secularized and factionalized. However, Jim Jansen, associate professor, information sciences and technology and his colleagues, Andrea Tapia, assistant professor, information sciences and technology and Amanda Spink, professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, found from looking at religious Web searching behaviors that no evidence of secularization exists, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream.
They also found that the results dispelled the stereotype that religious people are not as accustomed to technology as non-religious people.
"Our results showed that people searching for these religious topics were just as tactically skilled as the general Web population," said Jansen. "This actually fits well with the historical use of technology by religious groups and organizations."
There was a general increase in religious searching over time, which may be due to the advancement in technology, increased availability of religious content online and a change in the Web population.
"In the days of the earlier data sets, there were limited topics online," Jansen said. "As the Internet and Web became more main stream, a cornucopia of topics emerged -- religion was one."
Jansen also evaluated how well search engines delivered relevant content in response to religious queries, finding that the search engines preformed poorly.
"I don't believe it is an intentional bias on the part of the search engines," he said. "It is probably due to the localized nature of many religious Web sites. Small businesses face similar issues in trying to get ranked within the search engines."
Monday, December 7, 2009
Power of prayer flunks an unusual test
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12082681/
Power of prayer flunks an unusual test
Large study had Christians pray for heart-surgery patients
The Associated Press
March 30, 2006
NEW YORK - In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.
Researchers emphasized that their work can't address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.
They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.
Critics said the question of God's reaction to prayers simply can't be explored by scientific study.
The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.
Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.
The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.
The researchers didn't ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.
The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn't take part in the study, said the results didn't surprise him.
"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said. "There is no god in either the Christian, Jewish or Moslem scriptures that can be constrained to the point that they can be predicted."
Within the Christian tradition, God would be expected to be concerned with a person's eternal salvation, he said, and "why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they're in a research study?"
Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Power of prayer flunks an unusual test
Large study had Christians pray for heart-surgery patients
The Associated Press
March 30, 2006
NEW YORK - In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.
Researchers emphasized that their work can't address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.
They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.
Critics said the question of God's reaction to prayers simply can't be explored by scientific study.
The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.
Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.
The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.
The researchers didn't ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.
The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn't take part in the study, said the results didn't surprise him.
"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said. "There is no god in either the Christian, Jewish or Moslem scriptures that can be constrained to the point that they can be predicted."
Within the Christian tradition, God would be expected to be concerned with a person's eternal salvation, he said, and "why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they're in a research study?"
Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Manufacturing belief
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/15/lewis_wolpert/
Manufacturing belief
The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.
By Steve Paulson
May. 15, 2007 | In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." That human penchant for belief -- or perhaps gullibility -- is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast."
Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he's an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert's view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it's based on a grand illusion.
He has a theory for why religion first took root. He thinks human brains evolved to become "belief engines." Once our ancient ancestors understood cause and effect, they figured out how to manipulate the natural world. In essence, toolmaking made us human. Similarly, early hominids felt compelled to find causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death. They came to believe in unseen gods and spirits.
Wolpert sees human credulity all around him -- not just religious faith but all sorts of modern superstitions. His book targets astrology, psychics, homeopathy and acupuncture. Wolpert has participated in public debates with maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake about telepathy and other paranormal experiences. He dismisses Sheldrake's theory -- that "morphic fields" can transmit thoughts through space and time -- as nonsense.
There's no doubt that Wolpert is a provocateur, but unlike some other prominent atheists, he doesn't come across as a bitter enemy of religion. In conversation, his pronouncements are often punctuated by laughter and mock horror. I spoke with Wolpert by phone about the origins of religion, his doubts about telepathy and acupuncture, and why the debate over religion is so personal for him.
Can you explain the "belief engine" in the human brain?
What makes us different from all other animals is that we have causal beliefs about the physical world. I know that if I throw this glass at the window, it's probably going to break. Children have this understanding at a very early age. Animals, on the other hand, have a very poor understanding of cause and effect in the physical world. My argument is that causal understanding gave rise to toolmaking; that was the evolutionary advantage. It's toolmaking that's really driven human evolution. This is not widely accepted, I'm afraid, but there's no question about it. It's tools that really made us human. They may even have given rise to language.
But there is evidence that some animals have a very primitive form of toolmaking.
There's no question that certain apes are at the edge of causal understanding and they do make some very simple tools. Chimpanzees can break a nut with a stone. They can also take a stick and peel it to get ants out of a tree. But it's still very primitive. Curiously, some crows show remarkable toolmaking, using sticks to get things out of bottles. But on the whole, it's primitive compared to us.
And I suppose the radically new thing our ancestors did was to put two objects together -- for instance, a piece of stone on a wooden handle.
Precisely. You can't do that without having a concept of cause and effect. And once you had that concept, you wanted to understand the causes of other things that mattered in your life, like illness. That's the origin of religion. The most obvious causes were those things caused by humans, so people imagined there was some sort of god with human characteristics. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different gods in different societies.
So once you have an understanding of cause and effect, then ignorance is no longer tolerable? You want to explain everything.
Exactly. You know, we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of things that affect our lives. If you go to the doctor when you're ill, the one thing you can't stand is the doctor saying he or she has no idea what's wrong with you. And when they do diagnose you, I'm prepared to bet that on your way home, you'll tell yourself a story as to why you got ill.
But which came first: understanding cause and effect or learning to make tools?
They went together, but you cannot make complex tools without a concept of cause and effect. You must remember that no animal has a basket. If they go away from water, they can't take any water with them. They can't carry things. However, we're driven by interacting with our environment and looking for causes that affect our lives.
Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?
Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they're a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.
Why did they do better?
They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don't have religious beliefs.
Haven't studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they're less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?
Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.
So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it's totally an illusion.
Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don't understand where the universe came from. But to say God made it, well, you want to say, who made God?
To say there's no meaning is a pretty depressing assessment, isn't it?
No, why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we're here, but I'm afraid there isn't one. I don't find it depressing at all. I think it's remarkable that evolution has brought us into being. We're only here for one purpose, from an evolutionary point of view, and that's to reproduce.
You write that you were once quite a religious child yourself. When did you turn away from religion?
I came from quite a conventional Jewish family -- not Orthodox, but conventional -- in South Africa. I had to say my prayers every night. And I used to pray to God to help me in various things but found it didn't help. So I stopped being religious.
Your son became a fundamentalist Christian after a difficult late adolescence. Is he still an evangelical Christian?
No, he's not. The church he was in broke up. He's still a believer, but he doesn't go to church.
Does his faith bother you?
No. I found that religion was helping him a great deal. It gave him someone to pray to. He became a member of a church where they could discuss their problems. And I think the idea that he would eventually go to heaven gave him a great deal of encouragement.
Has your son read the chapter on religion in your book? It's rather dismissive of religion.
He knows I'm dismissive of it. In fact, I just spoke to him last night on the telephone and asked him, "Did I ever try to dissuade you from being religious?" He said, "No, you never did." I wouldn't agree with him, but I never tried to dissuade him not to be.
Do you find yourself wondering about ultimate meaning? Does that matter in your life?
Never. Ultimate meaning has no meaning in my life. I sound a bit shallow, but I think it's actually quite deep not to be bothered by that sort of thing.
You call David Hume your "hero philosopher." Why do you like him so much?
First of all, I don't like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He's very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.
Well, he didn't like religion.
No, it's not that he didn't like religion. If you take miracles, for example, there's a lovely quote from David Hume that you shouldn't believe in any miracle unless the evidence is so strong that it would be miraculous not to believe in it.
There are various competing theories about the origins of religion. One is the idea that religion evolved because it helped bind people together in social groups. Essentially, it acted like social glue. Why don't you think that's right?
I don't think it's wrong. There is some evidence that religion does lead to a community with shared views. But you have to ask, Why does religion deal so much with cause and effect? That comes from causal beliefs.
What about Daniel Dennett's idea that religion is a kind of "meme" -- an idea that has infected human cultures and keeps on spreading?
If you could tell me what a meme is, and how useful it is, I'd be very grateful. [Laughs] Please don't misunderstand, I'm a great admirer of Richard Dawkins [who developed the concept of memes]. But what are memes? How do you decide whether something is a meme or not? And what you really want to understand is, how is it passed on and why does it persist? This is never discussed. So for Daniel Dennett -- who's a philosopher, after all -- to get involved with memes, the moment he does that, I just stop reading him.
Virtually all these theories draw on evolutionary psychology. But I wonder if we're losing the flavor of religious experience, the willingness to live in mystery, embrace imagination and intuition.
Sometimes I've thought it must be quite nice to believe in religion. I'm getting quite old. The idea that I might go to heaven -- of course, there's also the possibility, in my case, that I would go to hell -- is quite an attractive one. Unfortunately, I don't believe that for a single second. I mean, the evidence for God is simply nonexistent.
Isn't there more to religion than belief in supernatural beings?
Certainly not.
But many theologians and scholars, such as historian Karen Armstrong, say religion at its root is not really about a set of beliefs. It's more about how to live your life and being compassionate in the world.
Well, many people who are atheists can behave quite well. That doesn't make us religious. No, it doesn't work like that at all.
I grant that. But do you really think religion comes down to belief in the supernatural?
When I talk about religion, I'm talking about belief in the supernatural. In Western society, we're talking about God. I don't believe you can be religious without having some concept of a god.
What about William James? He talked about religion as experience more than belief.
I think "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is one of the best books written about belief. Nothing has really changed since he wrote it a hundred years ago. He did point out that many people become religious because they had a religious experience. And that fits with my idea that we're partly wired to have religious beliefs. If you take the active component of a magic mushroom and give it to a group of people, quite a few of them will have mystical, almost religious, beliefs. It must mean the circuits are there which are turned on by the drug.
