"I had no need of that hypothesis."

Over the course of the summer I wrote a series of articles about brain science and Christianity, and I promised a final installment that never came.  This is it. The series asked and--within the limits of present knowledge--answered a set of questions that fascinate students at the intersection of religion and psychology. 

How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking?  Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?

How do we know what we know? What gives us a feeling of certainty?  What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?

How do conversion experiences work?  What makes religious conversion transformative?

 How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?  How does our social context influence or even control our religious beliefs?  How does religious identity develop in childhood? 

What makes beliefs resistant to change?  What causes people to lose belief?  When are people open to reexamining religious assumptions?

If you followed the series, or better yet the rabbit trails of imbedded references, you would have found that they distilled an exciting set of discoveries.  Brain science is remarkably close to offering a full naturalistic explanation of individual religious experiences, everything from certain belief to moral indignation to mystical rapture to spiritual transformation.

As theists are quick to point out, understanding the psychology of religion doesn’t tell us whether any specific set of beliefs is true.  I might believe in a pantheon of supernatural beings for all the wrong reasons (childhood credulity, hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind, group hypnotic processes, misattributed transcendence hallucination, viral transmission, cognitive dissonance reduction) and they might still might exist. Brain scientists can’t address the truth value of otherworldly assertions, only the mechanisms and patterns through which they occur in this the human mind. 

In a similar way, all scholars of religion are bound by the methods and focus of their respective fields.  Many fields can illuminate some aspect of the religious enterprise, and each has its limits.  Hard scientists are limited to addressing the testable assertions religions make about natural phenomena, such as the origins of species or the causes of epilepsy or the power of intercessory prayer.  Historians, aided by linguists and archeologists, can excavate the history of a set of ideas, but – except where theologians make historical assertions-- they too cannot answer definitively whether these ideas are factually correct.  Sociologists and anthropologists can examine the patterns and impact of belief on a collective.  They are uniquely able to assess claims that religious belief increases love and joy, or decreases crime.   It remains the domain of philosophers and ethicists to examine the rational and moral qualities of religious beliefs—to examine internal coherence or the virtue of a belief system as it relates to a set of universal ethical principles.   All of these are questions that lay outside the domain of brain science which, as I said earlier limits itself to the subjective experience of the individual and the correlates of that experience in neurological phenomena.

Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion.  If we are particularly concerned with Christianity, then we are particularly concerned with belief.  And more and more, we can explain Christian belief with the same set of principles that explain supernaturalism generally.  This is a serious blow to orthodoxy, meaning any religion based on right belief, and that includes most traditional forms of Christianity.

 In the past, one of the arguments put forward by believers was that there simply was no explanation for the born again experience, the healing power of Christianity, the vast agreement among believers, or the joy and wonder of mysticism, save that these came from God himself.  These experiences, they insisted, justified or even demanded belief in the Christian God including a personal, present resurrected Jesus. We now know this not to be the case.   Humans are capable of having transcendent, transformative experiences in the absence of any given dogma.  We are capable of sustaining elaborate systems of false belief and transmitting them to our children.  We are capable of feeling so certain about our false beliefs that we are willing to kill or die for them.

It possible, absolutely, to assert the truth of Christian beliefs even knowing that there are now other explanations for the Christian experience.  Claims about the afterlife or the spiritual realm are, after all, untestable.  They cannot be proven, and they cannot be refuted.  When it comes to beliefs about the “world to come,” literally anything goes. 

It also is quite possible to assert that the Christian experience has unique supernatural causes.  One could say, for example, that Christian joy is somehow different from the joy experienced by other religious people: It alone has both material causes (social/physiological/psychological) and a supernatural cause (e.g the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit).  But this kind of claim puts a defender of faith in an awkward position, one that is at odds with how cause and effect explanations usually work.

One general principle that has worked well for humans seeking to advance or refine knowledge is called “parsimony,” also known as Occam’s Razor.  It can be paraphrased thus:  “Usually the simplest explanation is the best one.” or “Don’t multiply entities unnecessarily.”  If we can predict storms by looking at barometric pressure and cloud formations, then there is no need to posit the existence of storm spirits or angry ancestors causing us trouble.  If we can predict that an electric light will come on when a circuit is completed, we don’t talk about the additional but undetectable flow of magic that makes the whole thing function.  When a scholar adheres to the principle of parsimony, explanatory factors get added only when they allow us to control or predict with greater accuracy.

In every field of human knowledge except theology, if we can find a sufficient explanation within nature’s matrix, we don’t look outside. We no longer, for example, posit that demons are involved in seizures or bubonic plague.  It’s not that we know for sure that the demon explanation is wrong, simply that it is unnecessary for predicting or treating seizures. 

What does all of this imply for the future of religious studies?  Simply that supernatural explanations for religious experience are becoming unnecessary.  Eighteenth Century French mathematician and astronomer, Pierre Simone Laplace, wrote a volume on the movements of the heavenly bodies.  When asked by Emperor Napoleon I why he had not mentioned God in his treatise, he replied, “je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.”  I had no need of that hypothesis.  Modern scholars of religion, more and more, find themselves echoing the words of Laplace.   We have no need of that hypothesis.

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If you would like to receive this series as a single Word doc or PDF, or if you would like to subscribe to weekly articles by Valerie Tarico, send your request to vt at valerietarico dot com. 

In case you missed the announcement, ShipofFools.com has published an "authoritative" list of the ten worst verses in the Bible. At a time when atheists are posting ads on billboards and busses around the world, you might assume that the Ship is an anti-religious site. But no. Ship of Fools is a Christian website with an impeccable British sense of the absurd. True to its name, the editors go where angels (and other Christians) dare not tread. "We're here for people who prefer their religion disorganized," says Simon Jenkins. "Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith."

I wince a bit at Jenkins' confidence. As a student at Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame, I thought that the school motto was "All truth is God's truth." Later I found out it was actually, "For Christ and His Kingdom." But at the time, I figured: Ask away; faith has nothing to fear. So, ask I did, until the last vestiges of my Evangelical beliefs finally crumbled. Another former Christian said it perfectly: "My exit from Christianity consisted of a series of strategic retreats covering an ever-shrinking patch of defensible ground."

Jenkins and his teammates seem willing to take that chance. Like Christian author, John Shelby Spong (The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love), Ship of Fools editors are unafraid of biblical criticism. They do not equate criticism of the Bible with criticism of their God. Rather, they regard the Bible as a human construction that offers glimpses of divinity seen through the dark glass of human fallibility. Beginning in July, they invited readers to submit what they consider to be the worst verse in the Bible.

You don't need to be a purple-faced atheist to notice that the Bible is a pretty mixed book. For every hymn to the loveliness of love, there's a story about God squishing someone because they worshipped the wrong god. For every wise and helpful saying, there's an incomprehensible law. For every verse Martin Luther King proclaimed in the streets of Alabama, there's one that Fred Phelps shouts outside gay funerals.

For a purple-face like myself who keeps pointing out theological - uh -complications -- from the outside, it's a pleasure to land in the virtual company of believers who have no problem saying that sexism and homophobia and slavery and genocide are Bad, no matter how well credentialed their endorsers. American Evangelicals often try to insist that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God, each word essentially dictated by God to the authors. Not only is this position ignorant --ever heard of synods or canonization?-- it has an enormous moral cost. People end up defending sexual slavery and scorched earth warfare, even a belief in dragons. Whew. Been there.

Mercifully, Christians like Spong and Jenkins offer an alternative to Orwellian contortion. To quote one of the Ship's editors, "[The Bible] doesn't have to be a textbook of infallible information and unbreakable laws to be God's book." This radical notion has big implications for Christians and non-Christians alike.

For Christians: As more and more is known about how the Bible was pieced together - what got in, what got left out, how human politics shaped the process--the notion of perfection (called "inerrancy") becomes harder and harder to defend. It requires an eyes-squeezed-shut, fingers-in-ears sort of faith. By contrast, acknowledging the Bible's human authorship and frailties allows for a faith that is flexible and open--one that is centered in worship and service rather than the defense of ancient texts. It also allows Christians to participate in the broader intellectual and moral community of humankind.

For the rest of us: Most of the evil that Christians do in the service of God is actually evil done in the service of a perfect Bible--well, that plus a few perfect follow-on dogmas. When people see the Bible for what it is, whole bunches of craziness, like anti-scientific fervor and Armageddon yearnings, go away. What's left is ordinary folks who are muddling along, living out their best hunches about what is good and what is real, rather like the rest of us. Anyone who is invested in the future of the human race might feel a surge of hope and respect upon finding themselves in the company of self-described "fools," meaning Christians whose religion is based on humble faith, open debate, and radical intellectual honesty. I certainly do.

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All right, you're probably thinking. Enough babble. Where's the list?! At Ship of Fools, of course. Don't miss it. And thank you to Edward Babinsky for calling it to my attention.

I have been wanting to do an interview with an articulate and perceptive non-theist, and I have found one in Dr. Valerie Tarico, author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth.

5.75 Change Happens

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.   --Antisthenes

My parents, as I’ve said before, were three for six in terms of producing believing children.  All of us accepted Jesus as our personal savior.  We all entered the “age of accountability” as born-again Evangelicals.    But that’s not where we ended up.  For each of the three who lost faith, the path was different:  One came to see the shame of his homosexuality, not as a personal failing but as a failing of our moral ancestors – which then exposed the host of other moral failings in the Bible.  Another was confronted by a small child’s cancer which unearthed a mother lode of buried questions about God’s beneficence and then existence.  The third was simply born able to think his way out of most boxes, and he used this ability to the detriment of his salvation.

Literally thousands of testimonials at websites like ExChristian.net describe journeys out of belief, each unique.  They are written by folks who were born into Christian homes and others who joined during adolescence and even people who moved into and then out of belief during adulthood.  A surprising number of contributors to the site are former pastors or missionaries who now feel a sense of remorse about their recruiting work.  Most never expected to be where they are today.  As one former Christian put it, “Through most of my life I was sure beyond doubt that god was real and that he had bought me as one of his own through the blood of Christ. I could not have conceived that one day I would lose my faith completely and come instead to believe that god is nothing more than a human invention.” (Darrel, ExC, ADGLW, 6/4/2009)  Despite their best efforts and intentions, people change. 

With all of the ways that we resist new ideas, one might think that awakening to complicated realities is hopeless.  But there is another half of the equation.  As much as we tend to be wary of threats against our world view, we are also wired to seek truth.  Being able to determine what’s real is a crucial part of survival:  In order to thrive, we need to understand the contingencies that actually govern our wellbeing, and in order to thrive among other humans, we need means of detecting deception and even self-deception among our fellows.  Accurate knowledge is valuable stuff.  In fact, truth is so highly valued that even self-replicating ideologies extol the virtues of truth--they just assert that they have found it.

How do we change our minds?  Belief revision as a process has long been studied by philosophers.  The philosophical  approach generally assumes humans are rational beings:  Logical propositions come into conflict with each other or with evidence, and people revise their beliefs to restore coherence.  This description works pretty well to explain how we adapt to new information, when we don’t have opposing social or emotional pressures. If I have little invested in my old assumptions, it is pretty easy to correct a faulty belief in the presence of new information.  The problem arises when the community of people around us, or the community of assumptions in our own heads exerts pressure resisting change.   Family systems therapists say that when an identified patient begins getting better, family members often give unconscious “change-back” messages.  The whole system is organized around a certain dynamic or set of roles, and even positive change bumps up against a tough, resilient homeostasis.  

