RELIGION – Some More Viewpoints
From “The Meaning of Human Existence” by Edward O Wilson
Rapture, a “joy excessive and sweet,” as Spain’s great mystic Saint Theresa of Avila described it in her 1563-65 diary, can be achieved variously by music, religion – and hallucinogenic drugs such as the Amazonian religion-enhancer ayahuasca. Neurobiologists have tracked at least some of the peak experiences of music to at least one cause, the release of the transmitter molecule dopamine within the striatum of the brain. The same biochemical reward system also mediates pleasure in food and sex. Because music began in Paleolithic times – bird-bone and ivory flutes date back more than thirty thousand years – and because it remains universal in hunter-gatherer societies around the world, it is reasonable to conclude that our loving devotion to it has been hardwired by evolution in the human brain.
In almost all living societies, from hunter-gatherer to civilized-urban, there exists an intimate relationship between music and religion. Are there genes for religiosity that prescribe a neural and biochemical mediation like that of music? Yes, says evidence from the relatively young discipline of the neuroscience of religion. Twin studies that measure the role of genetic variation, studies of hallucinogenic drugs that mimic religious experience, the impact on religiosity of brain lesions and the neural events tracked by brain imaging all suggest strongly that a religious instinct does indeed exist.
There is far more to religion than its biological roots. Its history is as old as that of humanity itself. The attempted resolution of its mysteries lies at the heart of philosophy. The purest, most general form of religion is theology – the existence of God and God’s personal relationship with humanity. Deeply religious people want to find a way to approach and touch this deity – if not His literal transubstantiated flesh and blood in the Catholic manner, at least to ask Him for personal guidance and beneficence. Most also hope for lie after death, passing into an astral world where they will join in bliss those who have gone before. Theological spirituality seeks the bridge between the real and the supernatural. It dreams of God’s dominion, where souls of the Earthly dead live on together in peaceful eternity.
The brain was made for religion and religion for the human brain. In every second of the believer’s conscious life, religious belief plays multiple, mostly nurturing roles. All the followers are unified into a vastly extended family, a metaphysical band of brothers and sisters, reliable, obedient to one supreme law, and guaranteed immortality as the benefit of membership.
The deity is higher than any prophet, high priest, imam, mystic saint, cult leader, president, emperor, dictator, the lot. He is the final and forever alpha male, or She is the alpha female. Being supernatural and infinitely powerful, the deity can perform miracles beyond the reach of human understanding. Throughout prehistory and most of history, people needed religion to explain the occurrence of phenomena around them. Torrential rain and flooding, a lightning bolt streaking across the sky, the sudden death of a child. God caused it. He or She was the cause in the cause-and-effect required for sanity. And the ways of God, albeit charged with meaning for our lives, are a mystery. With the coming of science, more and more natural phenomena have come to be understood as effects linked to analyzable phenomena, and supernatural explanations of cause-and-effect have receded. But the deep, instinctive appeal of religion and religionlike ideology has remained.
The great religions are inspired by belief in an incorruptible deity – or multiple kinds of deities, who may also constitute an all-powerful family. They perform services invaluable to civilization. Their priests bring solemnity to the rites of passage through the cycle of life and death. They sacralize the basic tenets of civil and moral law, comfort the afflicted, and take care of the desperately poor. Inspired by their example, followers strive to be righteous in the sight of man and God. The churches over which they preside are centers of community life. When all else fails, these sacred places, where God dwells immanent on Earth, become ultimate refuges against the iniquities and tragedies of secular life. They and their ministers make more bearable tyranny, war, starvation, and the worst of natural catastrophes.
The great religions are also, and tragically, sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Their exquisitely human flaw is tribalism. The instinctual force of tribalism in the genesis of religiosity is far stronger than the yearning for spirituality. People deeply need membership in a group, whether religious or secular. From a lifetime of emotional experience, they know that happiness, and indeed survival itself, require that they bond with others who share some amount of genetic kinship, language, moral beliefs, geographical location, social purpose, and dress code – preferably all of these but at least two or three for most purposes. It is tribalism, not the moral tenets and humanitarian thought of pure religion, that makes good people do bad things.
Unfortunately, a religious group defines itself foremost by its creation story, the supernatural narrative that explains how humans came into existence. And this story is also the heart of tribalism. No matter how gentle and high-minded, or subtly explained, the core belief assures its members that God favours them above all others. It teaches that members of other religions worship the wrong gods, use the wrong rituals, follow false prophets, and believe fantastic creation stories. There is no way around the soul-satisfying but cruel discrimination that organized religions by definition must practice among themselves. It is doubtful that ever an imam suggested that his followers try Roman Catholicism or a priest who urged the reverse.
Acceptance of a particular creation story, and of accounts of miracles vouchsafed by it, is called the faith of the believer. Faith is biologically understandable as a Darwinian device for survival and increased reproduction. It is forged by the success of the tribe, the tribe is united by it when competing with other tribes, and it can be a key to success within the tribe for those members most effective in manipulating the faith to gain powerful social practice were widespread through the Paleolithic Era and have continued unabated to the present time. In more secular societies faith tends to be transmuted into religionlike political ideologies. Sometimes the two great belief categories are combined. Hence, “God favours my political principles over yours, and my principles, not yours, favour God.”