So it all comes down to the chemicals that are firing in the brain?
I'm afraid so. Your neural circuits, yes.
What about paranormal experiences like telepathy or life after death? Are those bogus?
Yes. All bogus. I have a very close friend, an artist, who claims to have seen three ghosts. She knew they were ghosts because they didn't have legs, and they told her things about the house she was staying in that she didn't know before. Yes, she had strange experiences. It doesn't mean they were ghosts. And I don't believe telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, who's an old friend of mine, is a strong promoter of telepathy and things like that. I'm afraid the evidence just isn't there.
Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist who used to teach at the University of Cambridge.
Oh, he was a very clever plant cell biologist.
He's done various controlled experiments trying to figure out whether people know who's going to phone them, or whether dogs know when their owners are coming home. You're saying none of that is legitimate science?
It's legitimate, but I'm unimpressed by all of it.
Let's talk about one of his experiments. He did a controlled study of what he calls "telephone telepathy." People were asked to give four phone numbers of friends. The callers were chosen randomly and then asked to guess who was calling. The statistical probability was that 25 percent of the guesses would be right. Sheldrake said the responses were more like 45 percent.
I'd like to see someone else do the experiment and have it confirmed. Remember what David Hume said? In order to believe in miraculous things, the evidence should be so miraculous that you could not but believe it. You can't just do one experiment like that on such an extraordinary thing like telepathy. Telepathy goes against everything we know about neurophysiology and physics. If telepathy exists, it would be a miracle. That's why I go back to Hume. The evidence has to be overwhelming.
Listen, almost everybody has a strange, non-normal experience once a year. Many, many people have these. If you take the right drugs, you can have them on order. People taking LSD had the most extraordinary experiences. Those experiences were real, but they had nothing to do with the real world.
Well, telepathy goes against the understanding that the mind is totally the product of the neural processes within the brain, which is certainly the dominant thinking among neuroscientists.
You also have to transmit that message over distances into somebody else's mind. That's just nonsense.
What if there are forces out there -- perhaps energy fields, as Sheldrake would say -- that we just haven't discovered yet?
[Laughs] OK, when he discovers them, he'll let us know. I'm saying you really have to have good evidence. And there isn't any.
When my grandfather was 16 years old, he heard an odd sound, looked up and saw the photograph of his grandfather knocking on the wall in the living room. This was so unusual that he checked the time it happened. Later that day, his family got a telegram saying that his grandfather had died at precisely that time. Is that just coincidence?
Well, that is remarkable and I don't have an explanation. I'm afraid it probably is coincidence. But it does sound as if it's some sort of telepathic experience. And we all have that. You're thinking of someone and suddenly they phone you. You haven't spoken to them for six months and suddenly the phone rings and there they are. OK, I don't have a good explanation for that. But to think that there's some message going across is just most unlikely.
Unlikely yes, but doesn't this get at the limits of science?
No, it's not the limits of science. You've got to find experiments that will really show it. Science can't rely on anecdotes, on single, one-off experiences like this. You've got to find some way of testing them. Maybe the way Rupert Sheldrake goes about it is the right way to do it. But it has to be done extremely carefully, and single anecdotes tell you nothing.
You have written about alternative medicine and are highly skeptical of various healing practices, including energy healing and even acupuncture, which is now used quite widely in the West.
Yes, I know it's used. It's quite tricky because the placebo effect can really confuse these results very significantly. So if you believe the treatment is going to work, you've got a much higher chance that it's going to work. But there's just no evidence for the idea of energy fields, which acupuncturists use for deciding where to put the needles.
But there are thousands of years of experiential evidence going back to ancient China.
But nothing to do with energy. Energy is a well-defined concept. And I'm terribly sorry, no physiologist has ever detected any of these energy fields.
Maybe the scientific instruments that we have at our disposal just can't detect anything about qi.
Sorry. When they invented qi, how in the hell did they know what an energy field was? They hardly had a concept of energy. I mean, if you go back and look at their evidence, I'm afraid it was a nice set of ideas, but I'm terribly sorry, evidence matters. And that's what causal beliefs are really about. If we believe that something has a particular cause, we should be looking for the evidence.
Many people say they've been helped by acupuncture. Are you saying the placebo effect is the only explanation?
I have no idea why it works. But it's extremely unlikely that it's got anything to do with those energy fields. It could be largely due to the placebo effect. And homeopathy, where there are no molecules in the liquid that you take, is even more bizarre. And many people believe in homeopathic medicine.
Do you have any superstitions yourself?
[Laughs] I touch wood occasionally, I'm ashamed to say. And I don't ever like to say that I'm really happy because I think the gods may not like it.
Are you joking? Or is there some little part of you that really believes this?
I suppose this is part of the soft-wiring for mysticism. There's a lovely story -- I've forgotten the physicist -- who had a horseshoe over his door. He said it didn't do him any harm, but might do him some good.
Pascal's wager, right? You decide you're better off believing in God, even though the existence of God seems unlikely.
[Laughs] No, I don't go as far as that, but I am a little superstitious, yes. A tiny bit.
If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?
I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it's very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It's very strong there. I'd be very surprised if it disappeared.
So the project of Richard Dawkins -- basically, to try to turn us all into atheists -- is just a pipe dream?
I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people's personal experience, rather than logical arguments.
But isn't this what you're doing in your book, arguing for the virtues of reason over religious belief?
Not at all. I'm trying to understand what determines religious belief. I'm not trying to convert people out of religion. Not for a moment. But if they then want to impose some of their religious beliefs onto other people -- for example, in relation to abortion or not using contraceptives -- then I ask them to look at the evidence. I ask them to be much more careful about their beliefs.
Manufacturing belief
The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.
By Steve Paulson
May. 15, 2007 | In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." That human penchant for belief -- or perhaps gullibility -- is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast."
Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he's an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert's view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it's based on a grand illusion.
He has a theory for why religion first took root. He thinks human brains evolved to become "belief engines." Once our ancient ancestors understood cause and effect, they figured out how to manipulate the natural world. In essence, toolmaking made us human. Similarly, early hominids felt compelled to find causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death. They came to believe in unseen gods and spirits.
Wolpert sees human credulity all around him -- not just religious faith but all sorts of modern superstitions. His book targets astrology, psychics, homeopathy and acupuncture. Wolpert has participated in public debates with maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake about telepathy and other paranormal experiences. He dismisses Sheldrake's theory -- that "morphic fields" can transmit thoughts through space and time -- as nonsense.
There's no doubt that Wolpert is a provocateur, but unlike some other prominent atheists, he doesn't come across as a bitter enemy of religion. In conversation, his pronouncements are often punctuated by laughter and mock horror. I spoke with Wolpert by phone about the origins of religion, his doubts about telepathy and acupuncture, and why the debate over religion is so personal for him.
Can you explain the "belief engine" in the human brain?
What makes us different from all other animals is that we have causal beliefs about the physical world. I know that if I throw this glass at the window, it's probably going to break. Children have this understanding at a very early age. Animals, on the other hand, have a very poor understanding of cause and effect in the physical world. My argument is that causal understanding gave rise to toolmaking; that was the evolutionary advantage. It's toolmaking that's really driven human evolution. This is not widely accepted, I'm afraid, but there's no question about it. It's tools that really made us human. They may even have given rise to language.
But there is evidence that some animals have a very primitive form of toolmaking.
There's no question that certain apes are at the edge of causal understanding and they do make some very simple tools. Chimpanzees can break a nut with a stone. They can also take a stick and peel it to get ants out of a tree. But it's still very primitive. Curiously, some crows show remarkable toolmaking, using sticks to get things out of bottles. But on the whole, it's primitive compared to us.
And I suppose the radically new thing our ancestors did was to put two objects together -- for instance, a piece of stone on a wooden handle.
Precisely. You can't do that without having a concept of cause and effect. And once you had that concept, you wanted to understand the causes of other things that mattered in your life, like illness. That's the origin of religion. The most obvious causes were those things caused by humans, so people imagined there was some sort of god with human characteristics. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different gods in different societies.
So once you have an understanding of cause and effect, then ignorance is no longer tolerable? You want to explain everything.
Exactly. You know, we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of things that affect our lives. If you go to the doctor when you're ill, the one thing you can't stand is the doctor saying he or she has no idea what's wrong with you. And when they do diagnose you, I'm prepared to bet that on your way home, you'll tell yourself a story as to why you got ill.
But which came first: understanding cause and effect or learning to make tools?
They went together, but you cannot make complex tools without a concept of cause and effect. You must remember that no animal has a basket. If they go away from water, they can't take any water with them. They can't carry things. However, we're driven by interacting with our environment and looking for causes that affect our lives.
Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?
Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they're a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.
Why did they do better?
They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don't have religious beliefs.
Haven't studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they're less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?
Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.
So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it's totally an illusion.
Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don't understand where the universe came from. But to say God made it, well, you want to say, who made God?
To say there's no meaning is a pretty depressing assessment, isn't it?
No, why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we're here, but I'm afraid there isn't one. I don't find it depressing at all. I think it's remarkable that evolution has brought us into being. We're only here for one purpose, from an evolutionary point of view, and that's to reproduce.
You write that you were once quite a religious child yourself. When did you turn away from religion?
I came from quite a conventional Jewish family -- not Orthodox, but conventional -- in South Africa. I had to say my prayers every night. And I used to pray to God to help me in various things but found it didn't help. So I stopped being religious.
Your son became a fundamentalist Christian after a difficult late adolescence. Is he still an evangelical Christian?
No, he's not. The church he was in broke up. He's still a believer, but he doesn't go to church.