Consider another analogy.  In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote a seminal book entitled, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he introduced the term “paradigm shift.”  He argued that in science change rarely happens in a steady incremental way.  Rather, a generation of scholars operates out of a (tough, resilient) set of assumptions,  a paradigm, and new information gets assimilated or explained within the paradigm.  But gradually contradictory evidence accumulates until it reaches a tipping point, and what Kuhn called a “paradigm shift” occurs.  Previously ignored patterns in the contradictions abruptly becomes clear, and the community toggles to a better paradigm that will guide inquiry until evidence accumulates and these assumptions, too, get revised.  Kuhn wrote about the hard sciences, but scholars since have come to realize that a similar process can take place in other scholarly communities and even in individuals. 

An informal review of deconversion stories at ExChristian.net, suggests that, for many people, the process of faith revision happens much like Kuhn’s paradigm shift.  Contradictory evidence accumulates slowly over time.  The contradictions can be rational, moral, or emotional.  One Christian starts noticing Bible passages that are at odds with each other.  Another is troubled by a preacher’s justification of war and greed.  A third writhes when a social misfit is tormented and then ostracized by a youth group.  At first, perhaps for years, each finds ways to explain these contradictions within her existing theology.  Then in the presence of some triggering event, a pattern becomes clear, and she realizes she can no longer call herself a believer.  Julia Sweeney’s monologue, Letting Go of God, offers a tender, funny account of her efforts to reconcile faith with experience before she makes the startling discovery that she no longer believes.

Do  former Christians feel  loss or relief when they finally give up on belief and adopt another form of spiritual practice or none at all?  Do they develop psychological symptoms or lose them?  This depends on the nature of belief and social support at the time of deconversion.   After a long quest that led from Catholic Christianity through Eastern and New Age spirituality, Sweeney experienced only mild dismay and sadness when finally faced with her own disbelief.  Others have it worse.  Some former fundamentalists describe anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or even suicidal despair.  They may seek mental health services to help them deal with the loss of friends, family or core parts of their former identity.  At the other end of the spectrum are those who feel like chains have fallen away.  Freed from an exhausting, guilty battle to maintain faith, they happily take up the question posed by poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Just like the born again Christians who feel transformed by faith, those who feel freed from faith want to share their discovery with those they love. Many former Christians grieve the fact that their spouses, children, or dear friends are still imbedded in what now appears as an enormous cult.  But what are the options?  Attempts at conversation often fail, bringing tears and conflict, even shunning or divorce.  A couple of elderly scientists are not allowed to see their grandchildren because contact might lead the children astray.  A mother laments that a grown daughter won’t let her visit because of the mother’s loss of faith.  A college student  who has been caught reading “spiritual pornography” isn’t allowed to be with his younger siblings unattended.   What is a former believer to do?

One thing we know does not help is arguing.  Research shows that after an argument, both sides tend to be even more entrenched in their old positions.  By lining up our best arguments, we are more likely to convince ourselves that we are right than to convince anyone else.  Perhaps the best advice is to adhere to the formula that has worked well for other hidden and stigmatized minorities:  Be out.  Be yourself.  The more negative the stereotype of nonbelievers, the easier it is to challenge that stereotype simply by being a decent human being.  When it comes to explicit conversations about religion, try to arrange time to sit down and really talk through your changes rather than having the differences of opinion come up in bits and scraps.  Lay out your own thinking, and then let it be.  For those you love, either the paradigm shift will happen or it won’t.  It is not in your power to control anyone but yourself.

5.5:  How Beliefs Resist Change

The Jesuits have a saying sometimes attributed to Francis Xavier, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”  The Jesuits were a tad optimistic, but ample research on identity formation shows that religious, cultural, and political identity become established by early adulthood and rarely change thereafter except in response to crisis.  In fact, even in the face of crisis, core beliefs about who we are and why we are here, can be remarkably resilient.

This is due in part to the fact that individual beliefs do not exist in isolation.  Rather, each exists as part of a whole network of other beliefs, memories, and attitudes.  The more central or important any given belief, the more it is entangled with the rest of our world view.  And the more it is tied into the tangle, the harder it is to change.  Because religious views are so central, they are particularly resistant to change. 

To make things even more complicated, each religion has what can be called an immune system.   Because traditional Christianity is centered on orthodoxy, meaning right belief, the immune system consists of a set of teachings that guard against other beliefs or loss of belief.  Christianity’s immune system includes the following teachings:

·         Doubt is a sign of weakness or temptation by Satan, the father of lies.

·         False teachers (those whose theology differs) should be cast out.

·         Believers should not be unequally yoked (partnered) with nonbelievers.

·         Nonbelievers have no basis for morality, so their motives are suspect.

·         If  Christians act badly, the flaw is in the persons, not the religion.

Given that core beliefs are naturally resilient and given the power of messages such as these, it will come as no surprise that people go to extreme lengths psychologically to defend religious dogmas. 

Cognitive dissonance theory, helps us to understand what happens when people are confronted with contradictory beliefs.  If, for example, I believe the world is fair (called a Just World Hypothesis), but a kind, generous neighbor gets assaulted and hurt, I am faced with a contradiction.  I can revise my view of the world (it isn’t so fair), the neighbor (she isn’t so good), or the harm done (it wasn’t so bad).  Surprisingly often, people resolve such contradictions in favor of a treasured belief rather than in favor of the evidence—even if this requires blaming victims for their own suffering or coming up with elaborate justifications for catastrophes.  When the catastrophe is the apparent failure of a prophecy or the moral failure of a religious leader, such justifications can be spectacular.

In Doubting Jesus Resurrection, Kris Komarnitsky offers an nice overview of cognitive dissonance concepts followed by a series of jaw dropping stories from history – each showing the extreme contradictions believers can accommodate. Small apocalyptic cults suffer the devastating failure of end-of-the-world prophecies and yet each, faced with crushing disappointment, finds some interpretation that leaves the cult belief system intact. In this light, Komarnitsky examines the pressures faced by Jesus followers when his triumphal entry into Jerusalem was followed by torture and death.

A small close-knit cult fending adjusting to the disappointment of another ordinary sunrise is just an extraordinary example of ordinary – the human tendency toward confirmatory thinking.  All of us are biased to seek information that fits what we already believe.  Confirmatory evidence jumps out at us, and we find it emotionally appealing.  It’s like our minds set up filters – with contradictory evidence stuck in gray tones on the outside and the confirmatory evidence flowing through in bright and shining color. 

Unfortunately, confirmatory thinking causes all kinds of problems.  Corporate leaders fall into group think about the best competitive strategy.  Jurors assume an accused criminal is guilty.  Politicians fabricate reasons for war—sure that the real evidence must be there somewhere.  Confirmation bias is so built into human thinking that the whole scientific endeavor is structured essentially to get around it.  The scientific method has been called, “What we know about how not to fool ourselves.”  And yet, as we know, even scientists end up embarrassing themselves from time to time by getting a little to eager to confirm their pet theories and forgetting how easy it is to fall prey to our own filters. 

Even outside our personal information filters is a set of ring defenses:  our communities.  Who forwards you email?  What magazines do you subscribe to?  What shows do you watch?  Because confirmation is so satisfying and contradiction is so uncomfortable, we surround ourselves with friends and colleagues and coreligionists who think like us.  Often, we join groups that do the filtering for us:  Democrats for America, The Nature Conservancy, Assemblies of God, The National Rifle Association.  These groups provide a steady flow of information confirming and elaborating what we think we know—and ensuring that a lot of contradictory information never makes it anywhere near our brains. They let us short-cut.  Instead of weigh the quality of arguments and evidence – we look at the source and either raise or lower a draw bridge.

In an even more impervious form of this, we form a group identity:  I’m a Catholic. I’m a Republican. I’m an American. I’m a Woman. I’m Hispanic. I’m a Calvinist.  Each of these identities creates what I call a tribal information boundary (TIB).  TIB’s are remarkable efficiency devices, allowing us to weave coherent story lines about the world around us.  But for someone seeking to understand complicated realities, they can be tremendously costly.  People inside the tribe may be most able to help us refine our insider knowledge, but it is people outside the tribe who are most able to show us new vistas.

When we actually allow ourselves to bump up against the limitations of our world view, when we acknowledge we’ve hit a wall and then find a way over or around it—that is when growth is most likely to occur.  In the 1998 comedy, “The Truman Show,” the protagonist, played by Jim Carrey, pushes past an information boundary and realizes he is living in the artificial world of a television set.  From childhood, Truman has accepted the explanations and roles offered him.  But he is confronted with small discrepancies, and one day he ignores his own fears and barriers that his community has erected, and punches through to the outside, and finds that there are familiar people there to welcome him. The movie’s message to us all:  It is possible.

Kris Komarnitsky, Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?

(This article is adapted from an interview conducted by Valerie Tarico on Moral Politics Television, Seattle, June 12, 2009.   Guest Reverend Rich Lang has been preaching his way through the book of Revelation this summer. Special thanks to Producer Bill Alford.)

Real Christians are going to disappear abruptly someday soon.  The world is going to descend into a bloodbath while someone known as the antichrist attempts to seize control of the planet. That is what some of your neighbors think—and some of your politicians.  Many of them even relish the thought. Is  Revelation, the last book in the Bible, a set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations?  Neither, says Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard Washington.

If the Book of Revelation isn’t a blueprint that tells us what is coming in the End Times, what the heck is it?

Like any book in the Bible, Revelation was written from the perspective of faith for the purpose of giving faith.  It was written in the early days of the Jesus movement to a persecuted minority that was fearing worse persecution. 

As the Jesus movement started in Jerusalem and Jesus was crucified, and there was this experience of resurrection, at the same time, there was a simultaneous political movement within Judaism of rebellion against the Roman Empire.  It peaked in the 60’s and 70’s.  It culminated finally—horrifically-- in the Roman legions marching into the country, destroying Jerusalem and burning down the temple. These two factors – the young Jesus movement and the brutally crushed rebellion–intersect in the writings we now call Revelation

 But Revelation doesn’t talk about Jerusalem being destroyed.  It talks about a beast with many heads and a dragon and the four horsemen. . .

That poetic language which sounds so strange to us was actually familiar to ancient readers.  The author was writing a dramatic script in a form of popular media. Today we all recognize different modes or “genres” of writing—the detective novel, the love sonnet, manga. . Each has its own familiar structure and images.  The same was true in the past. 

The book of Revelation belongs to a then popular genre of literature called apocalyptic.  The term apocalypse means “unveiling.” There were lots of apocalypses, each a graphic poetic vision of some radically transformed future in which the good guys win.  This genre began around 200 BC and went out of style around 150 AD.  The book of Revelation is also called the Apocalypse of John, and it is one of several explicitly Christian apocalypses that still exist today. In each, metaphoric language was used to communicate something that, experientially, felt too big for words. It was a way of trying to speak the unspeakable—and to inspire endurance and hope. 

So what was the author of Revelation unveiling?

