It seems that we have something like a sweet tooth for religion. And the question is why. Why are we so eager for the particular rituals and the particular behaviors … why do they appeal to us so much? … Our sweet tooth for religions is one of the most important and influential factors in the world today. If we don’t understand it, we’re cruising to trouble in this 21st century.
Daniel Dennett on Open Source
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Is this… [AgonysMuse / Flickr]
…in our DNA? [King Coyote / Flickr]
Philosopher Daniel Dennett — a proud atheist in the mold of zoologist Richard Dawkins — wants to understand why religion has such a powerful hold on people. And as a believer in the gospel of Darwin, he looks to evolution to explain why our minds and our culture are gripped by God.
So this hour we want to ask — and try to answer, from a variety of perspectives — are we hardwired (i.e., did we evolve) to believe in God? If so, does that prove that God exists? Or doesn’t exist? If we do have a kind of “God gene,” why did our minds evolve that way? Did belief in the supernatural confer some kind of adaptive advantage? At the individual level? At the group level? Or is belief in God a specific byproduct of our brain’s more general ability to make imaginative leaps? Or did God guide our evolution and, in doing so, make it easy for us to have faith?
What questions do you have?
Daniel Dennett
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Professor of philosophy, Tufts University
Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University
Author, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Michael Murray
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Professor of philosophy, Franklin and Marshall College
Co-editor, Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions
David Sloan Wilson
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Evolutionary biologist, SUNY Binghamton
Author, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
Jeffrey Schloss
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Evolutionary biologist, Westmont College
Gawain de Leeuw
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Episcopal priest
Blogger, The Salty Vicar
I have commented on this issue before. Myself, I lean toward the idea that religion is a byproduct of various cognitive biases. But, we have to distinguish various aspects of religion, that is, basal supernaturalism vs. institutionalized religion. Functionalist/adaptive explanations are aimed toward the latter, but the cognitive byproduct is more relevant for the former. Many of your questions are more pointed when you clarify what you mean by religion: it seems ridiculous to assert that we have a “Christianity gene,” but one can posit functionalist reasons why Christians outbred pagans in the Roman Empire (as Rod Stark has). Similarly, it seems rather dicey to posit a functionalist/adaptive reason why we see “faces in clouds” (agency detection hyperactivity) since it seems likely that this emerges as a more generalized pattern recognition system we evolved for other reasons.
In specific response to your questions: are we hardwired to believe in God? I think the majority of humans do have a cognitive bias toward supernaturalism, but there is variation, and some people probably don’t have a tendency toward accept supernatural explanations (I think I’m one). But none of this speaks to the question of whether God exists outside of the context of your other axioms. If you are an unbeliever this shows how religion is just a natural phenomenon, if you are a believer it might show that God inscribed in your mind (via Design) a program for His belief.
I do not think there would be a ‘god gene’, so much as a ‘sceptic gene’.
We could be hardwired to believe in God but that does not necessarily mean that God exists. It proves nothing. The concept of God exists. That we know. “Does God exist through us (only)?” is another way to ask the question.
Can we know if God exists?
Perhaps we are wired to look for cause and effect in order to survive. This leads to existential questions and gods/God or the concept of gods/God. That might answer the question why id our minds evolve that way.
Belief in gods or God confers calm in the face of fear and anxiety from the forces of nature (including animals and other humans). If a mind is calm, not fearful, there is advantage; one can think more clearly, intelligently. This would also work well on the group level.
“So this hour we want to ask — and try to answer, from a variety of perspectives — are we hardwired (i.e., did we evolve) to believe in God?”
This is a reasonable and legitimate statement of the question. However, and I am sincerely trying to avoid pedantic games here, the question does assume a preconditioned framework and model based upon what can be described as a rationalist, scientific worldview. To illustrate, one may ask “Why did God(s) hardwire us?” “Why does Maya reveal a darwinan model or quantum mechanics, etc?” There are many other flavors and combinations. And I’m not trying to irritate. Moreover, I’d rather put this out there without giving in to my preconditioning, but that may not be possible.
The reason I’m pointing this out: proponents of a scientific worldview and a spiritual worldview often (not always) end up talking past each other because the underlying assumptions and frameworks are fairly distant and vastly different. The discussions that ensue rarely close the gap. Perhaps it can’t be closed. I honestly don’t know.
Are our questions worldview-sensitive as to the answers that are found? Does context create the answer for: Why does a person(s) adopt the beliefs they adopt? How do they change over time? How do they become more brittle over time? Can they become more flexible? What is the role of internal/external factors. Etc. I believe there used to be legitimate discussions about angels.
If memory serves, I think James Burke has described this process as something akin to wandering around a dark house with a flashlight. You tend to find what the tool illuminates. It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find interesting things. But, you may never be able to see the whole enchilada. Which is not to suspend the effort, it’s to try to cool the discourse.
Finally, I sort of think science and religion focus on completely different qualitative questions. There is some overlap. Both have informed each other. I’m not sure why there is not more mutual respect. I suspect these fields need each other like two competitive siblings.
and now, “Waiting for jazzman, nikos, et al.” I am very much looking forward to the discussion and discourse. Best to all.
I do not think there would be a ‘god gene’, so much as a ’sceptic gene’.
hm
that’s like saying that there is a homosexual gene and not a heterosexual gene.
Belief in gods or God confers calm in the face of fear and anxiety from the forces of nature (including animals and other humans).
this sort of introspective musing doesn’t get us far. after all, suicide attacks (muslim and shinto, for example) and mother-theresa-like-behavior are motivated by belief in god too, are these ‘beneficial’?
However, and I am sincerely trying to avoid pedantic games here, the question does assume a preconditioned framework and model based upon what can be described as a rationalist, scientific worldview.
well yes, dan dennett is looking for a naturalistic answer. myself, i tend to think that the naturalistic answer is all there is re: religion, but that doesn’t imply that that’s the only answer. some cognitive scientists who study religion from a naturalistic perspective themselves believe in a supernatural god. it isn’t so much as talking past each other as your second point: to some extent is a qualitative difference in what you are exploring. of course, some religionists (“fundamentalists”) challenge science on its own grown and attempt to formulate a deductive counter-paradigm (creationism, intelligent design, etc.).
“Is god in our genes?”"
Does it matter?
The better questions to my mind, “How can we learn to respectfully co-exist with 6 billion different perceptions of what this existence is about?”
Unless, we’re expecting to use genetic engineering to rid ourselves of the burden of spirituality. WOnder what the world would be like then. Or, we could engineer in the spiritual gene, especially the non-inquisitive, narrow minded one. Now, there’s a vision to strive for.
Sarcasm aside, what is the purpose of this exercise? What do we hope to achieve that might lead to more peace on the planet? I ask with an open mind. I’m sure that I’m missing something.
First, the politesse:
Thank you ROS for this show, which I have been anticipating for weeks like a kid on his way to Dairy Queen.
Second, the whining: giving us a mere one-day ‘warm up’ is cruel and unusual punishment!
So unfair!
Right. Enough petty whining. Nobody likes or respects whining.
I vigorously recommend to everyone Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003472X/002-7919812-6315255?v=glance&n=283155 (after linking, scroll down to see reviews).
It is easily the single most illuminating book I have ever read on the topic of religion and its appeal to the human mind.
I will however include a ‘disclaimer’ critique in my next post – but for only one relatively minor quibble.
This post, however, I originally worked up weeks ago, but must now conclude in unanticipated haste. Forgive, please, any inconsistencies or other flaws.
I hope Mr. Dennett will address the substance of this inquiry on the show. It would be best, however, since the premise of this inquiry is unconventional, if he read the whole of this post before Brendan or Chris poses the question, which I’ll frame as a title:
Would evolutionary theory be better received if science’s explanatory metaphors weren’t legacies of ancient notions of theistic agency?
Would it not be more effective and appealing if science used organic (or even musical or astronomical) metaphors instead: because machines are the opposite of life?
Having read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, I am aware of Mr. Dennett’s enthusiasm for the descriptiveness of ‘evolutionary engineering’. Yet this metaphoric choice wasn’t made by Mr. Dennett, but by the scientists, like Charles Darwin, of the Industrial Revolution era, and furthered by their followers. (For those unaware of the way metaphor underpins even the most ordinary language, please see Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-0226468011-0 ) Moreover and worse, this metaphoric language is a second-generation hand-me-down from the Biblical story of Genesis, wherein ‘God created life from clay’ – like a potter – a primitive form of ‘engineering’.
Machines require outside assembly of constructed parts; life is entirely different: it is a ‘parthenogenetic’ environmental transformation – it grows in essence by osmosis: absorbing material energy from without to create, sustain, and replicate itself.
It is, in a word, organic. Indeed, it seems much more ‘magical’ than ‘machine-like’.
Evolutionary science’s mechanistic paradigms reduce us all to pistons, lifters, flywheels, and cogs in a ‘godless’ and ‘soulless’ universal machine – and a machine with no apparent purpose. Is it any wonder people abandon belief in evolutionary theory in favor of religion’s unverifiable but millennia-old reassurances and moral castigations?
Mechanistic metaphors are the worst choice for explaining the inner alchemy and environmentally transformative magic of life.
To pretend otherwise is not merely a legacy of too damn much orthodoxy, but of an inexcusable failure of imagination.
You might as well compare a lawn mower to a horse, just because both seem to ‘graze’.
How much more palatable might lay-people find state-of-the-art evolutionary theory were it explained via organic (or even musical or astronomical) metaphors?
How many more or fewer ‘Intelligent Design’ battles would we have to fight if we stopped insulting everyone’s intelligence through the implication that we’re nothing but walking chemical soups of mechanistic impulses? And is this not the most glaring example of Daniel Dennett’s ‘greedy reductionism’? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism
Human intuition knows better: it rejects such dehumanizing metaphors. Yet we all suffer accidental consequences when those who reject insulting science retreat into the beckoning ‘memetic’ arms of superstition-based belief systems.
As in: “Science reduces me to a reactive machine inside a walking sack of chemical-water. But Jesus doesn’t.�
Reason can and should easily win this tug-of-war, but it needs a serious upgrade in the building blocks of its arguments. Evolutionary science ought to elevate and celebrate life, not insult it by framing it within an obsolescing Industrial-Revolution paradigm that implicates it as impulsive, reactive, and stupid.
That’s how the robber barons of 19th century industry thought of their laborers, for cryin’ out loud.
I can anticipate at least one possible reaction to this: “Any attempt to replace the long-established mechanistic paradigm with an organic one runs the risk of seeming ‘spiritual’ and therefore will jeopardize its scientific credibility� but this would be a red-herring argument – and another example of orthodox unimaginativeness.
Public acceptance of evolutionary theory would almost surely increase from an organically reinvigorated—and inherently more accurate—scientific explanation of life; and, Daniel Dennett’s hopes to illuminate the gulf of credibility between the scientific worldview and the religious would benefit profoundly and perhaps permanently were such a paradigm shift to occur.
Moreover, he is possibly the single most qualified thinker to take on the task.
Dennett is an already established philosophic voice among scientific circles – he has the necessary credibility.
His inventive comparison of religion to music in ‘Breaking the Spell’ demonstrates his intellectual depth and diversity.
And should a revision of paradigm from the mechanistic to the organic prove overly awkward because the metaphor is too close in nature to the concepts compared, perhaps he could at the very least exchange the mechanistic for the musical!
We’d lose those insufferably degrading machines in favor of angelic choirs and orchestras.
Who, pray-tell, could argue with that?
* * *
This is a brief appendix, including examples of alternative metaphors. Please forgive my inclusion of material I’ve posted in other threads:
1. It’s worth arguing that ongoing belief in the Biblical God is intuitive – that is, it’s founded on one’s trust in the input from one’s senses.
To the writers of the Bible, the universe was bounded by blue skies above, which at night shone with random sparkles that earned, via the human propensity for pattern-making, organized constellation-names.
Similarly, these writers knew, apocryphally perhaps, of volcanoes, and so were able to conceive of an under-world boundary that eventually evolved into the Christian concept of Hell.
This universe was bounded elsewhere by lands reputedly peopled by incomprehensible races and fantastical creatures. And to the west lay the Sea.
Such a universe – that sliver of the world perceptible to human senses and embellished only by rumor, legend, and superstition – can easily be explained as the Creation of a Father-Potter-God like Yahweh.
In a world wherein ‘religious authorities’ (who can’t objectively prove their contact with a god, and so simply prey on people’s credulity) deny the validity of effectively proven science, the credulous of the modern world can fall back onto the ‘small universe’ gleaned through one’s senses – which intuitively jibes with the teachings of ancient religions.
Is it any wonder that simpler, fundamentalist explanations of human purpose retain their popularity?
The Bible’s ‘God in Heaven’ (apparently located somewhere above the Holy Land) is of a very much smaller scale than appropriate to the universe’s infinitely stretching network of indestructibly immortal energy.
The universe perceptible by telescopes, microscopes, and their radio- and electron- using offspring, is a very different animal.
This universe requires not belief in a potter-God (who in books like ‘Judges’, by the way, tells his favored people to slay, conquer, and enslave others), but in something much more appropriate and rational.
This universe deserves a less mechanistic, and therefore more intuitively comprehensible and appealing paradigm:
What if ‘Natural Laws’ were understood instead as ‘natural’ or ‘universal customs’ – behavioral consistencies that stem not from an (implied) authorial lawgiver but are simply the predictable operative patterns of universal forces such as the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the (twinned) nuclear?
Doesn’t science, in its seemingly eternal skirmishes with religion, shoot itself in the foot by retaining the implication of a ‘lawgiver’ when instead it could just as easily substitute the notion of ‘custom’ – which carries no such implication of author or arbiter?
Remember: science doesn’t need to sway scientists, but the lay-folk whose tax-monies fund science!
Make it convincing, dammit!
2. Other descriptive metaphoric possibilities that spring to mind might involve explaining evolution’s ‘neutral accidents’, ‘happy accidents’, and ‘fatal accidents’ as ‘melody’, ‘harmony’, and ‘dissonance’ – although I don’t much expect this off-the-cuff notion to pass scrutiny. (I, after all, am not the professional thinker!)
Next, from Jonathan Marks’s What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee:
‘The mitochondrion, a subcellular organelle universally known in biology textbooks as “the powerhouse of the cell�, generates metabolic energy for the physiological processes of life.’ (pg.33)
‘Powerhouse’ is straight out of the Industrial Revolution lexicon.
Here’s a small, imperfectly thought-out set of alternative metaphoric descriptive possibilities:
From astronomy: ‘the sun of the cell’
From music (1): ‘the drums of the cell’
From music (2): ‘the (orchestral) conductor of the cell’
From life: the ‘muscle of the cell’
Or ‘the musculature of the cell’
Or ‘the legs of a cell’
Each of these points to the primacy and function of the mitochondrion, while not reducing-by-implication its subject (life) to constructed or engineered machinery.
I know with utter certainty this much: if I’m ‘engineered’, then I expect a manufacturer’s recall any minute now.
Life forms are far too idiosyncratically individual to be ‘engineered’. We are ‘evolved’: accidental experiments of a planet busily using sunlight to recombine its elements into self-aware entities.
Not ‘artifacts’.
Moreover, I do not ‘have’ a body. I am this body.
My body is not the house (or car!) of my consciousness. If anything, my consciousness is my body’s ‘mitochondrion’.
And the sooner science begins rectifying its inadequate descriptive choices, the sooner we – the whole of humanity – can reasonably evaluate the inappropriate implications and destructive biases of religion.
My father was an atheist and my mother is a Christian. Does that mean I got my religion gene from my mother?
And I did get the religion gene if there is one. In my lifetime I have committed myself to and practiced three different religions not counting peripheral involvement in other religions. I was raised as a Disciple of Christ, have been a founding member of a Pagan Goddess Circle for over 20 years and I am now a Buddhist.
What I am thinking about regarding this OS thread is how and why I became a Buddhist. It was not a sudden conversion. I’d been interested in Buddhism ever since I read Alan Watts in High School. I’d been going to meditations and teachings at a Buddhist center for years. I’d never felt the need to make it official. But I took refuge, the ritual of actually becoming a Buddhist, shortly after Bush invaded Iraq, not at all what I expected I would do.
I thought if/when we invaded Iraq I would go down to Seattle and stop traffic or hurl red paint on the steps of the Federal building and stage a die-in. One way or another I expected to fly into action. Instead, I laid on my bed… or my floor… listening to the news in utter despair. The next opportunity I had, I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. A wise lama took a snip of my hair and gave me a Buddhist name. Looking at it now in light of the question, are we hardwired for religious engagement, I am examining my own process. I’d tried really hard to stop the war before it started so I was tired. I was depressed. Not only did I feel a desire to be comforted by the teachings and by belonging to a group of likeminded people but I also felt a real need to commit myself to something beyond immediate dilemmas, embrace the insecurities and examine life in a meaningful way. I needed to sit quietly and watch my breath.
I think I am hardwired for religion. I’m not so sure about anybody else.
Sarcasm aside, what is the purpose of this exercise? What do we hope to achieve that might lead to more peace on the planet? I ask with an open mind. I’m sure that I’m missing something.
to know? isn’t that enough? though seriously, scott atran, who works in this paradigm in regards to religion has spoken of terrorism and how we might approach it taking into account human cognition and social psychology. before you can build a bridge you have to know something about engineering. before you can embark on a program of social engineering you should know something about society.
and btw, this isn’t sacracism: Or, we could engineer in the spiritual gene, especially the non-inquisitive, narrow minded one. Now, there’s a vision to strive for. it is a caricature of the research program which doesn’t reflect any reality, though it does make for good one-liners to those who haven’t bothered to read dan’s book.
My father was an atheist and my mother is a Christian. Does that mean I got my religion gene from my mother?
talking about a “religion gene” is as accurate as talking about a “height gene.” “religion” is a complex trait, and it is can be better though of as a normal distribution, with most people in the middle tapering off at the extremes, the zealous and the secular. as such it is likely the outcome of a confluence genes, environment and the interaction between the two. a particular genetic background might predispose you to certain outcomes, but expectation is not inevitability. religion is, to use genetic lingo, a quantitative trait, and so it is governed by statistical laws, not deterministic ones.
let’s get past the overly simple cut-outs, makes for great one-line rhetorical questions, but it allows us to evade the deeply textured aspects of the question on hand.
also, i will be frank and contend that getting many (most) religious people to approach their process of belief as a natural phenomenon is as likely as god creating a rock he can not lift: religious people imbue deeply personal ontological significance to what they believe and why they believe. this isn’t normal evo-psych at work here, this is not an exploration of banal universals, it is entering into territory which has motivated people to kill….
Nikos: regarding music. I wish I could remeber who said, “Nietche killed God. Duke Ellington brought God back to life”.
Despite the thought-provoking excellence and counter-conventional brilliance of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking The Spell, and, as a fellow atheist (at least by Judeo-Christian-Islamic norms) I urge Mr. Dennett to revise and exclude from future prints and editions his thoughts on page 21:
“I am a bright. My essay ‘The Bright Stuff’, in the New York Times, July 12, 2003, drew attention to the efforts of some agnostics, atheists, and other adherents of naturalism to coin a new term for us nonbelievers, and the large positive response to this essay, helped persuade me to write this book. There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen (not by me): bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful hijacking of the ordinary word ‘gay’ by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum, they’re straight. Those who are not bright are not necessarily dim. They might like to choose a name for themselves. Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers. It’s a nice word with positive connotations, like gay, and bright, and straight. Some people would not willingly associate with somebody who was openly gay, and others would not willingly read a book by someone who was openly bright…�
Sadly, this is utter self-sabotage. Despite protestations to the contrary, it is profoundly condescending.
The putative parallel between ‘gay’ and ‘bright’ is bogus. ‘Gay’, in its original meaning, was an emotional condition available to any and all. Homosexual identification with this word is not insulting to anyone else. (Harmlessly amusing, at worst.)
Arrogating a time-honored metaphor for ‘intelligent’ is entirely different. ‘Bright’ isn’t a variable human condition: it implies a superior intellect. ‘Intelligence’ is not a condition considered available to any and all. It is associated (rightly or wrongly) with elites.
It implies that those who choose millennia-old traditional belief in the supernatural are something less than intelligent: it attempts to expropriate ‘intelligence’, intellect, and enlightenment to the irreligious.
Using it as an identifying label for secularists discredits all secularists – including me – and I, for one, am not at all pleased by this.
I am in fact insulted and angry that one of the thinkers who champions my cause – and who does so with peerless skill – is so isolated in his ivory tower and surrounded by sycophantic pupils that the profound damage done by this arrogance is lost on him.
Please, Mr. Dennett: if you must choose a pop-culture name for the non-theistic like you and me, please choose something different.
And quickly.
Your wonderful, insightful, and potentially revolutionary book will otherwise likely fail to make the difference you surely hoped it might.
It deserves better. And so does the enlightened view of the world and nature we both wish to promulgate.
“getting many (most) religious people to approach their process of belief as a natural phenomenon is as likely as god creating a rock he can not lift”
Pagan religions are entierly based on natural phenomina.
Plus of course this idea that God is a “he” is relativly recent.
Peggy Sue: Alan Watts (who I’d make an honorary Guttersnipe if I could) was the philosopher who, in my less than articulate youth, provided the explanations I needed for my inarticulate discontent with the silly Western-Biblical ‘universe-is-an-artifact’ paradigm.