Does his faith bother you?
No. I found that religion was helping him a great deal. It gave him someone to pray to. He became a member of a church where they could discuss their problems. And I think the idea that he would eventually go to heaven gave him a great deal of encouragement.
Has your son read the chapter on religion in your book? It's rather dismissive of religion.
He knows I'm dismissive of it. In fact, I just spoke to him last night on the telephone and asked him, "Did I ever try to dissuade you from being religious?" He said, "No, you never did." I wouldn't agree with him, but I never tried to dissuade him not to be.
Do you find yourself wondering about ultimate meaning? Does that matter in your life?
Never. Ultimate meaning has no meaning in my life. I sound a bit shallow, but I think it's actually quite deep not to be bothered by that sort of thing.
You call David Hume your "hero philosopher." Why do you like him so much?
First of all, I don't like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He's very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.
Well, he didn't like religion.
No, it's not that he didn't like religion. If you take miracles, for example, there's a lovely quote from David Hume that you shouldn't believe in any miracle unless the evidence is so strong that it would be miraculous not to believe in it.
There are various competing theories about the origins of religion. One is the idea that religion evolved because it helped bind people together in social groups. Essentially, it acted like social glue. Why don't you think that's right?
I don't think it's wrong. There is some evidence that religion does lead to a community with shared views. But you have to ask, Why does religion deal so much with cause and effect? That comes from causal beliefs.
What about Daniel Dennett's idea that religion is a kind of "meme" -- an idea that has infected human cultures and keeps on spreading?
If you could tell me what a meme is, and how useful it is, I'd be very grateful. [Laughs] Please don't misunderstand, I'm a great admirer of Richard Dawkins [who developed the concept of memes]. But what are memes? How do you decide whether something is a meme or not? And what you really want to understand is, how is it passed on and why does it persist? This is never discussed. So for Daniel Dennett -- who's a philosopher, after all -- to get involved with memes, the moment he does that, I just stop reading him.
Virtually all these theories draw on evolutionary psychology. But I wonder if we're losing the flavor of religious experience, the willingness to live in mystery, embrace imagination and intuition.
Sometimes I've thought it must be quite nice to believe in religion. I'm getting quite old. The idea that I might go to heaven -- of course, there's also the possibility, in my case, that I would go to hell -- is quite an attractive one. Unfortunately, I don't believe that for a single second. I mean, the evidence for God is simply nonexistent.
Isn't there more to religion than belief in supernatural beings?
Certainly not.
But many theologians and scholars, such as historian Karen Armstrong, say religion at its root is not really about a set of beliefs. It's more about how to live your life and being compassionate in the world.
Well, many people who are atheists can behave quite well. That doesn't make us religious. No, it doesn't work like that at all.
I grant that. But do you really think religion comes down to belief in the supernatural?
When I talk about religion, I'm talking about belief in the supernatural. In Western society, we're talking about God. I don't believe you can be religious without having some concept of a god.
What about William James? He talked about religion as experience more than belief.
I think "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is one of the best books written about belief. Nothing has really changed since he wrote it a hundred years ago. He did point out that many people become religious because they had a religious experience. And that fits with my idea that we're partly wired to have religious beliefs. If you take the active component of a magic mushroom and give it to a group of people, quite a few of them will have mystical, almost religious, beliefs. It must mean the circuits are there which are turned on by the drug.
So it all comes down to the chemicals that are firing in the brain?
I'm afraid so. Your neural circuits, yes.
What about paranormal experiences like telepathy or life after death? Are those bogus?
Yes. All bogus. I have a very close friend, an artist, who claims to have seen three ghosts. She knew they were ghosts because they didn't have legs, and they told her things about the house she was staying in that she didn't know before. Yes, she had strange experiences. It doesn't mean they were ghosts. And I don't believe telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, who's an old friend of mine, is a strong promoter of telepathy and things like that. I'm afraid the evidence just isn't there.
Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist who used to teach at the University of Cambridge.
Oh, he was a very clever plant cell biologist.
He's done various controlled experiments trying to figure out whether people know who's going to phone them, or whether dogs know when their owners are coming home. You're saying none of that is legitimate science?
It's legitimate, but I'm unimpressed by all of it.
Let's talk about one of his experiments. He did a controlled study of what he calls "telephone telepathy." People were asked to give four phone numbers of friends. The callers were chosen randomly and then asked to guess who was calling. The statistical probability was that 25 percent of the guesses would be right. Sheldrake said the responses were more like 45 percent.
I'd like to see someone else do the experiment and have it confirmed. Remember what David Hume said? In order to believe in miraculous things, the evidence should be so miraculous that you could not but believe it. You can't just do one experiment like that on such an extraordinary thing like telepathy. Telepathy goes against everything we know about neurophysiology and physics. If telepathy exists, it would be a miracle. That's why I go back to Hume. The evidence has to be overwhelming.
Listen, almost everybody has a strange, non-normal experience once a year. Many, many people have these. If you take the right drugs, you can have them on order. People taking LSD had the most extraordinary experiences. Those experiences were real, but they had nothing to do with the real world.
Well, telepathy goes against the understanding that the mind is totally the product of the neural processes within the brain, which is certainly the dominant thinking among neuroscientists.
You also have to transmit that message over distances into somebody else's mind. That's just nonsense.
What if there are forces out there -- perhaps energy fields, as Sheldrake would say -- that we just haven't discovered yet?
[Laughs] OK, when he discovers them, he'll let us know. I'm saying you really have to have good evidence. And there isn't any.
When my grandfather was 16 years old, he heard an odd sound, looked up and saw the photograph of his grandfather knocking on the wall in the living room. This was so unusual that he checked the time it happened. Later that day, his family got a telegram saying that his grandfather had died at precisely that time. Is that just coincidence?
Well, that is remarkable and I don't have an explanation. I'm afraid it probably is coincidence. But it does sound as if it's some sort of telepathic experience. And we all have that. You're thinking of someone and suddenly they phone you. You haven't spoken to them for six months and suddenly the phone rings and there they are. OK, I don't have a good explanation for that. But to think that there's some message going across is just most unlikely.
Unlikely yes, but doesn't this get at the limits of science?
No, it's not the limits of science. You've got to find experiments that will really show it. Science can't rely on anecdotes, on single, one-off experiences like this. You've got to find some way of testing them. Maybe the way Rupert Sheldrake goes about it is the right way to do it. But it has to be done extremely carefully, and single anecdotes tell you nothing.
You have written about alternative medicine and are highly skeptical of various healing practices, including energy healing and even acupuncture, which is now used quite widely in the West.
Yes, I know it's used. It's quite tricky because the placebo effect can really confuse these results very significantly. So if you believe the treatment is going to work, you've got a much higher chance that it's going to work. But there's just no evidence for the idea of energy fields, which acupuncturists use for deciding where to put the needles.
But there are thousands of years of experiential evidence going back to ancient China.
But nothing to do with energy. Energy is a well-defined concept. And I'm terribly sorry, no physiologist has ever detected any of these energy fields.
Maybe the scientific instruments that we have at our disposal just can't detect anything about qi.
Sorry. When they invented qi, how in the hell did they know what an energy field was? They hardly had a concept of energy. I mean, if you go back and look at their evidence, I'm afraid it was a nice set of ideas, but I'm terribly sorry, evidence matters. And that's what causal beliefs are really about. If we believe that something has a particular cause, we should be looking for the evidence.
Many people say they've been helped by acupuncture. Are you saying the placebo effect is the only explanation?
I have no idea why it works. But it's extremely unlikely that it's got anything to do with those energy fields. It could be largely due to the placebo effect. And homeopathy, where there are no molecules in the liquid that you take, is even more bizarre. And many people believe in homeopathic medicine.
Do you have any superstitions yourself?
[Laughs] I touch wood occasionally, I'm ashamed to say. And I don't ever like to say that I'm really happy because I think the gods may not like it.
Are you joking? Or is there some little part of you that really believes this?
I suppose this is part of the soft-wiring for mysticism. There's a lovely story -- I've forgotten the physicist -- who had a horseshoe over his door. He said it didn't do him any harm, but might do him some good.
Pascal's wager, right? You decide you're better off believing in God, even though the existence of God seems unlikely.
[Laughs] No, I don't go as far as that, but I am a little superstitious, yes. A tiny bit.
If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?
I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it's very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It's very strong there. I'd be very surprised if it disappeared.
So the project of Richard Dawkins -- basically, to try to turn us all into atheists -- is just a pipe dream?
I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people's personal experience, rather than logical arguments.
But isn't this what you're doing in your book, arguing for the virtues of reason over religious belief?
Not at all. I'm trying to understand what determines religious belief. I'm not trying to convert people out of religion. Not for a moment. But if they then want to impose some of their religious beliefs onto other people -- for example, in relation to abortion or not using contraceptives -- then I ask them to look at the evidence. I ask them to be much more careful about their beliefs.
Fundamentalism Fails, On Both Sides
http://www.templeton-cambridge.org/fellows/showarticle.php?article=150
October 23, 2005
Fundamentalism Fails, On Both Sides
by John Timpane
It's the end of absolutes for both religion and materialist unbelief.
Neither has the knockout card, the open-and-shut, slam-dunk, airtight case.
And that should knock both of them back a step.
Each has something to say to the other, indeed the same thing: "Give up your fundamentalism—it's toxic, and it's hurting you."
Healthful words now, when evolution and intelligent design are being debated in Dover, Pa.
Both belief and unbelief may be much qualified in the coming decades. In a trend already 50 years old, belief increasingly may get hauled out of church, as believers feel less and less need for an institutional lens through which to believe.