Revelation was written about twenty years after the fall of Jerusalem. The author, who we know only as John, had lived during the horrors that accompanied fall of the city.  Imagine:  the Roman Empire is surrounding Jerusalem.  At the same time, civil war is raging within the walls.  People are literally starving to death.  As the siege continues, the Romans capture 20,000 Jews and crucify them on the walls of the city—while the city still is under siege.

20,000!  We think of the crucifixion being unique. 

No.  Crucifixions happened all the time. There were thousands and thousands of crucifixions.  The Jews wanted freedom.  To them it was a blasphemy to have the Romans in their land.  Many of them rebelled, and they lost.  Eventually, the city fell, and the people were slaughtered.  Many remaining were expelled from the land.  This is part of the Diaspora—the scattering of the Jews, who became dispersed around the Mediterranean—Asia Minor, Greece, Northern Africa and Europe. 

But the author, John, is a Christian. 

Remember, the earliest members of the Jesus movement were Jews, and so early Christians scattered with the rest of the Jewish people. Over time, thanks to this scattering and missionary activity, Christianity began to be adopted more widely by gentiles and at that point it began to grow rapidly throughout the Mediterranean.  John is writing to Pauline (gentile) churches, but they are very rooted in Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.

At the time Revelation is written, about twenty years after the devastating events of The Great Revolt, the young scattered Christian movement is being persecuted.  They are treated like Blacks in the South during the ‘30s and ‘40s.  A Christian carpenter might not be able to get work.  Some are lynched.  John, himself, is writing from exile, so whatever he was preaching was viewed by the Roman Empire as a threat to law and order. 

Why was the message so threatening? 

Clearly, part of his message was “Stop participating in the imperial cult.  Stop participating in the patriotic way of life of the Roman Empire which requires paying homage to the gods of the Empire and in particular the emperor as an incarnation of God.”  The Early Christian movement was an alternative to the way of empire. You know, Jesus is called “Lord and Savior”.  If you ask where did that language came from, that language came from Caesar.  Caesar was “Lord and Savior.”  Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus on December 25, which was when Roman celebrated the birthday of the Unconquered Sun.  The pagans believed that if they didn’t take care of the gods, the gods wouldn’t take care of them.  By forbidding the cult of the gods, the Christians threatened this balance. 

One thing confuses me.  Is John writing about events in his past or events in his future?

First of all, he is writing from a lived experience of what Empire can do.  That is the key to understanding his perspective.  He is writing a book that combines familiar political images.  The dragons, for example, are much like our political cartoons.  When you see an eagle and a bear you know it means the United States and the Soviet Union.  For him, he is using images largely out of Hebrew scripture to convey what the Roman Empire is, and what he believes will happen to the early Christian movement.  John’s primary message comes in Chapter 18:  Empire will fall.  Rome cannot last.  This power structure that seems so big and is so crushing of the people will crumble, and God will re-create out of the ruins a new Jerusalem. John continually counsels the movement to hold fast:  Those who endure to the end will be saved.  This is a book of hope: The empire is going to fall.  God is going to make a way where there is no way.

But had he—lost it?  With all of the bizarre images, I’ve heard Revelation called  “John on Acid.”

No.  Almost all the imagery in the book of Revelation is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and some comes from Greek myths.  In Chapter 12, you have the woman clothed in the sun and Satan falls out of the sky and there is this dragon that chases the woman.  Well, that is the birth of Apollo.  Dominion, who is the emperor at that time, he likens himself to Apollo.  He is the sun god.  So John is taking this known story and writing a counter-myth.  He is saying that Dominion is not so important as he thinks. The birth of the child, Jesus, that’s the real big story. 

The images of Jesus himself are rooted in Hebrew stories.  They simply cannot be understood unless you know that they are coming from the book of Daniel and Ezekiel and Zachariah.  The narrative, the story line is rooted in the Exodus story in which God liberates the Jews from Pharaoh’s empire – walks them through the Red Sea and the wilderness and sends them to a promised land.  Revelation is a recapitulation, a re-telling of the same story.  God is the god who frees us from empire, whether Pharaoh or Dominion.   We will come out of this into a land flowing with milk and honey.  One of the big exhortations of the book is:  “Come out of her.”—Come out of Roman Empire (as the Jews came out of Egypt).

What you are saying helps me to understand  why people who are immersed in this theology are so fearful of empire – the League of Nations, the Soviet Union, the United Nations—any form of internationalism. Among the “Left Behind” crowd, people who are bridge builders or peacemakers are seen as evil and to be mistrusted.  That is what John was talking about, that was his experience, even if people take it out of context. 

From the very beginnings, part of the Christian message was the notion of an end time.  God is going to clean up the world –which is a messy awful a place with a lot of violence and evil.  After all, the central hero of the Christian story is tortured and crucified-- put to death by an empire!  How is God going to clean up the world?  Jesus is going to come back and rule the world and shepherd the nations.

The Hebrew understanding of history is that it is going somewhere.  It is linear, not cyclical, which is a break with the agriculture-based earth religions.  Christianity, which is a child of Judaism, picks up the Hebrew storyline:  History is linear.  But –and this is really important-- in the Bible the end is never the end of the physical world.  It is the end of an age.  It’s the end, for example, of the Roman empire, and then what happens is not that everyone is whisked off to heaven but that on earth there is a renewal , a renewal of the earth itself, of culture, of the nations ,peace and justice, everyone has their own vineyard and fig tree.

So, where did the notion of everyone being lifted out of their clothes and cars and cockpits come from?

That comes from the 19^th Century.  An Anglo-Irish  theologian called John Darby created a new interpretive lens for the Bible.  It’s called Dispensationalism, because in this system, history is divided into seven “dispensations” or ages within an age. In this system, the Rapture leads to the Millennium when Jesus reigns on Earth for 1000 years but before the Millennium is the reign of the antichrist.  At different historical junctures different bad buys are picked as the antichrist.  In the 1970’s, thanks to Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, it was all about Russia. And the ten nations, the European Union would become part of the Beast.  Today dire warnings about Barack Obama being the antichrist are scattered about the internet. Or Osama Bin Ladin.

Believe me—I’ve seen plenty of both—even Chavez and Bono.   But come back, for a moment, to the Rapture itself.  What about that verse in Thessalonians  (1 Thess. 4:16).  There’s the Lord descending with a trumpet, and the dead in Christ rising and then “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.”

That is wonderful graphical mythical language which, when written, had very little to do with the plot of Left Behind.

Thessalonians is Paul talking with an early church in southern Europe, and he faces a specific challenge: Christians have died.  We had expected Jesus to come back before that happened. Now what do we do?  Paul thought he was living at the end of an age.  He thought he would see the day that God would come back, clean up the earth and restore Paradise.  But it hasn’t happened within the timeframe he expected, so he offers an explanation that integrates the existing facts—instead of Christ returning before any Christians have died, the dead and the living are united with Jesus together. 

Flash forward a little bit.  When you study very early church history, if you study the art of the early church you don’t see a lot of images of the crucifix or scenes of the crucifixion; you see images of paradise.   And there was a proclamation of the early church that had an optimistic view – that where we were headed --on earth as in heaven, was a paradise.  This was the expectation of many in the early Jesus movement. 

There was a historical process, and over time this expectation changed for some.  This process, which I don’t have time to go into, was wrapped around when Constantine became emperor and absorbed Christianity as the state religion.  Rather than being a minority faith it became the dominant faith.. Once it became the dominant faith Christianity radically changed because it became about politics and power and control of the nations.

You have this book that is all about how evil empires can be because he has this horrifying experience and now all of a sudden Christianity is in power; empire is on the side of Christianity. That’s a little awkward.

Yes.  And, the book of Revelation was dormant for many many years because of this. In our time the book of Revelation has come back with a vengeance because the imagery is made to order for wild interpretation.  You’ve got an entire generation of children being raised in these fundamentalist end-times churches, being told they are the last generation. 

You obviously think this is a bad thing.

Well, thankfully these families don’t live as if what they say is true is really true.  They  are still stashing away money to send their kids to college and for their own retirement.  If they really believed you would see a hardening of the faith.  There is a far right segment of Christian in which you do see this hardening—churches focused on “spiritual warfare” building walls rather than bridges, organizing services to celebrate gun rights, praying public prayers for the death of abortion providers or Barack Obama or judges.  This kind of far right hardening comes out of the misuse of apocalyptic literature. Christianity gets translated into a quest for purity and righteousness that will bring these prophesies to fruition. 

You said earlier that there were lots of apocalypses.  It was a popular medium. How did this particular book get into the Bible?

Well, there was controversy about that.  Many Christians didn’t want it in the Bible, and even Martin Luther questioned the decision of the Catholic councils to include it.  Revelation got into the Bible because the church fathers chose to believe that the same John who knew Jesus in person was the author of this and several other texts.  Their primary criterion was “apostolic authority.”  What we now know – this is just the evolution of our own knowledge—is that the authors who wrote the Gospel of John, the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John, were not the same person.  The script is very different.  The same phrases are not used.  One is written by a highly educated Greek author, the other written by a person whose primary language is Semitic. 

These books that the Catholic counsels thought were written by John, the companion of Jesus, they were written by two or three people? 

The people who actually knew Jesus, the twelve, none of them left writings for us.  All of these writings are written well after the death of Jesus.  The Church was looking for authority, and so they tried to choose writings that fit a hierarchical form of Christianity and that traced their lineage through the apostles back to Jesus.  The Bible is the book for the church and it was compiled by the Church for the purpose of helping the Church advance faith.  The books didn’t become finalized as scripture till 300 years after Jesus lived and died. 

I was taught as a child that the Bible was essentially dictated by God to the authors.  I was never taught about which books were chosen and how.  But I would assume that Catholics believe God gave perfect insight to the councils that made the decisions? 

I would assume so.  And that is a wonderful mask for authority.  When religion becomes a pursuit of power—a system to keep people in control, you are always going to have those games that are being played.  Against religion, you have the message of Jesus, which is a spiritual message – a message of freedom.

Part of what this comes down to is:  What is the Bible?  When you are dealing with an end times fundamentalist Christian, you are dealing with a person who believes that the Bible was written by God– God writes it and there is a secret code and if you are in the know you will know the code and the elect will know the code.  The Bible itself becomes a magical book, a secret script.  If you just know how to read the script, you’ll know where the world is going. And so people begin to live this script as if they live in the end times.

We’re so into that secret knowledge thing, aren’t we? You see it many places: Gnosticism, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Mormon temple, childhood clubs, Skull and Bones . . . .

Yes, and I think you see it in all religions.   I think that part of the religious impulse easily gets perverted into a quest for secret knowledge because it makes me more than you.  I am special, I am elect, I am closer to God, I know the truth.  The reality is that we are all schmucks trying to muddle through as best we can.

How Viral Ideas Hook Us

Did you know that Temple Baptist Church was built on land that sold for 57 cents, the amount saved by a little girl that had been turned away from their Sunday school?   Did you hear about the guy who died in his sleep, killed by his own farts?  Can you believe?! Elvis Presley said: "The only thing a nigger can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." And guess what --Scholars at the Smithsonian have uncovered writings of Nostradamus that relate to Barack Obama!