The guy is commonly dismissed as a ‘popularizer’ of Eastern thought (which is true) but he was also a genius of metaphoric explanation – and I’m not so sure that his personal takes on his subjects weren’t improvements in very many important ways.
Alan Watts rocks. Just as hard and good now as he did while alive.
Pagan religions are entierly based on natural phenomina.
two words: dumb generalization. why? “pagan” is a complementary term, it doesn’t define a set of doctrines, it is a negative of what the abrahamic religions are (the christians named the pagans pagans ['rustic' from pagani], the pagan philosophers for example called themselves ‘hellenists’ in the 4th century). in other words, paganism includes the entire sample space of beliefs that excludes the small constrained region of judeo-christian-islamic monotheism (conventionally understood).
Plus of course this idea that God is a “he� is relativly recent.
at attempt at profundity by using “quotes”? what is this? read a book like theological correctness you will note that “offline” conceptions of god(s) are very different than the air-fairy formulas propounded by theologians. the cognitive model that people have of god(s) is pretty straightforward, a personal agent + plus some superhuman counterintuitive “powers.” a personal agent can have a sex, we don’t need to posit that moses or someone in the court of rehoboam in jerusalem. this isn’t rocket science, it is an extrapolation of human intuitions constrained and biased by our cognitive architecture.
* john polkinghorne, anglican priest and physicist, has written a few books where he argues in fact that the supernatural non-materialist aspects of christianity are interpolations into the materialist-natural religion of the hebrews by a pagan-philosophical matrix. i don’t buy the either|or aspect of these arguments, but it shows how worthless these generalizations can be. religions aren’t platonic ideals, they are statisical distributions, and words can muddle far more than they clarify when not used judicioulsy.
some interesting stuff:
A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition.
razib: ‘dumb’ is pejorative. Enough so to be hostile.
I like your stuff. A lot. Please carefully consider your possible, (unintentional?) truculence. I’ve got ambitions to discuss the implications of this thread’s topic with you, but please don’t paint us into a corner.
For a decade and a half, I too considered myself a ‘pagan’ – not a ‘country-dweller’ – but a nature-reverencer. (NOT WORSHIPPER — that’s a monotheistic conceit, I think.
Give me time to type up a thoughtful reply, and thank you already for all the great stuff you’ve contributed – not only here but elsewhere, and in spades.
if you guys like dan dennett’s book, here’s some other good stuff:
religion explained, pascal boyer.
in gods we trust, scott atran.
why would anyone believe in god, just l. barrett.
theological incorrectness, d. jason slone.
mind
and religion, harvey whitehouse.
, d.s. slone.
a theory of religion, rod stark.
best
yeah, sorry about the word dumb
it’s late. i’ll jump in tomorrow if i have time. if i can’t comment, shout out to dan dennett!
nikos, for the record, i’m a nominalist in regards to most religious terms and definitions. i don’t think they really “exist” as useful reifications even. but, we are fooled into thinking that they are real categories because people will kill over them. see the homoiousios vs. homoousios controversy for what i mean: i don’t think the two really mean anything, i think they are word games, but people were willing to kill others over it, so we might as well give words their due.
ok…before i go to sleep…i will outline something real quick to explain where i’m coming from, because i think my comments were be more intelligible if i don’t back to this thread tomorrow.
‘religion’ is a diffuse and very slippery term. it isn’t a platonic ideal that exists somewhere, it is within the heads of human beings. there are multiple dimension of religion.
1) the cognitive/basal level.
2) the social/ritualistic level.
3) the mystical level.
4) the theological level.
a generalization for one does not apply to another. for example, i think a lot of the conversations we have are biased toward #4. we talk about ‘monotheism,’ ‘monism,’ ‘pantheism,’ ‘panentheism,’ ‘the trinity.’ what does this mean? i hold that most theology consists of word-games which exhibit the form but not substance of deductive inference. i don’t think terms like ‘the trinity’ really means anything aside from a creed, because cognitive scientists have shown that #1 is what people really “believe” in a deep level, and regardless of whether you aver monistic pantheism or dualistic trinitarianism the mental model you have god(s) is basically the same. that doesn’t mean that people won’t kill each other over outward markers and confessions, but hey, that’s just human.
when it comes to human variation i think #3 really kicks in, though many humans are mystical, a small minority are highly mystical. neurotheology is exploring this aspect of religion.
but mysticism is not the sum totality of religion. there are plenty of people in category #2, where they are ‘sunday epsicopalians,’ for whom religion is a social exercise that greases the wheels of the establishment.
these categories are not exclusive, rather, they nest into each other. #1 is normative and found in all societies. this is where biological evolution might offer insights. #2 is a higher level of complexity, but tends to be found in almost all groups. this is where group selection and what not might kick in (though i’m skeptical of group selection, see richerson and boyd’s recent work). #3 might be found in most medium-to-large societies, but lacking in a prominent fashion in small groups because only a small minority of humans are true mystics who command charismatic followings and small groups do not always harbor this kind of individual. #4 tends to be found in ‘complex’ societies with literate intellectual classes.
distinguishing between these aspects of ‘religion’ are crucial, i think, to clear and progressive discourse. as a younger atheist i mistakenly believed that #4 was the summum bonum of religion, i learned how to refute all the inductive and deductive ‘proofs’ of god. only later one did i realize that there was something ‘missing’ in my conception of the minds of other human beings. a lot of mental processes are ‘under the hood’ and unelucidated, and fall into category #1. i’m not a group oriented person, so #2 never had much appeal, and #3 is only something i feel the faintest whiff of (a trait which i think i share with most humans).
Razib: I fully understand the ‘lateness’ complication! It’s true for me right now, too, which seems to be adding up to a morning finish for my post.
Let me try this much at least: the show as teased above is at least slightly, if not wholly, misunderstood so far by the bloggers.
Dennett’s book only in passing considers anything like a ‘god-gene’: it examines the possibility that ‘religion’ is subject to ‘natural selection’ – via the usefulness of its dogma to the believers or proselytizers – as is genetic ‘DNA information.’
My take (having read the thing) is yes.
Emphatically yes.
So, the question isn’t so much whether people are ‘genetically prone’ to religion, but whether religion as a concept and in practice offers enough value to people to evolve like life does: into appropriate niches.
Again: yes. It does. Like a parasite!
It’s really a matter of personal taste and choice whether you think this ‘memetic parasite’ healthfully symbiotic or deleteriously malignant.
Read the book and think it out for yourselves!
I’ve got much more to say on this, but it’ll be a miracle if it comes before morning.
Night, all!
ok, one last thing, i think the thought of historians of religion like mircea eliade tends to seep into any discussion of religion as an analytic exercise (the tendency to dance around words as if they are what matters is part of this). i think that’s problematic because scholars like eliade fundamentally rejected the naturalistic/reductionistic paradigm.
the usefulness of its dogma
semantics! i don’t think anything like “dogma” existed prior to the rise of pan-ethnic states. i think “dogma” simply represents verbal “face paint,” a way to identify co-citizens. dogma is not what is parasitizing the mind…supernaturalism is, and that is far more diffuse than a narrow dogma. ultimately, i think that supernaturalism does not need dogma because it is so natural.
razib: Hokaaaay…. my comment, “Pagan religions are entierly based on natural phenomina” was certainly a generalization but no more a generalization than…. your comment….
“getting many (most) religious people to approach their process of belief as a natural phenomenon is as likely as god creating a rock he can not lift�
and certainly not any dumber.
razib: your 3:36 AM says to me: “tell him to read the book! What he’s talking about is in there!”
So, I’m tellin’ ya.
It’s in there. Read it and tell me what you think.
I suspect you’ll like it.
and by the way…
My father was an atheist and my mother is a Christian. Does that mean I got my religion gene from my mother?
that was a joke…. sheesh
was certainly a generalization but no more a generalization than….
semantics, but you said “entirely” and i said “many (most).” “entirely” implies a platonic ideal or an absolute truth, “many (most”) implies an inductive/probabilistic assertion. whether one assertion or the other was dumber is a matter of opinion.
nikos, yeah, i’ve read some of it. haven’t had time to finish….
re: adaptiveness and fitness. here is my attitude toward religion, at least stipulating religion #1, i suspect that there is no first order fitness benefit. eg., “religion brings calm, calm people are more fit.” or, “religion mitigates fear of death, and so people are less on edge, so more fit.” i don’t think religious belief arises to satisfy any tightly focused existential unease which has negative adaptive impact. rather, i suspect that religion is as natural a byproduct of a well oiled mind as heat is a byproduct of a powerful engine. the cognitive architecture implied by an optimal human mind is easily and naturally parasitized by religious beliefs. it isn’t a premeditated design feature, but the laws of cognitive neuroscience might make its ubiquity inevitable.
Allison says: “Is god in our genes? Does it matter? The better questions to my mind, “How can we learn to respectfully co-exist with 6 billion different perceptions of what this existence is about?�
Perhaps if we, at least those of us working on this level, understand the basics underlying the 6 million or so different perceptions, those variations will seem less important than the similarities. There will be more understanding and more compassion. Consequently the walls we erect will perhaps crumble.
In other words I think this is an attempt at not only self-understanding, but understanding and making sense of the bigger whole of the world ( and universe) around us. We are able avoid each other less and less.
This too is about survival– survival of the planet and life as we know it.
That’s why I think we pick away at this.
Thanks for the question.
Razib- I am not sure I understand you. My idea is that religion does indeed “mitigate fear of death” and so people are more calm, more able to think clearly and thus more fit. The problem arises when religion becomes so ornate and entrenched and part of the social fabric that it cannot acommodate reason, especially science. Then it works against survival.
The Dalai Lama is well aware of this.
frag that “bright” stuff.
we’re transhumanists.
but that likely has worse connotations than “brights”.
“human beings are not souls or spirits but evolved biological beings genetically programmed to survive, reproduce, and self-destruct.”–Young, designer evolution
religion evolved as a selective advantage.
when we defeat aging and death, will there still be religion?
and, of course god is in the genes. like Sir Richard says, religion is parasitic on our natural coding for altruism, kinship promotion, species promotion, care of children, generousity.
we are programmed to readily believe in the supernatural for a variety of reasons that increase fitness, like Atran and Boyer say.
It is easier to believe, than to not believe.
Ok. I completely totally sincerely disavow anything remotely religious: the whole deal. Start to finish. I’m not an atheist; that would put me on the spectrum. We’re simply the symbol-makers. god is a word symbol. It’s not a metaphor, it’s just a symbol like any other word, for what we don’t have answers about. Sooner or later there will be answers.
Once, while I was seeing a Jungian analyst I had a dream in which she invited me to a party at her house. At the party I ran into four other friends and we decided to do a comedy skit, like burlesque. But we started laughing at our own jokes and the dream turned into a shreiking, gasping laughing fit where you’re laughing so hard you can’t breath. On and on, gasping hilarity. I was loving it and then it gor better, way WAY better. Suddenly we all merged into each other and everything else and there was only this overwhelmingly pleasurable silvery one-ness. Think orgasm forever but perfectly still with no body times a thousand. Oh oh it was like nothing else. But almost as soon as I got there it started to break up. Not back to the dream but back in my bed awake. I was gasping for breath and the bed was bouncing against the wall. I HAD been laughing that hard and probably had stopped breathing.
Ever since Ithat night I’ve been convinced that my rapture–and everyone else’s–is a brain state produced by oxygen deprivation. Like orgasm, it’s an inbred reward for doing something necessary but unpleasant; childbirth and dying.
When I told my analyst she lit up with an elfin grin and observed; “You know, I’ve always wondered why the Buddhist monks are so jolly, always ready to laugh. I think you just answered my question.
It’s all just word symbols, in this case signifying nothing. So simple, it’s nothing.
and razib, i think you could argue that there is a first order fitness benefit on reproduction rate, or number of children per family, for all religions.
hmmm…didn’t we just talk about that at gnxp?
I would suggest a good read of any of Joseph Campbells books. It’s my worthless opinion that back in the old days when we were living on a more immediate tribal level, religion was an important part of the tribe. The belief system they had contained all the rules and standards they used to interact with each other and established the boundaries they all lived within. Everything outside those boundaries was other. Of course the god, or gods, they believed in was their god. Look at the old testament. The jews were god’s chosen peoiple. Of course they were, who is going to have a god that is for the other guys. They had a religious leader who was the interpreter and receiver of messages from god. I think a god or religion was useful at that level.
As life has gotten more complicated and the world filled with more complex thinkers, like those on this sight, religion and thinking about god became more complicated. Madison avenue, 1600 Pennskyvania avenue, found god quite useful, They’ve taken a belief in god and an obiedience to god and converted it to their own purposes. Tie god to your polotical party or product and people will feel an obligation, sometimes a moral obligation to side with you.
Bush and company understand these principles and this war is, in part, based on those principles. The evil empires are the others ridding the world of them is our god given task. They are a threat to our way of life and very existance. When delivering this message it aleays helps to throw in a healthy dose of biblical sounding words.
On an individual level I think the idea of a god is comforting to some people. It gives them some way of managing the chaos and helplessness they feel.
Take a look at some of the names we have come up with – Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, The Holy Trinity, Igzi’abihier, Jah , Ngai, Niskam, Ishvara, Brahman, Baquan , Anami, Purush, Radha, Swami, Radha, Ekam, Bahá, Ahura Mazda, Kisaski
It goes on and on and on, this site explores them.
http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names/gods.htm
If we are “wired” for this, the crazy configuration of our livewires adds up to something shocking indeed! pun intended.
My alltime favorite God has to be George Burns.
BTW, the above names came from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God
razib: and btw, this isn’t sacracism: “Or, we could engineer in the spiritual gene, especially the non-inquisitive, narrow minded one. Now, there’s a vision to strive for”. it is a caricature of the research program which doesn’t reflect any reality, though it does make for good one-liners to those who haven’t bothered to read dan’s book.
Oh, I must admit that I have not read the book and there was not enough lead in to this for me even peruse it. I was being sarcastic. Didn’t realize there was some program that I might be misrepresenting. My apologies if I was disrespectful.
A book called: “The Masks of God”, also explored the many faces and names of god, gods. One thing I admired about Joseph Campbell , is he sought out the commonality of people, their myths and religions. He showed me that when you refine us down to our basics we have more in common than not, belief systems included. Perhaps if we looked in that direction we could begin to understand and accept other ways of seeing things.
Does God belive Daniel Dennet?
Razib: re: adaptiveness and fitness. …. i suspect that religion is as natural a byproduct of a well oiled mind as heat is a byproduct of a powerful engine. the cognitive architecture implied by an optimal human mind is easily and naturally parasitized by religious beliefs. it isn’t a premeditated design feature, but the laws of cognitive neuroscience might make its ubiquity inevitable.
I’m trying to understand what you’re getting at. The metaphor above doesn’t work for me. Heat is a by-product but does not “parasitize” the engine. Why do you consider the mind parasitized (meaning, the the religious belief is a parasite on the mind?) by religious belief? Parasite has negative connotation- parasites are usually a destructive force to the host. While I can see the destructive force of religion in human history, I think what is not recorded in history is the beneficial force that a vast majority of individuals experience. I don’t think religion is parasitizing, I think self-serving people parasitize other people, using fear to push for religious beliefs that are not truly spiritual. It is fear, not religion that creates the destructivity.
And since you parse out 4 different aspects of religious belief (that I prefer to call spirituality, but hey, just more semantics), are you referring to all 4 aspects when you speak of parasitizing?
OK, I admit it. I,m dim. Dimmer than a 40 Watt bulb in a Walmart warehouse. And so those brights got me confused. Can’t figure out all of the comotion, you know. I mean, I can tell you, we dims don’t take this nearly as seriously as those brights seem to think. Well, not as seriously as we should, anyway. Ask any pastor. True, not true? Genetic, or not? Heck if I know. Anyway, it’s time for lunch.
Raymond, I agree with you about one thing. Some of the “brights” seem to just dismiss some of the “dims” comments by ignoring them. They breeze right on by and hope the lessers will go away and quit interrupting them. Not everybody was lucky enough to have the fine education President Bush and some of our loftier neighbors here have. I, for one, would like to apologize for getting in the way.
Babu- you dream is reminiscent of an LSD trip. Life-altering because you lose your individuality, your ego. They call this an “out of body experience” where you become one with ALL, but unless you have actually had it, it really means little. Good description though, very good.
Assuming we believe the bible is inspired of God…the bible says “…that it does not belong to man even to direct his own step.” (Jer. 10:23) To be successful, truly happy we have to rely on the one who made us.
Aha, babu, the lack of oxygen, now I understand. They say the lack of oxygen kills brain cells.
Another pubradio show, “The Infinite Mind”, also addressed this “are we hard-wired for ‘God’?” question last fall…there was a real interesting interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, who managed to duplicate the sensation of a divine presence nearby using a electrostatic helmet.
There’s a realaudio link here, Persinger’s interview is about 34:00 into the show.
http://www.lcmedia.com/mind406.htm
I’m willing to put money on my speculation that it’s all, including god, oxygen deprivation or the like. Maybe acid grabs or eats the O2 molecules. And meditation definitely lowers breathing; its a part of the practice. Oxygen scarcity.
If there’s any religious hard-wiring, this is it. Lack of air. We interpret it as divine when it’s just divinely pleasant.
O2 deprivation may be the key or the trigger, but I don’t know if it’s the whole story. We can’t be discovering anything here- there must be some research on this, or there should be.
What about whirling dervishes? Are they get O2 deprived as they whirl?
Do mountain climbers have a religious/God experience as they climb to the higher elevations?
The latter may not produce a relgious experience.
Something else must kick in, like an individual’s need or desire. ( Je ne sais quoi)
babu: “And meditation definitely lowers breathing; its a part of the practice. Oxygen scarcity”.
Are you sure? I always thought I was getting more oxygen when meditating because when I’m paying attention to my breath it is slower and each breath is longer and deeper. (is that why my knees hurt and I’m not experiencing orgasmic bliss?)
What is the sound of one hand clapping Babu. Go beyond reason. Reason, when isolated, can be a dangerous toy.
Here’s another thought: If oxygen IS the trigger, think about what we’re doing to the global oxygen supply with air pollution. ACID rain?
We’re poisoning ourselves and having an out of body experience at the same time. Poison rapture.
Oh m’gawd. Try this. What if the rise of air pollution is causing the rise in fundamentalism and terrorism? They’re telling the martyrs they go directly to heaven. I wonder if there’s an appreciable degeneration in air quality around all those oi- producing facilities in the Middle East?
Where are the highest densities of air pollutin in the U.S.? Wouldn’t I love to see if there’s a correlation between per capita fundamentalists and say
Babu I just reread your earlier comments. You wrote: “Suddenly we all merged into each other and everything else and there was this overwhelmingly pleasurable silvery one-ness.” That has to be one of the most perfect descriptions of losing your illusion of seperateness and blending back into the oneness that some would call GOD. When you are in REM sleep your body is almost in suspended animation. Your respiration and heart beat slow to the level of just keeping your physical self alive, leaving your spiritual self free to go back into the world it knew before it came here. Your reasonablr mind isn’t receiving much oxygen at this point. Thank you for sharing your wonderful experience with GOD.
SUV’s and Hummers?
That’s oil-producing facilities, above.
Here is a link to a neuroscience article on meditation.
Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/46/16369
Peggysue: I think you need a few giggles to get you on your way. I propose we all bring lots of jokes to our ROS meetup in Anacortes on May 7th.
Babu is a hindi term for father, it’s also another name for God. Are we just being tested here? Is Babu just Buddha disguised as a jester.
I had seen a summary of that very interesting research previously. Scanning it, there’s no mention of chemistry; it’s all hertz and waves. I’d like to know what the behavior of brain oxygen levels is associated with each of the states?
Come to Anacortes WA on May 7th and find out.
Nikos and peggysue and I are having a meetup. We set the date and time yesterday in the Convergence thread. It’s a funny read, actually.
ok, finished breaking the spell this morning. good review of the literature, though i suggest that people really interested still reading atran or boyer (i don’t know if i recommend stark as much, the guy has too much attitude, while d.s. wilson is kind of hot-air in my opinion).
Gee serious lee I think “father is ignoring us. I’ll just practise my deep breathing and try to communicate with her on the astral plane.
My idea is that religion does indeed “mitigate fear of death� and so people are more calm, more able to think clearly and thus more fit. The problem arises when religion becomes so ornate and entrenched and part of the social fabric that it cannot acommodate reason, especially science. Then it works against survival.
assume it does “mitigate fear of death,” does that make you less cautious, ergo, decreasing your fitness? that is, you are calm in the face of situations that should trigger your flight-or-fight response. do i believe this? no, my point is that you can make any story fit from introspection on this level.
the second point is that prior to the rise of zoroastrianism it does not seem like the afterlife of most religions was something to look forward to. hades is not elysium.
the last point is that fitness is a net equation. it might have positive benefits x, but if it has negative implications y, and y + x is less than 0, well, it shouldn’t spread, should it?
We all talk about God (capitalized) as if He (caps again) were some old dude with a beard sitting on a throne (Zeus?). God is not in our genes. God is us. We created him. Just ask Joseph Campbell. All the rest is just mental masturbation.
How’s your life? How ya livin’? Now that’s real. If only science had a voice people understood within context of their everyday lives. It does somewhere but is rarely expressed.