Religious faith offers enormous psychological benefits to the believers. It gives them an explanation for their existence. It makes them feel loved and protected above the members of every other tribal group. The price imposed by the gods and their priests in more primitive societies is unquestioning belief and submission. Throughout evolutionary time this strength to hold the human soul was the only bond with the strength to hold the tribe together in both peace and war. It invested its members with a proud identity, legitimized rules of conduct, and explained the mysterious cycle of life and death.
For ages, no tribe could survive unless the meaning of its existence was defined by a creation story. The price of the loss of faith was a hemorrhage of commitment, a weakening and dissipation of common purpose. In the early history of each tribe – late Iron Age for Judaeo-Christianity, and seventh century for Islam – the myth had to be set in stone in order to work. Once set, no part of it could be discarded. No doubts must be heard by the tribe. The only solution to an outmoded dogma was to finesse or conveniently forget it. Or, in the extreme, break away with a new, competing dogma.
Obviously, no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false, or at least questionable in details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Scientists by nature tend to be cautious in anything they say about religion, even when expressing skepticism. The distinguished physiologist Anton (Ajax) J. Carlson, when asked what he thought of the 1950 ex-cathedra (that is, infallible) pronouncement by Pius XII that the Virgin Mary ascended bodily into heaven, is reported to have responded that he couldn’t be sure because he wasn’t there, but of one thing he was certain, that she passed out at 30,000 feet.
Might it be better just to leave this vexatious matter alone? Not deny, just forget? After all, the great majority of people in the world are sort of getting along, more or less. However, negligence in the matter is dangerous, both short-term and long-term. National wars may have subsided, obviously due to the fear of their possibly catastrophic outcomes for both sides. But insurgencies, civil wars, and terrorism have not. The principal driving force of mass murders committed during them is tribalism, and the central rationale for lethal tribalism is sectarian religion – in particular the conflict between those faithful to different myths. At the time of writing the civilized world flinches before the brutal struggles between those faithful to different myths. The civilized world flinches before the brutal struggles between Shiites and Sunnis, the murder of Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan’s cities by other Muslims, and the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhist-led “extremists” in Myanmar. Even the blocking by ultra-Orthodox Jews of liberal Jewish women from the Western Wall is a menacing early symptom of the same social pathology.
Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religionlike ideologies into two groups, moderate and extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. Nowhere do people tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country – or their creation myth. In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality – including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth – the faith – of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else’s sacred creation myth is “religious bigotry”. It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat.
Another way of expressing the history of religion is that faith has hijacked religious spirituality. The prophets and leaders of organized religions, consciously or not, have put spirituality in the service of groups defined by their creation myths. Awe-inspiring ceremonies and sacred rites and rituals and sacrifices are given to the deity in return for worldly security and the promise of immortality. As part of the exchange, the deity must also make correct moral decisions. Within the Christian faith, among most of the denominational tribes, God is obliged to be against one or more of the following: homosexuality, artificial contraception, female bishops, and evolution.
The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well. George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then. It has become almost mandatory for political leaders to assure the electorate that they have faith, even, as for the Mormonism of Mitt Romney, if it looks ridiculous to the great majority. Presidents often listen to the counsel of Christian advisors. The phrase “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and today no major political candidate would dare suggest that it be removed.
Most serious writers on religion conflate the transcendent quest for meaning with the tribalistic defence of creation myths. They accept, or fear to deny, the existence of a personal deity. They read into the creation myths humanity’s effort to communicate with the deity, as part of the search for an uncorrupted life now and beyond death. Intellectual compromisers one and all, they include liberal theologians of the Niebuhr school, philosophers battening on learned ambiguity, literary admirers of C.S. Lewis, and others persuaded, after deep thought, that there must be Something Out There. They tend to be unconscious of prehistory and the biological evolution of human instinct, both of which beg to shed light on this very important subject.
The compromises face an insoluble problem, the Absolute Paradox. Dogmas forced on believers are not just impossible but incomprehensible – hence absurd. In particular is the core of the Christian creation myth. The Absurd is that the eternal truth has come to exist, that God has come to exist, it born, has grown up and so on, and has become just like a person, impossible to tell apart from another person. It was incomprehensible, even if declared true, that God as Christ entered into the physical world in order to suffer, leaving martyrs to suffer for real. The Absolute Paradox tears at all in every religion who seek an honest resolution of body and soul. It is the inability to conceive of an all-knowing divinity who created a hundred billion galaxies, yet whose humanlike emotions include feelings of love, generosity, vindictiveness, and a consistent and puzzling lack of concern for the horrific things Earth-dwellers endure under the deity’s rule. To explain that “God is testing our faith” and “God moves in mysterious ways” doesn’t cut it.