The above statements are false.  But that hasn’t kept them from circulating the internet for years.  Each of them is heart of a viral email, which means each has some quality that makes people forward it, over and over and over.  The first is a kind of message commonly known as “glurge,” too-sweet-to-be-true stories that nevertheless give many of us a warm feeling or even chills.  The second makes us laugh and piques our sense of curiosity.  The third plays with our contradictory fascination with celebrities, which includes a desire to tear them down.  The fourth appeals to our yearning for magic.  These stories all are drawn from the urban legends fact-finding site, Snopes.com.  What is the common theme?  Emotional arousal. 

Comparing religion to chain mail seems crass, but the kinship is real.  And as Francis Bacon said, “The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.”

Viral email has a variety of reproductive strategies.  Like computer viruses, many chain mail messages contain explicit “copy-me commands.”  Some promise us good luck if we forward the message to ten people before the day is up – or a week of happiness, or even prosperity.  Some threatens us with bad luck if we don’t.  Some tries to shame us:  “If you care about your friends, you’ll send this information about cervical cancer/visa fraud/brown recluse spiders . . .”   But most viral mails simply contain something that makes us want to pass them on.  They may make us laugh or feel validated and righteous.  Many delight us.  A few tap our sense of magic or mystery or transcendence.

The term “viral marketing” has itself gone viral recently, popularized by books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, or Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Corporations have discovered that their best sales staff are satisfied customers, and they’ve been experimenting:  Can we figure out the formula for starting a fad?  Can we seed the virus with a few hired hands who create buzz?  The Heath brothers offer communications professionals a simple formula that they call the “Six Principles for SUCCESs:”  SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES.[i]  Look at the formula.  Now think back about what I said regarding the boundaries of supernaturalism and the born again experience.  The fit is remarkably tight. 

In the field of medicine, epidemiologists study patterns of contagion.  They might track, for example, how an influenza virus spread across one region and how it jumped from country to country in the bodies of specific carriers.  Based on the way infections fan out, they may even be able to identify the “epicenter” of a disease.  Some of the tools of epidemiology are now being applied to study the spread of viral ideas. But whereas diseases spread passively, meaning people rarely try to infect each other, viral ideas, also known as “memes” spread by harnessing the human desire to share what we know and to learn from each other. Memes get transmitted through established social networks.  They spread horizontally within a generation, and vertically from generation to generation.  That is why specific religions are concentrated in one part of the world or another and children tend to have the same religion as their parents.

For developmental reasons, children are particularly susceptible to simply accepting the ideas of their parents and community.  If a parent says stoves burn you, cars can squish you, and bathing keeps you from getting itchy, kids tend to do best if they simply trust what their parents say.  Nature has designed children to be “credulous.”  This allows them to learn from the mistakes of their elders.  It makes them more efficient in acquiring valuable information and adapting to cultural norms. It is also why evangelical parents are encouraged to convert their children.   Research on identity development shows that if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave.  Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)

A successful religion needs to have the qualities of a successful virus.  In a changing environment, this means it must have the ability to mutate and adapt. In the past, religions spread largely by edict and conquest.  This is how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and into the Americas.  Today, though, religion is perceived as an individual choice and religions must gain share by attracting adherents.  This is why, today, the religions that are gaining mindshare are those that have good marketing, high birthrates, and what economists call “appealing club goods”. In the current environment, Christianity has been able to produce offshoots that need no edict or conquest.

Significantly, the religions that are growing right now are ones with strong copy-me commands.  Evangelical Christianity is centered on what Christians call the Great Commission:  “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost.”  In addition, just as the Roman church latched onto the strategy of competitive breeding (keep women home, sanctify a high birth rate), so Evangelicals have begun to explicitly add this form of copy-me command to the mix. By contrast, modernist Christianity is more often centered on what Christians call the Great Commandment:  “Love the Lord your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and . . . love your neighbor as yourself.”  In a straight up competition, the copy-me command wins out, and in fact, evangelicals are gaining mindshare, while modernists are losing it. 

One of the fastest changing aspects of our world is the growth of information.  As knowledge grows, some varieties Christianity accept new scientific or historical findings and reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions in light of our best understanding of the world around us. Tangentially, this is the approach taken by Tibetan Buddhism. The 14^th Dalai Lama  has said: 

"If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.” 

This kind of adaptation is common for forms of Christianity that, like Buddhism, are more centered in praxis (practice) than belief.  For those that are centered in belief, adapting to new knowledge is more difficult, and the survival strategy more often is a sort of fundamentalist retrenchment.  Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God, describes this retrenchment in the Abrahamic religions. 

The need to adapt may seem at odds with the recent success of fundamentalism, but in actual fact, fundamentalism is an adaptation to a changing world.  Rather than revising dogmas, fundamentalists develop stronger defenses against external threats to a traditional homeostasis.  An extreme example of this can be seen in the case of the Amish or Hassidic Jews:  the belief system sustains itself relatively unchanged by engaging people to re-create an ancestral environment in which the belief system emerged.

But most theological fundamentalists have a more hybrid approach.  They protect their children from external influence by home schooling or parochial schools, but don’t mind accessing creationist materials from interactive websites.  They provide in-house social services that include pop psychology.  They promote hierarchy and sexism but are willing to have women and children as spokespersons for these views. They play up the risks of inquiry and doubt and yet use scientific findings to make their arguments convincing. Fundamentalist populations resist ideological change, but they have learned to exploit popular culture, best business practices, new technologies, and even scholarship itself to maintain the survival of their beliefs. 

Since a virus and host fit together like a lock and key, understanding viral ideas helps us to understand the human mind, and vice versa. Retro-viruses and influenza mutate rapidly, which makes it hard to develop immunizations against them.  On the spectrum of religions, Christianity shows a similar flexibility, regularly spinning off new sects, denominations, and even non-denominational renegades.  Christianity has adapted to a broad range of human minds and cultures, a strategy that has resulted in success beyond the wildest visions of the patriarchs.

Learn More:

“Memetic Lexicon” http://www.lucifer.com/virus/memlex.html#MEME

Richard Brodie. - Virus of the Mind

Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 253-257.

The Born-Again Experience

“. . . I prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum.  When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself.  I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy.” --Cathy  “Something began to flow in me—a kind of energy . . . Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went.” --Colson   “It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving . . . I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body.” --Jean    “I felt something real warm overwhelming me.  It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity. . . . a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped . . . and ran.” --Helen.  (from Conway & Siegelman, Snapping, pp. 24, 32, 12, 31)

For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known.  A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy – this is the stuff of spiritual transformation.  Once experienced it is unforgettable, and many people can recall small details years later.  In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities.  A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children.  A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.  

This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation.  A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen.  Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying “the sinner’s prayer” may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship.  Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues.  Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy. 

What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity.  In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant.  Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs.  It requires a specific social/emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary. 

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have written an accessible overview of what they call sudden personality change, or “snapping.”  The first edition of their book, Snapping focused on small countercultural cults and self-help groups that sprang up in the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, EST, Mind Dynamics, Unification Church, Scientology, and others.  When asked about whether Evangelical Christianity might fit the pattern, Conway and Siegelman were reluctant to say yes.  Today they admit, “In America today, increasingly, that line [between a cult and a legitimate religion] cannot be categorically drawn. . . . Our research raised serious questions concerning the techniques used to bring about conversion in many evangelical groups.”(37).

Conversion is a process that begins with social influence.  As sociologists like to say, our sense of reality is socially constructed.  We will come back to this later.  Suffice for now to say that missionary work typically begins with simple offers of friendship or conversations about shared interests.  As a prospective converts are drawn in, a group may envelope them in warmth, good will, thoughtful conversations and playful activities, always with gentle pressure toward the group reality.

In revival meetings or retreats, semi-hypnotic processes draw a potential convert closer to the toggle point.  These include including repetition of words, repetition of rhythms, evocative music, and Barnum statements (messages that seem personal but apply to almost everyone-- like horoscopes).  Because of the positive energy created by the group, potential converts become unwitting participants in the influence process, actively seeking to make the group’s ideas fit with their own life history and knowledge.  Factors that can strengthen the effect include sleep deprivation or isolation from a person’s normal social environment.  An example would be a late night campfire gathering with an inspirational story-teller and altar call at Child Evangelism’s “Camp Good News.”

These powerful social experiences culminate in conversion, a peak experience in which the new converts experience a flood of relief.  Until that moment they have been consciously or unconsciously at odds with the group center of gravity.  Now, they may feel that their darkest secrets are known and forgiven.   They may experience the kind of joy or transcendence normally reserved for mystics.  And they are likely to be bathed in love and approval from the surrounding group, which mirrors their experience of God.

The otherworldly mental state that I refer to as the domain of mystics is known in clinical situations as a "transcendence hallucination,” but this term fails to reflect how normal and profound the experience can be as a part of human spirituality.  The transcendence hallucination is an acute sense of connection with a reality that lies beyond and behind this natural plane.  It typically lasts for just a few seconds or minutes but may leave profound impression that lasts a lifetime.  For Christians it may be interpreted as an encounter with a supernatural person -- Jesus, or an angel.  (A seeker of the paranormal might be convinced of an encounter with aliens or spirits.)  More often, a person gets a disembodied sense of connection accompanied by intense feelings of joy, wonder, peacefulness or alternately terror, depending on the context. 

Transcendence hallucination can be triggered by neurological events like a seizure, stroke, or migraine aura; or by a drug such as psilocybin, but it also can be triggered by over or under-stimulation of the brain.  Some mystics from the past have described or even drawn these events with such impressive detail that a diagnostic hypothesis is possible.  Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, wrote of the intense pain accompanying her visions and created scores of drawings that show the visual field distorted in keeping with a migraine aura. 

In modern times, author Karen Armstrong describes the seizures that she first thought to be triggered spiritually. In discussing an altered state known as Kundalini awakening, one migraine sufferer commented, “I usually don't follow any of the mystic/esoteric stuff, but I must say it is kind of strange to see all my symptoms lined up like that outside of a western/medical context."  Let me emphasize, though, that these altered states don’t depend on some kind of neurological damage or pathology.  They can be unforgettable, peak experiences for normal people, long sought and hard won by those who care about the spiritual dimension of life.  Sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, rhythmic drumming, or crowd dynamics have all been used systematically to elicit altered states in normal people. 

Since we humans are meaning-makers to the core, such a powerful experience demands an explanation.  But for most of human history, naturalistic explanations simply were unavailable.  “Lacking understanding and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these abrupt changes in awareness to a source outside the body.  They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communications that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time and earthly matter.”(Conway & Seligman, 30) Needless to say, some supernatural hypotheses are more compatible with what we know about ourselves and the world around us than others.  

In an evangelical conversion context like a revival meeting or missionary work, religious interpretations of the snapping experience are provided both before and after it occurs. These explanations become the foundation stones on which whole castles of beliefs later will be constructed.  The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly, which gives them the power to now transform the convert’s world view in accordance with their own theology.  Conversion activities can be harmful because all too often authorities use this power to promote a kind of tribalism that is built around exclusive truth claims and Iron Age moral priorities.  The unforgettable born again experience gets used to justify beliefs that may be factually or morally bankrupt.

The conversion process as I have described it sounds sinister, as if manipulative groups and hypnotic leaders deliberately ply their trade to suck in the unsuspecting and take over their minds.  I don’t believe this is usually the case.  Rather, natural selection is at play.  Over millennia of human history, religious leaders have hit on social/emotional techniques that work to win converts, just as individual believers have hit on spiritual practices they find satisfying and belief systems that fit how we process information.  Techniques that don’t trigger powerful spiritual experiences simply die out.  Those that do get used, refined, and handed down.