Where’s the convergence of good science and good literature? That I would like to read.
and razib, i think you could argue that there is a first order fitness benefit on reproduction rate, or number of children per family, for all religions.
hmmm…didn’t we just talk about that at gnxp?
religions like lamaism and medieval roman catholicism did fine though they encouraged celibacy on their practitioners. one could appeal to a form of group selection, but i’m skeptical. i don’t think modern situation applies to the past, and context matters. intergroup variation doesn’t tell us much, but, assuming the axiom that more-religion=more-reproduction, one would wonder why the (relatively) religious nations of southern europe are so much less fecund vis-a-vis scandinavia. social context matters. now, the more pointed point is that does intragroup variance in reproduction correlate with religiosity? today, yes, i would argue it does. but if frequency dependent selection is in play than it need not.
the short of it would be that i suggest caution on interpreting religion #1 (basal cognitive biases toward supernaturalism) as being fitness enhancing. i think the fitness detracting aspects of secularism are correlates, not causative.
Since I’ve got the book in my lap (and am rereading it with unaccustomed haste) I think it would be constructive to our conversation here to quote Dennett’s chapter summaries:
Chapter 1:
Religions are among the most powerful natural phenomena on the planet, and we need to understand them better if we are to make informed and just political decisions. Although there are risks and discomforts involved, we should brace ourselves and set aside our traditional reluctance to investigate religious phenomena scientifically so that we can come to understand how and why religions inspire such devotion, and figure our how we should deal with them all in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 2 (premise): There are obstacles confronting scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it sis both possible and advisable for us to turn to our strongest investigative light on religion.
Chapter 2 (conclusion): Religion is not out of bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.
Chapter 3 (premise): If we want to know why we value the things we love, we need to delve into the evolutionary history of the planet, uncovering the forces and constraints that have generated the glorious array of things we treasure. Religion is not exempt from this survey, and we can sketch out a variety of promising avenues for further research, while coming to understand how we can achieve a perspective on our own inquires that all can share, regardless of their different creeds.
Chapter 3 (conclusion): Everything we value—from sugar to sex to money to music and love and religion—we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection.
Chapter 4 (premise): Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they must operate. The social and linguistic environment that coevolved with human brains gives human beings powers that folk religions apparently evolved to handle. The apparent extravagances of religious practices can be accounted for in the austere terms of evolutionary biology.
Chapter 4 (conclusion): Extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking, we can surmise how folk religions emerged without conscious and deliberate design, just as languages emerged, by interdependent processes of biological and cultural evolution. At the root of human beliefs in gods lies and instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated that moves.
Chapter 5 (premise): The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents wherever the action is are the irritants around which the pearls of religion grow. Only the best, most mind-friendly variants propagate, by meeting—or seeming to meet—deep psychological and physical needs, and then these are further refined by the incessant pruning of selection processes.
Chapter 5 (conclusion): The obvious expensiveness of folk religion, a challenge to biology, can be accounted for by hypotheses that are not yet confirmed but testable. Probably the excess population of imaginary agents generated by the HADD yielded candidates to press into service as decision aids, in divination, or as shaman’s accomplices, in health maintenance, for instance. These co-opted or exapted mental constructs were then subjected to extensive design revision under the selective pressure for reproductive prowess.
Chapter 6 (premise): As human culture grew and people became more reflective, folk religion became transformed into organized religion; the free-floating rationales of the earlier designs were supplemented and sometimes replaced by carefully crafted reasons as religions became domesticated.
Chapter 6 (conclusion): The transmission of religion has been attended by voluminous revision, often deliberate and foresighted, as people became stewards of the ideas that had entered them, domesticating them. Secrecy, deception, and systematic invulnerability to disconfirmation are some of the features that have emerged, and these have been designed by processes that were sensitive to new answers to the cui bono? question, as the stewards’ motives entered the process.
Chapter 7 (premise): Why do people join groups? Is this simply a rational decision on their part, or are there relatively mindless forces of group selection at work? Though there is much to be said in favor of both of these proposals, they do not exhaust the plausible models that attempt to explain our readiness to form lasting allegiances.
Chapter 7 (conclusion): The human proclivity for groupishness is less calculated and prudential than it appears in some economic models, but also more complicated than the evolved herding instinct of some animals. What complicates the picture is human language and culture, and the perspective of memes permits us to comprehend how the phenomena of human allegiance are influenced by a mixture of free-floating and well-tethered rationales. We can make progress by acknowledging that submission to a religion need not be cast as a deliberate economic decision, while also recognizing the analytical and predictive power of perspective that views religions as designed systems competing in a dynamic marketplace for adherents with different needs and tastes.
Chapter 8 (premise): The stewardship of religious ideas creates a powerful phenomenon: belief in belief, which radically transforms the content of the underlying beliefs, making rational investigation of them difficult if not impossible.
Chapter 8 (conclusion): The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to “save� their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves. The result is that even the professors don’t really know what they are professing. This makes the goal of either proving or disproving God’s existence a quixotic quest—but also for that reason not very important.
Chapter 9 (premise): The important question is whether religions deserve the continued protection of their adherents. Many people love their religion more than anything else in life. Do their religions deserve this adoration?
Chapter 9 (conclusion): Before we can ask the question of whether religion is, all things considered, a good thing, we must fist work through several protective barriers, such as the love barrier, the academic territoriality barrier, and the loyalty-to-God barrier. Then we can calmly consider the pros and cons of religious allegiance, looking first at the question, Is religion good for people? And the evidence to date on that question is mixed. It does seem t provide some health benefits, for instance, but it is too early to say whether there are other, better ways of delivering these benefits, and too early to say if the side effect outweigh the benefits.
Chapter 10 (premise): The more important question, finally, is whether religion is the foundation of morality. Do we get the content of morality from religion, or is it an irreplaceable infrastructure for organizing moral action, or does it provide moral or spiritual strength? Many think the answers are obvious and positive, but these are questions that need to be re-examined in the light of what we have learned.
Chapter 10 (conclusion): The widely prevailing opinion that religion is the bulwark of morality is problematic at best. The idea that heavenly reward is what motivates good people is demeaning and unnecessary; the idea that religion at its best gives meaning to life is jeopardized by the hypocrisy trap into which we have fallen; the idea that religious authority grounds our moral judgments is useless in genuine ecumenical exploration; and the presumed relation between spirituality and moral goodness is an illusion.
Chapter 11: The research described in this book is just the beginning. Further research is needed, on both the evolutionary history of religion and on its contemporary phenomena, as they appear to different disciplines. The most pressing questions concern how we should deal with the excesses of religious upbringing and the recruitment of terrorists, but these can only be understood against a backdrop of wider theories of religious conviction and practice. We need to secure our democratic society, the home base for this research, against the subversion of those who would use democracy as a ladder to theocracy and then throw it all away, and we need to spread the knowledge that is the fruit of free inquiry.
Daniel Dennett, Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon, Viking; 2006
The devil, of course, lives in the details between all those ‘premises’ and ‘conclusions’. I’m willing, provisionally, to ‘play Dennett’ – but since my understanding of the book is my own idiosyncratic take, I can hardly be trusted to answer questions about the work as Dennett would. (Nevertheless, I appear to be one of the few of us who had read the thing.)
With that (substantial!) caveat in mind: let’s party!
p.s. the fact that religious expression and zeal exhibits a range and is heritable suggests that its fitness implication isn’t that unambiguous. traits with powerful long term fitness implications get fixed and no variation shows up in the population due to genotype. we know this isn’t true, bouchard’s twin studies suggest a 0.5 heritability for religiosity. in other words, if religiosity and fitness were so strongly correlated atheists would be as rare as people with 3 fingers, and i don’t think that’s the case.
I’m trying to understand what you’re getting at. The metaphor above doesn’t work for me. Heat is a by-product but does not “parasitize� the engine. Why do you consider the mind parasitized (meaning, the the religious belief is a parasite on the mind?) by religious belief? Parasite has negative connotation- parasites are usually a destructive force to the host. While I can see the destructive force of religion in human history, I think what is not recorded in history is the beneficial force that a vast majority of individuals experience. I don’t think religion is parasitizing, I think self-serving people parasitize other people, using fear to push for religious beliefs that are not truly spiritual. It is fear, not religion that creates the destructivity.
And since you parse out 4 different aspects of religious belief (that I prefer to call spirituality, but hey, just more semantics), are you referring to all 4 aspects when you speak of parasitizing?
my analogy wasn’t apt in that i was addressing different aspects simultaneously.
religion #1, cognitve basal biases works like so, religion:though, work:heat. that is, we have social intelligence and tend to see agency around us. if we subtracted this, we would lack religion because religion needs both of these. but we tend to exhibit “false positives” in detecting agency (design/teleology) where there is none. i hold that this is a byproduct of our mental architecture. we could work in ways to avoid the biases that allow us to see agency where there isn’t (gods where there isn’t), but that might be costly, just as designing engines that dissipate heat well might be. i don’t think that religious beliefs are so costly that modifiers have evolved to fine tune our brain so we don’t enter into the “false positive” problem. evolution is a good enough solution.
re: parasitize, you can use another word. meme for example. same idea. basically, religion is not one thing, but a complex of ideas. these ideas tend to be really good at fitting into the preconceptions of our brain, and so they flourish.
religions 2-4 can fit into this picture, but they are higher-level aspects. functionalism and the idea that certain ideas are more “fit” than others are more relevant here too, though i’m still skeptical of group selection or anything like that, especially in #4.
one thing to remember is that humans seem to be conformist have a tendency to “do what everyone else is doing.” so a lot of the fitness vis-a-vis religion might be a byproduct of the fact that the majority of people are religious, so it increases your mating prospects if you are religion (this is a modified form of runaway selection).
Isn’t it amazing (& appalling) how you can’t see typos until after you’ve posted?
Chapter 2 (premise) – “preliminary exploration shows that it is both�
Chapter 2 (conclusion) – “Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform�
Chapter 4 (conclusion) – “At the root of human beliefs in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger�
Chapter 9 (conclusion) – “Before we can ask the question of whether religion is, all things considered, a good thing, we must first work�
& “It does seem to provide�
Apologies to Mr. Dennett and to any and all readers!
Isn’t it amazing (& appalling) how you can’t see typos until after you’ve posted?
we are all sinners.
and taking a break from seriousness, what’s up with dan dennett and his beard? atheists aren’t supposed to look like prophets out of the hebrew bible…are they?
Amen, Acuman. Your superior mental acuteness astounds me. Perhaps Babus orgasmic ecperience was a direct result of her mental masturbation? I also agree that things do get a bit lofty around here at times but going to great heights can also lead to oxygen deprevation and just another chance to meet god. Love God
OK, I’ve outed myself. I admit it, I am God. If you have anything more to say about me please address me directly. Sorry about all the misunderstanding, we’re working on coming up with a website to try and clear up all the misconceptions you poor souls labor under. My advise to all of you is: “Keep it simple stupid.” Now, I want you to all make up and stop associating me with the republican party. I haven’t voted in ages.
I concur with razib in many areas.
Most explicitly: ‘religiosity’ isn’t genetic.
Yet religions are ‘memetic’ idea clusters that survive within human culture via an extrapolation of the ‘natural selection’ dynamic: if a new religion offers a greater value to a person or population than an old religion – or no religion – people will adopt it. Same goes for change within a religion: whatever tenets, dogma, doctrine, and practices survive scrutiny best will endure. The rest, like ‘witch-doctoring’ fall to history’s wayside.
Once again: ‘God’ isn’t in our genes, nor is religion.
But we are a pattern- and inference-making species, and, until recently, we relied on supernatural explanations for answers about the world beyond the perceptions of our five senses.
Now, instead, we amplify our senses with technological aids and with reason, and religious premises can’t endure the scrutiny. Religion therefore survives via fears of personal oblivion, appeal to supernatural ‘magic’ (like soul salvation), and by fighting science tooth and nail.
This worries me deeply.
The next ‘dark age’ isn’t predestined by nay means, but it sure is likely if religions forcibly curtail or end scientific inquiry.
I neglected to mention religion’s best ally: social pressure. As in: you must believe as I, your father (or mother or brother or king) believes. Failure to comply will lead to consequences.
How many of us are aware of the man in Afghanistan facing execution for his repudiation of Islam, and conversion to Christianity?
Now that’s social pressure!
He might escape with his life by a convenient employment of an ‘insanity’ judgment, which adds a delicious layer of Orwellian logic to the entire sordid business.
Hey Nikos….. it’s a law about typos…. no matter how hard you scour, there are always plenty waiting for you on the other side of the wall that you can no longer change. Personally I like to see other typos-I ‘d hate to be the only one.
Back to business- thanks so much for all the work involved to give us the summaries.
I notice that Joseph Campbell has been mentioned several times on this thread….bravo!
However I’m with Raymond in the dim bulb group.
Razib.. I am out of your league I think but I persist:
“assume it does “mitigate fear of death,â€? does that make you less cautious, ergo, decreasing your fitness? that is, you are calm in the face of situations that should trigger your flight-or-fight response. do i believe this? no, my point is that you can make any story fit from introspection on this level.”
We need our fears to a point. A sustained “fight or flight” reaction leads to mental illness so we do need calming, very much so. There is so much to talk about in this vein but think of post traumatic stress syndrome as one extreme. Think of the victims of natural disasters whose nervous systems have been shocked. What brings them back to normalcy? What calms?
more interesting reading material (PDF): The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science and The Folk Psychology of Souls (also PDF).
We need our fears to a point. A sustained “fight or flight� reaction leads to mental illness so we do need calming, very much so. There is so much to talk about in this vein but think of post traumatic stress syndrome as one extreme. Think of the victims of natural disasters whose nervous systems have been shocked. What brings them back to normalcy? What calms?
sure, i am not disputing that religion => calmness => more fitness might actually work. i am saying that it is an illustration, but we can’t assume that it is that telling a priori via our intuitions. there needs to be a balance between calm and sensitivity to fears, where is that balance? depending on where we draw the line it will have big implications for the question “is religion fitness positive or negative?” this is a tendency of many assertions people make in regards to psychology, we are pretty good at folk psychology, but it has its limitations, but our own mental biases tend not to see this, so our a priori logic and intuitions tend to be very presuasive. i’m saying be suspicious.
How many of us are aware of the man in Afghanistan facing execution for his repudiation of Islam, and conversion to Christianity?
one thing, some people argue that this sort of extreme social pressure is a feature of the abrahamic religions. that is, doctrinal conformity is a feature of islam and christianity, whereas other groups tend to be more orthopraxy in orientation (jews and hindus for example). i don’t buy into this dichotomy totally, but there is something there. nikos’ point about social pressure though does hold i think, fitness is socially contextualized. many people in small towns have to find a church-home if they are to get along (or get a job and business).
But we are a pattern- and inference-making species, and, until recently, we relied on supernatural explanations for answers about the world beyond the perceptions of our five senses.
Now, instead, we amplify our senses with technological aids and with reason, and religious premises can’t endure the scrutiny. Religion therefore survives via fears of personal oblivion, appeal to supernatural ‘magic’ (like soul salvation), and by fighting science tooth and nail.
i’m not sure i agree in this insofar as religion serves as a “proto-science.” i agree that it is a way to explain aspects of the world around us, that it is a way to address existential fears, but, i think that the focus that these aspects of religion have received in intellectual discussion is a function of the interests of intellectuals. i suspect that religion, and obviously religion #1, draw mostly from mundane cognitive biases and intuitions. i think that the “religion that can’t endure scrutiny” should be changed to “some religions can’t endure scrutiny.”
consider fundamentalism, how many christian fundamentalists hold that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth? these are logical inferences from passages in the bible (“the four corners of the world,” the sun stood still for joshua, etc.). fundamentalists simply reinterpreted their old beliefs, they regularly engage in the sin of metaphorical interpretation when they have to. re: evolution, once genetic engineering becomes powerful enough that speciation is something that man himself can do i suspect a lot of the opposition to it will fade…though i have argued that one problem with evolution is that it attacks too many of our native intuition about kinds and folk biology.
i think the god-of-the-gaps argument is powerful for the intellectuals, for those who trust and believe in abstractions and vast systems of thought. but for most people i don’t think this is that important, and so i think religion will naturally bend with the wind and adjust with the blows.
i guess i am saying that to some extent s.j. gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria is correct. the problem is with fundamentalisms who want to interpose themselves onto the explanatory axis where science is so useful. ultimately they will give ground and adapt, evolve so to speak, but it takes time because though most humans appreciate the fruits of science few truly understand science on a deep level (most scientists are narrow specialists themselves).
p.s. my comments are more intelligible assuming some knowledge of the cognitive revolution.
sure, i am not disputing that religion => calmness => more fitness might actually work.
Exactly: these are benefits that religion can provide — thus making them ‘fit’ for survival in the Darwinian sense.
This is the meat of Dennett’s book.
Calmness however, can come from a variety of cultural sources, like meditation, which needs no god or creed to be useful.
Calmness also — and perhaps best — can come from the unique human gift of music.
Razib—Might actually work? Where is that balance? Everyone has to balance (and rebalance) between calm and sensitivity (wakefulness, awareness) for themselves according to their emotional needs and changing circumstances. Religion is a tool in that sense and it can work positively as well as negatively (obviously) in the world. Yes, of course religion has limitations, but if it is working, calming, one cannot at the same time “be suspicious”.
( Are we communicating?)
re: the provenance of ‘calmness’ — how could I forget to mention the calming effects of 4 mile runs???
Nikos…..absolutely music… It’s funny after being agitated by ROS thought provoking topics, after the show comes “Eric in the Evening” here in the Boston area. He’s all great jazz selections and I can feel the physical change. Needless to say- we are music lovers in this house-bigtime.
potter, to reiterate:
1) there is calm
2) there is non-calm
3) there a ratio between calm and non-calm which is fitness optimal (too calm and you snooze while the tiger stalks, too scared and you run over the cliff)
4) some personality tendencies and beliefs may module the ratio of calm:non-calm
my contention is that a) we don’t know the ratio b) we don’t know the impact of “religion” on that ratio in the net (i.e., some religious modes are not calm). i am willing to grant b), that religion on the whole is calming, but i am not willing to wager what a) is, and so i am not willing to give an opinion as the relationship between individual fitness and religion, mediated by the proximate trait of “calmness.”
razib: nicely done (4:39).
I will take this opportunity though to point out to all readers of this thread that the topics addressed so far by we bloggers are only decimal points worth of percents of the book’s scope and depth! As in, oh, maybe .3 of 1%!
It’s a terrific book, easy to read, and offers as many intriguing questions as answers.
And if it didn’t have that utterly foolish ‘bright’ business in its first chapter, it would surely become the first great philosophy book of the new century.
You’ve just got to hold your nose through that silliness, I’m afraid to say…
Razib: right we do not know but religion has some calming effect and I say it is quite important just from my own observation of the world. In the net, at times I wish we did not have religions because of the negative aspects. I agree this is not measurable.
I am going to offer here again ( for the third and maybe last time on this ROS site) the late Czeslaw Milosz poem ( from the book “Second Space” ) because it means a lot to me. It helps me.
IF THERE IS NO GOD
If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keep er
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God
re: czeslaw miloz, hallelujah!
re: dennett’s book, i would add that i enjoyed all the chapters except the first and the last. the lit. survey was good, but the rest was not of particular interest to me. i prefer the term atheist to ‘bright.’
and I, my dear freind Potter, will once more say that though the poem is lovely and evocative, it might be misguided.
Besides, and this will hearten you: Dennett examines, and then concludes that logical attempts to ‘prove’ divine existence aren’t the same thing as ‘empirical’ attempts, and so the whole issue is moot.
The issue is religion, not an unverifiable supernatural entity. ( And I am reminded of CCM’s hilarious reference to those invisible, undetectable lobsters orbiting Jupiter!)
Peace and love to Potter from Guttersnipe Nick
ὅπεÏ? ἔδει δεῖξαι
another praiseworthy angle: http://www.subgenius.com/
A genetic predisposition toward seeking God? That’s just too convenient. That’s like saying we are genetically predisposed to avoid responsibility or to look through another person’s wallet while he’s unconscious. God is an idealization that forms out of our perceptions of our imperfections. That’s not genetic but a consequence of living in a physical universe.
What does a god represent? Power, control. The god arises out of a desire to prevent our environment from overwhelming us. The first gods were probably storm gods and fertility gods, responding to natural fears of being drowned, starved, or otherwise wiped out. When life was less precarious, war gods and origins gods developed. Once a deity system is established, divinities multiply in proportion to the number of distinct human concerns that develop. The Hindu, Greek and Roman religions have spawned thousands of gods. But each is nothing more than a desire for supernatural control of one’s environment.
Monotheism streamlines the process, but doesn’t change the objective. It’s still an attempt to develop a relationship with a bigger, stronger character who can do favors and get me out of jams. We learn this behavior as children hanging out with those giants, Mommy and Daddy. Later we transfer the appeal to an older sibling or companion perhaps, until such time as we feel strong enough to handle the challenges ourselves.
We don’t regard any of these people as gods because they are DEMONSTRABLY more knowledgable and powerful than we are. It’s only when we imagine a SUPERNATURALLY powerful being that we get into god territory. The proof is indirect because, by definition, a god’s power can’t be understood. Otherwise, we could just take care of things ourselves.
The concept of a need for God is confounded when we figure out new ways to deal with the hazards and challenges of life. Every time a new technology or scientific concept is developed, religionists rail that it’s an unnatural abomination. If God had meant for us to do that, “he” would have given us brains or some such thing. But the lightning bolts don’t fly, and life gets easier and safer, which only leads to more intense religious focus on the terrors we still can’t control.