As Carl Jung once said, some problems can never be solved, only outgrown. And so it must be with the Absolute Paradox. There is no solution because there is nothing to solve. The problem is not in the nature or even in the existence of God. It is in the biological origins of human existence and in the nature of the human mind, that made us the evolutionary pinnacle of the biosphere. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.
Jim Palmer was an evangelical megachurch pastor for many years. Eventually, he could no longer teach his Christian doctrine with a good conscience and realized this teaching was not truly changing people’s lives… so he walked away from the whole enchilada.
He got into ministry initially because he wanted to make a difference and help people, and he relied upon the belief system he learned as the proper framework to achieve this. It took a lot of post-religion reflection to see the ways this belief system was hurting people.
He offers the below list in hopes that you might disentangle yourself from harmful beliefs and attitudes impacting your life.
14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know:
1. Toxic religion is rooted in fear, especially fear about the afterlife. It leverages the false doctrine of hell to win converts and demand holiness. The fear of God’s disapproval, rejection, abandonment and punishment is another hallmark of toxic religion.
2. Clergy have no innate authority. Holding a church leadership position or having a theological degree does not imbue a person with special divine authority or superiority. The terms “anointed”, “called”, or “chosen” or titles such as “pastor”, “priest”, “bishop”, “elder”, “evangelist” or “apostle” do not confer any innate authority on an individual or group.
3. We hold sacred what we are taught to hold sacred, which is why what is sacred to one community is not sacred to another.
4. The stories in our sacred books aren’t history, nor were they meant to be. The authors of these books weren’t historians but writers of historical fiction: they used history (or pseudo-history) as a context or pretext for their own ideas. Reading sacred texts as history may yield some nuggets of the past, but the real gold is in seeing these stories as myths and parables and trying to unpack the possible meanings these parables and myths may hold.
5. Prayer doesn’t work the way you think it does. You can’t bribe God, or change God’s mind through obedience, devotion, or grovelling. The underlying theistic premises of prayer are untenable.
6. Anything you claim to know about God, even the notion that there is a God, is a projection of your psyche. What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says less about God and more about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high caste or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values.
7. Nobody is born Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, etc. All humans are born Homo sapiens on planet Earth. Our evolving species and planet are not innately religious. We are conditioned by narratives of race, culture, religion, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. If you were born in Nepal, you are Hindu, if you were born in Nashville, you are Christian, if you were born in Nazareth, you are Jewish. People don’t necessarily choose their religious belief system, they are conditioned or enculturated into it. Christianity is not a superior religion just because it’s your religion and you were born in the Bible Belt.
8. Evangelical theology isn’t the free search for truth, but rather a defense of an already held position. Evangelical theology is really apologetics, explaining why a belief is true rather than seeking out the truth in and of itself. All theological reasoning is circular, inevitably “proving” the truth of its own presupposition.
9. Becoming more religious cannot save us. Religion is a human invention reflecting the best and worst of humanity; becoming more religious will simply allow us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of religion. Because religion always carries the danger of fanaticism, becoming more religious may only heighten the risk of us becoming more fanatical.
10. Becoming less religious cannot save us. In fact, being against religion can become it’s own fanaticism. Becoming less religious will simply force us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of something else. Secular societies that actively suppress religion have proven no more just or compassionate than religious societies that suppress secularism or free thought. This is because neither religion nor the lack of religion solely nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred.
11. A healthy religion is one that helps us own and integrate the shadow side of human nature for the good of person and planet, something few clergy are trained to do. Clergy are trained to promote the religion they represent. They are apologists not liberators. If you want to be more just, compassionate, and loving, you must do the personal work within yourself, and free yourself from the conditions that lock you into injustice, cruelty, and hate, and this means you have to free yourself from all your narratives, including those you call “religious.”
12. Religious leaders claim that their particular understanding and interpretation of their sacred books should be universally accepted. Religious leaders often say, “My authority is the Bible.” It would be more accurate for them to say, “My authority is what they taught me at seminary the Bible means.” People start with flawed or false presuppositions about what the Bible is, such as the Bible was meant to present a coherent theology about God or is a piece of doctrinal exposition; the Bible is the inerrant, infallible and sole message/”word” of God to the world; the Bible is a blueprint for daily living. Too often religious leaders make God about having “correct theology.” There are a lot of unhappy, broken, hurting, suffering, depressed, lonely people in the church with church-approved theology.
13. If your livelihood depends on the success of your church as an organization, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that you will mostly define and reward Christianity as participation in church structures and programs. Christian living is mostly a decentralized reality or way of life, not a centralized or program-dependent phenomenon. Church attendance, tithing, membership, service, and devoted participation, become the hallmarks of Christian maturity.
14. You are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don’t need to be told what to do. You naturally have the ability, capacity, tools and skills to guide and direct your life meaningfully, ethically and effectively. Through the use of your fundamental human faculties such as critical thinking, empathy, reason, conscience and intuition, you can capably lead your life. You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.
~ Jim Palmer