With few exceptions the evangelists, from mega-church ministers to “friendship missionaries,” are unaware of the powerful psychological tools they wield.  They are persuasive in part because they genuinely believe they are doing good.  After all, they have their own born again experiences to convince them that they are promoting the Real Thing.  Consider, for example, the Apostle Paul, whose Damascus Road event (possibly a temporal lobe seizure) transformed his moral priorities and sustained a lifetime of missionary devotion. What decent person wouldn't want to share the secret to healing and happiness? The challenge is trying to figure out exactly what that secret is.  As I say to my daughters, it is not enough to be well intentioned—even joyfully, generously so.  We also have to be right.

Essentials:
Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America's Epidemic of Personality Change

Iona Miller, “Fear and Loathing in the Temporal Lobes” http://neurotheology.50megs.com/whats_new_9.html (excellent bibliography)

Sharon Begley. “Your Brain on Religion” Newsweek May 7, 2001. http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm

On a warm afternoon in June, two men have appointments with a psychiatrist.  The first has been dragged to the office by his wife, much to his irritation.  He is a biologist who suffers from schizophrenia, and the wife insists that his meds are not working.  “No,” says the biologist, “I’m actually fine.  It’s just that because of what I’m working on right now the CIA has been bugging my calls and reading my email.”   Despite his wife’s skepticism and his understanding of his own illness, he insists calmly that he is sure, and he lines up evidence to support his claim.   The other man has come on his own because he is feeling exhausted and desperate.  He shows the psychiatrist his hands, which are raw to the point of bleeding.  No matter how many times he washes them (up to a hundred in a day) or what he uses (soap, alcohol, bleach or scouring pads) he never feels confident that they are clean. 

In both of these cases, after brain biochemistry is rebalanced, the patient’s sense of certainty falls back in line with the evidence.  The first man becomes less sure about the CIA thing and gradually loses interest in the idea.  The second man begins feeling confident that his hands are clean after a normal round of soap and water, and the cracks begin healing. 

How do we know what is real?  How do we know what we know?  We don’t, entirely.  Research on psychiatric disorders and brain injuries shows that humans have a feeling or sense of knowing that can get activated by reason and evidence but can get activated in other ways as well.  Conversely, when certain brain malfunctions occur, it may be impossible to experience a sense of knowing no matter how much evidence piles up.  V. S. Ramachandran describes a brain injured patient who sees his mother and says, “This looks like my mother in every way, but she is an imposter.”  The connection between his visual cortex and his limbic system has been severed, and even though he sees his mother perfectly well, he has no sense of rightness or knowing so he offers the only explanation he can find (Capgras Delusion). 

From malfunctions like these, we gain an understanding of normal brain function and how it shapes our day to day experience, including the experience of religion.  Neurologist Robert Burton explains it this way: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process.  Certainty and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”(OBC, xi) This “knowing what we know” mechanism is good enough for getting around in the world, but not perfect.  For the most part, it lets us explain, predict, and influence people or objects or events, and we use that knowledge to advantage.  But as the above scenarios show, our ability to tell what is real also can get thrown off. 

Burton says that the feeling of knowing (rightness, correctness, certainty, conviction) should be thought of as one of our primary emotions, like anger, pleasure, or fear.  Like these other feelings, it can be triggered by a seizure or a drug or direct electrical stimulation of the brain.  Research after the Korean War (e.g. R Lifton) suggested that the feeling of knowing or not knowing also can be produced by what are called brainwashing techniques:  repetition, sleep deprivation, and social/emotional manipulation.  Once triggered for any reason, the feeling that something is right or real can be incredibly powerful--so powerful that when it goes head to head with logic or evidence the feeling wins.  Our brains make up reasons to justify our feeling of knowing/ rather than following logic to its logical conclusion. 

For many reasons, religious beliefs are usually undergirded by a strong feeling of knowing.  Set aside for the moment the question of whether those beliefs tap some underlying realities.  Conversion experiences can be intense, hypnotic, and transformative.  Worship practices, music and religious architecture have been optimized over time to evoke right brain sensations of transcendence and euphoria.  Social insularity protects a community consensus. Repetition of ideas reinforces a sense of conviction or certainty. Forms of Christianity that emphasize right belief have built in safeguards against contrary evidence, doubt, and the assertions of other religions. Many a freethinker has sparred a smart, educated fundamentalist into a corner only to have the believer utter some form of “I just know.” 

Does this mean that rational argumentation about religion is useless?  The answer may be disappointing.  Religious belief is not bound to regular standards of evidence and logic.  It is not about logic but about something more intuitive and primal.  Arguments with believers start from a false premise—that the believer is bound by the rules of debate rather than being bound by the belief itself.  The freethinker assumes that the believer is free to concede; but this is rarely true.  At best the bits of logic or evidence put forth in an argument go into the hopper with a whole host of other factors.  And yet each of us who is a former believer (we number in the millions) reached some point in our lives when we simply couldn’t sustain our old certainties.  Our sense of knowing either eroded over time or abruptly disappeared.  So sometimes those hoppers do fill up.

Given what I’ve said about knowing, how can anybody claim to know anything? 

We can’t, with certainty.  Those of us who are not religious could do with a little more humility on this point.  We all see “through a glass darkly” and there is a realm in which all any of us can do is to make our own best guesses about what is real and important.  This doesn’t imply that all ideas are created equal, or that our traditional understanding of “knowledge” is useless.  As I said before, our sense of knowing allows us to navigate this world pretty well—to detect regularities, anticipate events and make things happen.  In the concrete domain of everyday life, acting on what we think we know works pretty well for us.  Nonetheless, it is a healthy mistrust for our sense of knowing that has allowed scientists to detect, predict, and produce desired outcomes with ever greater precision.

 The scientific method has been called “institutionalized doubt” because it forces us to question our assumptions.  Scientists stake their hopes not on a specific set of answers but on a specific way of asking questions.  Core to this process is “falsification” – narrowing down what might be true by ruling out what can’t be true.  And to date, that approach has had enormous pay-offs.  It is what has made the difference between the nature of human life in the Middle Ages and the 21^st Century.  But knowledge in science is provisional; at any given point in time, the sum of scientific knowledge is really just a progress report.  

When we overstate our ability to know, we play into the fundamentalist fallacy that certainty is possible.  Burton calls this “the all-knowing rational mind myth.”  As scientists learn more about how our brains work, certitude is coming to be seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  Certainty is a confession of ignorance about our ability to be passionately mistaken.   Humans will always argue passionately about things that we do not know and cannot know, but with a little more self-knowledge and humility we may get to the point that those arguments are less often lethal. 

Essentials:  Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain
                    V. S. Ramachandran  (on Ted.com), A Journey to the Center of Your Mind

More: Robert Jay Lifton. (1989) Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China  University of North Carolina Press.

Ronald Burks 2002.  "Cognitive Impairment in Thought Reform Environments"  http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~rb267689/  

Why God has a human mind.

Jesus was a human, fathered by a god and born to a virgin. He died for three days and was resurrected.  His death was a sacrifice, an offering or propitiation.  It brings favor for humans. He lives now in a realm where other supernatural beings interact with each other and sometimes intervene in human affairs.

Gradually the mainstream of the American public is becoming aware that none of these elements is unique to Christianity.  Symbologists or scholars who specialize in understanding ancient symbols, tell us that the orthodox Jesus story, as it appears in our gospels, follows a specific sacred or mythic template that existed in the Ancient Near East long before Christianity or even Judaism.  In part this is due to the flow of history.  Religions emerge out of ancestor religions.  Though the characters and details merge and morph, elements get carried through that allow us to track the lineage.   The Gilgamesh and Noah flood-hero stories are similar because the Hebrew story descended from the Sumerian story .  The same can be said of the Sumerian “Descent of Inana” and the Christian resurrection story.  Even religions that exist side by side borrow elements from each other -- a process called syncretism.

But another reason for similarities among religious stories is that all of them are carried by human minds.  To quote cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer, “Evolution by natural selection gave us a particular kind of mind so that only particular kinds of religious notions can be acquired. (p. 4) . . . All human beings can easily acquire a certain range of religious notions and communicate them to others” (Religion Explained, p. 3)  Our supernatural notions are shaped by the built-in structures that let us acquire, sort, and access information efficiently, especially information about other people. 

You may have heard the old adage:  If dogs had a god, God would be a dog; if horses had a god, God would be a horse . . . .  Humans are more inventive than dogs and horses, and not all human gods or magical beings have human bodies.  They do, however, have human psyches—minds with quirks and limitations that are peculiar to our species.  Philosopher John Locke believed that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate.  We now know this not to be the case.  (Leda, Principle 4).   Because we need to learn so much so fast, certain assumptions are actually built in.  This allows us to generalize from a few bits of data to a big fund of knowledge.  It lets us know more than we have actually experienced or been told.

Let me give you an example that will illustrate the point.  If I tell you that my "guarg," Annie, just made a baby by laying an egg and sitting on it, your brain says:  Guargs (not just Valerie’s guarg) are non-human animals that reproduce by laying eggs.  You have different categories in your brain for animal reproductive systems, and putting one guarg in the egg laying category puts them all there.  To oversimplify, we have a built in filing system.  Most of the labels actually start out blank, but some of them don’t.   The preprinted labels appear to include:  human, non-human animal, plant, man-made object, natural object.

A large percentage of our mental architecture is specialized “domain specific” structures for processing information about other humans.  We homo sapiens sapiens are social information specialists; that is our specialized niche in this world.  Our survival and wellbeing depend mostly on smarts rather than teeth, claws, stealth or an innate sense of direction, and most of the information we need to survive and flourish comes from other humans.  Our greatest threats also come from our own species--people who seek to out-compete, exploit or kill us.   For this reason, our brains are optimized to process information from and about other humans. 

How does all of this affect religion? 

Here is a concrete example.  Our brains have a specialized facial recognition module.  Studies of infants and brain injuries have taught us much of what is known about the inborn structures of our minds, and we know about the facial recognition module from both.  Shortly after birth, babies are uniquely attracted to two round circles with a slash beneath them.  Later on, brain injury or developmental anomalies can produce a disorder in which people cannot recognize faces, including their own(!)—even though other kinds of visual processing are perfectly intact.  This is called prosopagnosia.   Most of the time, though, our facial recognition module overfunctions rather than underfunctioning.  In ambiguous situations—looking at clouds, rocks, lumps of clay, or ink blots--we have a tendency to see faces.  Our brains automatically activate the facial recognition machinery even though it doesn’t really apply.  Through history people have seen gods, demons, ghosts looking at them.  Christians, whose interpretation of hazy shapes  is further shaped by belief in specific supernatural persons see  Jesus, the Virgin Mary, an angel, a demon, or even Satan. 

This illustrates a broader point that cannot be overemphasized in understanding the psychology of religion:  when faced with unknowns and ambiguities, our brains activate inborn information modules even when they don’t really apply.  We take unfamiliar situations and even random data and perceive patterns that are inherent, not in the external world, but in our own minds.  Furthermore, our pattern recognition systems err on the side of being overactive rather than underactive.  This is called apophenia.  It is alarming to look at a face and not see it immediately as a face; it is quite common to see a face in an array of leaves or shadows.

