De Novo

For some interpreters, such as philosopher Daniel Dennett and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, science reveals religious beliefs to be malignant memes gnawing their way through believers’ brains, diseases needing to be cured. Yet for many of the researchers closest to this work, the recognition that religion has biological roots only makes it harder to talk about severing it from ourselves.

This must have come as a disappointment to comedian and Real Time host Bill Maher, who traveled the world making fun of religious people for his documentary Religulous. Standing at the prophesied site of Armageddon — 

Meggido, Israel — 

Maher indicts religion as a “neurological disorder” that causes the afflicted to wish for apocalyptic death.

Maher interviewed Dean Hamer and Andrew Newberg, two scientists who study the biology of religion, to back up his anti-religious polemic; neither says much of substance in the film. Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, is the author of The God Gene, which posits that human beings are genetically predisposed for “self-transcendence,” the feeling that there is something beyond ordinary experience. In other words, we’re hard-wired to believe in a higher power. In his research, Hamer noticed a correlation between personality survey data and different alleles of the gene VMAT2, which codes for an emotion-regulating brain chemical. In the course of human evolution, he suspects, this gene helped foster “an innate sense of optimism” that had adaptive benefits.

Since the NIH doesn’t sanction Hamer’s religion research, Maher interviewed Hamer at a lab at American University. During the interview, “[Maher] really kept on pushing me to say that science proves religion is wrong,” Hamer recalls. “And I kept on trying to push back and say, ‘Science proves that people have an innate desire for religion.’”

from Seed Magazine, via 3qd.

My takeaway from seeing Religulous was that Maher was, on the whole, more even-handed than someone like Dawkins has been in his documentaries; he was able to treat people with whom he disagreed with a modicum of human respect, even as he made fun of their beliefs.  But the film was light on science and research from experts in fields like neuroscience and psychology, and heavy on unfounded opinion.

Likewise, Dawkins, in his recent crusade against Harry Potter, is cited saying: “I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”  But Dr. Dawkins, there is already plenty of research.  Reams of it.  It just doesn’t say what you wish it did.

There seems to be a pattern emerging: secular fundamentalists like Maher and Dawkins seek to use the cover of science to advance their foregone conclusions, rather than looking objectively at what the evidence presents; there’s a deadly certainty here that is the actual culprit of radical fundamentalism.  In Dawkins’ words: “Always look at the evidence.”

Chet Raymo has been almost everything I’ve wanted in a blogger on science and spirituality, which is why I’ve been spending more time reading his amazing insights lately than writing my own thoughts.  I have much to learn from this wise old man, a veteran of scientific practice, a laughing saint and mystic of the highest order.  Searching scientists, scrutinizing people of faith, take note.

On Kohlberg’s scale, being willing to question authority, especially when it seems unjust or ridiculous, represents the highest stage of moral development, which is based on abstract reasoning using what he calls “universal ethical principles.”

– Dr. Stephen Larsen: The Fundamentalist Mind

Meme from Greg Newman, Justin Lilly and Brian Rosner, via James Tauber:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnJiHu7h-C8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCaOCWYpPk4

If you vote for Obama, bad things will happen to the Jews.

In case you haven’t seen, irony is apparently not dead:

“They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’”

The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.

…
It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

He took the calf which they had made and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it.

Then Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you, that you have brought such great sin upon them?”

Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn; you know the people yourself, that they are prone to evil.

– Exodus 32:8-9, 19-22

via Wonkette

 We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

– John Muir

Just saw The Dark Knight with some friends, and on the walk home, we saw a new billboard placed near I-5:

The Dark Knight just topped opening weekend sales records, making it the most profitable superhero franchise in history.  Americans clearly have an appetite for superhero logic.

An East African vision of [the] great lord of the world emerges from a folktale of a young man whose dead father appeared to him along a path going into the ground, as into a burrow.  … In the morning the Great Chief Death appeared.  One side of him was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground.  Attendants were gathering up the maggots.  They washed the sores and, when they had finished, Death said, “The one born today will be robbed if he goes trading.  The woman who conceives today will die with the child.  The man who works in his garden will lose the crop.  The one who goes into the jungle today will be eaten by the lion.”  But the next morning Death again appeared, and his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil, and when they had finished, Death pronounced a blessing. “The one born today: may he become rich!  May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live to be old!  Let the one born today go into the market: may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind!  May the man who goes into the jungle slaughter game; may he discover even elephants!  For today I pronounse the benediction.”

“If you had arrived today,” said the father to his son, “many things would have come into your possession, but now poverty has been ordained for you; so much is clear.”

– Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology NY: Penguin Books, 1976, pp.118-119

The theme of duality pervades the Batman franchise more overtly than perhaps any other multi-million-dollar Hollywood comic book fad, and indeed, as some have pointed out, can be interpreted as right-wing propaganda.  Isn’t that getting the cart before the horse?  How could Batman possibly be an imitation of Bush, when it’s been so apparent this whole time that Bush is in fact the simulacrum?

Loki, archetype of the Joker

While Two-Face embodies in the flip of a coin Batman’s Jekell/Hyde duality (CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation by day, high-tech strong-man by night), the Joker is Batman’s mirror image, the trickster, the destroyer of order, with “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint”.  Bruce Wayne hoardes money, in order to use it for “good” ends; the Joker burns piles of it in sweet torment of the pathetic ambitions of the mob.  Batman is the warrior king; Joker, the trickster who is the agent of the oblivion, the teacher of the most difficult lesson we all must one day face, but seek — in fear — to hold at bay.

