Book Review: The Religion Virus

The "New Atheists" have described religion as a delusion, a poison, and now apparently a virus.  The author says at the end that he hoped people would view their religions differently, but I doubt many religionists could get past the title of this book:  The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God, An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity.

Craig James applies Dawkins' theory of memes to the main concepts of religion.  In many ways I found this convincing, but he tries a little too hard to force the meme concept onto the book.

The concept in this book that has stuck with me most of all is the transition from pantheons of single-function gods to almighty, multi-dimensional single gods.  The All-Powerful god meme, which replaces the Warrior God Meme, the Protector God Meme, and the Loving Father God Meme, or rather conflates them all into one god-meme.  This transition wasn't ever complete with Catholics, at least.  They continue to pray to patron saints for help with their specialties. 

Still, it's a powerful idea.  It explains how God could be so contradictory, taking both sides of a football game for instance.  It also explains how the various stories and phases of the Old Testament portray different concepts of God.

The memeplex lost me a bit, but I get the concept of multiple memes sticking together and supporting each other.  I imagine a herd of gazellish ideas sticking together, which would be very adaptive.

Essentially, the analogy states that ideas that are advantageous to themselves will survive.  The most obvious is missionary work, of course.  Religions that prosletyze survive and those that don't, won't.  Christianity & Islam prosletyze and they number in the billions.  Judaism doesn't, and hence comprises a tiny minority in the world.

The virus analogy enters only at the end: religion is a parasite on society, needing to be passed from person to person to survive and yet destroying some of them.  It survives for its own purposes more than for the benefit to society... or something.  I found this part a little bit of a stretch.  A virus spreads through unconscious mechanisms, and religion spreads through prosletyzing, brainwashing, and "educating" young children.  Some of the memes seem to infect other memeplexes a.k.a. religions, though.

Some of the book oversimplifies, especially the virus analogy.  Religion has helped or hurt its societies to varying degrees.  Of course you can claim that there are beneficial parasites as well as destructive ones, and some that are only destructive under the right circumstances.

It's definitely a thought-provoking book.  Anyone who has read the Bible knows that the "unchanging" God has changed quite a bit from the beginning to the end.  Even the commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" implies that at one time Judaism was not monotheistic.  "The" God just wanted to be Numero Uno.  The warrior god seems to have softened his approach.  He wiped out the world, then he wiped out entire peoples or countries in genocidal rampages, then honed in on cities and eventually individuals.  "An eye for an eye" was a big moral improvement over genocide.  Then later there's no payment at all thanks to penal substitution.  God went from destroying the whole world to saying "fuhgeddaboudit."  This book frames a theory that explains these changes.

Book Review, Part Deux: The Belief Instinct

More on Jesse Bering's book on the psychology of belief . "The Belief Instinct" continues harping on the issue of "theory of mind" throughout, but the points are interesting if not valid (I'm not one to judge).

Whenever I encounter a reference to the naturalness of belief, or basically any claim to the universality of some religious virtue, I want to hear about the unnatural examples.  This book delivers.
Toward the end of the particularly delightful chapter titled, "When God Throws People Off of Bridges," Bering refers to studies of autistics and aspies, and how their reactions differ from those of "normal" people. There are also studies of atheist reactions to "coincidences."  I found both of these particularly validating, as they prove my suspicion that though religious sentiment (or instinct) may be natural, it is not necessarily an accurate portrayal of or reaction to reality.

The surprising and uncomfortable result of studying atheist reaction to coincidences and unfortunate events is that we, too, want to believe in Fate or some guiding hand making things go the way they're supposed to.  He relates this to his pet theory (Theory of Mind) of course, but the very fact that atheists, myself included, feel a kneejerk reaction to these events says to me that 1) religious stories are the window dressing of human thought processes, not the other way around and 2) wishful thinking in atheists is the result of human psychology, not a suppressed belief in the supernatural.  This speaks to the "no true atheist" and "there are no atheists in foxholes" cannards.  Unlike less developed species and less-developed humans (i.e. autistics), most healthy humans not only survive by relating to the minds of other, but by hoping to find comfort and answers by reaching out to those minds.

Research has shown humans to be more susceptible to religious sentiment during trying times.  These are times when our usual social network has let us down somehow.  If you depend on your family for comfort and you get lost in a snowstorm, a fantasy creature that can hear your thoughts will make a fine substitute.  If your spouse has died, the person you would still feel an impulse to turn to is that same person whose death has distressed you.  Believing that your ancestors are watching out for that person will be a comfort both to you and to the spouse you assume will be equally as distressed.  If a tornado roars through town, everyone else feels the same way and they are dealing with their own traumatic stresses.  Enter the all-loving "Creator" (who allowed the destruction) they can gather together to pray to.