When we look at the world around us, we instinctively see more than faces.  We also “see” kindred conscious beings.  Humans (and some intelligent animals) have developed a capacity called “theory of mind.”  We not only have minds, we imagine that others have them, and we think about what they might be thinking.  To guess what someone else might do (or to influence what they might do) it is tremendously helpful to think about what they want and what they intend.  Theory of mind is so important in navigating our way through society that we can think about it several steps removed:  I can imagine what Brian is thinking about how Grace intends to respond to Janet’s preferences.    Furthermore, because our brains process information about minds differently than information about bodies, we can imagine human minds inside of all kinds of bodies (think stuffed animals, pet rocks or cartoon characters) or without any body at all, (think evil spirits, poltergeists or God). 

Because our theory of mind is so rich, we tend to over-attribute events to conscious beings.  Scientists call this hyperactive agency detection.  What does that mean?  It means that when good things happen somebody gets credit and when bad things happen we look for someone to blame.  We expect important events to be done by, for and to persons, and are averse to the idea that stuff just happens.  We also tend to over-assume conscious intent, that if something consequential happened, someone did it on purpose. 

This set of default assumptions explains why the ancients thought that volcanoes and plagues must be the actions of gods.  Even in modern times, we are not immune from this kind of attribution:  Hurricane Katrina happened because God was angry about abortions and gays; the Asian tsunami happened because he was disgusted with nude Australian sunbathers.  If gods are tweaking natural events, then we want to curry their favor.  Around the world, people make their special requests known to gods or spirits by talking to them and giving them gifts. Athletes huddle in prayer before a game, just in case those random bounces aren’t random.   After a good day at the casino, a thank-you tip may go into the offering basket.  Or it may be that the offering goes into the basket beforehand. 

All of this builds on the idea that gods or other supernatural beings are akin to us psychologically.  They have emotions and preferences.  They take action in response to things they like and dislike.  They experience righteous indignation and crave retribution.  They like some people better than others.  They respond to our loyalty by being loyal to us.  They can be placated or cajoled.  They like praise, affirmation, and gratitude.  They track favors and good-will in a kind of tit-for-tat reciprocity.  

Abstract theologies are a fairly recent invention in the history of human religion, and they tend not to govern religious behavior.  Even people who describe their god as omniscient or who insist that everything is predestined actually behave as if they need to communicate their desires and can influence future events by doing so.  The god of Christian theology and the god that ordinary Christians worship are two different creatures. 

If the structure of our minds predisposes us to certain kinds of religious beliefs, it also precludes others.    Nowhere in the world is there a supernatural being who exists only on alternate Tuesdays, or who sees everything but forgets it all in ten minutes, or who rewards us for ignoring and disobeying him.  Nowhere is there a god who knows the future, but only the next hour, or a god who starves people to death whenever he is pleased with them, or who is exactly like an ordinary person in every way.  Some ideas are simply not interesting to us.  They may be counter-intuitive in ways that make them forgettable instead of “sticky.” Maybe they don’t make good stories or maybe we don’t have good places to file them in our catalogue of memories.

According to Pascal Boyer, a good religious concept must strike a balance between being interesting and expected.  It must activate an existing ontological category (let’s say “river”), add some counterintuitive tag (when dark and bubbling river turns to blood and heals people), and retain the default assumptions of the category except those that are otherwise specified (river is wet, flows, is longer than it is wide, has a bottom, etc.)   We start with a familiar class of being or object then tweak it to pique our interest but leave intact our other basic assumptions about that kind of object or being.  If the supernatural thing we are discussing is a conscious being, it also needs to have a basically human mind.  Only under these conditions will it stick and get passed from one person to another.    

Christian beliefs are highly successful at getting retained and transmitted.  They fit our information processing structures and yet are counterintuitive in intriguing ways.  They capitalize on our tendency to attribute events to human-like causal agents who have minds much like our own. They allow us to take machinery that is designed for processing social information and apply it to the problems of understanding inanimate objects and natural phenomena.  They leverage our tendency to see patterns in ambiguous or random events.   Consequently they are intuitive and broadly applicable and are easily remembered.   

But if our brains allow for a wide range of religious concepts, how come so many people believe exactly the same thing?  And what makes them so sure that those ideas are not only interesting—they are true.  As we shall see in future articles Christian beliefs don’t just fit our mental categories.  They also leverage powerful emotions and social relationships so as to become the core reality for those who believe. 

Essentials:  Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained.  
            Andy Thomson, Why We Believe in Gods; American Atheists, 2009.

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Why Cognitive Science is Essential to Understanding Christianity.

My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59 and I was in my mid thirties.  In one of our last deep conversations before his 1000 meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would “get right with God.”  Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago.  His mother lived out her life in the Assemblies of God denomination that had recruited them all, while Dad settled into a closely allied form of Evangelical fundamentalism without the speaking-in-tongues bit.  As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins.  And yet of his six children three of us, by Evangelical standards, are now slated for eternal torture. We are on the wrong side of a battle being waged on a spiritual plane, a battle in which those who are not on the side of God are agents of evil.  If Dad were alive, our lack of belief would grieve him.

Religious belief is one of the most powerful forces in our world.  Believers think that it has the power to save us all.  Increasingly, doubters fear that the opposite may be true:  a tribal mindset, unaccountable to ordinary standards of reason and evidence but armed with state of the art weapons may hasten our extinction.  In the United States, religious affiliation is the best predictor of political party alliance.  Almost half of Americans insist that humans were created in their present form sometime within the last 10,000 years because the Bible says so.  In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shia split over theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us but that in their minds create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict. 

Why is belief so wide-spread and powerful?  The traditional Christian answer is:  because it’s true, and people who haven’t hardened their hearts against God recognize this when God’s plan of salvation is presented to them. 

But recent explosion of knowledge in cognitive science offers a new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological standpoint but from a practical standpoint.  What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs? What does evidence and reason have to do with it? How is it that six devoted Christian kids can turn into three devoted Christian adults and three agnostics?

The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human brain--the more we understand about human information processing--the more we glean bits of insight into the religious mind. 

This article is the first in a series of six.  Each takes a look some part of cognitive or social psychology, how it relates to our tendency toward religious belief.  The articles will focus on the following questions:

·         How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking?  Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?

·         How do we know what we know?  What gives us a feeling of certainty?  What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?

·         How do conversion experiences work?  What makes religious conversion transformative?

·         How does our social group influence or even control our religious beliefs?  How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?

·         Why do missionaries target children?  How does religious identity develop in childhood?  How is belief in childhood different from belief acquired as an adult?

·         What makes beliefs resistant to change?  What causes people to lose belief?  When are people open to reexamining religious assumptions?

Before looking at these questions, it is helpful to understand why belief is so important in Christianity.  For traditional Christians— belief is the heart of the Christian religion.  In the final analysis, believing that Jesus Christ died as a “propitiation” for your sins matters enormously to God. It is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell.  No matter how kind and loving your life may be, no matter that you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what great things you may accomplish in the service of humanity or the world at large – if you believe wrong you are doomed.  Only if you believe correctly do virtue and service become relevant. The creedal councils, canonization of scripture, inquisitions, purges and centuries of conversion activities can be understood only in this context. 

This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions.  In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on belief.  The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to people or natural events like storms, earthquakes, illness, birth and death.  But the point of religion wasn’t belief; it was to take care of the gods so that they would take care of you and your community.  The word “cult” (Latin cultus, literally care) is related to the word “cultivation.”  We talk now about cultivating ground so that it will bear fruit.  Nonprofits talk about “cultivating donors.”  That was what the gods cared about, and so it was the heart of religious practice. 

From the beginning, Christianity was different.  Jesus worshipers cared tremendously about right belief, also known as orthodoxy.  Bart Ehrman’s book, Lost Christianities, offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus criticized and competed with each other, and one of them won out.  Some of groups (e.g. Ebionites) believed that Jesus was a fully human Jewish messiah and that Jesus worshipers must follow the law.  Others (e.g. Marcionites) believed that Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on human likeness.  Still others (Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine “Eon” during the years of his ministry—revealing to his followers secret knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane.  Others, now known as proto-orthodox or Roman, had ideas about Jesus that lead to the views of Christians today.  (“Roman Catholic” means Roman universal.)  What all of these groups agreed on was that it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was and what Christianity should be. 

This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism.  It existed in a rudimentary form in Judaism, but even today Judaism is more concerned with living right than believing right.  Christianity’s exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire.  Polytheists often are quite agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon.  Christians could persuade pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off of the others.  Today, in India, for example, Evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god. 

Eastern religions don’t share Christianity’s concern with belief.  The emphasis is more on practice or “praxis” –spiritual living, self-renunciation, insight or enlightenment-- and among ordinary people, a sort of cult or caretaking of the gods like that practiced by ancient pagans.  Right belief isn’t what lets you move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain nirvana.  Nor is it what gets you the favor of gods. 

Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or reproductive strategies, so religions compete for human mind-share in different ways. An emphasis on propagating belief (ie. evangelism) and purity of belief (ie. orthodoxy) is only one of those. 

In the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity.  Modernist theologians began reexamining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and human history.  In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain, and many modernist Christians are more like members of Eastern Religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief.  But a backlash emerged in response to modernism.  People who proudly called themselves “fundamentalists” insisted that no-one was a real Christian who didn’t hold the traditional beliefs.  Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch, and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward emphasis on right belief.

This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square.  It is the mindset that sends Christian missionaries out into the world seeking converts in impoverished corners of the planet.  It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be distributed in Iraq and has organized to establish control of the American military hierarchy, seeking to create an “army of Christian soldiers.”  To understand American Christianity specifically or monotheism more broadly, it is necessary to understand the psychology of belief. 

Essential Reading:  Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities.           

Evangelism in the halls of the Pentagon. Personalized Bible studies for foreign diplomats. Passion of the Christ advertisers next to plates in the Air Force Academy mess hall. Officers Christian Fellowship buses from military bases to revival meetings. A Southern Baptist fundamentalist at the head of the Chaplain Corps.

Through Christian Embassy and similar organizations, millions of dollars annually are dedicated to insuring that our military leadership is steeped in born-again Christianity. The investment has paid off. Mikey Weinstein at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation receives letters daily from service men and women who have been ostracized or pressured because they aren't born again. Ironically, most of those who complain are Christians -- just not the right kind.

You can't have this kind of conversion activity going on inside the military without it spilling over to the outside. One missionary boasts that he sent 1.3 million tracts to Iraq. Claiming to be humanitarian aid workers, others go bearing Bibles and video tapes or coins with Bible verses for Iraqi children. But much of the public didn't get the pattern until Al Jazeera this week ran footage of soldiers unwrapping Bibles in Afghanistan and a chaplain urging them to "hunt people" for Christ.

From a moral standpoint, the behavior of missionary soldiers is akin to missionaries who pretend to be aid workers. Soldiers handing out tracts or Bibles are violating an explicit military rule while deceptive aid workers violate an implicit ethical rule, but the reason those rules exist is the same -- to prevent harm. How much effort and tax money has gone into convincing the Arab world that our presence among them is not a religious crusade? How much lethal hatred have our soldiers absorbed because Muslims believe that it is?