Make no mistake: Batman is, like most conventional superhero tales, most immediately obsessed with national (and, indirectly, personal and ego) security.  The threats to society consist of mobsters, terrorists, bombs; Gotham City is in a sort of perpetual crisis mode, overrun with criminals and corrupt officials. For the greater part of the 20th century, a large portion of the American people lived cowering in fear that any minute bombs may begin raining down.  This sublimated fear has oozed out of our pores and become pop culture — comic books, movies, cartoons — stories that, not coincidentally, bear strong resemblance to tales our ancestors wove about times and places quite different from our own.  We resonate with Batman: we worship in the temples of our movie theaters and shell out our wages to purchase his likeness.  Excessive violence in the Bible notwithstanding, our understanding of the world order is as much informed by watching the Joker as it is by reading Beatitudes.  Simply because the comic book industry, unlike the religio-tainment industry, does not yet come equipped with an army and a navy, it’s easy to dismiss the religious significance of witnessing and vicariously living in the psyche of Batman, the vigilante of order and reason in a chaotic universe.  Singling out only one form (the Bible, a comic book, a political figure) is an exercise in vanity, unless we go further and address the underlying root cause of these forms and our affinity for them.  The stories we venerate — whether blockbuster movies or Bible tales — are as much a reflection of us as we are of them.  Until we begin to address the affinity between both kinds of “religious” experience and acknowledge that it is a fundamental feature of human psychology, generations will continue to be swayed by the crusading Batman rhetoric of the Bushes of the future.

Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in.  That is the manner of working of the intellect.  But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images — in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.  It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.  It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.  They are the source of all our conscious thoughts, and one of these primordial images is the idea of life after death.

– C. G . Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
    Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
    To Odin, myself to myself,
On that tree that none may ever know
    What root beneath it runs.

Poetic Edda, “Hovamol” (translated by Henry Adams Bellows, via Joseph Campbell: Primitive Mythology

Odin (aka Wotan), the Zeus-like Ruler of the Gods in Norse mythology, in order to retrieve sacred wisdom from the Underworld, sacrifices himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil,

whose shaft was the pivot of the revolving heavens, with the World Eagle perched on its summit, four stags running among its branches, browsing on its leaves, and the Cosmic Serpent gnawing at its root… It is the greatest of all trees and the best, the ash where the gods give judgment every day. Its limbs spread over the world and stand above heaven. Its roots penetrate the abyss. And its name, Yggdrasil, means “The horse of Ygg”, whose other name is Odin.

I’ve taken issue with Richard Dawkins before, not for his work as a scientist, but for his attempts at evangelizing the benefits of science to an audience he doesn’t really understand using philosophical tools he doesn’t quite have mastery of.  Meet Rev. Michael Dowd, a man who promises to make up for all of Dawkins’ shortcomings:

In 1981, Michael Dowd would have counted himself among the millions of conservative Christians who blame Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the idea of a godless, purposeless universe for the moral decline of society. That year, as a freshman at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., Dowd felt a rush of indignant anger in biology class when the professor held up a textbook that taught evolution. As he stormed out of the classroom, Dowd could not have imagined that he would come to view evolution as a spiritually inspiring idea that religion must embrace.

In the years that followed, Dowd shed his more conservative views and served as a pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ. Today he calls himself an evolutionary evangelist. For the last six years, he has traveled across North America with his wife, Connie Barlow, in a van that displays an image of two fish kissing each other — one labeled Jesus, the other Darwin — explaining to conservative and liberal congregations why understanding and accepting evolution will bring them closer to spiritual fulfillment. The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview, Dowd says, is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years. And that, he says, has a potentially liberating effect: never mind guilt; once we understand our sinful ways, we can get past them and play a conscious role in the evolution of humanity.

(from the New York Times)

Such an approach raises a variety of questions:

• Isn’t this just “Intelligent Design 2.0″?  No.  It’s actually the exact opposite of Intelligent Design, which cloaks religion in the vestiments of science.  While religion makes a poor basis for scientific understanding, science makes an excellent basis for religious understanding; Dowd offers to replace what Dawkins merely seeks to tear down: many people in religious communities are attached not only to their beliefs but more importantly to their traditions, communities, and vague sense of meaning and purpose that the trappings afford them.  It may be easy for some atheists to trivialize these things, but atheism will never make inroads or even win respect among such communities until it shows a capability to offer a mature sense of community amongst laypeople (not merely practicing scientists).
• Why call the Universe “God”?  Why not just throw out the term “God” altogether?  This is along the lines of Dawkins’ fallacy that religion is merely a virus, to be disposed of by reason.  Others have argued that religion is as much an inherent feature of the human mind as language; while the particular form of religion may be heavily influenced by culture, the religious experience/impulse is built out of hardwired features of the human brain that can’t simply be erased.  Giving a religious framework for appreciation of science helps to address this feature, rather than antagonize it (akin to “fighting sin” vs. understanding and addressing the causes of human behavior).

Take a look at Dowd’s “promises” for a sense of the scope of what he’s attempting here.  I don’t expect that his ideas will be embraced very soon by the more biblical-literalist wing of the religious community, but his approach undercuts the (already naive) claims by fundamentalists that evolution presents a universe controlled by randomness, without purpose or meaning, and shows a way to establish morality and value in the universe described by science.