And speaking of Death... this is another feature of the Theory of Mind.  Bering cites studies showing that people have a very difficult time handling the idea that their mind will not continue after their body dies, a kind of theory of one's own mind.  He extrapolates this to the death of others, but I think that's the reverse.  We are utterly dependent on other people from our first breath to our last.  Christianity plays up the personal, but Eastern religious play to the theory of mind of others much more.  Ancestor worship and shrines to them play a role in some religions.  I think the difficulty of letting go of the individuals that have made our individual lives possible explains the belief in an afterlife much better.

Even Christians, who supposedly believe that souls go to Heaven or Hell, often want to believe their loved ones are waiting for them or watching over them.  My grandmother used to talk to my grandfather about the events of the day, even decades after his death.  I have heard people talk much more about their loved ones' afterlives than their fears or hopes for their own.  Angels take little children to God because he loves them.  (that one always makes me gag)   And then there's the Rainbow Bridge story, which has taken hold in a surprisingly short time.

I suppose these constitute what apologists like William Lane Craig call "properly basic beliefs."  He even cites the belief in the presence of other minds as a properly basic belief.  Craig tries to argue that some things are just so obvious that they can be treated as givens in philosophical debate, not debatable points themselves.  Alvin Plantinga makes this claim too (interesting video, even though he's full of crap).  Of course I find that idea that you can extrapolate from other humans existing to a supernatural god-human existing laughable, but with this Theory of Mind in mind (so to speak) it's a little easier to understand how Craig and thousands of years of religious thinkers have rationalized seriously irrational beliefs.

As an evolutionary psychologist, Bering believes this theory of mind is part of what gives humans a leg up in the survival of the species.  I can go along with that, and I appreciate the work of psychologists to study the phenomenon scientifically.

In order to appreciate the ease with which the people like Craig and Plantinga can convince people (and themselves) with such slim arguments I think we have only to look at a few logical fallacies.  The main problem with believing that belief in god is correct because it's part of human psychology (properly basic) is the fallacy called an appeal to nature or naturalistic fallacy.  The difference from the classic examples of natural = good is that it associates natural with correct, or justified.

We do unnatural things every day in modern society.  We fly in planes rather than walk barefoot to our destination.  We crap into the toilet rather than in the woods or over a hole in the ground.  We live into our eighties thanks to vaccinations, water sanitation, and antibiotics, among other things.  We wear glasses.  We eat Twinkies.  We blog on the internet.   Even the Amish will get into their horse and buggy and go into town on paved roads. 

None of us lives a truly "natural" life and we don't question it.  But yet when it comes to letting go of our cherished Sky Daddy and imagining our loved ones and ourselves truly becoming "dust into dust," then suddenly we (I mean "they") cry "properly basic" and "oh yeah? then where do you go when you die?"

Atheism is unnatural and difficult to get used to, but once you've freed yourself from the fairy tales, you find yourself wondering "Could I really have believed that?  How could I have tried so hard to believe something so false?"  This book gave me some answers to those questions.

And just as people are sometimes tempted to wizz by the side of the road or crap in the woods, we will sometimes revert to nature and wish a Sky Daddy or our grandparents were watching over us.  That's only natural.

Don't forget to check out The author's site, or read the book yourself.  I've probably garbled his message by putting in my own two cents. It's definitely a mind-changer, and I can imagine some minds being changed because I have a theory that other minds do indeed exist.

Book Review: The Belief Instinct, a.k.a. The God Instinct

Jesse Bering's book on the psychology of belief was titled "The God Instinct" in the U.K. but released as "The Belief Instinct" in the U.S.  I would love to hear the story of how they decided to change the title.

This is a rare book that cites verifiable research sources and yet reads like something you could pick up at Waldenbooks.  I'll link to some of these sources in this review.

The book starts off rather tedious, but I didn't know a lot of this stuff so I stuck with it.  The main point seems to be that "Theory of Mind" (i.e., theory that others have minds) is behind the need to believe in some intelligence in the universe. 

The next section talks about the concept of having a purpose in life.   I've heard this argument many times from theists:  If you don't believe in God, then your life has no purpose.  Their purpose?  If they're glassy-eyed fundamentalists, it's to glorify god, or perhaps just worship him.  But in reality their purpose is to stay on God's good side so they won't go to Hell.  Ask a Christian sometime if they would still worship God if they knew with 100% certainty they would be going to Hell anyway.  I bet they've never considered that.   If you've never encountered such a theist, I suggest having a listen to this caller (Clifton) on the Atheist Experience.  He demonstrates both of these first two psychological needs perfectly.  Note that it doesn't matter whether any of Christianity is true, only that it supposedly gives one a purpose. Believers don't cling to their religions because they really believe in everything in the ancient texts.  They cling to them because these religions fulfill an existential need and they can't imagine going through life with that need unmet.