Even when conversion activities don't cause soldiers to get physically hurt or genuine aid workers to be driven off, they do cause harm. A conversion agenda undermines the slow painstaking work of laying down trust, the foundation material that lets us bridge our cultural and religious differences and see our shared humanity.

So why would soldiers put their fellows at risk? Why would those who seek to serve the God of Truth lie about their objectives? Why can we count on these problems continuing? Because evangelical Christianity is about evangelizing. Evangelicals believe that they have a moral mandate to win converts, one that trumps other moral priorities.

Don't get too superior. The fact is, we all weigh moral priorities against each other constantly, violating some in the service of others. Constantly. The problem isn't that evangelicals are doing this. The problem is what they believe.

From its beginnings, Christianity has been a proselytizing religion, one that seeks to convert others to orthodoxy, meaning right belief. The writer of Mark didn't say, "If you're finding this way of life rich and full you might want to share it with a friend." No, he said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost." (Mk 16:15) Christians call this the Great Commission, and it appears in various forms in our Bible. "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." (Mt 4:19) Some religions are about tending the gods. Some are about living well or attaining insight. Traditional Christianity is about believing well and attaining salvation and persuading others to do the same. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved -- from eternal torture.

If you truly believed that this is how things work, wouldn't winning converts take priority over a slightly increased risk to your buddies? Wouldn't it take priority over some peacekeeping mission? Wouldn't it take priority over being up front with immigration officials and people you befriend?

When the Asian Tsunami happened a few years back, a local mega-church suggested how members could respond . (I'm paraphrasing): 1. Pray for the people who were affected. 2. Give to Mars Hill Church. 3. Give to our Church building missions in India. From the outside it is appalling that an institution would seek to divert the compassionate impulse into conversion activities or filling their own coffers. But if you genuinely believe, as they do, that belief is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell for eternity, what higher good could there be?

I get frustrated sometimes with well-intentioned tripe about respecting all beliefs, as if, in order to respect each other as human beings we must subjugate reason and evidence to the higher priority of making nice. Beliefs matter. They shape behavior, and when they are powerful enough, they control it. If you walk in my front door and I believe that you are in my house to kill my daughter, that belief dictates my every move. If my husband believes I am wrong, he has a moral imperative to argue me down. And fast.

True believers of all stripes take belief too seriously. They mistake the feeling of certainty for external reality, and they underestimate the vast human capacity to err. But I think that many of the rest of us don't take belief seriously enough. We think beliefs can somehow exist in isolation from social and personal priorities. We talk about people setting aside their religion in the voting booth, as if they could or should pull their deepest values on and off like a sweatshirt.

Does everybody have the right to believe whatever they want? Yes.

But that doesn't mean we must give religious belief a free pass. We don't have to treat "I just know" as if it meant something about anything other than the speaker's mental state. Nor should belief be treated as a valid excuse for bad behavior, the way that intoxication used to be. Harm done in the names of gods is still harm. A chaplain or soldier who doesn't understand this doesn't belong on the government payroll.

Organizations like the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and Americans United are fighting to re-establish the legal separation between church and state, but some religious beliefs obligate practitioners not to honor this separation. The only solution I can see is to address the beliefs themselves -- to stop exempting them from the normal rules of discourse. Any beliefs that insert themselves into the public square must be subject to rigorous public scrutiny and debate. We owe it to ourselves and each other to take belief more seriously.

The circles I run in include a fair number of recovering fundies—people who were raised on the notion that morality comes from Jesus. In fact, the former Calvinists among us were taught that anyone who is not "washed in the blood" is utterly depraved. For real. A Seattle Calvinist mega-minister, Mark Driscoll, had this to say to his flock: "If the resurrection didn’t literally happen, there’s no reason for us to be here. If the resurrection didn’t literally happen, there are parties to be had, there are women to be had, there are guns to shoot, there are people to shoot." (Have you heard that Calvinism is all the rage?)

Children are hard-wired to be credulous, to accept what they are told—which means that this shit gets inside people at a gut level—which means it takes a lot of work to get it back out. Recovering fundies spend a fair bit of time reminding each other that just because something got wired into your brain before your critical faculties developed doesn’t mean it’s true. So of course last week’s Pew report about churchgoing and torture approval made the rounds.

In case you missed it, Pew released survey data showing that the more frequently someone went to church, the more likely they were to approve of torture. (So much for total depravity on the outside.) Church attendance in this case may be a proxy for conservative religious belief. Of the groups surveyed, Evangelical Christians were most likely to think that torture is often or sometimes ok (62%), followed by Catholics (51%), followed by mainline Protestants (46%). Nonbelievers were least likely to agree (40%).

What’s the deal? Over at the Washington Post religion blog, On Faith, modernist theologian Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, suggested that maybe the problem is rooted in theology, what is called the "penal theory of atonement." Jesus gets torture and death because the rest of us deserve it. So through the twists and turns of theo-logic, Jesus getting tortured to death turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the human race. It’s the way believers escape the fate that awaits the rest of us—and is a part of God’s perfect, loving plan.

"For Christian conservatives," Thistlewaite says, "severe pain and suffering are central to their theology." In evidence, she points to Evangelical enthusiasm for Mel Gibson’s movie, a theologically justified orgy of Hollywood torture. She has a point. Convinced of the film’s salvific merit, my mother’s church bussed in teens and made special arrangement for wheelchair-bound elderly. Wouldn’t want them to miss that half-hour beating scene.

Does penal atonement theology lead to torture approval? Could be. A host of other hypotheses were suggested in response to Thistlewaite’s article, most of them none too flattering in their assessment of those Evangelical churchgoers:

• --It’s political. They’ve allowed the GOP instead of the gospel to shape their thinking.
• --They don’t think. Being a Christian requires you to torture logic every day.
• --Christians have a higher duty to protect innocents than prisoners.
• --Since God approves of torturing most of the human race for eternity it must be ok.
• --Witch drowning, heretic burning, even medieval waterboarding – the Church has a lot of practice at torture.
• --Evangelicalism is authoritarian—so is torture.
• --Anyone who believes in torture isn’t a true Christian.
• --They approve because it’s Muslims who are being tortured.
• --The ends justify the means in saving souls; the ends justify the means elsewhere.
• --Since Christian leaders are saved, they can do no wrong.
• --Evangelical Christianity is a tribal religion, focused on distinguishing in-group from out-group, and out-group actors don’t have rights.
• --Christians walk around with an instrument of torture dangling from their necks.
• --Many Christians misunderstand the message of Christ.

After spending 10 years watching my tired father twitch in church, I’ll confess to my personal favorite: "Sometimes sermons are such that congregants who cannot fall asleep feel that torture is part of God's plan; this does not imply that they like it."

But one comment actually made me think. It was from a nonbeliever who expressed her dismay, not that so many Christians were willing to condone torture, but that so many nonbelievers did too. Christian fundamentalism may increase tolerance of torture, but if so, it is part of a broader problem.

Scholar Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade,The Real Wealth of Nations) offers a framework that may lend some relevant insights. Eisler proposes that all institutions, ideologies, and relationships can be thought of on a continuum from domination orientation to partnership orientation. In a domination orientation, people are caught up in the business of competing for control. You either eat or are eaten, and given the option, most people would rather be at the top of the food chain. Underlings use what power they do have: manipulation, deceit, passive resistance, even suicide. Those in power do harm, often because they perceive that the alternative is "being done to." Being the torturer is better than having your hands tied behind your back and a hood over your head.

Evangelical Christianity has a strong dominance orientation. The metaphor of "spiritual warfare" is ubiquitous. Onward Christian Soldiers. Dominionists seek to take control of the reins of power to rule the rest of us according to Biblical principles. In the church I grew up in, women were taught to submit, even to abuse. My pastor gave a full sermon on breaking the will of his two year old. Spare the rod . . .

But the rest of us are not immune from this mentality of domination either, which ultimately is a mentality of fear, the fear of exploitation or insufficiency. It’s so—primate. Unless the weaker monkey can sneak, the dominant monkey will eat all the grapes. Unless the weaker chimp can sneak, the dominant chimp will get to mate with all the best females. But even our primate cousins would have impossibly wretched lives without the rudiments of compassion and cooperation. Chimpanzees both seek help from one another and give it. Rhesus monkeys have been willing to starve for a week rather than shocking another monkey to get fed (Hauser, pp. 354-355). Their behavior reflects a complex blend of domination and partnership strategies dictated largely by instinct. But, our intelligence allows us more behavioral flexibility than any other species. We who call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens –wise, wise—have the power to understand fear and domination deeply and to orient our personal relationships and social institutions toward the other end of the continuum.

Even as old an institution as Christianity has the power to learn. That may be one of the most important take-aways from the Pew study. Yes, as many people pointed out, the Church has a history of embracing torture, sanctifying it theologically and using it to defend purity of belief. And yes, those Christians who are still stuck defending the "fundamental" belief agreements made in the Fourth Century may be stuck defending torture as well.

But Christians like Thistlewaite who have been willing to re-evaluate the old regula fidei or rules of faith have moved both theologically and morally. Many mainliners center their theology not in "penal atonement" but in radical hospitality. Call it the Great Commandment. Call it love. Like partnership-oriented Humanists, Buddhists and others, modernist Christians teach their children how to think rather than what to think. They model their values and share their theological hunches but don’t feel a need to "break" the kids at age two to control their spiritual quest. If that doesn’t help us to outgrow torture, I don't know what will.

This week the Supreme Court declined to review a Texas murder case in which a juror brought a Bible into the sentencing process - showing that the Bible recommends death for anyone who kills another person with an iron rod (Numbers 35:16).

Let me say for the record that I'm not against the death penalty, and in this case it sounds like the defendant fit my criteria, too. I know I'm ruining my liberal credentials here, but I frankly don't have any moral problem with the jury condemning him to death. However, to do so based on the sanctification of a Bronze Age legal code is somewhat horrifying--especially given the list of other "crimes" that are recommended for capital punishment in the Bible.

Yes, yes, the court assures us that even though bringing the Bible into the sentencing was improper, there is no evidence that it swayed the jury. Rest assured that when the Bible and other authorities (like our judicial system ) are at odds, we can trust Texas jurors to ignore the Bible and do what is right. Even though half the country believes that God made humans in their present form because the Bible says so--we can count on Texans (school boards excepted) to follow the evidence and the constitution.

All the same, just in case an issue like this should come up in your state, thirty six different offenses in the Bible qualified for capital punishment. Do any of these apply to you?

Cursing Parents
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him. Leviticus 20:9
Working on the Sabbath Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Exodus 31:15

Premarital Sex (girls only)
. . .If, however, this charge is true, that evidence of the young woman's virginity was not found, then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father's house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, Deuteronomy 22:20

Disobedience (boys only)
If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. Deuteronomy 21:18

Worshipping any god but Yahweh
If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that . . . hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; . . .Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die. Deuteronomy 17:2-5

Witches
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus 22: 18

Wizards (epileptics? migraine sufferers? schizophrenics?)
A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:27

Loose Daughters of Clergy
And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire. Leviticus 21:9

Girls who are Raped within the City Limits
If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city . . . But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. Deuteronomy 22:23-25

Blasphemers
And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death. Leviticus 24:16

Anyone Who Tries to Deconvert Yahweh Worshipers
If anyone secretly entices you--even if it is your brother, your father's son or your mother's son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend--saying, "Let us go worship other gods," . . . you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them. Deuteronomy 12:6

Men who Lie With Men
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:13

Adulterers
And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20: 10-12

Men who Lie with Beasts and Beasts who Lie with Men
And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast. Leviticus 20:15

So. Are you up for the death penalty?