God doesn’t solve human problems. Look at the conspiracies, massacres and disasters throughout history. If anything, God is only there to reassure us and challenge us to deal with our fears, to solve the problems ourselves. The appeal to a rescuing god is nothing more than an abdication of responsibility for the things we might change or a wish to escape the things we can’t.
If we could easily see solutions to new problems, the notion of God would never come up. But because we are all ignorant to an extent and powerless to an extent, we err, we clash, and we lose. Therefore some of us invent gods to create an advantage where there would otherwise be none. Worse, some of us crafts gods to justify our bad behavior toward others. God wants it, God approves, God is on our side. What could be better than an excuse note from the highest authority? God does not appear to be so much a need as a convenience.
It is impossible, even for God, to extend peace, justice and mercy to everyone in this world simultaneously, even if we cooperated. If I were God, I wouldn’t even try. Identifying as a Christian, I see God as a friend, a comforter and as a challenger to my development and compassion. God doesn’t need us. God doesn’t even need to be needed. A relationship with God based on dependency is not mature.
NotAnExpert,
i note that your profile suggests you are an ‘ex-seminarian,’ so i offer that many of your assertions are germane only for religion #4, philosophical theism and its progeny. i would assert that maturity (as you, to some extent i) define it will never be normal for the majority of humans. the universe will always be demon-haunted….
Nikos: Disclosure: I first heard a version of the lobster metaphor from Timothy Ferris. Recently, another version from Dan Dennett.
I’m thinking what makes some people feel drawn towards religious engagement while others are not may be more in the way we perceive. Some people have a better grasp of and more comfort with the mysterious and take a more poetic view of the world around them. Other people are more analytical, they like quantifying and measuring things, putting things in boxes and labeling the boxes. When we judge one way of being as airy-fairy numbskulls and the other way as narrow-minded pencil heads (Oh, sorry, was that me making that last judgment?) I think we miss out on what could be most interesting thing about this discussion which is, what is it in our make-up that gives us these inclinations?
A spiritual path isn’t necessarily and easier way. If there is an evolutionary benefit I think it is in acknowledging that your true identity is much bigger than your self or ego identity and involves a willingness to sacrifice yourself for the greater whole. Keeping calm and alert is just a side effect.
h wally; Get off of my turf. You wanna tell them something you can tell them about gravity.
Some people have a better grasp of and more comfort with the mysterious and take a more poetic view of the world around them. Other people are more analytical, they like quantifying and measuring things, putting things in boxes and labeling the boxes.
i would argue that the “analytic” types created both the rationalistic creeds and theologies and their refutations (st. thomas aquinas formulates the 5 ways which modern philosophers “refute”). that is part of the problem, the bounds of religion are defined by analytic types who go through tedious systematic cognitive motions when the reality of religion as it is experienced for the vast majority of the humans is fundamentally intuitive, non-verbal and social. i would contend that the mullah, priest, guru, monk and theologian and philosophical atheist have much more in common than the man-on-the-street muslim, christian, hindu, etc.
to be precise: i would argue that atheists and phillosophical theists of all stripes have more in common with each other than religious professionals do with their “flock.” similarly, the mental outlook and experience of most muslims, hindus and christians is far more similar than a dry recitation of doctrine, dogma or creed would imply.
aside to Potter: Dennett also says (somewhere in the book’s later chapters) that although he is an atheist, he esteems the world as ‘sacred’. Which precisely mirrors my sentiments: and this sentiment doesn’t need any god.
Religionists tell us differently, but they are mistaken.
Dennett’s book also proffers a bevy of lovely quotes, like this one:
It was the schoolboy who said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so�.
– Mark Twain
Babu get off my cloud. I don’t need gravity.
OK everybody. Let’s be on our best behavior. The show is about to begin. Put on your thiking caps and break a leg.
What I like most about NotAnExpert’s excellent contribution is the allusion to parents: it’s my opinion that most ‘god worship’ stems from infancy, and the infant’s utter dependency on parents. Thus, the style of gender-dominance in your culture determines the gender of your culture’s deity(-ies). I reckon also that misogyny stems in no small part from a child’s anger at a mother’s natural discipline, and is able to root deeply and grow malignantly in patriarchal disrespect for femininity. This, of course, might open a whole new dialogue here, so maybe let’s leave it until after hearing Dennett on the show…?
serious lee: you seriously remind me of a former regular of this web forum. Thanks for joining — or rejoining under a different guise.
Of course, I’m probably wrong. It’s all too common of me.
As I read through the post it occurs to me that if there is a god ,there is. If there isn’t, there isn’t. There are as many versions of god as there are people who believe in a god. Everybody alters the image just a little to suit themselves. In this life, if there’s a god or not only matters to those who take up the subject. If there is something after this, then it might become more important. This topic has been discussed since it became a topic and no one has the difinative word. It all comes down to faith and that’s good enough for me..
Nikos, shh, I’m in the federal witness protection program and I’ve started a new life as a cosmotologist in a zoo. Please ask the others not to read this. Any resemblance between me and any other living creature is purely coincidental. I miss you. Thank God we’ll always have Paris.
LOL
H wally (6:21 PM): if there is a god, there is. If there isn’t, there isn’t.
Okay, but since it’s an open question, here’s some others:
Do we skeptics politely refrain from open expression of our doubts?
Do we allow believers to dictate their morality to us?
To make our public policies?
To influence foreign policy?
To infiltrate the military and effectively take over institutions like the Air Force Academy?
To publicly advocate ‘crusading’?
And that’s just the American dilemma with religion.
Europe’s heavily secular – except for its growing Muslim minorities.
Religion carries an old and yet growing array of malignancies that we can just ‘wish away’.
Thus, the style of gender-dominance in your culture determines the gender of your culture’s deity(-ies)
this is testable. some cultures have goddesses, some do not. the japanese for example have amaterasu, the south asian hindus kali and the chinese guanyin. unless you count mary and fatima the abrahamic traditions have nothing close. i think it might explain some of the variation, but not much (most of the variation in misogyny is probably attributable to other factors).
Sorry to leave my thought incomplete: Europe’s recent crises with its Muslim minorites is in no small part due to the secularists and religionists disrespecting each other. I know perfectly well that the vast majority of Muslims are no more ‘malignant’ than Christians.
It’s the extremists, of both religions, that pose the threats.
And this is why Dennett’s inquiry is so important.
I know perfectly well that the vast majority of Muslims are no more ‘malignant’ than Christians.
my personal experience (raised a muslim) differs, i think that the distribution of muslims is “shifted over.” that is, most “moderate muslism” tend to exhibit views and opinions which are congruent with conservative christians, not “moderate christians.” i believe that muscular christianity was gelded by the wars of religion and the enlightenment….
razib: my experience with Greeks is that not only Mary but many female Orthodox ‘saints’ are worshipped as much a Jesus is. It’s never admitted, but it’s true. More later.
Razib: wow.
More later.
Nikos, if you agree with them help or encourage them. If not oppose them or do what you feel you should do. Either way it won’t change the fact of god’s existance or not. Those things are side effects of belief or lack of belief.
razib: my experience with Greeks is that not only Mary but many female Orthodox ’saints’ are worshipped as much a Jesus is. It’s never admitted, but it’s true. More later.
difference between religion #1 (what believe “really” believe) and religion #4 (explicit “doctrine”)
which is “important?”
Oh Nikos….
“it’s my opinion that most ‘god worship’ stems from infancy, and the infant’s utter dependency on parents. Thus, the style of gender-dominance in your culture determines the gender of your culture’s deity(-ies). I reckon also that misogyny stems in no small part from a child’s anger at a mother’s natural discipline, and is able to root deeply and grow malignantly in patriarchal disrespect for femininity. ”
Sooo, which is it? Do we worship a Mother Goddess because our Mothers were so domineering or do we exclude women from any positions of power in religion because our Mothers were so domineering?
“This, of course, might open a whole new dialogue
Oh yes indeed. We are not going to run out of material for discussion.
Regarding Goddesses (and gender of deities in general), and an understanding of them from an author respectful of evolutionary psychology, I’d recommend Leonard Shlain’s Alphabet vs. the Goddess.
ObMetaComment: If only these forums would evolve beyond the monolithic single thread…
Being finite beings are we really fully equipted to examine the infinite.or are we like the three blind men examining an elephant.
Dennett’s memetic framing of religion was previously brought forth both by Dawkins and also in Susan Blackmore’s excellent book, “The Meme Machine”. It’s not easy to get a grasp on the concept that memes are replicators in and of themselves, just as genes are, but once you’ve got it, a lot of things start to make sense.
Peggy Sue: you said ‘domineering’ not me! I said ‘natural discipline’.
Boys don’t like limits (I can’t speak for girls)
As to you question: Do we worship a Mother Goddess because our Mothers were so domineering or do we exclude women from any positions of power in religion because our Mothers were so domineering?
maybe both?
maybe neither?
Maybe it’s whole lot more nuanced — especially if you read my original statement carefully.
Is science another “agent”.
fred: just so. Exactly.
Read Dennett’s book, everyone!
It is so much fun to listen to a Darwinian. It really is true that evolution has no direction. Man is not at the apex of any process. I would guess that Religion began around 12,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. Homo Sapiens hasn’t changed much in 100,000 years. therefore, we spent most of our short time here doing just fine without Religion
Chris, religion is neither universal nor ancient. It is a recent development that developed along with other aspects of “modern” life. It is prehaps better to ask why religion developed as human societies became larger and more organized. Prehaps Marx was right…
Fred– yes, I have Blackmore’s book right now, checked out of the BPL, overdue no doubt… I’d also recommend Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which articulated the evolutionary relationship between God, Torah, and Man.
Sorry I haven’t read the 15,000 words, maybe that was brought up.
Homo Sapiens hasn’t changed much in 100,000 years.
but we have changed….
Back to the elephant. Each blind man would hold his own belifs about what he knows and each would be right in his own way. They just aren’t equipted to understand the totality of what an elephant is. Each of your guests is one of these blind men. I’ll fill in as the third.
How do we know that man had no religion 100,000 years ago. Perhaps what acted as religion to them was not expressed verbally or in the physical world. Perhaps like the Zen Masters they knew it was something that was beyond words and reason.
“Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds”
– Barnett Newman
kel: religion is as recent a phenomenon as culture– 12,000 years ago. So I think that qualifies as “ancient” by most definitions. And I can’t imagine life was “just fine” for Homo Sapiens from 300,000 to 10,000 BCE: hunting and gathering. That lasted for a long time not by popular demand, but because of a primitivity of language and cultural evolution left to chance.
Of course we have reached the point of communication saturation.
Wally– there is very little culture left from 100,000 years ago: Just bones. There was no agriculture then, so no seasonal Gods to pray towards.
Does buddism have a radical, violent streak?
Or is Buddhism not a true religion because it doesn’t recognize the existence of a Diety
If we remove religion and all it’s influences what is left. Is the world better off with it or without it?
Does buddism have a radical, violent streak?
Or is Buddhism not a true religion because it doesn’t recognize the existence of a Diety
re: buddhism & violence, see sri lanka (and also some monk activists in myanmar). also, buddhists on the ground basically treat the buddha (theravada) or boddhisattvas (mahayana) as gods.
Evolution says nothing about the struggles betweeen “groups”. It only speaks to the comparative reproductive advantages of individuals
Is prayer a necessary part of religion. Perhaps their version of religion is something you can’t fathom. Perhaps it was nothing more than an experience they held inside them.
What is it about biological gurus, which makes them think their particdular credential credentials them to universal expertise? Perhaps it is something in their genes, parasitical or not.
Two quick observations and a plea. Well, maybe the plea first.
Stop thinking that your knowledge about biology credentials you to speak as an expert on musical matters. Two egregious errors, and counting:
1. Puritans were not “against” music. Neither were the Pligrims… Read a little Perry Miller, observer the Ravesncroft Psalter, and become nearly as wise as you think you are.
2. Tonal music does not “originally” sound better than atonal music. Nor is a sense of what IS tonal unversal across cultures.
Nikos: Sorry for putting words in your mouth. As a former preschool teacher I can say that I learned children of both genders feel most comfortable with clear limits (they depend on their caregivers, male or female, to keep them from playing in traffic). Neither gender of children appreciate unresonable or random limits. Some of course are more rebellious than others. I’m guessing you were a real handfull when you were about 3 years old!
I myself doubt that this has much to do with choice of deity gender but, as you say, this could be a discussion for another time. Try reading Women and Nature by Susan Grffin.
I think the point from Dennett is that we could not have evolved without it. It’s as if we didn’t have language or taste. But Dennett is making a good point now about that–
and now we’ve stopped for the pitch. Give money! pledge! else this forum will go away! join WGBH and support open source so that the server doesn’t strain under the weight of all these comments! just call 888-897-WGBH –
– ok, he was saying that religions have a problem, in that people use faith to blot out reason. That’s caused a lot of death and destruction over the generations, of course.
Evolution says nothing about the struggles betweeen “groups�. It only speaks to the comparative reproductive advantages of individuals.
this is the standard model, but some people are trying to revive group selection. i’m skeptical, but we shouldn’t pretend like it doesn’t exist….
Hello All!
Religion has at least one serious evolutionary benefit: followers of successful religions follow rules for good living: dietary rules, behavioral rules, altruistic rules, educational and disciplinary rules, requirements of honesty and restrictions on violence, rules that enable community cooperation and community defense. These rules all depend on higher functions (including intelligence, culture, learning, language, etc). Not to say religion is perfect—just adaptive.
Gene Levine
Go back in time and every 100 years or so stop and ask the great minds of the day these same questions. I’m sure that most would feel that they have the answers or true beliefs. I can’t wait for the follow up show to this one 100 years from now. Ought to be good for a few laughs.
I like the idea that Religion is a byproduct of our expanded capacity ie like Mathematics.
wally– not quite. There is a directionality to history: you can learn from it. Dennett right now is addressing that: the refinement of techniques and understanding.
Heard Chris on our collective lack of progress in describing the power of music and religion, which made me think:
I think one of the great attractions of religion is that it provides a user interface for ideas of human transcendence and human resilience that are offered in few other places in our culture. These ideas about transcendence and resilience are a response to everbody’s experience of pain, disease, the death of all of our loved ones and ultimately of us. Add to this that it’s presented in a group setting, often along with ritual and music that are time-honed symbols of those ideas.
I fully accept that people can gain access to those ideas without the user interface of religion (that’s what Existentialism was all about, the philosophy that launched a million berets). I have a lot of respect for these efforts, I find them very brave and rigorous.
Maybe these secular ways of dealing with existential problems would gain more converts if they weren’t almost always done alone. As a response to human misery and despair they seem a little lacking in this area. There’s something quite powerful about community, about our conversation with each other, in forming a response to The Void. (Maybe they could have some music, too. Now seems like a good time for a link to the Orthodox Church of Coltrane).
You can establish a foundation of truth with the information available to you at the moment. Will it remain with the passage of time or will it change. A straight edge on a molecular level is a pretty bumpy thing.
The vague term “religion” cannot be the basis of serious intellectual inquiry. Monotheism is one thing, the Asian sages traditions differ remarkably from these, and the “primal religions” of simple subsistence societies present yet another reality. So this is ethnocentric analysis at best, and even then, diversity within the Abrahamic monotheisms leaves even “western religions” beyibd hioe fir good thinking. So this author’s premises crumble as a serious starting point.
From the other pole, this attempt to ground religion in genes represents a kind of modern “magical thinking” about genes and the actual proven possibilities of genetic explanation. Just what would be the causal thread that would connect cellular chromosomes with the socio-cultural behaviors called “religion” ?? Consult the important and award-winning book by molecular anthropologist Jonathan Marks WHAT IT MEANS TO BE 98% CHIMPANZEE (Univ of California Press, 2003) to see how in popular culture and even geneticists do not understand the foundations of cultural analysis and instead twist their data beyond its explanatory possibilities.
I am all for exploring how religion today can make people stupid, how it can become a weapon for organizing others, but this is not a well-founded beginning to really getting at that.
Jon History isn’t an exact science. Ask any black man in this country. History like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I’m outta here. My local church group is sacrificing a herd of cattle tonight. Can’t wait.
Since when did ‘music’ become an animate object, one capable of ‘evolving’ by itself? Music doesn’t evolve; people’s ideas of what constitute music may evolve. Music, as many other things, still takes a creator, does it not? Someone designs and assembles notes, chords, melodies, themes. They don’t just happen. Even an atheist can make or create or appreciate music. But without the player, composer, listener, publisher, critic…what do you have? How does the atheist feel free to use the word ‘design’ in support of the theory of evolution, which presumes no helping or guiding hand?
Peggy Sue: point taken.
My larger point is that adoration or veneration or worship of ‘big, incomprehensible humanish beings’ begins in infancy – and that god-worship is the adult descendant of this.
The origination of misogyny is a bigger and much more monstrous issue that surely depends on patterns of enculturation that follow infancy. I strongly suspect a connection not unlike what I posited, although my offering was hasty and incomplete.
Now before going any further, let me say this: if aliens came from a space ship and said: “Pick a deity to worship, or die�, I’d without even thinking for a millisecond say: “Gaia.�
If they then said, “No, a male god�, I just might say “Take me to the guillotine.�
I can’t stand patriarchal monotheism.
I loathe with all my heart misogyny.
I’ve an overstuffed personal library dripping with feminism.
And dozens of books on various takes of goddesses and goddess worship.
So, I’ve got definite tilt in this dialogue, and it’s toward the feminine, not toward my own gender’s many sacred-cow and unacknowledged conceits.
I hope to talk this out later. It seems to me that this thread is the first in ROS history with the potential to reach 1,000 posts!
philo: good questions, but it’s all about ‘memes’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
this is a very new concept about concepts, and takes a lot of practise to understand and employ with fluency.
Which is yet another reason this thread could grow for weeks on end.
I don’t know if god is in our genes, but some people really do worship and old pair of faded denim.
Most valuable pair of jeans
An original pair of Levi Strauss & Co (USA) 501 jeans aged over 115 years old were sold by Randy Knight (USA) to an anonymous collector (Japan) for $60,000,00 (£33,230) through internet auction site eBay on June 15, 2005.
Lisa Williams- I like your post. It’s an expansion of what I was saying about religion serving to calm… the communal aspect is very powerful.
Nikos: re your post http://www.radioopensource.org/is-god-in-our-genes/#comment-8122
On Milosz- He’s saying ( I think) “If there is no god….” I might not be ready to consider that yet even if we could know for sure which we cannot so please be sensitive to that. What is important is our relationship, caring, compassion.
This is hardly misguided I am sure you will agree. What is your interpretation?
aside to Potter: Dennett also says (somewhere in the book’s later chapters) that although he is an atheist, he esteems the world as ’sacred’. Which precisely mirrors my sentiments: and this sentiment doesn’t need any god.
Religionists tell us differently, but they are mistaken.
Yes I agree. I feel that way too. The Milosz poem by the way tugs at me, to tolerate, to respect the needs of others.
( Are we communicating?)
Returning the love all the way to WA from MA. Hope you are not cutting down too many sacred trees.
is anyone going to do an online prayer, as the show is over?
PS to philo: I, for one, am still struggling to attain even a beginning fluency with the ‘meme’ concept. And I’n not so sure that the concept is settled even in academia, where Dawkins birthed it a few years back.
Sidewalker: Thanks for the levity. My head hurts. Thinking (too much) can decrease fitness.
Nikos – Did you hear about the biologist who won a Nobel Prize for developing a method to detirmine a boy chromozome from a girl chromozome?
He simply looked in their “jeans”!
“is anyone going to do an online prayer, as the show is over?”
sure, I will…
Through the great good of these words
May the beings of all the realms of samsara,
In the ground of primordial perfection, attain Nirvana.
Amen
Fenixfacs, sidewalker, & razib:
Potter: yes, we are communicating.
My concern is that religionists defend their deities with often venomous fury. I worry that more people have died violently under the guise of a god’s sanction than under purely modern nation-state vs. nation-state jingo-sanction.
Those of us who disbelieve might feel it a duty to communicate our skepticism, even if this is ‘impolite’. A duty to humanity.
Please see my posts at 6:45 PM, 5: 55PM March 23, 2006, and via implication, the conversation Peggy Sue & I seem to be starting.
I have elsewhere likened belief in god – especially in the biblical sort of daddy tyrant god – to belief in Santa Claus. And eventually even the most credulous child ought to have the Santa myth’s fanciful hold loosened. So yes, the poem is heavy with beautiful pathos, but it strikes me as yet another defense of belief that seeks to imply that its object of worship is unverifiable. This is dangerous.
At the very least it is irrational.
And we all, I think, know what horrors a tolerance of irrationality can lead to.
I think you are asking the wrong questions personally. Religion is only important in the context of inspiration, and for some reason it has always been the mystics who have driven this source of revelation which everyone else follows, much like the great geniuses push along science and music and the rest of humanity. To talk about this being communal in the sense that the experience of the divine is something everyone shares begs the point: who opened the door? Who went through enough pain to find joy? Because, as Neitzche makes clear, it is the madman who sits in trees and comes back in an ecstatic daze that the old kind thought was gifted, and the thrust of it all is to gather the followers, be it through individual power of the passion of a musician, poet, or holy man. But this is not through rational means, language, it is felt.