Materialism (sometimes called "naturalism," sometimes "rationalism") is the belief that all that exists is the visible, concrete universe of matter. That's it—nothing else, no spirit realm, no divinities, no afterlife. There is a fine, august tradition behind materialist unbelief. But—especially in the minds of some who believe they are representing or defending science—it has taken on a dismissive energy. In years to come, materialism may actually benefit from admitting it's just a guess, more like other beliefs than most materialists admit.
At least, such are my conclusions after participating in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. This summer, 10 journalists attended seminars for two weeks at Cambridge University in England, went home for five weeks to prepare presentations, and returned for a last week of seminars, presentations, debate, English ale, and amazement at our chance to study God and science in 15th-century splendor.
Many stars joined us: evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris; cosmologists John D. Barrow, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies; theologians Russell Stannard, Nancey Murphy, and Ronald Cole-Turner. They gave brilliant talks, argued with one another, with us, and with the cosmos; challenged us to stretch our minds and write better about science, religion, and the interface (if there is one!) between the two.
All my friends want to know: So who won?
Nobody. And that should temper all those who think their team already has.
Despite the trial in Dover, the current American conflict is not between "science" and "religion." It is, to quote Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and other books, a conflict between tightly defined subsets: "those who adhere to the scientific theory of evolution and those who believe that the biblical story of the six-day creation is literally true." As she points out, this boils down to "a struggle between two religions." The culprit on both sides in this American standoff is the mental habit of fundamentalism itself. And it could well hobble both sides.
Book-based religious fundamentalism will, I suspect, gravely wound the cause of religion. It holds sway today among about 20 percent of Americans, but that's only now. In many minds, the underhandedness and the coercive truculence of religious fundamentalist rhetoric confirm that religion is bad. It gives individuals no choice, nowhere to go, no way to grow. That's why, when science enlarges our view of the cosmos, one often hears fundamentalist yelps.
The current uprising may be a harbinger of the death of religion for many people. We'll continue to be a believing people, but more and more of us will do our believing out of doors.
Religious fundamentalism got beat up good at the Templetons, especially by religious people. Fraser Watts, who teaches theology and science at Cambridge and is co-director of the fellowship program, said: "I am a follower of Christ, not the Bible, and if I'm forced to make a choice, which I hope I am not, I will choose Christ."
But religion is not the only fundamentalism in the room. Let us now turn to the other bad boys: the fundamentalist materialists.
Some say, "I believe in science. Evidence. Empirical demonstration. What I can see. And that's it."
But many materialists don't stop there. Fighting hard, against religion and other forms of "ignorance," they claim their view is scientific. When, strictly speaking, it is not. It strains the proper bounds of science to enlist it for these purposes, and most honest scientists will say so.
Rightly does biologist Kenneth R. Miller (who testified against intelligent design in the Dover trial) complain of materialists who go "well beyond any reasonable scientific conclusions that might emerge from evolutionary biology."
Miller cites biologist William Provine, who wrote: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society. … We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us."
Science doesn't imply anything about morality, ethics, or afterlifes. It just doesn't go there. But Provine sure wants it to, and then vaults to "must conclude."
Materialists often idealize science. They speak of science, not as it is, but as they wish it were. They pretend science is a unitary practice with a stable, complete, sufficient view of the cosmos. They pretend—beyond the capacity of logic—that you can draw hard and fast definitions between what is science and what is not.
I heard many such pretenses at the Templetons, and you cannot know how irritating that is.
Scientific practice bypasses what can be seen, tested, or demonstrated all the time. The structure of the benzene ring came to
August Kekulè not through an experiment, but through a dream. No one has ever seen such a string, but many physicists now have high hopes for "string theory" (in which the structure of the universe is made up of resonating submicroscopic strings). Cosmology relies on arguments based on what cannot be seen (dark matter) to explain what can.
Sometimes that works, sometimes not. Science is a search for what works—and sometimes that's empirical, and often it's not. It often proceeds through undirected play. Thank you, Yale neurobiologist Robert Wyman, for saying so: "You get curious about something and you mess around. That's what science is in the beginning; you mess around."
It's amazing how angry people get when you say such things. That doesn't make science any more wonderful, its triumphs any less spectacular.
Some people just insist on a purity that science does not have and never did. Such insistence hurts them, their babes-in-the-woods politics, and any chance of discussion. They should drop it, acknowledge the humanity of their endeavor, and listen.
Materialism is a good guess. A very intelligent good guess.
It was none other than zoologist Richard Dawkins, an eminent nonbeliever, who told us that materialism can't really close the argument against God. So even he knows it. I wonder how many other materialists would admit the same.
The high point of the Templetons, for me, came after a stellar presentation by cosmologist John D. Barrow, including an explanation of multiverse theory, which argues that our universe is not alone but is only one of about 10550 universes.
Dawkins raised his hand and, after praising what he had just heard, asked why anyone would want to look for divine characteristics in the universe.
To which Barrow replied: "For the same reason that somebody might not want to."
A throwaway line? No: the single most honest, most incisive thing I heard at Cambridge. Barrow spoke the thing neither institutionalized belief nor institutionalized unbelief will admit—the great scandal—that neither side can close the deal, leaving it to you and me. There are wonderful reasons to believe—and not to believe. Go out, look around, keep your mind and senses wide open, and decide for yourself; for nothing—no book, no experiment, no theory, no minister in his smoke and vestments—can make up your mind for you. It's just you and the cosmos within and without.
And throughout this lifelong quest, if ever you feel your mind hardening—don't let it happen. That's how belief and unbelief got into this mess in the first place.
October 23, 2005
Fundamentalism Fails, On Both Sides
by John Timpane
It's the end of absolutes for both religion and materialist unbelief.
Neither has the knockout card, the open-and-shut, slam-dunk, airtight case.
And that should knock both of them back a step.
Each has something to say to the other, indeed the same thing: "Give up your fundamentalism—it's toxic, and it's hurting you."
Healthful words now, when evolution and intelligent design are being debated in Dover, Pa.
Both belief and unbelief may be much qualified in the coming decades. In a trend already 50 years old, belief increasingly may get hauled out of church, as believers feel less and less need for an institutional lens through which to believe.
Materialism (sometimes called "naturalism," sometimes "rationalism") is the belief that all that exists is the visible, concrete universe of matter. That's it—nothing else, no spirit realm, no divinities, no afterlife. There is a fine, august tradition behind materialist unbelief. But—especially in the minds of some who believe they are representing or defending science—it has taken on a dismissive energy. In years to come, materialism may actually benefit from admitting it's just a guess, more like other beliefs than most materialists admit.
At least, such are my conclusions after participating in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. This summer, 10 journalists attended seminars for two weeks at Cambridge University in England, went home for five weeks to prepare presentations, and returned for a last week of seminars, presentations, debate, English ale, and amazement at our chance to study God and science in 15th-century splendor.
Many stars joined us: evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris; cosmologists John D. Barrow, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies; theologians Russell Stannard, Nancey Murphy, and Ronald Cole-Turner. They gave brilliant talks, argued with one another, with us, and with the cosmos; challenged us to stretch our minds and write better about science, religion, and the interface (if there is one!) between the two.
All my friends want to know: So who won?
Nobody. And that should temper all those who think their team already has.
Despite the trial in Dover, the current American conflict is not between "science" and "religion." It is, to quote Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and other books, a conflict between tightly defined subsets: "those who adhere to the scientific theory of evolution and those who believe that the biblical story of the six-day creation is literally true." As she points out, this boils down to "a struggle between two religions." The culprit on both sides in this American standoff is the mental habit of fundamentalism itself. And it could well hobble both sides.
Book-based religious fundamentalism will, I suspect, gravely wound the cause of religion. It holds sway today among about 20 percent of Americans, but that's only now. In many minds, the underhandedness and the coercive truculence of religious fundamentalist rhetoric confirm that religion is bad. It gives individuals no choice, nowhere to go, no way to grow. That's why, when science enlarges our view of the cosmos, one often hears fundamentalist yelps.
The current uprising may be a harbinger of the death of religion for many people. We'll continue to be a believing people, but more and more of us will do our believing out of doors.
Religious fundamentalism got beat up good at the Templetons, especially by religious people. Fraser Watts, who teaches theology and science at Cambridge and is co-director of the fellowship program, said: "I am a follower of Christ, not the Bible, and if I'm forced to make a choice, which I hope I am not, I will choose Christ."
But religion is not the only fundamentalism in the room. Let us now turn to the other bad boys: the fundamentalist materialists.
Some say, "I believe in science. Evidence. Empirical demonstration. What I can see. And that's it."
But many materialists don't stop there. Fighting hard, against religion and other forms of "ignorance," they claim their view is scientific. When, strictly speaking, it is not. It strains the proper bounds of science to enlist it for these purposes, and most honest scientists will say so.
Rightly does biologist Kenneth R. Miller (who testified against intelligent design in the Dover trial) complain of materialists who go "well beyond any reasonable scientific conclusions that might emerge from evolutionary biology."
Miller cites biologist William Provine, who wrote: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society. … We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us."
Science doesn't imply anything about morality, ethics, or afterlifes. It just doesn't go there. But Provine sure wants it to, and then vaults to "must conclude."
Materialists often idealize science. They speak of science, not as it is, but as they wish it were. They pretend science is a unitary practice with a stable, complete, sufficient view of the cosmos. They pretend—beyond the capacity of logic—that you can draw hard and fast definitions between what is science and what is not.
I heard many such pretenses at the Templetons, and you cannot know how irritating that is.