The chapter that particularly intrigued me is called "When God Throws People off of Bridges."  There is a remarkable history of people plunging to their deaths from bridge collapses, and preachers afterward trying to defend God's decision to dump them into the drink.

The first of these happened in Britain in 1845.  A crowd of women and children gathered to watch a stunt on the river below.  The bridge collapsed and about sixty children and as many as forty adults lost their lives.  The local reverend urged the grieving townspeople to reflect on their sins, which he blamed for the disaster.  (A local inquest blamed the design of the bridge)

Piaget's theory of the moral development of children to the rescue!  We want JUSTICE!  We want things to make sense.  We want some parental surrogate to sort out the good from the bad and mete out the punishment to those who deserve it.  This is somehow tied to a concept called "intentionality."  Things happen for a reason, and someone intended things to be that way.  When good things happen, it's because we're good people and we deserve it.  When bad things happen we must be to blame, and some supernatural entity metes out the punishment.

So... the more you suffer, the more you believe in God.  If you live in Northern Europe, you're fairly comfortable and you don't need God.  If you're unhealthy and living in poverty in Mississippi you're likely to be part of the overwhelming majority in that state that believe in God.  This whole thing also explains what I considered a surprising denouement in PBS' Nova episode "The Bible's Buried Secrets," that I reviewed here.  When the Jews were defeated and dragged off to Babylon, they became more religious.  It also explains the (false) idea that "There are no atheists in foxholes."  If you believe in your own religion because it helps you deal with existential fears, the fear of death would be the ultimate.  Psychological projection takes it into the realm of the other's mind (theory of mind again).  It's hard to imagine another mind that isn't like our own.

I'm still only halfway through the book but I thought I'd post this half-book review, seeing as I keep digressing into my own ideas anyway!

I recommend it for anyone who is tired of the Science vs. Religion debate.  The scientific method plays into this because of the studies the author cites, but it's about the psychology of belief, which I think is at the root of religion.

While you wait for me to get around to the rest of the book for the second half of my review, check out The author's site

What is the Square Root of a Tomato?

Secular Bible?

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/04/a-c-grayling-writes-a-secular-bible/

Sounds a lot like the Jefferson Bible.  

There's some good stuff in the Bible.  Lots of things worth keeping for moral instruction.  Such as:

• Be nice to the others in your community (but it's okay to kill them en masse)
• Don't kill people (unless you don't like them)
• Obey your parents (until they become inconvenient) 
• Take care of your children (except when you kill them)
• Be nice to your neighbors (except when God tells you they're all going to die in a flood or some other act of genocide -- then get out quickly and don't tell them a thing!)
• Be a good slave, especially if your form of slavery is called "marriage"

Yeah, sounds good to me!

The Christian Delusion, a book (chapter) review

I picked up this book a couple of weeks ago and I've been slow to get into it, partly because I don't need to be told that Christianity is silly. I just need to get older for religion to get sillier, it seems. I buy atheist books as a kind of vote for the cause. When arguing ad populum, some Christians will have to concede that atheism is indeed becoming more popular, based on book sales. After all, what other tool do we have to express our numbers? We have only a few organizations, and few of us bother to join them. A Christian parent might remind a grown child that membership in the church offers protection from Hell, but American Atheists offers a magazine and maybe a conference worth attending once in awhile. Atheists, on the other hand, don't need to argue ad populum. We have much better ammunition.

Unfortunately, women are still in the minority when lobbing the grenades. There are nine contributors to this book, and only one woman. She is Valerie Tarico, PhD, whose chapter is titled "Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science." My first thought was "Oh great, the only woman is a psychologist, not a heavy hitting physicist or philosopher" but as I thought more about it, the woman's point of view does tend to be psychological. And my personal take on atheism is informed by that female experience. We have been brought up to be nurturing, understanding, considerate, and emotive. The "male" perspective from the hard sciences doesn't seem to be winning many converts. They are collectively called the "New Atheists" in derisive tones. Perhaps Dr. Tarico's voice is just what we need. Her PhD is in counseling psychology. What better perspective for examining a "delusion?"