Humans are searching for joy, and in the absence of it they will take what doesn’t hurt, and in the absence of what doesn’t hurt, what distracts them from it. It is the mystic, in whatever form, who can take the spiritual-emotional pain and find at the bottom of it joy through the fire within him or her, through the freedom to hurt like few have the courage to. To talk about anything else, in my opinion (which is of course worthless), is to ignore the basis of being: pain.
That the essence of a God is encoded into us is as obvious as the stars above out head: we sense it, we are it, we are of the same material as everything else but get lost in all sorts of different logical and rational constructs/concepts, trying to build and posit a system which is understandable basically to itself, which always falls apart under the first rule: a thing may never know itself.
What is a gene anyway? Chimps share 97 percent of our genes but theirs are expressed a different way. Are we talking about the 97 percent religious experience they might be having?
msterlingprice, Ouch!
I think the essence of being is the continuation of being, through reproduction, through monuments, grand deeds and anything that outlives us and through dreams of an afterlife. In all of this there is joy and pain—childbirth maybe the best example.
In the unfortunate haste of this show’s warm-up, I missed a chance to further a suggestion from matoko-chan, so here’s a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanist
So, Peggy Sue, do you think it’s worth exploring religion’s possible role in misogyny?
For starters, I think that religion doesn’t cause it, but it sure does codify it. Sexist religions don’t happen outside of sexist societies, I don’t imagine. Misogyny can certainly worsen under patriarchal religion – that’s entirely plain.
So, what do you think is the psychological and emotional underpinnings of misogyny? Why do some men mistrust and vilify women why others, even men of sexist societies don’t?
Any thoughts?
Permit me some whimsey… Are the belief in mankind in God’s genes? In other words, are some (one?) supernatural beings hardwired to create humans? Is the essence of the Over-Spirit to believe that he is the creator of humans, or did he freely choose to believe this? Does His belief that He created the universe prove that the universe exists? In a struggle for survival among spirits, did the belief by one spirit that It created all the others (and the material world) confer some type of competitive advantage to It? Is the mind of this God-spirit inherently able to make imaginative leaps? Or did His concept called ‘man’ guide the evolution of God’s thinking, making Him think he created time and space? If mankind ceased to exist, would God cease to exist too? Is this why the existence of the human race seems to have such a grip on God? As a heavenly creature that supposedly created everything from gazillions of star systems to gazillions of gazillions of electrons, neutrons and protons, is there another reason why He is obsessed with one primate species on a single flyspeck planet?
“…god is a concept by which we measure our pain…” john lennon
It seems to me there are two kinds of people: those who believe in the impossible, and those who believe that, with God, all things are possible.
I am of the first type: I believe that some things, indeed many things, are impossible, that miracles do not happen. (This does not mean that we fully understand what happens.) This left me unable to believe in God after a certain age, despite my best efforts. Certainly I could not believe that a god who had made me this way could condemn me for being the way he made me. So I guess even at that young age, I believed that my unbelief was in my genes. I suppose that the reverse is true as well.
However, we should not confuse belief in gods with religion. Religion is what one believes is the truth, what one thinks about it, feels about it, does about it. (Paraphrased from Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Desk Dictionary, 1984) Everybody has at least one, and most of us have several combined into a personal philosophy.
Science is religion. Math is religion. Both take a lot of faith to learn, faith that the scientists who came before were mostly men of good faith, that if you follow the rules, the equations will work.
A whole religion has three basic parts: cosmology, how the world works; morality, how we treat each other, and holiness, how we treat ourselves. My own cosmology is scientific, and therefore I am an atheist. But my morality is Christian, because I believe in and follow the laws of Jesus, my king. And my holiness is a mix of natural science and Christianity, aimed at working efficiently and staying in optimum health without forgoing life’s little pleasures, which are good for one in moderation. Jesus rejected dietary taboos, and took pleasure in food and drink.
Live Free and Prosper,
Ah yes, Nikos, Well of course religion is misogynist if you mean the many thousands of European Women who were burned at the stake for witchcraft by the Christian Church in the middle ages. But, when you say “religion” I do think you need to specify what religion you mean because the Pre-Christian religions of Europe, at least what we know about them due to the fact that the Christian Church did such a good job of demonizing and destroying them, were not, it seems, misogynist. My Pagan Goddess Circle is not misogynist.
If you are talking about Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the great man holy book religions) you bet they are misogynist. But those are not the only religions.
I studied this subject matter in great depth at one time and I’m a little rusty now but in Pre-Christian times the feminine was revered for having the power to give birth. No one really knows what the people who made them were really thinking but all across Europe one of the most common artifacts are the little (or sometimes giant like on the Island of Malta) Goddess figures. With the rise of Patriarchy men co-opted the birth process so we have Athena springing forth in full armor out of the head of Zeus and you should hear Gloria Steinem describe how the interior architecture of the great cathedrals of Europe mimic the female reproductive system – in great and hilarious detail!
I completely agree that patriarchal religion is misogynist. But not all religion is patriarchal. As for the psychological and emotional underpinnings of misogyny, I think it is all about power.
I will just add a tid-bit about the Dalai Lama since I am now a Buddhist. When I heard him speak, at the end he took questions and one of them was, “Why have there been no female Dalai Lamas?â€? He explained that the purpose of the Dalai Lama was to serve the people and because the cultures that Buddhism came out of, India and Tibet, where such that males held positions of power the Dalai Lamas have been male but in the future, if the Tibetan people decide to keep having Dalai Lamas, it may be very appropriate for there to be a female Dalai Lama. Then he added (laughing) that as for him, he said he thought having the surgery to become a woman wasn’t really necessary.
PS to Potter: perhaps it seems I’m advocating rudeness. I hope not. My problem with the sentiment behind the poem is, essentially, that it’s censorious. I don’t want to blocked from saying:
“It might not be a good idea to uncritically believe this unverifiable proposition that a supernatural being is intimately aware of your life, and is judging your fealty to him to determine your worthiness for an afterlife. It might not be true. Some of us in fact actively disbelieve it – and we have not been smitten by thunderbolts.
“It might not be a good idea to obey every dictate of your religious leaders. Even if your god exists, your priest might not truly know your god’s will. If your priest tells you that blowing yourself up while killing other humans will secure your place in the afterlife, and yet he is not truly speaking your god’s will, then to what purpose is it to obey him? To what good end?â€?
Skepticism is valuable.
Uncritical belief is hazardous.
Those of us who understand – or even to simply believe we understand – the values and hazards of both owe it to our humankind kin to share our minds.
I hope this satisfies.
peggysue – Speaking of “nonpatriarchal religions” I wonder what kind of religion a matriarchael society like Bonobos would have?
“The species is distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal and egalitarian culture, and the prominent role of copulation in their society.”
“Professor Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading primatologists, avers that the Bonobo is often capable of altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience and sensitivity.”
“Recent observations in the wild have confirmed that the males among the Common Chimpanzee troops are extraordinarily hostile to males from outside of the troop. Murder parties are organized to “patrol” for the unfortunate males who might be living nearby in a solitary state. This does not appear to be the behavior of the Bonobo males or females, which both seem to prefer to “make love” with their group rather than seek “war” with outsiders. The Bonobo lives where the more aggressive Common Chimp doesn’t live. Possibly the Bonobo has given a wide berth to their “murderous” stronger cousins. Neither swim, and they generally inhabit ranges on opposite sides of the great rivers.”
“Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, and as favors traded by the females in exchange for food. Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face genital sex (most frequently female-female, then male-female and male-male), tongue kissing, and oral sex. This happens within the immediate family as well as outside of it. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with individual partners.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
And what might be a defining physical characteristic of a “High Priest” of this religion of Bonobos if the females of this society chose them?
“the startling example of the large size of bonobo testicles”
http://humanists.net/cdhs/recap-2003-11-09-Stewart.html
The MAIN reason I am not a Christian, or other theist is not because I don’t believe in god(s). But because I couldn’t believe in the fundamentals of theistic ethics (aka “divine command”).
I am “endowed” by nature or let’s say god with a certain ethical sense acording to which torturing people, any people, for any reason, for an eternity is bad, immoral and wrong. If god is going to allow eternal torture of people in hell, even the worst kind of sinner (let’s say the kind of Hitler) then I denounce that kind of god !
Only Imagine Eternal Torture !!! That’s not a million years, that’s not a trilion years, that’s an INFINITY !! How could we allow anyone to suffer for an for eternity without parole ! Shame on anyone who would allow that ! Even if that’s god itself !
See, for some people “good” is what brings them rewards, “bad” is what brings them happiness. Thus to them its good to love god and go to heaven rather than denounce him and go to hell, like other people who denounce him. I don’t adhere to this primitive, simplistic morality. I wouldn’t compromise my humanistc ethics for self-serving salvation !!
For more of what I try to say please visit my threads, which are also polls, at infidels.org
“Should Hitler Burn in Hell Forever?”
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=135809
“Why don’t you worship God?”
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=153597
“Does eternity makes heaven hell?”
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=153686
“Do Nihilists care about humankind?”
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=154031
Peggy Sue: you and I have a lot more in common than we knew. We probably own 20 or 30 of the same books, and maybe many more.
The problem of course is that the kind of religion you mention in the pre-Buddhist part of your 12:54 AM is more akin to the pre-monotheistic ‘folk religion’ that Dennett says the Abrahamic faiths ‘domesticated’ and supplanted. Which, to me, doesn’t denigrate them – hell, it’s why they appeal to me!
So perhaps I should refine my query to ask how you view the role of patriarchal monotheism on cultural misogyny. Several histories (and novels) I’ve read (and cherish) posit that matrilineal polytheism was the ancient norm until patriarchs either invaded or overthrew the existing tranquil societies. This proposition often earns derision from folks who can’t imagine either a goddess-centered culture or any era of relative peace and equality. Now, I don’t want to believe those who deride the proposition, but I can’t ‘prove’ that they’re wrong. An era of tranquil matrilineal polytheism might well only be a pipe-dream – and yes, my books include Gimbutas.
So, what I’m hoping to stir up from this thread is a better sense of which came first: the ‘chicken’ of an invading or rebellious patriarchal revolution, or the ‘egg and slow growing chick’ of an evolution toward patriarchy that ‘nursed’ on an evolving mistrust of women that was clerically & scripturally represented by priests of the gods who would someday expropriate from goddesses all claim to divinity? (Forgive the lengthy sentence!)
What might have led to this?
fenixfacs: check this out: http://www.blockbonobofoundation.org/
And thank CheeseChowMain for it.
Aside to CCM: it appears that the 3-link limit is no longer in effect.
Freethinker, come to think of it, that was the breaking point for me, as well. The whole idea of hell repelled me, certainly as an instrument of divine justice. Way beyond cruel and unusual punishment, even, as you say, for Hitler or Genghis Khan. A God that could condemn a more or less good person like me to hell, just for not believing in him, was an old bastard I didn’t want to meet anyways.
Freethinker: Right. Christian belief in Hell is abominable, and, by any other name, profoundly immoral. Any god capable of inflicting eternal torture is, by any other name, a demon.
Bishop Carlton Pearson got himself dubbed a heretic for coming to this same conclusion.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Bishop+Carlton+Pearson
See, the argumetns about the “Cat thinking” is a good one ! While we can adopt a plausable sociobiological explanation about why we think the cat is thinking we cannot rule out the possbility of cat thought. Scientific epistemology is inductive so it cannot make absolute conclusions.
However our ethical sense is deductive (that is I can deduct from my internal ethics that certain things are moral and other are immoral, there is no uncertainty here) so it can make absolute, definite conclusions.
So here is the definite answer why I don’t worship god:
(my reproduced thread from infidels.org)
——————————————————————————–
Why don’t you worship God ?
When a believer tries to persuade me about the existence of god with the same worn-out arguments, I don’t debate with him or her anymore, I merely ask him or her whether existence of God merits by itself God’s worshiping. I am even willing to genuinely assume for a moment that Personal God is a complete reality. However knowing that Personal God is real wouldn’t persuade me to worship him, in contrary I will despise him more than I despise Hitler. Why would anyone worship a God who allows so much suffering in the world?
But even if we all lived in a paradise without any suffering and plenty of goods, on what moral grounds should we worship God ? A power-freak God that requires his creation to genuflect in worshiping him is as despicable as a power-freak father who requires his children to kiss his hand when they meet him. Even without genuflecting, merely requiring his creation to regularly address to him in form of prayer is as ridiculous as for a lonely mom to ask her children to call her every single day (or perhaps 5 times a day as in Muslim prayer). God has to get a life and let his creation live in peace and happiness. A God who eliminates unnecessary suffering from the world , gives complete independence to its creation and doesn’t require anything from its creation is the kind of God I can respect. However my respect wouldn’t extent to a demeaning worshiping. Why would I thank God for something he should’ve done anyway? Should we thank a father for feeding, clothing and not abusing his children? No! That’s his ethical obligation as a father, if he doesn’t want to treat his children right he shouldn’t make them in the first place. Same with God.
Nikos: there is no reason to worship a god, even the one who doesn’t send people to hell and make everyone happy. That’s my libertarian ethical conclusion.
as I mentioned
A God who eliminates unnecessary suffering from the world , gives complete independence to its creation and doesn’t require anything from its creation is the kind of God I can respect. However my respect wouldn’t extent to a demeaning worshiping. Why would I thank God for something he should’ve done anyway? Should we thank a father for feeding, clothing and not abusing his children? No! That’s his ethical obligation as a father, if he doesn’t want to treat his children right he shouldn’t make them in the first place. Same with God.
Freethinker (I love the handle, btw – it’s one of my favorite words): author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas offers a compelling argument that dogs and cats cogitate.
See: The Hidden Life of Dogs @ http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=0684810263
And her other books, including Tribe of Tiger and The Social Life of Dogs, are excellent too.
And thanks for your offerings here on the thread!
Freethinker (we’re overlapping): re your 1:51 — right on.
I revere nature, and am even willing to play (and I do mean ‘play’) with the notion of a ‘Gaia’ Earth-deity, but ‘worship’ is a monotheistic, jealous god conceit.
Reverence is laudable. Reverence implies that you care and appreciate.
Worship is denigrating — to oneself!
It’s interesting that the Afghanistan government’s ‘case’ against the guy who disavowed Islam in favor of Jesus is that he ‘disgraces’ Allah.
Please!
Is your god so powerless that one man’s counter-conventional choice ruins the god’s standing?
I don’t understand the insecurity – except that it must be masking oceans of self-doubt!
Nikos:
1) I have three cats, and while they are often silly in their thinking they most certainly think. I’ve read cats think at the level of 18 month-old-child while dogs, especially smarter breeds, can think even at the level of a 3-4 year old. Of course cats and dogs way of thinking is quite different than ours, for example they have a trouble with the conception of “self” and “time”. Chimps, and other primate of course think more like us and are aware of self-hood, as studies show, and they even morn for the dead, so they are even aware of thier own mortality.
2) If “reverence” means “treat somebody with admiring respect”, I migh revere nature, cosmos or something impersonal but I just couldn’t bring myself to revere a personal god. For me revering a “personal god” like Alah or Jeahovah is some sort of “personality cult”. It’s deamining for humans and for god. If I would have been a personal god I would felt uncomfortable with people revering me all the time.
It’s not that I am too proud. I know that I am a worm and the food for the worm. But I would rather prefer to keep my integrity and remain a worm than lose it and become a sycophant angel.
Freethinker: It’s not an exact science, but it seems to me that ‘worship’ is the strongest word, ‘venerate’ the next, ‘revere’ the next, and ‘admire’ the last. I admire folks like certain friends, or even mere acquaintances like Chris Lydon.
But I revere nature – and, on some days, like those spent atop Gray Wolf Ridge’s many alpine peaks, I even venerate it – but that’s just my enthusiasm getting me high!
Worship?
Nah. Never. It’s an ‘abjection’ that freethinking minds needn’t trouble with. Besides, by my way of freethinking, we are the Earth, powered by sunlight via plant-life, in individuated forms, which more or less makes us as divine as anything we revere!
Well if we are the Earth, and we revere the Earth, than we revere ourself, or at least part of ourself. And to that I can agree. To love and to admire others we first need to love and admire ourself.
I wonder what razib’s take will be on my 2:05 AM March 24, 2006.
Moreover, I wonder razib’s take on this idea: that Islamic scripture is less internally contradictory than Christian, which actually stymies a more liberal strain of Islam. Christian interpreters of their scriptures have so much woolly-minded stuff to plumb that they can make it forgiving and ‘socialist’ or repressively moralistic, depending on what kind of congregation they want to attract. Islam’s greater scriptural consistency might actually curtail an Imam’s desire to make his message as liberal as some Christians’.
What do you think, razib?
Nikos: Jon Garfunkle posted this earlier. I haven’t read this book but I heard the author speak and he talks about the transition into patriarchy. I find his theory intriguing. He relates the rise of patriarchy to printed language. I don’t picture a monolithic matriarchal hunky dory happy time but Pre-agricultural hunter gathers were egalitarian so I think the long period of developing agriculture and city sates had quite a bit to do with it too.
“Regarding Goddesses (and gender of deities in general), and an understanding of them from an author respectful of evolutionary psychology, I’d recommend Leonard Shlain’s
Alphabet vs. the Goddess.�
“how you view the role of patriarchal monotheism on cultural misogyny�
The warriors of the malevolent Sky God have desecrated the sacred mother Earth and her beloved daughters. (OK, it’s past midnight now just in case need an excuse for that last sentence)
fenixfacs: “I wonder what kind of religion a matriarchael society like Bonobos would have?”
Sounds to me like a congegation touched by the spirit of the holy moly rolling tantric boogie.
“And what might be a defining physical characteristic of a “High Priestâ€? of this religion of Bonobos if the females of this society chose them?”
Because they are a matriarchal and egalitarian culture I don’t think they would have a “high priestâ€?.
from wikipedia…
“Females are much smaller than males but have a higher social status. Females maintain their social status by cooperating amongst themselves. No one male can dominate the group because the rest of the females band together to protect the social order.�
I see the holy priestesses of the bonobo tantric boogie doing a lot of vigous sufi twirling booty shakin’.
“Christian interpreters of their scriptures have so much woolly-minded stuff to plumb” The sermon on the Mount has been a major obstacle for state sanctified military missions for quite some time. There has been a lot of hair that has been pulled out in trying to reconcile militarism, materialism, etc. with these teachings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_mount
Nikos Thanks for your thoughts.
I’m all for rationality. You say above: Compassion if that is your definition of pathos, not suffering, is what this poem is about for me. I think you are reading too much extra into “If there is no God”. Milosz is not talking about religion (to my mind anyway) and all the trappings, the good and the bad.
I don’t think Milosz is referring to religion, his religion or any other. He is referring to belief that there is a God, (whatever one’s idea of God is) pure and simple and very basic. He is allowing also for the possibility that there may not be a God- which is interesting….there is doubt when he says If.
Your(and my) warring about the harm that religions have caused is not to be aimed on this core of belief but rather what proceeds from that.
Belief in God, that there must be some form of God, is a pillar for many that I for one would not want to take away from anyone who needs it- as if I could or even had the right to, as if I knew or could know rationally with any finality anyway. You don’t know either. Whatever certainty we have is limited by what we know. The rest is belief. (One can believe there is no God for instance.) Milosz is not saying God is the God of the Old Testament. He leaves that open.He does not define God.
I think it’s a mistake to think that telling someone that it is a mistake to believe in something that they fervently believe in is going to get you anywhere anyway. It just does not work.
Milosz appeal is a moral one, If you feel censored by it you are objecting to the morality he espouses which for me is a cautionary note. Be careful, he says, be kind, because your brother may need this (core belief) to go on and simply live meaningfully everyday whereas you might not- or may have found another form of support.
You are free to believe or disbelieve what you like. You are free to feel strongly the error or harm of others following the dictates of mortals who interpret or misinterpret “God’s will”. And you are free to point that out and even take action on it. But to say “There is no God” is something different. When you are setting out to destroy the concept of God you should know what you are doing…in each case…. And even be responsible for what will replace it.
So one can’t run around saying “There is No God”. That is irresponsible. What you can say with integrity is I do not believe, think, feel, there is a God or God (and this is what I mean by that). That’s shows integrity, compassion and responsibility (in my opinion). No one, not Milosz in this poem, is saying you are censored from advising that it might not be a good idea to uncritically believe. On the other hand, and again, from a position of assumed power or strength over another, one should not, morally speaking, simply say “There is no God”– leaving that person with nothing but despair. No.
By the way, this has nothing to do with what I personally believe or don’t believe. I departed from my orthodox religious family early on… and paid a heavy price for it but I have had to learn how to live with them peacefully and respectfully. We had had many discussions, and you learn not to bang your head against a wall, and finally you learn that people defend what is vital to them.
I over italicized again geez!
Peggysue – And with processes of barter like this, why would smart Bonobo females interject an agent / broker like a preistly class inbetween them and their markets so that they could take a slice of the pie without adding any value?
“and as favors traded by the females in exchange for food.”
And I think that all the literature would support the nototion that the Bonobo females are too smart for that.
CCM: Right. The problem, I think, is that Old Testament wool.
Doesn’t seem to me like the same ‘god’ inspired jesus. Know what i mean?
Potter, you seem to recognise that both belief and non-belief involve positive belief: i.e., a belief that God does not exist is more certain and positive than uncertainty on that point. Everyone who has an opinion believes something. I do not believe in a creator god because I believe that the universe runs according to unvarying natural law, and the impossible is just that, impossible. Miracles do not happen. That is the core of my religion. (See my 12:52 AM comment. Religion is what you believe…)
However, like you, I do not find it productive to argue that point. People want to believe that all things are possible, that they can live forever, and other such wishful thoughts, and you won’t dissuade them. I find it much more productive to argue about their religion and the consistency of their beliefs. This country being mostly nominally Christian, it is most fun to read, understand, and argue the Bible and the life, times, and beliefs of Jesus, as opposed to all the views of all the writers of the Old Testament, and the New.