Scientific practice bypasses what can be seen, tested, or demonstrated all the time. The structure of the benzene ring came to
August Kekulè not through an experiment, but through a dream. No one has ever seen such a string, but many physicists now have high hopes for "string theory" (in which the structure of the universe is made up of resonating submicroscopic strings). Cosmology relies on arguments based on what cannot be seen (dark matter) to explain what can.
Sometimes that works, sometimes not. Science is a search for what works—and sometimes that's empirical, and often it's not. It often proceeds through undirected play. Thank you, Yale neurobiologist Robert Wyman, for saying so: "You get curious about something and you mess around. That's what science is in the beginning; you mess around."
It's amazing how angry people get when you say such things. That doesn't make science any more wonderful, its triumphs any less spectacular.
Some people just insist on a purity that science does not have and never did. Such insistence hurts them, their babes-in-the-woods politics, and any chance of discussion. They should drop it, acknowledge the humanity of their endeavor, and listen.
Materialism is a good guess. A very intelligent good guess.
It was none other than zoologist Richard Dawkins, an eminent nonbeliever, who told us that materialism can't really close the argument against God. So even he knows it. I wonder how many other materialists would admit the same.
The high point of the Templetons, for me, came after a stellar presentation by cosmologist John D. Barrow, including an explanation of multiverse theory, which argues that our universe is not alone but is only one of about 10550 universes.
Dawkins raised his hand and, after praising what he had just heard, asked why anyone would want to look for divine characteristics in the universe.
To which Barrow replied: "For the same reason that somebody might not want to."
A throwaway line? No: the single most honest, most incisive thing I heard at Cambridge. Barrow spoke the thing neither institutionalized belief nor institutionalized unbelief will admit—the great scandal—that neither side can close the deal, leaving it to you and me. There are wonderful reasons to believe—and not to believe. Go out, look around, keep your mind and senses wide open, and decide for yourself; for nothing—no book, no experiment, no theory, no minister in his smoke and vestments—can make up your mind for you. It's just you and the cosmos within and without.
And throughout this lifelong quest, if ever you feel your mind hardening—don't let it happen. That's how belief and unbelief got into this mess in the first place.
How your brain creates God
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html
February 4, 2009
Born Believers
How your brain creates God
by Michael Brooks
What would you say if a group of scientists attempted to explain to you why humans enjoy music, art, and literature? You might concede that they could shed some light on the issue, but that any purely scientific explanation is going to be woefully paltry because the question extends far, far beyond science’s proper purview.
That’s the same attitude we should take towards this article which, as New Scientist triumphantly proclaims, tells us “How your brain creates God” (How’s that for a shot across the bow?)
The article proposes to explain, through evolutionary psychology, why humans have a propensity towards belief in the supernatural.
The scientists quoted propose that the human mind’s ability to abstractly conceive of other minds that work like ours is an evolutionary advantage, because it allows you to do things such as plan ahead, form complex social groups, and avoid unseen enemies. A byproduct of this, they think, is the tendency to “create” these abstract minds everywhere, from imaginary friends on up to God himself. They conclude that belief in the supernatural is a built-in aspect of human nature because of its presence in even very young children in all cultures, to the disappointment of some atheists who want religion to be a mere social construct which can be defeated in time. It is a two-edged sword, though: atheists think that some bits of evidence on the material side explain the supernatural away, while believers are wary (rightfully) of attempts to reduce belief to mere materially determined events.
The major flaw in this explanation, though, is that like the art example it’s only a very narrow part of the picture. In wandering from explanations of the natural world into explanations of the mind, science leaves its proper territory behind, unless one holds the philosophical (non-scientific) opinion that there is no non-natural aspect to the human mind — no soul. If that’s what the scientists think, fine, but they should admit that they are bring prior philosophical assumptions into their scientific work.
In addition to the mind’s ability to create images of other minds, another aspect of the belief in God, the scientists state, is the human mind’s tendency to look for cause-and-effect relationships. It is in investigating this aspect that we find the most glaring example of intruding scientific thought where it does not belong:
When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist “to make nice music”, while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. “It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were ‘for’ a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion,” says Kelemen.
The authors think that this shows the human mind has a natural tendency to look for design where, they pointedly state, there is none. But once again, Keleman and her associates have brought in their unscientific assumptions into the situation. Keleman is only surprised because she somehow expected the children to think scientifically, which the children weren’t. Scientific thought is not the only method of knowing, but scientists get so used to it that they sometimes can’t think otherwise. Who’s to say that the clouds and the mountains aren’t for a purpose? Sure, there is no scientific purpose, but did Keleman tell the children they were only allowed to use scientific thought when answering the question? To conclude that the children imagine design where there is none is a flawed conclusion from this study; it just means they can find design where Keleman can’t.
People find purpose in many aspects of creation, even in simple beauty. It’s not scientific purpose, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered what evolutionary psychologists make of the human tendency to find the most sublime beauty in the most hostile of environments — barren mountains, stormy oceans, plunging waterfalls, etc. I’m sure there’s some “reasonable” evolutionary explanation, most likely something about attraction to novelty. That must be it.)
The New Scientist piece concludes with an example of the tired suggestion that atheists are smarter and more courageous than believers:
Religious belief is the “path of least resistance”, says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.
Got that? Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa because he didn’t want to expend any effort. Now you know.
February 4, 2009
Born Believers
How your brain creates God
by Michael Brooks
What would you say if a group of scientists attempted to explain to you why humans enjoy music, art, and literature? You might concede that they could shed some light on the issue, but that any purely scientific explanation is going to be woefully paltry because the question extends far, far beyond science’s proper purview.
That’s the same attitude we should take towards this article which, as New Scientist triumphantly proclaims, tells us “How your brain creates God” (How’s that for a shot across the bow?)
The article proposes to explain, through evolutionary psychology, why humans have a propensity towards belief in the supernatural.
The scientists quoted propose that the human mind’s ability to abstractly conceive of other minds that work like ours is an evolutionary advantage, because it allows you to do things such as plan ahead, form complex social groups, and avoid unseen enemies. A byproduct of this, they think, is the tendency to “create” these abstract minds everywhere, from imaginary friends on up to God himself. They conclude that belief in the supernatural is a built-in aspect of human nature because of its presence in even very young children in all cultures, to the disappointment of some atheists who want religion to be a mere social construct which can be defeated in time. It is a two-edged sword, though: atheists think that some bits of evidence on the material side explain the supernatural away, while believers are wary (rightfully) of attempts to reduce belief to mere materially determined events.
The major flaw in this explanation, though, is that like the art example it’s only a very narrow part of the picture. In wandering from explanations of the natural world into explanations of the mind, science leaves its proper territory behind, unless one holds the philosophical (non-scientific) opinion that there is no non-natural aspect to the human mind — no soul. If that’s what the scientists think, fine, but they should admit that they are bring prior philosophical assumptions into their scientific work.
In addition to the mind’s ability to create images of other minds, another aspect of the belief in God, the scientists state, is the human mind’s tendency to look for cause-and-effect relationships. It is in investigating this aspect that we find the most glaring example of intruding scientific thought where it does not belong:
When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist “to make nice music”, while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. “It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were ‘for’ a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion,” says Kelemen.
The authors think that this shows the human mind has a natural tendency to look for design where, they pointedly state, there is none. But once again, Keleman and her associates have brought in their unscientific assumptions into the situation. Keleman is only surprised because she somehow expected the children to think scientifically, which the children weren’t. Scientific thought is not the only method of knowing, but scientists get so used to it that they sometimes can’t think otherwise. Who’s to say that the clouds and the mountains aren’t for a purpose? Sure, there is no scientific purpose, but did Keleman tell the children they were only allowed to use scientific thought when answering the question? To conclude that the children imagine design where there is none is a flawed conclusion from this study; it just means they can find design where Keleman can’t.
People find purpose in many aspects of creation, even in simple beauty. It’s not scientific purpose, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered what evolutionary psychologists make of the human tendency to find the most sublime beauty in the most hostile of environments — barren mountains, stormy oceans, plunging waterfalls, etc. I’m sure there’s some “reasonable” evolutionary explanation, most likely something about attraction to novelty. That must be it.)
The New Scientist piece concludes with an example of the tired suggestion that atheists are smarter and more courageous than believers:
Religious belief is the “path of least resistance”, says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.
Got that? Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa because he didn’t want to expend any effort. Now you know.
God, He's Moody
http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/06/24/evolution_of_god/
June 24, 2009
God, He's Moody
In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity.
by Steve Paulson
Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape -- from foreign policy to technology -- it's his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty.
Actually, "The Evolution of God" never grapples with the most basic religious question -- the existence of God. Instead it charts the twists and turns of how God's personality has kept changing over the centuries, and specifically, how the rough-and-tumble politics of the ancient Middle East shaped the Abrahamic religions. The book is filled with richly observed details about the Bible and the Quran, though Wright wears his learning lightly as he guides us through several thousand years of religious history.
There's something to offend just about everyone in this book. Wright recounts in harrowing detail how the early Israelites, who'd been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians, invoked Yahweh to wreak vengeance on their enemies. This is no God for the faint of heart! And he's no gentler on Christianity. Wright's Jesus is not the prophet of peace and love but a sometimes mean-spirited apocalyptic preacher obsessed with the approaching End Times. Islam's founder, Muhammad, comes across as much a warrior as a prophet, bent on annihilating his enemies when they cross him.
Despite all this religious mayhem, the book also shows a gentler side of the Abrahamic religions, especially when they manage to find common cause with their heathen neighbors and rival monotheists.
At first, "The Evolution of God" reads like another atheistic tract exposing the seamier side of religion. But then I came to Wright's account of the "moral imagination" and his surprising conclusion: He may not believe in God, but Wright thinks humanity is marching -- however wobbly -- toward moral truth.