Her lens is a bit broader than just a narrow view through the psyche, though. She considers evolutionary psychology (without calling it that) and recent advances in the neurobiology of religious experience. But the main focus is the psychology of belief, the reason being that Christians place a greater emphasis on believing the right things than do pantheistic or Eastern religions.

After a brief history of Belief with a capital B in Christianity, she reduces the human habit of self-serving bias to a wonderful metaphor: "each of us is the protagonist in a custom-made Hollywood movie with the best possible camera angles." (p. 51) The goal is to get to a "coherent plot line." (p. 52) The human mind as storyteller is a great analogy. We like stories with plots, art that "looks like something" and songs that have a beginning, middle and end. Having studied anthropology and the arts, I learned through other means that there are very few universals in human culture, but there are universal patterns amongst human beings. Blind spots and irrationality in thinking are part of the package.

She brilliantly summarizes the biggest problem for Christianity thusly: "Arriving at a belief in an infallible God by way of an inerrant Bible requires an unwarranted belief in yourself."

Sometimes things go wrong in the brain and people "know" things that just aren't true. I've seen this in my family and in other people I've known. She offers some examples and stories for those who haven't been fortunate enough to see schizophrenia in action, then cites research on how people achieve "certainty," including brain-washing techniques. The Christian "just knows" they're right, while the scientist learns to have a "healthy mistrust for our sense of knowing." (p. 55)

Next she discusses what I have tried to argue with theists: that humans' evolutionary success has come from having a "mental architecture" that makes us what she calls "social information specialists," and that our greatest threats have been from other people.

The same facial recognition skill that makes it possible for babies to recognize their caretakers gets transferred to inanimate objects and creates gods, demons ghosts... (she doesn't mention Jesus on Toast or Mary on an Office Building but I wish she had!)

"Theory of mind" makes it possible for us to put a mind behind the faces we see and even into stuffed animals or disembodied spirits. We can then recognize and attempt to anticipate patterns. Usually this is a helpful skill, thereby surviving long enough to reproduce (she doesn't say this but it follows). Credit and blame can be falsely attributed thanks to hyperactive agency detection. We want things to make sense! Naturally, our gods tend to think and behave as we do. Otherwise we wouldn't recognize them, I guess.

The rest of the chapter explores "The Born-Again Experience." She's too polite to call this a mind-fuck, but that's my opinion of it. Perhaps you have to know people with psychiatric disorders to know when someone is describing a neurological phenomenon.

Anywho... I love to see my opinions validated by an expert: "Conversion is a process that begins with social influence." (p. 60) Yep. I've never seen anyone have a conversion to a religion that nobody else in the room practices. Clinicians call the emotional-mystical experience "transcendence hallucination.|" I would call it the orgasmic part of the mind-fuck. She points out that seizures, migraines, drugs, and strokes can trigger this experience. 1,000 years ago the victims of these experiences were either mystics or witches depending on whether they agreed with the group. Hildegard of Bingen's drawings indicate that the headaches accompanying her spiritual experiences were migraines. But these symptoms can also be brought on by drumming, sensory deprivation, fasting, and crowd dynamics. (61)

So... add our pattern-making, meaning-making minds to our socially-driven unusual mental experiences and the result is a spiritual experience. She adds another factor almost as a side matter, but I think it's important: the authority figure. Their beliefs gain credibility after such an experience. "The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly." Charitably, she doesn't attribute sinister motives to the ministers who induce these experiences, since the ministers themselves have likely had them and may not even be aware of the neurological processes.

Her conclusion very specifically claims that cognitive research offers a "sufficient explanation for the phenomenon of belief." (I would have pluralized it to phenomena, because she lists several!)

The killer conclusion is one of my pet ideas. I feel so validated! It's that Occam's Razor applies here. "In fields of human knowledge other than 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."

Exactly. Human psychology, neurobiology, sociology and anthropology have revealed enough to make possible a naturalistic explanation of religious experience without at all resorting to to fields of philosophy and 'hard' sciences at all. (well, neurobiology yes...)

These fields developed long after philosophy and physics had laid claim to the "Truth," or the ability to discern truth. Even today, these "old" fields are dominated by men, who tend to be (if I may overgeneralize) less interested in the social and psychological aspects of "reality."

The "famous" atheists today are still coming from physics and biology. Their arguments fall on deaf ears precisely because they appeal to "objective" reality and not the subjective realities of society, culture, and personality. Tarico points out that when backed into a corner the Christian often concedes by saying "I just know." That's an indication of the neurobiological "knowing." I've gotten a few into the corner using logic, & they said "It's a matter of faith."

This to me is proof that it's a matter of wanting to be part of a culture that says it "knows."