After all, Jesus didn’t write a word of the Bible. From Matthew and Mark’s accounts, he rejected about 90% of Mosaic Law, retaining 5 commandments and one admonition: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (See the story of the rich young man, Matt 19:16-22) Yet modern-day Christian Pharisees constantly point to Old Testament laws and the views of ex-Pharisee Paul when condemning homosexuality. We are fighting today exactly what Jesus was fighting in his day, and it’s easy to point this out.
Read the Bible as history, (a chapter at a time, with a large grain of salt), and you can tease truth from fiction. Those who hold that the Bible is unerrant truth are saying that men knew truth then and know it now; yet by their own belief, only God is good, and knows all. God didn’t write a single word of the Bible, except possibly the Ten Commandments on those stone tablets. The first 5 books were written by Moses, by his own account raised a prince of Egypt. Others were written by court historians and self-appointed prophets. Various books were gathered together by a committee maybe 150 years after the death of Jesus and called holy. They were written in various languages and translated several times over the centuries. And none of those writers, copyists, and translators wrote a lie? I don’t think so.
Indeed, read the four Gospels in a row, and you’ll find that the gospel according to a Greek called John is a lie from beginning to end, with not even a passing resemblance to the first three gospels. But because it favors belief over works, it is a favorite of preachers and their congregations alike. Belief is easy for some; keeping even 6 commandments is much harder. But then, right in the middle of “belief” there is a “lie.”
Live Free and Prosper,
Potter: “…be responsible for what will replace it. So one can’t run around saying ‘There is No God’. That is irresponsible.�
We might be talking apples and oranges.
I see no evidence of the Old Testament god who lives on in muted form in the New Testament. (I can’t speak for the god of contemporary Judaism.) Seeing no evidence of that sort of jealous tyrant – except as a justifying archetype for rapacious human elites – while seeing much non-human splendor suggests to me that the divine is not monotheistic but pantheistic. Which makes ‘god’ essentially democratic: it’s all of us, including the poorest humans, their pets, those bonobos, and even the bones of the earth I like to climb and hike in summer.
So, I think I’m being eminently responsible to share this view.
And I’ll fight like hell against the dominance of the other style of ‘god’, because it’s a human projection, and a profoundly damaging one. It’s also worth noting that for me to call my ‘sacred earth’ ‘god’ is problematic. This earth is miraculous in that it hosts this process of turning archaic, fossilized star-stuff into life simply by basking in sunshine – but the only evidence I have that the planet is in any way conscious is me and you! We’re the planet’s consciousness, so far as I can determine.
Are we gods? Maybe it’s all semantics. Or apples and oranges.
Nikos @ 11:06: Spot On amigo. My better-half often reminds me of this. I’m more of a student of the new testament than old testament, but I’m being brought up to speed. And there is great void in internal coherence in this artifact that you were describing. Of course, coherence is a problem all over the place in this artifact. Much quality scholarship that has brought this down out-of-the-clouds. Makes for spiritual and intellectual dim sum.
Thanks for the heads-up about the three link moratorium potentially being lifted. BTW, Kevin Phillips is on Diane Rehm and I’m listening as I type. Best to ya…
BTW, as a guttersnipe, I’m going to advocate a position that the Bonobos are God’s choosen beings and they are showing us the way to enlightenment.
Rycke: great post (11:21 AM). You capture the vital inconsistencies of the hodgepodge of scriptures informing Christian notions.
What ‘god’ in his right mind would sanction such an inarticulate collection of contradictions? Especially the divinely orchestrated slaughter and enslavement in the Old testament and the radical message of unconditional love and forgiveness in the New?
This is the ‘god’ I want to discredit.
It’s simpler than that: murder is deocide. Violence done to humans is violence done to the divine. Greed and hoarding are ‘humanly’ demonic, not divinely approved.
It’s a long, tiresome struggle. But we’re trying!
god bless you, ccm!
An Non-Nested Alternative to a Monolithic Thread
Sorry in advance to all here who seek, in 30,000 words or less, answers to the hardest questions of the ages …
But, Jon Garfunkel (and Brendan), here is a non-nested alternative to a single threaded forum … that also addresses lengthy and frequent posting.
Why not post each contribution in summary, much as ROS does now when clicking on any nickname, and allow the reader to expand the contribution on command?
Now, here is the good part. Count the number of times readers expand a contribution and report it alongside the summary, much as ROS currently does for the number of comments. This would allow the ROS community to measure the relevance of a contribution (not a contributor) to a particular topic. Readers then could decide what to read based at least in part on what other readers thought was relevant. Or, readers could be contrarian and read what others readers thought was irrelevant. And the measure of relevance would provide editorial feedback from the community to the contributor.
Now to appease peggysue in advance, there are a number of pleasant ways to subvert this system. Readers could inflate their numbers by expanding their own contributios repeatedly. ROS could artificially inflate or deflate a contribution just to get it noticed or not.
But I think it is more likely that the feedback would prove beneficial for the contributor and the ROS community.
Just a thought …
Chris: thanks for the ‘Post-Game’ analysis (at the top of the comment thread).
I think that if we’ve had a religious upbringing our ideas of God can be so deeply embedded into our consciousness we don’t even know it.
One reason I held off so long actually committing myself to the Buddhist path was because even though I have not been a practicing Christian for many years I still had a residual jealous God thing lurking deep in my consciousness. I thought I had to resolve my religious background before I became a Buddhist. I never did and now I just see it as layers. I left the Christian Church because of its inherent intolerance and insistence on being “the only way�. The more I learned about the world the less that rang true. But there were some things about my Christian upbringing that I cherish like the message of love that Jesus taught and in my own denomination we were taught to develop our own personal relationship with God. For me that meant God morphed from that hairy guy upstairs to something more akin to the Force of the Jedi.
Getting back to my point though which is that you cannot assume that all religions are the one you grew up with, I have had a few aha moments. Like realizing that as Buddhism is not theistic (though the Tibetans have plenty of deities if you want one or more) I was not being disloyal to any would be jealous God after all. Or I will start to feel guilty about something and catch myself, hey wait, I’m a Buddhist, phew! I don’t have to feel guilty. The practice is, primarily for me anyway, sitting still and paying attention to what my mind does. But it’s not unusual for me to catch myself looking at Buddhism through my deeply embedded Christian filters.
Another time I caught myself seeing other people’s religion through my Christian upbringing filter was one day when I was opening hate mail at the Earth First! Journal. We got a letter from a Souix woman who was livid because she’d heard that a bunch of white kids at an EF! gathering had built a sweat lodge. My first response was, “Oh geeze lady, white people sweat tooâ€?. She was accusing us of “stealing her religionâ€?. I thought no, we can steal your land, kidnap your children and kill you but how can anyone steal a religion? But the more I thought about this, the more I realized I was looking at it through the eyes of someone raised to believe that God is not the physical objects. I was raised a no frills Protestant. What I realized then was that in fact as a nature based religion for the Souix God is the objects. I still think white people ought to be free to build sweat lodges but I was able to see her point of view more sympathetically once I recognized my own filtered view.
So Nikos, I’m just wondering, when you hear the word “religionâ€? if all the red flags that spring up aren’t popping up out of a Catholic upbringing? I’m just guessing
Raymond: Actually I think you have a very good point. Last night as I was searching through this lengthly thread for the Jon Garfunkel post about the Goddess vrs the Alphabet I had a hard time finding it – I wished that somehow this all could be condensed. I also wondered it the posts could be numbered for referencing back to earlier posts.
Actually I guess the Date/time already does number the posts in a way but my screen is set small so for me they are hard to read.
Nikos And I’ll fight like hell against the dominance of the other style of ‘god’, because it’s a human projection, and a profoundly damaging one.
I think I got your dukes up because you assume the “God” of “There is no God” in the Milosz is one you feel strongly you need to destroy for all the damage. That’s lilke wanting to destroy history. It’s man’s changing concept and interpretation of the God of the Bible through time that’s done the damage. And I would say some good too. The concept/interpretation evolves. I see no evidence of the Old Testament God either and even fundamentalists admit that time is gone.
People believe in their versions of God which may be more or less evolved and metaphoric but it’s still God or they call it God. “God” can be believed to be the sum total of everything that is and is not.
I don’t think you want to destroy all concepts of God. Right?
One reason why evolution theory is having such a hard time being accepted in this country especially is because people feel that accepting evolution means they have to give up God, that they will be told definitively “there is no God”.
But people need to ( and will in time) move their concept of God ( and thus their religion) accordingly. E.O Wilson said something to this effect recently.
Are we still apples and oranges?
Rycke: Potter, you seem to recognise that both belief and non-belief involve positive belief: i.e., a belief that God does not exist is more certain and positive than uncertainty on that point.
A belief that God does not exist is more positive than uncertainty? Is saying “we cannot know” or “we do not know” less positive?
Everyone who has an opinion believes something. Right. We all believe something.
Note: Chris is inspired by the Bible.
peggysue: “What I realized then was that in fact as a nature based religion for the Souix God is the objects.” I am going to riff off this: I can make the stretch and respect this POV ‘unilaterally’. I suppose where the rub is coming for me is a percieved underlying assumption that Prof. Dennett is making from a natural science philosophy: Belief is an object which can be studied with analytical tools. And analytical tools can be extremely violent.
For some, to attempt to put this object on display for experimental/scientfic study is akin to removing an organ or significant skin tissue while the patient is still alive. The affects on the patient may be catastrophic; a psychic crises at some point. Belief is not a plaything. Nor is it the mere substance of experimental material. My concern is that a scientific POV, and in fact any fundamentalist POVs of any stripe, do not make the necessary incremental steps to explain fully the ramifications in plain, common terms (not scientific heavy, alienating terms). To make this study feasible, buy-in from a lay public must be obtained who often turn to a religion as a belief system because of an often overwhelming feeling of terror and anxiety. Without buy-in, this becomes a vacuous exercise.
Thus, makes Prof. Dennett’s approach suffers the fate of a non-starter and potentially perceived as dangerous; though I perceive him as an honorable and honest broker of extreme courage and conviction. One rub, of many, is that belief cannot be studied in terms of interacting with a being once the animate process has ceased. A cadaver doesn’t allow for this inspection. Therefore, a fully animate person is required. We are missing incremental steps, told in common language that reduce anxiety, not increase anxiety. This sets the table for an explosive backlash. I have heard Prof. Dennett in other interviews with lay people. And though he is courageous, he is not getting buy-in or relieving anxiety from an important, non-disposible segment of the population. Finally, I personally do not feel the threat, but I know to make progress, one should recognize that other people may. And most importantly, putting core values and first principles out there for folks to understand, will in fact help sharpen-the-stick and improve the inquiry, not detract from the overall objective.
I really blew on sentence one, paragraph three. I cannot even understand it. Let’s try this: Thus, this sets up Prof. Dennett’s approach to suffer the fate of a non-starter and potentially perceived as dangerous;…
CCM to Peggysue: And though he is courageous, he is not getting buy-in or relieving anxiety from an important, non-disposible segment of the population. Finally, I personally do not feel the threat, but I know to make progress, one should recognize that other people may. And most importantly, putting core values and first principles out there for folks to understand, will in fact help sharpen-the-stick and improve the inquiry, not detract from the overall objective.
CCM: Precisely and this ties in with what I am trying to say above. Your post above is germane to my line of thinking and though it seems like we are talking about different things, we are not I believe.
CCM: Dennett addresses your concerns at length in his early chapters. Aside from reiterating my vigorous reccommendation that you read the book before judging its potential validity or utility, let me point out that each of the other 3 ‘live’ guests on the show (to varying degrees) lauded Dennett’s attempt to further already extant investigation of religion by using a ‘natural selection’ lens.
This lens uses ‘memes’. And it’s revolutionary. It doesn’t examine belief: it examines the conceptual ‘stuff’ of religious convictions. It asks how these memes found favor in human minds, who then refined them — and it asks: to what end?
And don’t forget that the people lauding Dennett’s new attempt included religionists.
One of the worst things about the show — and I can say this without rancor because I’ve read the book — is that the show tried to include so many voices that it lost tight focus on Dennett’s book and the search the book launches.
Read the book. Judge it afterwards.
One further follow-up. I believe Prof. Dennett’s book discussed here is an attempt to bridge the gap to the lay-public. But, I believe he has leap frogged over some important areas of consideration. Perhaps, he is not even the appropriate source to develop these incremental steps. Perhaps, his effort and others are just getting this cranked up and it will be refined. I would hate to lose a valuable exploration due to becoming excused as threatening or irrelevant.
re: potter. I’ve been following your posts, as allows. And this sort of turned the crank for me…
Nikos: “Read the book. Judge it afterwards.” I definitely am. I just started, so you are justified in suggesting I’m being premature. I would like to see other voices trying to bridge this gap. It is probably not necessary, but I think some of the other guests who have a religious/spiritual belief system which resonates with their scientific system may have a better chance of persuading people and alleviating anxiety. For this to work, there must be buy-in. And to be slightly calculated: Tone and how it is presented are of utmost importance. To reiterate: Belief is not the mere substance of experimental material. Best and thanks for keeping it honest!
CCM & Potter: I neglected just now to mention (it was in the show but only briefly) that Dennett’s proposal is this: “let’s study religion first, and after comprehending it decide what of its features are healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. Then professional religionists can sagaciously choose to alter their profession and its product toward the healthy.�
That strikes me, at least, as a brilliant proposition!
CCM: re your 4:15 — that’s right. The work will surely be done by others. Dennett is simply offering a fresh starting point.
Nikos @ 4:38. I disagree. We are web friends and spiritual guttersnipes. This may be a first disagreement. And as my friend, you should not back down nor give up on me. But, to reiterate: analytical tools can be extremely violent. This is an important consideration. This must be contemplated before any study is embarked upon.
For one thing, it will tighten up the methodology and sharpen the focus before the study. And often a plan-of-action is revised when put to the test of being in the field. But, a proper period (undefinable) must examine the implications and effects on people. There are important incremental steps to make before beginning the study and they need to be layed out. I know you understand this deeply, but we must observe we are talking about people and belief is as important as a body part or an organ. I realize my view is contrary to some, but I view belief as a living being I coexist, a companion. It is no more a crutch, a convenience, or an impediment to living as my lungs or brain or liver or skin tissue. It must be handled with extreme care and caution. It must be nourish properly to maintain health. Experimental science and therapy has a dark history. Religion has a dark history. Both of these fields have done damage. Caution and prudence must be observed.
Keep after us. It’s very helpful.
A few more thoughts for those exploring Dennett’s book:
It deals with ‘memes’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Language is the fundamental human ‘memetic’ system.
Music is a memetic system. We tend to believe that it’s ‘healthy’.
Arithmetic is a memetic system. We usually think it’s healthy.
Cooking is a memetic system. Most of us like it, and it’s probably healthy, although ‘raw-food’ people think otherwise.
Sports are physical activities but memetic systems. You can run without thinking, but the instant you call it ‘running’ you’re talking a meme. Timing your runs isn’t a single meme but a set of memes. Athletics, we deem, is healthy. (Although competitiveness might not be. It perhaps deserves a memetic study like that proposed by Dennett for religion. Especially since ‘big-time sports’ is a quasi-religious memetic system.)
More coming later, but I gotta run for now.
CCM: re your 4:55 — my suggestion that competitiveness undergo an exam is my answer to your worries over Dennett’s study somehow being ‘violent’.
I fear you might be overly (if understandably) threatened by his proposal.
“Fear not the valley of the shadow of Dennett…”
He’s an okay bloke, really.
He’s just dead wrong about that ‘bright’ nonsense.
Nikos @ 5:09. Excellent and LOL! You’re a friend and spiritual guttersnip indeed. I enjoy listening to Prof. Dennett and reading his works. I’m going to ponder upon this and try to get further with this current book over the weekend. I can see a need a reread of Dawkins. I really enjoy his works too. Most importantly, allow myself time to examine deeper the implications. It’s a drag to be 100th chimp. Best …
Potter, I’m thinking how much resistance a religious person has to examining their beliefs analytically might have to do with how important it is to them that say, the world is flat, if that is their doctrine. They could have a whole political/social system based on flat earth that could crumble painfully if it were exposed as untrue. I think this is the problem Galileo had and Christians who insist that evolution must be wrong if it discredits anything that is written in the bible. But to me as a religious practitioner, I think I would want to know the truth however painful it may be. That’s why I’m a Buddhist. I take some comfort in knowing that the Dalai Lama has said that if age-old doctrine, or for example belief in reincarnation, can be empirically proven to be wrong, Buddhism would have to change. I can see how Dennett’s ideas may be very threatening to some religious people but I think it is a worthwhile pursuit. I don’t know how far it can go because I think there will always be some mystery beyond which our human tinkering cannot reach.
Now, something that keeps coming up in this thread is the idea that religion exists to quell people’s anxiety. I think that is just a very small piece of it. In fact if someone is truly “called by the spiritâ€? to fulfill a certain destiny it can require a great deal of sacrifice. There are big examples of this like Martin Luther King or Gandhi but even in my own life there have been moments where I felt I was living in my destiny and they were not exactly calming but I will say I have felt myself to be in a state of grace even with all hell breaking loose just because I had that feeling of doing what I was put on this earth to do. That is anyway something that I want from my religion, to find my own groove or flow in this amazing universe acknowledging that I may not know what that is and it may even mean that I get to be the sacrifice.
Lately it seems like it’s been my destiny to sit at my computer partaking in this fascinating blog thread but Lord Almighty I’ve got to get some work done today! I sure hope I didn’t piss off Nikos. He is such a great guy.
Oh wait! As soon as I hit the button I realized I meant to address cheeschow not Potter… dang, oh well
but of course I ment to address Potter et al as well…
peggysue: “Now, something that keeps coming up in this thread is the idea that religion exists to quell people’s anxiety. I think that is just a very small piece of it.”
I couldn’t agree more. I’ll defer describing the spiritual belief system I hang my hat upon. I don’t feel it relevent for my advocacy. Let me say that anxiety can be motivating. I have observed other people very much operating in a mode of anxiety. It is clear in deed, word, action, and intention. But, even if this is the motivation, a prolonged reliance upon anxiety may lead to a superficial experience. Just as in good health practices, some folks understand the need without a traumatic event. Others need the fear to correct behavior. To sustain the behavior, something other than fear probably needs to kick in. However, to not recognize the role of anxiety, its presence/absence, is to miss an important group of people, an opportunity, and putting some brain power on bridging the gaps. The activity of building the bridge will improve the study. I see no downsides. It is likely to be a productive time use of brain cycles.
Prof. Dennett can be perceived to be operating in a sort of ‘bulldozer’ mode that is prevalent among some in the science community. Can we stipulate that scientists have been known to get ahead of themselves without thinking through the effects of their work. I hope I don’t need dig up web links which point out the improper use of the scientific method on people and animals and our environment. And certainly there has been cynical abuses and misuses of religion upon people. Furthermore, in the search for truth/Truth both communities have been known to abdicate their ethical and moral responsibilities at times. The seduction are often too great.
Perhaps I am perceived as overtly paranoid. As they say, am I being paranoid enough? But, seriously, the reason to point this out is I’ve observed Prof. Dennett and other fellow travelers (Prof. Dawkins to name just one of several) not persuading people who have the very worldview they are interested in scrutinzing. A worldview where you can find palpable anxiety. Therefore, a wall goes up. Perhaps this would be helpful: I can concoct a scenario which will explain from a religious POV the need to cure Prof. Dennett of his sickness without regards to its effects upon him or fellow travelers. I hope we understand the implications. A study of beliefs can be argued to be of the same potential effects as cure of a scientific sickness if you disregard the necessity of ruminating about the effects before beginning the exercise. Both POV objectify the belief to be studied. Only the methods and findings differ. Both seek to perform an act which comports with the fitness of their worldview. History is replete in a lack of prudence and goodwill with coercive machinations. Again, tone and presentation, along with sincerity and good judgement are extremely important. Due diligence before embarking upon the study. These imcremental steps and dialog are not bonus steps. They are of necessity. Otherwise, an opportunity will be lost.
Mercifully, I will not be included into the process, so I’m beginning to understand, my thoughts upon this matter are of no practical consequence. Like I said, being the last monkey on-the-bus can be a real drag. Best to all…for the good of the thread, I’ll try to stay at periscope depth. Pardon my intrusion.
In a way, simply put it’s about making the communication, getting through. It’s one thing ( for a scientist ) to observe and come to know something or see something ( a pattern) more clearly and it is quite another to share that so that it has effect. Scientists are not good at this. And those who are on board can argue these things until they are blue in the face and it is worse than for nought because walls will go up ( as they have already) which is counterproductive having the opposite effect. (This psychology is nothing new.)
Potter, a very keen observation and much shorter @ 7:38. And peggysue, thank you for the affirmations of courage and commitment. To hopefully complete my thought process, I am probably arguing for something Prof. Dennett may be advocating. I just haven’t heard it. So, what’s missing: I need to read the whole book for starters. Second, his interview interactions (I’ve heard/seen him speak several times) are not expansive formats. It may be that he has not been able to discuss the small incremental steps that I am accusing him of leap frogging in a thorough way. Third, I need to unpack my baggage and hit my listen/thinking button. Okay, I really am off…I hope.