In our interview, we talked about the bloody history of monotheism, what a mature religion would look like, and Wright's own spiritual awakening at a meditation retreat.
At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?
I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he's very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that's what I mean by being a materialist.
What do you mean by the facts on the ground?
My basic premise is that when a religious group sees itself as having something to gain through peaceful interaction with another group of people, including a different religion, it will find a basis for tolerance in its scriptures and religion. When groups see each other as being in a non-zero sum relationship -- there's a possibility of a win-win outcome if they play their cards right, or a lose-lose outcome if they don't -- then they tend to warm up to one another. By contrast, if people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with another group of people -- they can only win if the other group loses -- that brings out the intolerance and the dark side of religion. You see that in the world today. A lot of Palestinians and Israelis think they're playing a win-lose game. They think their interests are opposed and inversely correlated. In the long run, I think they're wrong. They're either both going to win or both going to lose.
And you're saying these attitudes keep fluctuating back and forth over the history of religion. It's not just a gradual movement from less tolerance to more tolerance.
There hasn't been any smooth progression toward tolerance in any of the religions. If you look at the way human beings treated each other 10,000 years ago, it was not uncommon for members of one hunter-gatherer tribe to consider strangers as subhuman and worthy of death. I try to show that all the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are capable of making great moral progress by extending compassion across national and ethnic and religious bounds. But there has not been any kind of smooth progression.
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn't originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.
And bad things happened because the gods were against you or certain spirits had it out for you?
Yes, you had done something to offend a god or spirit. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That's an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge.
Everyone knows everybody, so it's hard to conceal anything you steal. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap.
But it's easier to explain why bad things happen in these older religions. You can attribute it to an angry spirit. It's harder to explain evil if there's an all-powerful, all-loving God.
The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good -- and can do anything He or She wants -- why do innocent people suffer? If you've got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they're not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem.
Why did monotheism first develop?
My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think -- in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.
Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It's not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today's Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.
So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?
In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel's desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel's god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.
Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?
You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God's most favored people.
King Josiah comes off rather badly in your book. He's hugely influential in the development of monotheism, but also a brutal tyrant who tried to wipe out people with competing religious beliefs.
He was an authoritarian. By the standards of the day, maybe not an unusually harsh one. Politics were pretty rough and tumble in those days. He was a nationalist, populist authoritarian -- maybe a little bit like Hugo Chavez. It was a rejection of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. By our standards, King Josiah was a bad guy. He kills a bunch of priests who had the misfortune of not focusing their devotion exclusively on Yahweh. He cleans out the temple.
For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it's interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible's account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods.
However, after the exile, monotheism evolves into something much more laudable and inclusive. Now the exiles have returned to Jerusalem and Israel is in a secure neighborhood. It's part of the Persian empire and so are its neighbors. So you see a much sunnier side of God, with expressions of tolerance and compassion toward other nations. This shows that monotheism isn't intrinsically good or bad. It depends on the circumstances in which it finds itself.
This gets pretty confusing for today's religious believer. There's a vengeful God in some of these early books of the Old Testament -- a God who at times says you need to wipe out people with different religious beliefs. But within this same sacred text, you can also read about a very compassionate God.
You're right, the contrasts are extreme. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, God is saying, "I want you to annihilate nearby peoples who worship the wrong gods." He says do not leave anything alive that breathes -- not livestock, women or children.
Then other times you have Israelites not only tolerating a neighbor who worships another god but using that other god to validate their desire for tolerance. So they'll say to the Ammonites, "Look, you've got your god, Chemosh. He gave you your land. We've got our god, Yahweh, who gave us our land. Can't we just get along?"
You see this kind of vacillation in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it's a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people. That's also the challenge in the modern world. Barack Obama gets this. So long as Israeli settlements are expanding, you're not going to convince Palestinians that they're playing anything other than a zero-sum game with the Israelis. Obama understands it's partly a question of perception. Muslims who feel disrespected -- whether or not they really are -- will fuel religious extremism.
Let's skip ahead to the next great monotheistic religion. Why did Christianity take root?
The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There's reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire.
Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business.
Paul also made some good strategic choices. There were followers of Jesus who dictated that any non-Jews who became part of the Jesus movement had to be circumcised. Adult men had to be circumcised to join the church. This was before modern anesthesia, so you can see this would be a disincentive. Paul said no, and they don't have to follow the dietary laws either.
They also developed an attractive doctrine of an afterlife. The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable.
So later Christians, Paul among others, really institutionalized Christianity. What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?
It's popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it's the opposite.
He's typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.
Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he's not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with "love your enemies." Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn't say Jesus said it. It's only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn't the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it's actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.
If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he's commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?
I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I'm not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn't mean in heaven. He meant God's going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you'd expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn't seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There's one episode where a woman who's not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He's pretty mean and basically says, no, we don't serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it's an ugly story. It's only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.
But wasn't Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.
It's certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don't think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don't think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn't new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I'm sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.
So you are distinguishing between Jesus and Christ -- Jesus the flesh and blood historical figure as opposed to how he was later represented as Christ, the son of God.
That's right. There's no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but "messiah" in those days didn't mean what it's come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ -- the son of God -- that's something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written.
So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime.
Do you see Islam as essentially an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tradition or as something fundamentally new?
Muhammad was trying to create a synthetic religion, drawing on the existing traditions of Judaism and Christianity. He says very nice things in the Quran about Christians and Jesus, though he can't quite accept the idea that Jesus was the son of God.
He also made great overtures toward Jews. He established a fast that was essentially Yom Kippur. The ban on eating pork probably comes as a reflection of Judaism. There's every indication that he hoped to play a successful non-zero-sum game with Christians and Jews and draw them into a larger religion. He insisted that his God was their God. But it didn't work out.
Apparently, not that many Jews bought into his mission.
In the standard telling, once Muhammad was ruling the city of Medina and he'd become a statesman as well as a prophet, some Jewish tribes betrayed him and were collaborating with the enemy. So there was a very violent falling out. And he expelled Jewish tribes and in one case killed the adult males. But there's no doubt that the origins of Islam are rooted in the existing traditions of Christianity and Judaism.
You make the point that the Quran is a different kind of sacred text than the Bible. It was probably written over the course of two decades, while the stories collected in the Bible were written over centuries. That's why the Bible is such a diverse document.
We think of the Bible as a book, but in ancient times it would have been thought of as a library. There were books written by lots of different people, including a lot of cosmopolitan elites. You also see elements of Greek philosophy. The Quran is just one guy talking. In the Muslim view, he's mediating the word of God. He's not especially cosmopolitan. He is, according to Islamic tradition, illiterate. So it's not surprising that the Quran didn't have the intellectual diversity and, in some cases, the philosophical depth that you find in the Bible. I do think he was actually a very modern thinker. Muhammad's argument for why you should be devoted exclusively to this one God is very modern.
Do you think it's been harder for today's Muslims to accept liberal interpretations of the Quran because it's linked so directly to Muhammad, while the Bible isn't so closely associated with Moses or Jesus?
Yes, and also because Muhammad spent a certain amount of his career as a politician and a military leader. There are parts of the Quran that are a military manual, which advocate killing the enemy. Of course, the Bible has these things too, but they're a smaller portion of the overall Bible. But when you look at that part of the Quran, it's much more subtle than a lot of people think.
Take the famous verse "Kill the infidels wherever you find them." Actually, it's a mistranslation. It's "Kill the polytheists." So it probably wouldn't include Christians and Jews. If you look at the verse in context, it seems that he exempts those polytheists who are on the side of the Muslims in this particular war. So all that passage says is "Kill the people who are enemies in this war." It's not fundamentally about religion. In this case and others, it complies with my basic argument: When people see themselves in a non-zero-sum relationship with other people, they will be tolerant of them and of their religion. Muhammad probably exemplifies that better than any single figure in ancient Abrahamic history.
Your book focuses on the Abrahamic religions. But aren't Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation?
Yes, it's not uncommon in Asia for somebody to be a little bit of a Buddhist and a little bit of a Taoist. It's certainly possible for religion to be non-exclusive. Parts of Buddhism are exemplary. In some ways it was the earliest religion to recognize the fundamental problem of being human. The challenge is to change the already existing character of a religion. The world is not full of Buddhists. And even Buddhist monks have gone on rampages. There is no religion that is always a religion of peace. But in Buddhism, you're seeing some very interesting developments. The Western, quasi-secular Buddhism is an interesting adaptation to a scientific age because it makes relatively few claims about the supernatural.
You've written a secular history of how religion has been used by various political movements to consolidate power. But you're ignoring the power of personal spiritual experience -- what some people would call revelation. Can you explain religion without acknowledging the importance of actual religious experience?
I do think religious experience has played an important part in religion. I think the Apostle Paul felt genuinely inspired. I myself have had profound experiences that could be characterized as religious. I certainly had some when I was young and a believing Christian. And I've had some since then. I did a one-week silent meditation retreat and had very profound experiences.
What kinds of experiences?
As the week wore on, the walls between me and other people and the rest of reality broke down a little. I became much less judgmental. I remember at one point looking at a weed and thinking, I can't believe I've been killing weeds because they're as pretty as anything else. Who put this label on weeds? And that's just a metaphor for what was changing in my consciousness.
It was completely profound by the end of the week. Of course, a week later it wore off and I was a jerk again. But I think it was a movement toward moral truth. The truth is that I'm not special, and you're not special.
That is the key adaptation that religions have to make in the modern world -- to make people appreciate the moral value of people in circumstances very different from their own. That is a move toward moral truth. It's a fascinating feature of the world we live in that as technology expands the realm of social organization, its coherence and integrity depends on moral progress.