Just so you know, it could be worse. As I am reminded by people who want me to make nice, this list represents an advancement from mob justice. They are right, and the Levitical Code would a fascinating window into human moral history were it not for the fact that juries in Texas, politicians in Colorado, and clergy in Africa all advocate the death penalty for one person or another on the basis of these texts (murderers, homosexuals, and child witches respectively).

When people put God's name on Bronze Age documents, and then make those documents a golden calf, they get stuck with Bronze Age moral thinking. Maybe it's time to take the Bible down off of its pedestal, and acknowledge the obvious human handprints on the texts. Maybe it's even time to do again what Thomas Jefferson did: cut the book apart, keep the parts that are worth keeping, and leave the rest on the floor in the cutting room of history.

Comments at: http://www.streetprophets.com/story/2009/4/22/124045/027

In some ways, there's a symbiotic relationship between evangelicals and secularists. The religious right emerged in response to a widespread sense of cultural grievance stemming from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Today's newly organised atheists and agnostics were mobilised by the theocratic bombast of Bush-era Republicans. More than ever, one's religion is tied up with one's political choices rather than family history.

To illustrate, let’s let one of these mobilized nonbelievers speak for himself. This is from “Foetusnail” at BoingBoing (Comment #46):

First, everyone needs to get this straight: Atheists wouldn't give a tinkers damn about any of these religions if they would mind their own business; if they could mind their own business, they would be forgotten overnight. But they won't, they can't. Their holy books demand they interfere with the lives of those around them.

Secondly, Christians are a target in the Western World, because they are the largest and most powerful religion in the Western World. They have been struggling to control the lives of the people and their governments for almost two thousand years.

Now, let me tell you the truth in four words; we are at war. This is an ideological war for freedom from religion and superstition. We are fighting off the last shackles of the Dark Ages. We are fighting for knowledge and against fear and ignorance. These people don't deserve any more respect than if they were trying to shutdown hospitals, think stem cell research.

Think of the pope and the recent condom/AIDS controversy. Millions of people are dead because these whack jobs don't believe in passing out condoms; a position supported by my government and financed with my tax dollars. F*** Them.

Are more social ills associated with religion or a lack thereof?

If you're honest, your answer to this question probably maps to your belief status. After all, most of us like to think we're on the side of the elves, not the orcs-- that we and our kind are making the world better. In the absence of clear evidence, the religious and the nonreligious both believe this. Every once in a while, though, we actually get a bit of data to mull over, and last week some interesting research hit the press.

One of the oft touted benefits of religion is that it eases our dying. Surprise: According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive."

Religious patients were less likely than secular patients to sign do not resuscitate orders or to create living wills. They were more likely to want ventilators to keep them breathing till the bitter end. They got more ICU care. Doctor Holly G. Prigerson, an author on the study, offers a very benign explanation for this pattern: "To religious people, life is sacred and sanctified," Dr. Prigerson said, "and there's a sense they feel it's their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible."

If you are a nonbeliever, set aside your annoyance at her implication that life isn't sacred for the rest of us. The problem with this explanation is that it simply doesn't map to the facts of the situation. These patients knew they were already in the final stages of the dying process. They also knew that their use of extraordinary measures was costly, though they wouldn't incur that cost themselves. Medicare spends one third of its entire budget on people in their last year, much of this on people in the last week of life. In a world where children go without immunization, women go without prenatal care, and young adults can't afford insurance, the choices these patients made did not increase the sacred and sanctified life on this planet. The opposite is true.

Even for themselves, they may have gained little.  The measures used to prolong the dying process often are associated with suffering and pain above and beyond that caused by the terminal illness itself—leaving a person with little capacity to experience a few more hours or days to experience that which we cherish in life. 

Why might devout believers avoid preparing for death and then want anything medical science has to offer to prolong the dying process? I can't help but put on my therapist hat here and offer a hunch.

The fact that devout patients more often failed to take preparatory steps like living wills and advanced care planning gives us a clue. It suggests that they were avoidant--coping with the dying process in part by not thinking about it. As a coping mechanism, avoiding works really well in some ways and not so well in others. It can shut out a host of negative emotions, but it also can get in the way of doing what needs doing, on a practical level or an emotional level or both. Then, if an avoided reality breaks through, you're not ready. Think, for example, about how you avoided studying for exams.

Avoidance suggests anxiety or fear.

We are made to be scared of dying--to fight for life and as the poet Dylan Thomas put it to "rage against the dying of the light." Nonreligious people have to face this head on. They have to wrap their brains around the idea of non-existence, which frankly is rather hard to grok. Emotionally it raises not only fear but anger, confusion and grief. Religion offers a shortcut. Death isn't really death. It is a transition to the next phase of life. In Christianity, when you die you retain your personal identity and memories. You become either a perfected or perfectly tormented version of yourself. For the Christian believers in the study, this is what their religion teaches, and as believers they expect to be perfected, not tormented.

But very few people believe in heaven or hell the same way they believe in the floor beneath their feet. If they did, as Christian philosopher Ken Himma has pointed out, it would be unconscionable for them to have children and risk the latter. This week a devout airline pilot was convicted of manslaughter, because, in the face of potential disaster he handed off controls to a copilot and began praying. (Sixteen people died.) Cases of this type are mercifully rare; if they weren't, the devout would not be entrusted with planes. Faced with the prospect of fiery death, usually prayer isn't quite as trusted as the control panel.

In psychological research, stated beliefs don't always match what subtle indicators like eye movements, sweating or reaction time reveal a subject's underlying assumptions to be. Freud was wrong about many things, but he was right that a whole lot of stuff going on in our brains isn't available to our consciousness. We know this to be true of religion. (Pascal Boyer)

Implications? Even though belief offers a shortcut around anger and fear at the thought of death, it isn't a perfect solution. At some level, a believer may wonder or even know that he simply doesn't know, but belief itself precludes the hard work of coming to peace with nonexistence. So, in those hard final days, faith is there, but subterranean fear is too. We are all human, after all.

That is my best guess about what is going on with those cancer patients. Correlation is not causation, and let me caution that my clinical hunch may be quite wrong.  Religion may increase  other feelings that make people want to prolong the dying process.  Fear of death may increase religiosity.  Some other factor may contribute to both.  Given the social costs, these questions seem worth exploring. 

As a society, it is becoming more and more clear that collectively we have to make some hard choices about medical care. We have been living high on the borrowed hog, pretending that we can have it all. But in a world where economic theory meets reality, unlimited access to aggressive life prolonging technologies has an opportunity cost. The tradeoff is less healthy children and young adults because of money not spent on simple preventive measures and early interventions.

Will religion help us make these decisions in the most moral way possible? (Our wisdom traditions, both religious and secular, do archive the best ethical thinking of our ancestors.) Or-- will the yearning for eternity make it harder to tend the precious fragile lives that are sacred to all of us here on earth?

Comment at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/18/710284/-Losing-Your-Religion-How-to-Talk-to-Your-Kids

Sometimes I get letters from former Evangelical/fundamentalist Christians who are also parents. "What do I say to my kids?" they ask. "I raised them to believe that without the blood of Jesus they are evil sinners. What a horrible thing for them to think! I feel guilty." "All of their friends are members of our old church, so we keep going. I don’t want to tear them apart, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to pretend." "When I try to talk to them they just cry. They think I’m going to hell."

Polls show that more and more of us are questioning our received traditions, seeking to base both our personal lives and our public policies on reason and evidence.  For parents, this brings some extra challenges. Changes that may feel rewarding to us personally can be confusing and scary to kids who love us. No matter what age the kids are, telling them your beliefs have changed or even that you no longer believe can be tricky. Here are three suggestions.

1. Help them to understand your changes as a matter of spiritual growth rather than spiritual abandonment.

The bottom line is that moral and spiritual evolution are very much in keeping with the history of human religion, including Christianity. Every past generation answered our deepest questions as best they could. What is real? What is good? How can we live in moral community with each other? But every generation was like the blind men and the elephant. They were limited by their cultural and technological context – their point in history.  Besides which,  they, like us, were imperfect. By outgrowing the answers that were handed down to us, we honor their quest and continue their journey.

Here is how I explained my own loss of faith to my extended family.

Even if you emphasize growth, both your own and that of our ancestors, your kids will ask about your current beliefs. After all, you’ve probably taught them to think that it’s the answers that matter, not the process. Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian? Do you believe in Jesus? Are you going to Hell? Try to anticipate their questions and think ahead about some simple responses that are both honest and reassuring. But let them know that you are still learning and that you expect to keep learning for the rest of your life. The nice thing about this framework is that it allows your conversations to continue evolving.

2. If your children are still at home, don’t forget that they may need a new community.

As you continue to grow and change, you may find community online or with your spouse or you might simply prefer solitude and good books in this next phase of the quest. But if you have raised your children with religion in the center of their lives, they will have their own need for explicit conversations about religion, spirituality and morality. What should replace Sunday school or Pioneer Girls or Bible study?

On top of this are their social needs. Did your church reach out to kids with fun and music? Your kids may have their friends, their weekend activities, and their summer camps all integrated with religion. It’s not fair to cut them off abruptly just because you’ve hit your own tipping point.

Think about seeking out a moral/spiritual community that allows room for doubt or even atheism. A Unitarian church might be a fit, or a Quaker meeting or Ethical Culture Society. If you were in Christian fundamentalism, you may not know that within Christianity there are traditions that would allow your children access to familiar rituals and stories without feeding the belief that the Bible is perfect and their parents are doomed. Traditions I might look at include United Church of Christ, United Methodist, and Episcopal. All of these recognize the human handprints on the Bible and traditional dogmas—and they allow a humble, inquiring approach to the meaning of Christian faith. However, this very much depends on the individual minister. Openness to interfaith or "interSpiritual" work can be one indicator that a group doesn’t make exclusive claims about truth and salvation. Pay particular attention to whether your children would be offered explanations of the world that seem real and right to you, and whether they would have a group of peers.

3. Trust yourself, even when you are feeling your way in the dark, to be a spiritual guide for your children.

You may feel less wise or less confident than before, but that is because you have moved forward. Don’t be afraid to talk with them about spiritual matters, just because you no longer have a clear set of pat answers. What you do have still is deeply held values and principles that guide your life. What are they? Have you ever put them into words? At the Wisdom Commons or the Virtues Project International or similar sites you can find quotes, stories, and curriculum materials to help you talk with your kids about your moral core.

As complicated and awkward as it may feel to find the right words for all of this, it’s worth it. You have the chance to model for your kids what it means to be a lifetime learner -- someone who cultivates the curiosity and humility that can make it actually feel good to realize you were ignorant. Along the way, if you keep asking questions, you will be making some wonderful discoveries, and part of the delight can be sharing them. If you once gave your kids a fish, now you can invite them on a fishing expedition. Who knows what you might catch together!

Valerie Tarico is a Psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth; founder of www.WisdomCommons.org; and host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.