First I want to agree with Nikos’ point that >> One of the worst things about the show was the inclusion of too many guests – it should have been Chris & Dennett for the entire pledge interrupted hour. The guests probably worked better for Chris as his analyses of Dennett’s theses was soundly repudiated by Dennett repeatedly (his disembodied voice had a timbre and cadence that reminded me of Garrison Keillor) before the introduction of the guests which added very little IMO to the discussion. Peggysue’s Duke Ellington quip was the only mention of the bloggers at all (I guess if the Duke brought it back to life then Art Tatum is God as acknowledged by Duke himself.)
The 2nd thing I noticed was that Dennett conflates the evolution of non-genetically based entities with Darwinian Evolution I agree that concepts, ideas and beliefs evolve as in they change over time, but the meme thing as I said in the Morality thread is a facile attempt to impart the scientific (almost universal) imprimatur of DE to sociobiology and psychology both soft if not pseudo-sciences IMO much like Lamarck and Lysenko sought and E.O. Wilson’s theories seek scientific cachet. I was fascinated by the idea of memes some years back but came to the conclusion that except for jumping on the bandwagon (usually due to the lack of examination of one’s beliefs and the reasons for holding those beliefs,) memes are as bogus as the 100th monkey phenomenon. That I agree with philo on music: Peoples’ musical “ears� and taste evolve and the music created to appeal to those people’s emotional response is successful or not by the same criteria. The constant exposure to pop/hip-hop or any genre creates a subliminal response in a large part of the populace who are peer conscious which then “mimetically� reproduces itself in sales which generates more of the same genre. This phenomena would be miraculous if memes were actually a physical mechanism (like virtual photons or gravitons- hah) that mediated the effect. Memes are among those agents Dennett so vehemently decries.
I found Dennett’s assertion that he did not discount the possibility of miracles disingenuous. He adduces 1 in a trillion odds against DE but states the DE constantly beats those odds because he believes in it, accepts it as fact and wouldn’t question or bother to investigate it even in the face of the miracle it would be if true. The putative fact that inert elementary particles somehow became “ert� is an unexplained miracle that he accepts because “there is non- life and life so life must have come from non-life – how else could it be? The miracle of consciousness (cat or other) is seen as an emergent epiphenomenon. He asks: “What purpose does the common cold virus have?� They serve many purposes – they can boost our immunity to other viruses – give us an excuse to avoid unpleasant engagements/situations – provide down time to give our stimuli barraged selves a break yada yada yada. There are many more reasons including the viruses’ joyful expression and self replication. The idea of bootstrapping is fallacious – the origin of the cliché that one lifts oneself by ones own bootstraps says it all – it’s impossible. The modern notion of a computer bootstrapping gives rise to the something from nothing idea but that’s just a meme. Enough on the woebegone hour.
I enjoyed Freethinker’s ideas and echo many of the sentiments. I may say something next week about them but I only have a limited time tonight.
Potter: Regarding the Czeslaw Milosz poem. I agree with the idea that it is neither kind nor advisable in certain cases to “sadden your brother� but it is your brother’s decision to be saddened if and when he believes the assertion. He has to learn to decide for himself (as do each of us) what his belief is. I used to argue with fundamentalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS etc. for sport. I slowly realized it was inappropriate as I had nothing to offer as a replacement for beliefs that I logically decimated (to my mind and some of theirs) I caused disharmony in families and even though they made the decision to question some of their fundamental beliefs I was doing it out of less than ideal (ego) motives. I tried to talk to a couple of Muslim Engineers during the Salman Rushdie Fatwa about intolerance and they told me he should die for blaspheming Allah. That was when I realized that a person’s belief system is his/her religion and it is like a computer’s operating system. All data is processed according to the rules and the filters of their beliefs. This is the case for all humans – realizing that is the first step to change.
The energy and matter comprising us is earth and water, powered by sunlight and freshened by air. We each are ancient stardust made conscious by the seeming miracles that follow Earth’s absorption of sunlight. Therefore:
Revere all other humans: they are you in different bodies. They see, on your behalf, what you cannot. On your behalf they hear what you cannot. On your behalf they smell what you cannot. On your behalf they taste what you cannot.
And on your behalf they feel what you cannot.
Revere all other creatures: they may not ponder as profoundly as you, but they feel just as deeply.
Revere the plants: they feed you, whether directly or through animals that consume them, that you consume in turn.
Revere the mountains and the valleys, the forests and the deserts, the wild steppes and the tamed plains. Revere all water, no matter its amount. Earth and water combine with sunlight to make you and all other life.
Consider carefully – with empathy as your guide – the effect on other creatures and people any action you make.
After empathy guides you, choose the action that harms the fewest other sentient creatures.
Is this religion?
I just made it all up. It’s nothing more than a quick distillation of precepts I try to live by, precepts I’ve never before tried to codify like this.
If it’s religion, then I’m religious without knowing it.
My favorite route for going to church is the grueling two-hour climb up the Maynard Burn Trail, to 7,000 feet above sea level and a 200-mile view to any direction. It’s one of the world’s most magnificent cathedrals, and I usually have it to myself.
On reaching the summit, I sit, pant, and gawk in utter awe.
Every time.
The world I see up there is worthy of reverence – and even of veneration.
And please note: not once do my precepts mention ‘god’. Not even ‘divinity’. I would suggest that this creed of mine is perhaps a purer form of ‘moral goodness’ than the morals propagated by most religious authorities.
This is my latest attempt to meet halfway Potter, CCM, and any others offended by my insistence that the common, culturally accepted concept of ‘god’ is inherently flawed.
This personal ‘creed’ is my best answer to Potter’s poem.
Is this apples vs. oranges?
Let me know. I’m still sussing it out.
beautiful Nikos. Some might call it religion. Some might call it Deep Ecology or Northwest Mysticism. I don’t think it matters what you call it but it reminds me I need to get outside more.
h wally: if you’re still around, aplologies for my 5:39 post. The oxygen bit was all a riff but my timing was off at the end.
Nikos: I worship James Lovelock and Gaia. I think that with Gaia, Lovelock created a flashcard for the rest of us to ‘see, glimpse, intuit’ the huge fractal, pattern-making, self-organizing chaos-driven magesteria we would otherwise not be able to access personally.
Your Gaia mention teased out a correlation between a conundrum I encounter in my work and the opus of this thread on religion. As a landscape architect I studied Gaia 101, but as a practitioner I interact with the public, who are conditioned to want, and therefore ask me for Roman villas. (I’n the interest of brevity, I’m generalizing) Our moral and aesthetic construct about working the earth is biblical, paternalistic, etc. Sustainable, green design sounds great but runs into a ‘fundamentalist’ wall in practice. Those weedy native plants look dead all winter and I’ve sadly concluded that people don’t want to be reminded of or live with their mortality……they prefer juicy, water-guzzling ornamental landscapes; oases signifying heaven on earth. I could go on, but this is a conversation for another context.
Perhaps I should explain a bit further and more precisely the responsibility I feel to publicly question ‘god’. Dan Dennett actively worries (in his book) that his famous willingness to investigate religion risks his life. I worry too.
Let’s assume for argument that the Christian god and Allah are not only the same being but real, and that He is watching us.
Which of His purported scriptural teachings are we to believe?
If we accept that humans are imperfect (compared to god – and for the record, I don’t think we’re ‘imperfect’ because I don’t seriously believe in ‘ideal states’), then we must acknowledge the possibility that those claiming to know “God’s will� might actually not. The voices speaking in their minds might be none other than their own. Their teaching and the actions they advocate might not be divinely inspired at all – yet religion insists or at least suggests otherwise.
Now, if you were God (or Allah), what would you do?
How about this:
Miraculously inspire a non-theistic rendition (like mine of the 8:46 PM, March 24, 2006) of the morals you want your people to follow, and, just to avert the risk of violence mistakenly done in your name teach that you don’t exist!
This, in one ‘fell swoop’, obviates priesthoods.
Wouldn’t this be much more prudent? Safer?
And more divinely clever???
You could still judge people by their adherence to the morals you covertly imparted, while safeguarding against tricksters earning a living by falsely representing you!
If I were God, I would insist that I don’t exist!
Which what? – makes cranky old Nikos a prophet!
PS to my admittedly tongue-in-cheek 10:27 PM March 24, 2006: it just occurred to me that, entirely by accident, it might be ingenious.
Because if God’s intent is to judge a person’s true goodness, my seemingly silly model provides a more genuine test than one wherein fear of Hell, or, at least, the loss of paradise provides a carrot and stick.
I mean, what does God want to test: our fear and/or greed for an afterlife, or our true, unselfish ‘goodness’?
Any clergy reading this might want to suggest my spontaneously generated idea and model to your personal gods and saviors.
You old anti-trickster Nikos. Love those ideas.
If there were an all knowing, all powerful entity of some kind, it would also seem unnecessary to have places of worship and prayers, since that entity (let’s call it BT for Big Tofu, which is healthier than cheese) would know what is in people’s hearts and minds regardless (must have one hell of a big memory chip and brilliant data management program to keep track of all the details). And why would BT give so much power (free will) to the people in the first place? Just to test how true they are? No need, BT would already know. So it has to be a game. Then the BT wouldn’t really care about any single or any group of pawns (and please don’t tell me that BT would root for some underdog), so what would be the point of appealing, through some kind of sacrifice, repentance, sip of wine or the like? As Nikos says, BT wouldn’t need middle-men either because BT could use a much more efficient direct programming method.
This then leaves two choices. One is that BT is not all knowing and all powerful. BT is more like a demi-god or, god forbid, one of the lessor gods, in which case BT is just competing with Ganga, Dionysus and the likes. Or maybe BT is only a celestial being, like an Apsaras. Or an angle. Or a fairy.
The other choice is that BT is just a wish, a desire, a vision, a possibility, which tosses it all back to us and what as individuals, groups and societies (given the limitations of our genetic and evolutionary dispositions and time/space conditions) we come to make of this life.
Some choose to walk with thunder and go out with a bang, but I prefer to tread lightly and, when the time comes, go gently into the night.
Hi jazzman. Nice to see your presence here. I was beginning to wonder if the ‘evolutionary’ premise had put you off the topic entirely.
Now, you realize that your rejection of the ‘meme’ notion for its parallel to DE might just commend to the rest of us, don’t you?
Jests aside, and despite the truth that I’m merely a dilettante meme enthusiast and nothing like an expert, I disagree with your meme critique and here’s why:
First, even common, everyday language is thoroughly underlain by metaphor. This is of course less true for abstract language, but I think the meme concept lies in between abstract and metaphoric. Thus, when it’s used in discourse, it sure seems like the speakers or writers are saying that memes have ‘lives of their own’ – as if they’d exist even without hosting minds – but that’s just the metaphor, not the reality. Of course they must have hosting minds.
The first time a woman planted a seed she’d gathered, the ‘gardening’ meme was born. If the action hadn’t led to plants sprouting in the same location she’d planted, the meme wouldn’t have survived. Instead, plants sprouted and the gardening meme proved valuable enough to spread to other human minds for its cultivation – leading, obviously, to more and more experiments with crop cultivation. (Moreover, who knows how many unsuccessful attempts other ‘first-hosts’ of the gardening meme might have made by planting in poor conditions or inappropriate soil? But, once it worked and caught on, a whole memetic family evolved.)
Stretching skin across an empty turtle shell started somewhere as a simple meme, was copied and developed by others, who cultivated it into drumming and scads of other rhythmic practices – which likely entail millions of memes. Yet music is obviously less ‘useful’ than agriculture. Even so, early musicians liked it, and enough so to cultivate and refine it. (Thank goodness!) And music, though splendid, likely doesn’t award a hard and fast evolutionary advantage.
Isn’t it conceivable that human culture, regardless of its component ‘usefulness’, is the descendants of early memes?
How about recent, purely ‘useless’ memes: like baseball caps. Then baseball caps worn at rakish angles. Then baseball caps worn backwards. Then baseball caps worn backwards and at rakish angles!
None of this ‘style’ is in any way evolutionarily useful. Why do the styles evolve and persist? Because people like it, right? Yes, and that’s because it confers something of perceived value to whoever likes it enough to let it colonize his or her mind. (Disclaimer: I don’t like hats of any kind except for winter woolen ones and my Goretex rain hat for outdoors activities – and even then I remove them at first chance.) So, ‘perceived value’ is the same necessary predicate for the gardening and drumming memes.
For all successful, persistent, and evolving memes.
Now, religion entails a different family of memes from the others, and it probably has roots even more ancient than agriculture. Religion’s zillion memes have persisted through untold generations of variations and experiments and failures. The most useful – useful, that is, to the hosting minds, like emperors and popes and inquisitors – developed the refinements necessary to persist and flourish. In other words, these ideas — memes — evolved to suit their hosts. Symbiotically.
Ultimately, ‘meme’ is only a concept for studying the spread and evolution of ideas. It’s a bit gnarly at first because it’s a concept about concepts, and yes, it relies on belief in evolution – but that’s why Dennett can make such convincing use of it in Breaking The Spell.
And that’s why I think it revolutionary and useful enough for me to seek the fluency to use it correctly.
Therefore, I would appreciate any feedback, blowback, or simple questions, from anyone so inclined, to force me into ever more accurate comprehension of this ice-cream-sundae of a novelty-idea.
First, a correction for the second sentence my post directly above: “Now, you realize that your rejection of the ‘meme’ notion for its parallel to DE might just commend it to the rest of us, don’t you?”
Babu: I love the Gaia theory, but I’ve heard it hasn’t stood up to scrutiny. I’d welcome any references you can point me toward. I’ve got Lovelock’s book, and another whose title I can’t recall and don’t want to rummage through the mess to find. I’m hoping for something more recent than my mid-90’s era info, anyway.
Next, no Peggy Sue, my religious upbringing was a bit schizophrenic, and not Catholic. It started in a Greek Orthodox church but was incomprehensible because the whole thing was recited and sung in Greek, which I barely understood. This made church very, very boring. The only things of visual interest were the weird costumes of the clergy and the altar boys, and the horrifying icons of the bleeding, dying man nailed to a big stick.
Why, I ask, hasn’t anyone ever questioned the appropriateness of exposing small children to that sort of gore?
Talk about unassailable sacred cows!
Anyway, perhaps my Greek Sunday school teacher wasn’t much good, or maybe the morality she taught rubbed me the wrong way (probably!), but for whatever reason, I wasn’t much of a believer even while young enough to know of no alternatives…
Well, that might not be exactly true.
My father read to us kids a children’s version of the Iliad and Odyssey. And I loved the gods and goddesses in that stuff – a cast of characters so much more fun, expansive, and realistic than the tiny and tedious Christian pantheon. Plus, we had an illustrated book of Greek myths, and my dad had stashed away (but not well enough!) other illustrated books – including artistic representations of life in ancient Crete. (Bare breasts and all – and don’t believe the propaganda that little boys aren’t interested in naked women. It just ain’t so.) So, even as a kid, I yearned for a radically different religion than the incomprehensible and stern nonsense in church.
Then just to confuse everything, I lived for a few years with my non-Greek mother – who took us to a Presbyterian church. This, at least, was all in English, and the pastor was progressive, patient, and forgiving. So, I prayed a lot. And I had a lot to pray for too: without going into the nasty details, my childhood was a pretty miserable affair. Yet none of my prayers earned any of the goodness I yearned for. So, at around 11 or 12, when an older relative confided the shocking truth that there wasn’t a god to listen to anyone’s prayers, I was at first crushed (like learning the truth of Santa), but my hard experiences had set me up for this sort of disabusing, and, after the inevitable moping, I accepted it.
Then for years I trundled along as an agnostic/atheist, even while pining for something more ancient and pagan. Briefly tried Buddhism, but it didn’t feel authentic to me – I guess I wanted something more related to my childhood yearnings. And then, in the mini-explosion of neo-paganism, found it.
And found, amid the questionable spirituality, a whole bunch of egomania-for-misfits. Now, I’m a quiet guy to begin with, so my ‘pagan’ period turned real quick into a solo practice. (Real quick, as in, about a week.) And, not long after that, I realized two things: my ‘rituals’ were little more than mediations to incenses, candles, and tiny icons, and my true sense of connectedness with the ‘earth spirit’ occurred outdoors, not inside. So, even after finding at last my childhood dream-religion, I wasn’t much of a ‘believer’.
Ever since then, for my version of a ‘religious experience’, I go hiking, mountain scrambling, and canoeing.
So, to answer your question, I’ve never found much to commend anything like ‘organized’ religion – even though it fascinates me and plays a central role in my fiction of empathetic pagan priestesses and their wild adventures.
Is that a satisfying answer? If not, I’ll happily try to answer any other queries you might pose. Although it might be best to do this at our get-together instead of here in the forum?
Nikos: I am really looking forward to talking to you about….
“my fiction of empathetic pagan priestesses and their wild adventures”
I just wondered if Catholicism lurked somewhere in your past because the people I know who are also vehemently anti “God” or “religion” have suffered through Catholic upbringings and the negative reaction is understandable. I was just trying to understand how you came to have such intense views on the subject.
Even as a child I was creating rituals and seeking out religious experience… so, maybe I did get the religion gene from my Mom ; )
I wonder if Dennetts religious meme is not just what Nietzsche’s death of god and Foucault’s death of man must look like in the age of genetics. Or is this what we get when we brew together structuralism, evolutionary theory and the resplendid replication?
Let me get this staight. Sugar, through the tongue, sound through the ears, numbers through the fingers and faith from a breath of air found the perfect host in the human brain to evolve into taste, music, mathematics and religion, just because they could. Go figure.
To Peggysue from http://www.radioopensource.org/is-god-in-our-genes/#comment-8242
The whole post is good, and thanks for the anecdote of the Sioux woman’s anger and the evolution of your thinking. This, as a result of meditation practice no doubt. I meditated for five years practically daily which helped me enormously. I am aiming to get back to it. I do practice mindfulness and lovingkindness in my life. I am convinced that Buddhism is very advanced and has so much to offer those of us brought up in the Abrahamic religious traditions. Many Jews have gravitated to Buddhism and there are some prominent Buddhist teachers of Jewish background in this country. ( this is another subject)
Peggysue I think that if we’ve had a religious upbringing our ideas of God can be so deeply embedded into our consciousness we don’t even know it.
.
To Nikos: I enjoyed reading your post above of 3:00 am particularly the part about your upbringing though I cannot believe you are a quiet guy.
Regarding your creed/religion you write:
Is this religion?
I just made it all up. It’s nothing more than a quick distillation of precepts I try to live by, precepts I’ve never before tried to codify like this.
If it’s religion, then I’m religious without knowing it.
I don’t think you just made it all up, it’s been slow in coming and I would say it all is and has been embodied one way or another in and from others as well as in various religions. Those ideas have been transmitted to you and what you have done, as many of us have, is weed your garden and allow a few strong trees to stand. Weeding frees us up to grab onto music and soar with it, or shriek at the thrill of seeing a tiny frog drinking a dewdrop on a leaf.
That is not to say either that fervent belief in a religion does not work the same for some.
I think Joseph Campbell might say that once we get around, through, past these portals we should arrive at a place where we meet in spirit. If we do not then something is wrong. The first place to look is within.
Potter: right – I didn’t “make it all upâ€? any without outside influence. But I grounded it in the bare essentials of what life on earth is: a seemingly miraculous parthogenesis stemming from sunlight’s actions on the third stone from the sun in question.
It’s not grounded in any sort of god. It’s ‘bare bones’, too.
I posited it to show that one can lead an entirely ‘moral’ and empathetically grounded life with absolutely no personal ‘religion’ – in the organized sense, at least.
And I stand by that.
‘God’ is not necessary. And if I were god, I would insist to humans that this is so.
Religion is not necessary; and priests are not necessary.
Many before me have observed this, but the memetic systems of religion have evolved defenses to discredit those whose freethinking has comprehended these truths.
And Dennett’s book is invaluable for that observation if nothing else!
re the last two sentences of my 10:19AM — I’m very much looking forward to CCM’s view of the book for exactly this reason. If you’re a believer, and you see the sense of the argument — like Michael Murray said so on the show — then, like Murray, you must postulate that God has given us this analytical gift to help us to Him.
I, unsurprisingly, found Murray’s argument a convenient new evolution of the religious meme system that seeks to secure its domain from any risk of disconfirmation. Which any successful memetic system must do.
crap. re my 10:19 again: “Potter: right – I didn’t “make it all upâ€? without any outside influence.”
I should never type before drinking my morning coffee.
sidewalker: All I can say to your typically excellent 6:18AM (I loved your 1:15AM too, btw) is that this ‘meme’ stuff doesn’t make sense out of context — but makes crystalline sense in context. Just like we don’t truly begin to understand words until we hear them used in sentences, you’ve got to read Dennett’s book to grasp the sense of the ‘meme’ tool.
And keep in mind: it’s no more or less a tool than any other concept.
Tools that don’t perform as well as others rust away to dust in the bottom of the toolbox.
I very much doubt that this will be the fate of the ‘meme’ tool.
Try it, and let me know how you like its ‘action’ and utility.
Babu: I found what I was looking for in the ‘usual suspect’ place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
Potter: keep in mind that I am now God’s prophet of His nonexistence. You must therefore hereafter tolerate my open religious skepticism.