There is another way to understand religion. Certain influential people have intense and profound spiritual experiences, which are later codified and turned into systems of belief for their followers. Do you accept this distinction between spiritual experience and organized religion?
I'm against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders. At the same time, there are valid spiritual experiences. I've had them.
But you don't acknowledge that there's anything transcendent about spiritual experience -- any communication with a deeper, alternative reality.
No, I do think the experience I had at that meditation retreat was transcendent. It removed me from the ordinary trappings of mundane consciousness. There is a moral axis to the universe. If we don't make moral progress, chaos ensues. If only in that sense, we are tethered to a moral axis. It raises legitimate questions as to whether the whole system was in fact set up by some being, something you could call a divinity.
It's really interesting to hear you say there's moral truth. That's not the kind of thing we usually hear from someone who calls himself a materialist.
Maybe not, but materialism has gotten a bad name. You can be a materialist and still believe that some larger purpose is unfolding through the history of life on this planet. And you can think of the source of that purpose -- however hard it is to conceive of that source -- in favorable terms. You can use the term "divine," if you want. I do believe there's evidence of some larger purpose unfolding; you'd think religious people would like that. On the other hand, I take a very skeptical view of the claims to special revelation that religions make. You would think my account of religious history would be to the liking of atheists and agnostics.
So we can believe there's an underlying moral truth without believing in God.
The phrase that philosophers use is "moral realism." Do you think morality is in some sense a real thing out there? It's a very elusive question. What I feel sure of is that there's a moral axis to the universe, a moral order, without believing in God.
Are you also saying we can be religious without believing in God?
By some definitions, yes. It's hard to find a definition of religion that encompasses everything we call religion. The definition I like comes from William James. He said, "Religious belief consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting to that order." In that sense, you can be religious without believing in God. In that sense, I'm religious. On the God question, I'm not sure. But I can call myself religious and have a fully scientific worldview.
You write, "Religion needs to mature more if the world is going to survive in good shape -- and for that matter, if religion is going to hold the respect of intellectually critical people." How does it need to mature?
You can't believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. There's a whole list of things that are not compatible with modern science.
That's obvious. But some people would also say the idea of a personal God does not square with the scientific worldview today.
It's not a logical impossibility that there's a personal God out there. It's not even quite impossible that God intervenes when the scientists are not measuring stuff, when nobody's watching. But if you're going to have a religion that's broadly reconcilable with a scientific worldview and going to win acceptance among intellectual elites, then it's not going to involve an interventionist God. There are certainly people who find tremendous reassurance and guidance from religions that don't involve a god of any kind, and here I'm thinking about secular Buddhism.
Or you have a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich who tried to get away from an anthropomorphic God. He talked about God as "the ground of being."
Of course, he got accused of sugarcoating what was in fact something like agnosticism or atheism. It's easier to get reassurance by thinking there's some powerful being looking out for you than for something called "the ground of being." But for my money, if you're interested in hanging on to some kind of religious worldview that's viable in the modern world, you have to make that effort. I haven't tried to work out any detailed program here. It's something I'd like to think about in the future.
At the end of your book, you say the great divide in modern thinking is between people who think there is some divine source of meaning -- a higher purpose in the universe -- and those people who don't. Is this different than the usual dichotomy between believers and atheists?
It's a little different. I'm trying to get members of the different Abrahamic religions to realize that if they want to have an enemy, there's a bigger one than each other. I don't want them to declare jihad on atheists, but it might be good for them to realize, in the modern intellectual battle, they all have something in common: not only a specific Abrahamic God, but belief in a transcendent source of meaning. And I'd like to add that there are a lot of other people who don't subscribe to your notion of God, maybe not to any notion of God, who do believe in a transcendent source of meaning and a larger purpose that's unfolding.
As opposed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
I think he's wrong. But it's not surprising. Physicists don't think much about the animate world. So he probably hasn't given a lot of thought to the human condition and the direction of human history. But I'd say even the realm of physics -- just the weirdness of quantum physics -- should instill in all of us a little humility. It should make us aware that human consciousness, designed by natural selection to do really mundane things, is clearly not capable of grasping some ultimate things that are probably out there.
June 24, 2009
God, He's Moody
In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity.
by Steve Paulson
Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape -- from foreign policy to technology -- it's his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty.
Actually, "The Evolution of God" never grapples with the most basic religious question -- the existence of God. Instead it charts the twists and turns of how God's personality has kept changing over the centuries, and specifically, how the rough-and-tumble politics of the ancient Middle East shaped the Abrahamic religions. The book is filled with richly observed details about the Bible and the Quran, though Wright wears his learning lightly as he guides us through several thousand years of religious history.
There's something to offend just about everyone in this book. Wright recounts in harrowing detail how the early Israelites, who'd been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians, invoked Yahweh to wreak vengeance on their enemies. This is no God for the faint of heart! And he's no gentler on Christianity. Wright's Jesus is not the prophet of peace and love but a sometimes mean-spirited apocalyptic preacher obsessed with the approaching End Times. Islam's founder, Muhammad, comes across as much a warrior as a prophet, bent on annihilating his enemies when they cross him.
Despite all this religious mayhem, the book also shows a gentler side of the Abrahamic religions, especially when they manage to find common cause with their heathen neighbors and rival monotheists.
At first, "The Evolution of God" reads like another atheistic tract exposing the seamier side of religion. But then I came to Wright's account of the "moral imagination" and his surprising conclusion: He may not believe in God, but Wright thinks humanity is marching -- however wobbly -- toward moral truth.
In our interview, we talked about the bloody history of monotheism, what a mature religion would look like, and Wright's own spiritual awakening at a meditation retreat.
At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?
I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he's very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that's what I mean by being a materialist.
What do you mean by the facts on the ground?
My basic premise is that when a religious group sees itself as having something to gain through peaceful interaction with another group of people, including a different religion, it will find a basis for tolerance in its scriptures and religion. When groups see each other as being in a non-zero sum relationship -- there's a possibility of a win-win outcome if they play their cards right, or a lose-lose outcome if they don't -- then they tend to warm up to one another. By contrast, if people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with another group of people -- they can only win if the other group loses -- that brings out the intolerance and the dark side of religion. You see that in the world today. A lot of Palestinians and Israelis think they're playing a win-lose game. They think their interests are opposed and inversely correlated. In the long run, I think they're wrong. They're either both going to win or both going to lose.
And you're saying these attitudes keep fluctuating back and forth over the history of religion. It's not just a gradual movement from less tolerance to more tolerance.
There hasn't been any smooth progression toward tolerance in any of the religions. If you look at the way human beings treated each other 10,000 years ago, it was not uncommon for members of one hunter-gatherer tribe to consider strangers as subhuman and worthy of death. I try to show that all the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are capable of making great moral progress by extending compassion across national and ethnic and religious bounds. But there has not been any kind of smooth progression.
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn't originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.
And bad things happened because the gods were against you or certain spirits had it out for you?
Yes, you had done something to offend a god or spirit. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That's an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge.
Everyone knows everybody, so it's hard to conceal anything you steal. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap.
But it's easier to explain why bad things happen in these older religions. You can attribute it to an angry spirit. It's harder to explain evil if there's an all-powerful, all-loving God.
The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good -- and can do anything He or She wants -- why do innocent people suffer? If you've got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they're not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem.
Why did monotheism first develop?
My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think -- in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.
Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It's not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today's Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.
So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?
In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel's desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel's god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.
Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?
You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God's most favored people.
King Josiah comes off rather badly in your book. He's hugely influential in the development of monotheism, but also a brutal tyrant who tried to wipe out people with competing religious beliefs.
He was an authoritarian. By the standards of the day, maybe not an unusually harsh one. Politics were pretty rough and tumble in those days. He was a nationalist, populist authoritarian -- maybe a little bit like Hugo Chavez. It was a rejection of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. By our standards, King Josiah was a bad guy. He kills a bunch of priests who had the misfortune of not focusing their devotion exclusively on Yahweh. He cleans out the temple.
For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it's interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible's account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods.
However, after the exile, monotheism evolves into something much more laudable and inclusive. Now the exiles have returned to Jerusalem and Israel is in a secure neighborhood. It's part of the Persian empire and so are its neighbors. So you see a much sunnier side of God, with expressions of tolerance and compassion toward other nations. This shows that monotheism isn't intrinsically good or bad. It depends on the circumstances in which it finds itself.
This gets pretty confusing for today's religious believer. There's a vengeful God in some of these early books of the Old Testament -- a God who at times says you need to wipe out people with different religious beliefs. But within this same sacred text, you can also read about a very compassionate God.
You're right, the contrasts are extreme. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, God is saying, "I want you to annihilate nearby peoples who worship the wrong gods." He says do not leave anything alive that breathes -- not livestock, women or children.
Then other times you have Israelites not only tolerating a neighbor who worships another god but using that other god to validate their desire for tolerance. So they'll say to the Ammonites, "Look, you've got your god, Chemosh. He gave you your land. We've got our god, Yahweh, who gave us our land. Can't we just get along?"
You see this kind of vacillation in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it's a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people. That's also the challenge in the modern world. Barack Obama gets this. So long as Israeli settlements are expanding, you're not going to convince Palestinians that they're playing anything other than a zero-sum game with the Israelis. Obama understands it's partly a question of perception. Muslims who feel disrespected -- whether or not they really are -- will fuel religious extremism.
Let's skip ahead to the next great monotheistic religion. Why did Christianity take root?
The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There's reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire.
Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business.
Paul also made some good strategic choices. There were followers of Jesus who dictated that any non-Jews who became part of the Jesus movement had to be circumcised. Adult men had to be circumcised to join the church. This was before modern anesthesia, so you can see this would be a disincentive. Paul said no, and they don't have to follow the dietary laws either.
They also developed an attractive doctrine of an afterlife. The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable.
So later Christians, Paul among others, really institutionalized Christianity. What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?
It's popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it's the opposite.
He's typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.
Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he's not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with "love your enemies." Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn't say Jesus said it. It's only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn't the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it's actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.
If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he's commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?
I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I'm not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn't mean in heaven. He meant God's going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you'd expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn't seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There's one episode where a woman who's not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He's pretty mean and basically says, no, we don't serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it's an ugly story. It's only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.
But wasn't Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.
It's certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don't think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don't think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn't new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I'm sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.
So you are distinguishing between Jesus and Christ -- Jesus the flesh and blood historical figure as opposed to how he was later represented as Christ, the son of God.
That's right. There's no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but "messiah" in those days didn't mean what it's come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ -- the son of God -- that's something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written.
So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime.
Do you see Islam as essentially an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tradition or as something fundamentally new?
Muhammad was trying to create a synthetic religion, drawing on the existing traditions of Judaism and Christianity. He says very nice things in the Quran about Christians and Jesus, though he can't quite accept the idea that Jesus was the son of God.
He also made great overtures toward Jews. He established a fast that was essentially Yom Kippur. The ban on eating pork probably comes as a reflection of Judaism. There's every indication that he hoped to play a successful non-zero-sum game with Christians and Jews and draw them into a larger religion. He insisted that his God was their God. But it didn't work out.
Apparently, not that many Jews bought into his mission.
In the standard telling, once Muhammad was ruling the city of Medina and he'd become a statesman as well as a prophet, some Jewish tribes betrayed him and were collaborating with the enemy. So there was a very violent falling out. And he expelled Jewish tribes and in one case killed the adult males. But there's no doubt that the origins of Islam are rooted in the existing traditions of Christianity and Judaism.
You make the point that the Quran is a different kind of sacred text than the Bible. It was probably written over the course of two decades, while the stories collected in the Bible were written over centuries. That's why the Bible is such a diverse document.
We think of the Bible as a book, but in ancient times it would have been thought of as a library. There were books written by lots of different people, including a lot of cosmopolitan elites. You also see elements of Greek philosophy. The Quran is just one guy talking. In the Muslim view, he's mediating the word of God. He's not especially cosmopolitan. He is, according to Islamic tradition, illiterate. So it's not surprising that the Quran didn't have the intellectual diversity and, in some cases, the philosophical depth that you find in the Bible. I do think he was actually a very modern thinker. Muhammad's argument for why you should be devoted exclusively to this one God is very modern.
Do you think it's been harder for today's Muslims to accept liberal interpretations of the Quran because it's linked so directly to Muhammad, while the Bible isn't so closely associated with Moses or Jesus?
Yes, and also because Muhammad spent a certain amount of his career as a politician and a military leader. There are parts of the Quran that are a military manual, which advocate killing the enemy. Of course, the Bible has these things too, but they're a smaller portion of the overall Bible. But when you look at that part of the Quran, it's much more subtle than a lot of people think.
Take the famous verse "Kill the infidels wherever you find them." Actually, it's a mistranslation. It's "Kill the polytheists." So it probably wouldn't include Christians and Jews. If you look at the verse in context, it seems that he exempts those polytheists who are on the side of the Muslims in this particular war. So all that passage says is "Kill the people who are enemies in this war." It's not fundamentally about religion. In this case and others, it complies with my basic argument: When people see themselves in a non-zero-sum relationship with other people, they will be tolerant of them and of their religion. Muhammad probably exemplifies that better than any single figure in ancient Abrahamic history.
Your book focuses on the Abrahamic religions. But aren't Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation?
Yes, it's not uncommon in Asia for somebody to be a little bit of a Buddhist and a little bit of a Taoist. It's certainly possible for religion to be non-exclusive. Parts of Buddhism are exemplary. In some ways it was the earliest religion to recognize the fundamental problem of being human. The challenge is to change the already existing character of a religion. The world is not full of Buddhists. And even Buddhist monks have gone on rampages. There is no religion that is always a religion of peace. But in Buddhism, you're seeing some very interesting developments. The Western, quasi-secular Buddhism is an interesting adaptation to a scientific age because it makes relatively few claims about the supernatural.
You've written a secular history of how religion has been used by various political movements to consolidate power. But you're ignoring the power of personal spiritual experience -- what some people would call revelation. Can you explain religion without acknowledging the importance of actual religious experience?
I do think religious experience has played an important part in religion. I think the Apostle Paul felt genuinely inspired. I myself have had profound experiences that could be characterized as religious. I certainly had some when I was young and a believing Christian. And I've had some since then. I did a one-week silent meditation retreat and had very profound experiences.
What kinds of experiences?
As the week wore on, the walls between me and other people and the rest of reality broke down a little. I became much less judgmental. I remember at one point looking at a weed and thinking, I can't believe I've been killing weeds because they're as pretty as anything else. Who put this label on weeds? And that's just a metaphor for what was changing in my consciousness.
It was completely profound by the end of the week. Of course, a week later it wore off and I was a jerk again. But I think it was a movement toward moral truth. The truth is that I'm not special, and you're not special.
That is the key adaptation that religions have to make in the modern world -- to make people appreciate the moral value of people in circumstances very different from their own. That is a move toward moral truth. It's a fascinating feature of the world we live in that as technology expands the realm of social organization, its coherence and integrity depends on moral progress.
There is another way to understand religion. Certain influential people have intense and profound spiritual experiences, which are later codified and turned into systems of belief for their followers. Do you accept this distinction between spiritual experience and organized religion?
I'm against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders. At the same time, there are valid spiritual experiences. I've had them.
But you don't acknowledge that there's anything transcendent about spiritual experience -- any communication with a deeper, alternative reality.
No, I do think the experience I had at that meditation retreat was transcendent. It removed me from the ordinary trappings of mundane consciousness. There is a moral axis to the universe. If we don't make moral progress, chaos ensues. If only in that sense, we are tethered to a moral axis. It raises legitimate questions as to whether the whole system was in fact set up by some being, something you could call a divinity.
It's really interesting to hear you say there's moral truth. That's not the kind of thing we usually hear from someone who calls himself a materialist.
Maybe not, but materialism has gotten a bad name. You can be a materialist and still believe that some larger purpose is unfolding through the history of life on this planet. And you can think of the source of that purpose -- however hard it is to conceive of that source -- in favorable terms. You can use the term "divine," if you want. I do believe there's evidence of some larger purpose unfolding; you'd think religious people would like that. On the other hand, I take a very skeptical view of the claims to special revelation that religions make. You would think my account of religious history would be to the liking of atheists and agnostics.
So we can believe there's an underlying moral truth without believing in God.
The phrase that philosophers use is "moral realism." Do you think morality is in some sense a real thing out there? It's a very elusive question. What I feel sure of is that there's a moral axis to the universe, a moral order, without believing in God.
Are you also saying we can be religious without believing in God?
By some definitions, yes. It's hard to find a definition of religion that encompasses everything we call religion. The definition I like comes from William James. He said, "Religious belief consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting to that order." In that sense, you can be religious without believing in God. In that sense, I'm religious. On the God question, I'm not sure. But I can call myself religious and have a fully scientific worldview.
You write, "Religion needs to mature more if the world is going to survive in good shape -- and for that matter, if religion is going to hold the respect of intellectually critical people." How does it need to mature?
You can't believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. There's a whole list of things that are not compatible with modern science.
That's obvious. But some people would also say the idea of a personal God does not square with the scientific worldview today.
It's not a logical impossibility that there's a personal God out there. It's not even quite impossible that God intervenes when the scientists are not measuring stuff, when nobody's watching. But if you're going to have a religion that's broadly reconcilable with a scientific worldview and going to win acceptance among intellectual elites, then it's not going to involve an interventionist God. There are certainly people who find tremendous reassurance and guidance from religions that don't involve a god of any kind, and here I'm thinking about secular Buddhism.
Or you have a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich who tried to get away from an anthropomorphic God. He talked about God as "the ground of being."
Of course, he got accused of sugarcoating what was in fact something like agnosticism or atheism. It's easier to get reassurance by thinking there's some powerful being looking out for you than for something called "the ground of being." But for my money, if you're interested in hanging on to some kind of religious worldview that's viable in the modern world, you have to make that effort. I haven't tried to work out any detailed program here. It's something I'd like to think about in the future.
At the end of your book, you say the great divide in modern thinking is between people who think there is some divine source of meaning -- a higher purpose in the universe -- and those people who don't. Is this different than the usual dichotomy between believers and atheists?
It's a little different. I'm trying to get members of the different Abrahamic religions to realize that if they want to have an enemy, there's a bigger one than each other. I don't want them to declare jihad on atheists, but it might be good for them to realize, in the modern intellectual battle, they all have something in common: not only a specific Abrahamic God, but belief in a transcendent source of meaning. And I'd like to add that there are a lot of other people who don't subscribe to your notion of God, maybe not to any notion of God, who do believe in a transcendent source of meaning and a larger purpose that's unfolding.
As opposed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
I think he's wrong. But it's not surprising. Physicists don't think much about the animate world. So he probably hasn't given a lot of thought to the human condition and the direction of human history. But I'd say even the realm of physics -- just the weirdness of quantum physics -- should instill in all of us a little humility. It should make us aware that human consciousness, designed by natural selection to do really mundane things, is clearly not capable of grasping some ultimate things that are probably out there.
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