Everyone: a bit more about memes: it’s simply a concept, a metaphoric tool for comprehension of hitherto incomprehensible mysteries.
This is exactly why it so threatens religion. Religion is a ‘memetic system’ that for millennia has brilliantly insulated itself from risk of disconfirmation.
Again: scrutiny by way of a memetic lens can’t disprove ‘god’, but it sure can ask a whole new slew of penetrating questions.
Murray’s reply to Dennett on the air was an example of memetic evolution at work. Murray warmly hosts the religion meme, and his suggestion that God has given us this new tool of the ‘meme lens’ to better understand His truths is a perfect and sterling example of how this meme persists in the face of all critical scrutiny.
American belief that belief in God is a virtue is another example of the meme’s adaptability.
Potter’s insistence that my reaction to the poem’s censorious intent is closely related to the meme’s pervasive influence and insistence that it must not be questioned.
Fundamentalist Islam’s violent, coercive reactions to expressions of skepticism are a startling and abhorrent example of the meme’s successes in insulating itself from risk of disconfirmation. “Believe in me or die.”
Again, if all this meme talk is Greek to you, read the Dennett book.
I look forward to more conversation, should the prospect appeal to anyone.
Sheesh. Sometimes not even coffee is enough to make a dumb guy bright.
Correction: “Potter’s insistence that my reaction to the poem’s censorious intent is misguided is closely related to the meme’s pervasive influence and insistence that it must not be questioned.”
Sorry everyone!
babu: “I worship James Lovelock and Gaia”.
just a note from the bookstore… James Lovelock’s new book is now out in the UK and we are awaiting it here. Title, Gaia’s Revenge. But this should probably go on the global warming thread.
opps really screwed up my bolds & italics
I’m not really trying to push this thread to 300 by Monday, it only seems like it.
I just ‘memed’ a new way to talk in simple language about memes:
Memes aren’t either ‘true’ or ‘false’. Cat litter scoops aren’t true of false either. Cat litter scoops are tools, and they are real. They are rather useful, too.
Memes weren’t ‘real’ until Dawkins coined the term, inventing in-so-doing a new conceptual tool.
Now, if memes can help religious professionals to clean the litter boxes of their faith traditions, are they not then potentially rather useful tools?
Miraculous, even?
Memes aren’t ‘true or false’, they’re simply ‘real’ to those that use them. Just like litter scoops.
oOpS! I failed to make the comparison plain: let’s please say that the ‘litter boxes’ in my metaphor aren’t the religions, but that the religions are the cats that the clergy tend and feed!
And we don’t want our cats living in unhealthy bio-waste, now do we?
Maybe your gods will appreciate your cleaning of the box!
Potter’s insistence that my reaction to the poem’s censorious intent is misguided is closely related to the meme’s pervasive influence and insistence that it must not be questioned.�
Nikos you said that Milosz poem was misguided and censorious. I did not feel censored by it. It awakened me, sort of like Peggysue was awakened to something in herself by the Sioux woman’s anger. I recognized in this poem that I arrived at a place where I no longer feel the need to battle other people’s religions out of them (my own family’s especially) to prove my own beliefs. I am relieved.
And then I have come to see the beauty of these human creations. (Not to deny the harm.)
I see the benefits those that I love derive from their practice.
I think the “brother’s keeper” meme is a good one. I think you do too from your posts. ( Can I use “meme” for that?)
Of course you are free to say whatever you want to whom you wish but sometimes it is not wise, nor moral, nor effective ( in my view). I can understand being on guard against any morality being imposed on you especially if you come from a strong religious tradition that you have left for those very reasons, maybe the same basic one that made me hit the road. But I trust that you are a caring person and wil not in fact trun through the streets shouting “There is no God” ( as if that would get you anywhere but into a straight jacket).
But I don’t think this is about religion at all. This plea of Milosz comes from another place- outside of religion. Milosz is after all by saying “ifâ€? allowing for the possibility in himself that there may not be a God. He has taken that step. But he cautions about saying this definitively, authoritatively to one who would possibly be put into a depair,saddened. The brother who needs keeping, one needs to be more careful with, so be cautious. That’s compassion.
In other words after religion, after God, there is still morality, we are still here caring for each other. This is a tree left standing.
Nikos, I forgot to ask what meme ( exactly) “must not be questioned”. The existence of God? The need for religion? ( can you point me to your post on that?)
Nikos: I’ll refrain from appointing you the ‘God that doesn’t exist’ (for now) but how about the Grand PooBa of the New United States to whom is given the task of rewriting the Constitution? not quite all-powerful but significant none-the-less. Would you tamper with that meme we call the ‘Bill of Rights’ by rewording the part that guarantees the citizenry ‘Freedom of Religion’?
Bonobo theory: In his book Universe in a Sigle Atom the Dalai Lama, in the chapter on evolution mentions “One of Tibets own myths of creation tells how the Tibetan people evolved from the mating of a monkey and a fierce ogress (a theory he says he is not convinced of).
Peggy Sue: No!
I’ve got lot’s to say especially to Potter but won’t have time till tonight. (It’s all love, Potter, don’t fret.)
Except for this: Dennett doesn’t call for the abolition of religion either. Some genius earlier in this thread pointed out that Jesus tried to reform religion and got killed for it. Dennett is asking that religions examine themselves and don’t mind the help of others whose outsider perspectives can offer rich threads of insight.
Dennett suggests that religions offer much beauty and value to human life — and much threat and misery too.
It’s incumbent upon religion to rectify this, just as it is upon junkyards to remove refrigerator doors so that kids playing don’t get inveigled and pay with their lives.
Lastly (for now, only for now), the bill of rights must also include a citizen’s right of freedom from religion — and from the perils posed by others’ religions!
Religions, to be blunt and brusque, need to clean up their acts.
Later, all.
PS: religionists armed with nuclear weapons?
Religions need to clean up their act, and need to do so internally — and NOW.
Nikos: oh good. My understanding of freedom of religion is that it includes freedom of conscience allowing for personal beliefs including evangelical secularism.
What I wish is that we could get rid of intolerance, cruelty, and violence (by any memes necessary!) whether it is cloaked in religion or justified any other way. Anti-religious forces can be just as horrific and murderous as any pro-religion force. I’m thinking of China in Tibet and all of the tortured and murdered monks and nuns, destroyed temples, libraries and religious art.
And Nikos: I do hope you know I mean this in the spirit of friendly banter.
Peggy Sue: here’s some friendly banter back at you:
pssst! Peggy Sue, I secretly kinda like religion – just none of the world’s current ones!
Don’t tell!
But even if I were crowned World King, with the sovereign right to impose on whim any style of worship, I doubt I’d ever be much of a believer in anything apart from my non-religious earth reverence. I’d simply make everybody get outside on Sundays for a couple of hours or more, and listen to the voices of nature.
Some ‘religion’, huh?
‘Real world’ religion is like motor racing: a hell of a spectacle, exciting, stirring, oddly beautiful and inspirational, and dangerous to its professionals and onlookers alike, and: a titanic industry. Yet its sudden disappearance would free massive amounts of resources for other more worthwhile uses, and we’d probably not lose much in the way of ‘real value’ in the bargain. (Although I could be wrong on this last wisecrack — I’m willing to ‘parley’ over the reputed positves of religion.)
Anyway, here’s how a revised Article of Religious Freedom might work in practice.
Freedom from Religion. This would not only ensure that a future government could never mandate religious observance; it would act to prevent use of the public airwaves to convey religious content. You’d have to ask your cable TV provider for the televangelist channels. It would be bundled into a ‘premium’ package instead of included in ‘basic’. Religious radio would have to move to satellite.
On the street, proselytizers could set up sidewalk tables covered with their tracts and let interested people take them, but the passersby would have to initiate the exchange, not the religionists. AND: no more door-to-door proselytizing.
Any such intrusive religious proselytizing would violate constitutionally guaranteed freedom from religion.
As for Freedom from ‘Religiously Posed Peril’:
Let’s say I start a new religion that (improbably) worships the ancient Greek Olympian pantheon. Part of this new creed is a paranoid preaching that claims that all Greek Orthodox Christians are secretly in league and plotting to recreate the Byzantine Empire in America – and therefore I preach that all unrepentant Greeks must be attacked, in hopes of either killing them off or forcing them out of the country from fear for their lives.
Now, laughs aside, recall that the Pursuit of Happiness is a national credo. You can hardly pursue happiness if bigots are threatening your life by preaching your destruction.
Free speech stops where threats and exhortations urging hostilities begin.
You wanna ape the Nazis and preach that Jews are subhuman vermin? Fine, try it in solitary confinement in the Big House, pal. Try it while your written communications are burned before your eyes by your prison guards.
No religion practicing hate speech ought be allowed to rupture or threaten any citizen’s pursuit of happiness.
How’s that for a preliminary scheme?
Oh, and think how relieved the ACLU would be to be obviated from protecting the constitutional right to hate speech! They could switch instead to protecting the constitutional rights of those threatened by paranoid and bigoted religionists.
This starts addressed to Potter, but, like most posts on this forum, it’s ultimately for everyone.
One function of the blog style of writing is that it pays to be concise. Sure, this is true for all writing, but its truth is stronger here. We all know that I’m not very good at it, but that’s beside the point. I try, and one consequence of trying for conciseness is that it’s much easier to post your strongest feelings and neglect to express your moderate ones.
If you feel that religion is an old menace growing stronger every year, it’s much easier to say why. It’s less easy to moderate your discontent: it might weaken the points you most want to represent. And it lengthens the post in the process. So, here’s a belated ‘moderation’:
I’m not advocating the abolition of religion. As I said above (6:22 PM March 25, 2006), religion’s providers need to weed the fields of scripture from which they reap their seeds and crops. The rest of this post will try to express why in concise detail.
Dennett in his Chapter 10 mentions and quotes Sam Harris, who says that
“…there is a cruel Catch-22 in the worthy efforts of the moderates and ecumenists in all religions: by their good works they provide protective coloration for their fanatical coreligionists, who quietly condemn their open-mindedness and willingness to change while reaping the benefits of the good public relations they thereby obtain. In short, the moderates in all religions are being used by the fanatics, and should not only resent this; they should take whatever steps they can find to curtail it in their own tradition. Probably no one else can do it, a sobering thought:
“If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation. This transformation, to be palatable to Muslims, must also appear to come from Muslims themselves. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of ‘moderate’ Muslims. (Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p.154, 2004)
“We must hold these moderate Muslims responsible for reshaping their own religion—but that means we must equally hold moderate Christians and Jews and others responsible for all the excesses in their own traditions.� (Dennett, pgs. 299-300) (Emphasis in bold added by Nikos)
I worry that the ‘martyrdom by suicide’ meme isn’t exclusive to Islam – hell, we know that Christians, Jews, and Hindus (at least!) have been willing in the past to die for their religions.
Here’s a spy novel plot for anyone to steal (I don’t write spy fiction although I’m often happy to read it): the psychological crisis of an American Air Force Academy graduate…we’ll call him Jess. He’s in intelligence, undercover in Karachi, and learns all about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and how to procure, with funds provided by the CIA, a nuke. This is a ‘sting’ operation of his anti-proliferation job, but Jess hides enough of his work from his superiors for them to provide the money and wait for their trusted spy’s timing to procure the thing. What his superiors don’t know is that Jess is a repressed homosexual and guilty as sin over it. His wife has left him, his personal life is in ruins, and he is a devout Christian – and eager for the Rapture. He knows he isn’t likely to get raptured himself because once while drunk he had a homosexual encounter and liked it. His self-torment hasn’t tainted his work – until now. An undercover Islamist persuades Jess that an action that starts WWIII and the biblical ‘end of the world’ might win him his place in the Rapture.
Jess acquires the nuke, and, using his diplomatic cover, smuggles it into Israel…and detonates Armageddon.
A fanciful tale? Sure. It needs many more details to be convincing – but that’s how novelists spin their webs of lies – by adding detail.
The point is that the ‘end of times’ needn’t come from an Islamic action. It could well come from a Christian or Jewish one – or even a Hindu. I don’t know much about Hinduism, but I can tell you what I do know about. I grew up in more than one American working class neighborhood, and in one, my bigoted pals openly daydreamed of crusading in Israel to take back the Holy Land for Jesus! One of them joined the Air Force, too. (Needless to say, I had to ‘hold my nose’ more than a little in my youth.) And this, mind you, was in the mid-1970’s! Nowadays kids have internet access: access to hate sites and to religious extremism.
How do we know fundamentalist Christianity isn’t quietly breeding a new slew of terrorists for Jesus? We don’t. What we do know is that it sure did just that (crusaders) a millennium ago.
The problem is scripture: it needs weeding.
It needs it badly. Too many religionists (regardless of creed) uncritically try to swallow the whole morass of their faith’s sacred texts – this leads to internally contradictory religious messages and to unacceptable bigotry too. (Not to mention millions of man hours wasted in ‘interpretation’ instead of in charitable activities!)
Here’s a start. Imagine you are witnessing a World Convocation of all major religions. The first religion stands before the others and says:
“My name is Greek Orthodoxy, and I am an addict. I have tried for centuries to be a force for good in the name of my Lord and Savoir, but in my youth I fell afoul of devilry. I am addicted to worship and to the money those I attract as worshippers bring to me.
I am old now, in my dotage, and before I expire in my home continent’s increasing religious disinterest, I wish to redeem myself.
I have for millennia fought wars and slain innocents. I have preached intolerance, exclusivity, and I have hypocritically condoned and fostered hatred.
No longer.
To this end, I disavow all of the Bible save Jesus’s message of unconditional love, forgiveness, acceptance, and the paupering of oneself through acts of charity.
No Hell.
No crucifixion.
No resurrection.
No Old Testament.
Only good works in hopes of pleasing God.
Jesus does not exclude souls – he forgives.
I have decided therefore to cull from the gospels only the messages of love, forgiveness, acceptance, and sharing, and this small, retained fraction of the old Bible will hereafter become the entirety of our Holy Words.
I know that this act might well diminish me: people needing the carrot of eternal salvation and the stick of a threatened Hell might abandon me for other, unrepentant preachers of unverifiable hellfire and damnation. Yet I can no longer countenance my addiction to worship and income.
I must risk my relevance in service of the God I have misrepresented for most of my existence – and in hopes that His anger over my sins might fade to Christian forgiveness. Perhaps my act will inspire others to cleanse their own scriptures of their toxicities. I offer my very existence as a sacrifice to this end.�
Now, don’t you think it peculiar that this little sketch is coming from an unbeliever?
Just the other night I was typing away right here as I am now, and something took over my fingers: without knowing it, I typed God’s revelation:
He long ago stopped speaking in the minds of the men who claim to represent him. These men selected their scriptures from false sources that projected not His message of love but their own images and their prejudiced, mistaken beliefs about people. These men polluted the essence of the teachings meant to illuminate humankind, in favor of messages that provide excuses for enrichment and the pursuit of princely powers.
Your God, religionists, has lost patience with hypocrites that invoke Him to satisfy greed and to justify bigotry.
He is so angry that He has chosen me – of all people, one who doesn’t believe in His existence! – to relay news of His retirement from concerns over earthy and human affairs, and to teach that He doesn’t exist.
He is, in short, so disgusted that He is giving up on you.
He is angry as sin that He has time and again reincarnated Jesus to spread the Word of love, forgiveness, and charity; yet religionists and the world’s leaders alike ignore the message. He has given you Jesus as Gandhi, as Martin Luther King, and as millions of progressive humanists and feminists.
Yet none who ought listen pay His many messengers any heed.
Religionists: your God is speaking through an infidel. He is challenging you to study your scripture and retain only the messages of love, forgiveness, acceptance, and charity.
How about it, patriarchal monotheisms?
How willing are you to risk your institutional bloat and influence, and strip down your message to the sweetest essences of your God’s goodness?
Are any of you willing to dare to claim that you’ve hosted a new, corrective visitation from your God, instead of leaving His messaging to one who scorns you?
Are you willing to host this Divine Visitation and afterwards trim the toxic fat from your scriptures – toxicity that oppresses, excoriates, judges, condemns, and advocates or condones violence?
What sort of men are you really? Gutless conformists who fear the loss of stature and relevance?
Or courageous men who will risk irrelevance – and in so doing just might recreate and reinvigorate religion – your religion – and with it capture the hearts and minds of all the world’s peoples? (And hasn’t this always been your egotistical goal?)
Have you the testicular fortitude to admit and confess your self-absorbed excesses and meet the unbeliever’s challenge?
Who knows – doing so might just inspire a new and approving real-world appearance of this God of yours I dismiss as fiction.
Would you care to chance this, to prove wrong my scorning disbelief?
An anxious world awaits.
Sincerely,
Guttersnipe Nick
Unwitting Chosen Prophet of Your God’s Nonexistence
The italics thing is weird and touchy. Sorry. I don’t know why it spilled over from the Dennett/Harris quote, but it’s probably self-evident where it was supposed to stop.
Also, Potter, I’ll look into your specific meme question tomorrow. My two long posts tonight — amid the routines of life — ate up all my time.
See ya.
To be clear: the italics should have stopped @ “p.154, 2004)”
Two more thoughts about memes – one specifically for Potter (yet for everyone), and another general one (yet also for Potter as much as for everyone):
Viewed through a meme lens (remember please, Jazzman, that memes aren’t ‘true or false’ but simply conceptual tools) religion’s spectacular success has depended in no small part on the memetic variant that says: ‘Perpetuation of this cultural entity (religion) is imperiled by any threat of the Supernatural Entity’s disconfirmation. Therefore: protect the Supernatural Entity from threat of disconfirmation no matter what!’
‘No matter what’ can be as abhorrent and severe as the possibility of death for Afghanistan’s Abdul Rahman (for converting to Christianity) – or as mildly censorious as the Milosz poem. (And yes, I still contend that it is at least mildly censorious – in fact, its very mildness lends it such emotional power that it’s likely a more effective censor [to Americans] than the Islamic threat of execution!)
The ‘general’ point about the usefulness of memes can be illustrated by the notion in my 3:19 AM, March 26th that hate-preachers can and should be incarcerated.
The ‘anti-Semitism meme’ was cultivated and ‘bred’ (artificial selection, to Darwin) in Christian churches. It evolved little over the appalling centuries of pogroms, but in the end infected political thought – and mutated into Nazism.
Incarcerating willing hosts of such a malignant meme acknowledges that the concepts are virulent and transmissible. Incarcerating such willing hosts isn’t repressive – the preachers are repressive for posing threats to the happiness and well-being of those their hate-speech targets.
And ‘meme’, for all its lack of ‘truth’ as a theory (which it isn’t), is a useful tool for perceiving these distinctions.
I can imagine college students inspired by Dennett and Dawkins beginning an effort to ‘scientifically categorize and name’ (in Linnaean style Latin and Greek) memes like bacteria and viruses. This might earn them academic plaudits but is probably fool’s gold.
Idea families would be very much harder to separate into arbitrary memes and meme groups than bacteria and viruses – although, as mind-candy, I’d happily read a pop-science distillation of the students’ most amusing categorizations!
Potter, I hope this post satisfies and leaves you in peace with my critique of the Milosz poem. Perhaps in the end we must simply agree to disagree.
Sorry, it’s me again. One more potentially helpful thought on the meme thing: I don’t actually know (or care) whether Dawkins and/or Dennett think the meme idea is a ‘theory’. In my opinion, it is a metaphor that compares ideas to genes – it implies that ideas mutate spontaneously, and therefore are subject to selection pressures just like biological genes. The memes that confer the most favorable traits for ensuring the original idea’s survivability in the human mind – in human culture – persist and continue to mutate.
This is why it’s a conceptual ‘tool’. It’s a metaphoric lens for comprehending the evolution of ideas.
And that’s all it is. (In my opinion!)
Oh Nikos you wildman. It is easy for me to picture you running up and down the mountains on the pennisula in a lioncloth with chattering little monkeys clinging to your long matted hair as it flys out behind you – the wildeyed prophet of militant radical secularism!
I for one agree to peacably and respecfully disagree.
Peggy Sue! Thanks for cracking me up!
PS to Jazzman: your meme-dissent actually sparked the cobweb-cleaning of my latest meme cogitations, forcing me to better understand the propositon and perceive what it is and isn’t.
I therefore — as usual — owe you a big Thank You!
Nikos: Bonjour mon ami.
You say above;religion’s providers need to weed the fields of scripture from which they reap their seeds and crops.
Don’t forget that those who worship in a particular religion are deeply imprinted and I do not know if that can be erased or even modified so easily. “There is no Godâ€? is not a weed killer au contraire. Change may have to start with religious leaders becoming more enlightened through consciousness raising/education sessions to bring about (plants seed of)holistic thinking. This might have some effect in deemphasizing certain interpretations and practices that no longer serve humanity, gradually phasing them out altogether.
A series of serious conferences of the world religious leaders could help. A movement that seeks to come up with an international universal creed (with signatories, fanfare and follow-through) could have it’s good effects. Religious extremist leaders beyond the pale, and would be suffocated out of the marketplace.
This would be a far better crusade/jihad.
To beat a dead horse: Bush destroyed any political capital that he might have had when the opportunity was great, when so many were awakened and attentive, towards that end.
Regarding the poem that is causing us trouble Nikos:
You don’t acknowledge the distinction between the phrase “If there is no God” (it’s qualifying “if”) and our shared distaste of the negative effects of religion and scripture interpretation. You conflate the two. I don’t. That is not my interpretation of Milosz.
I will have to accept that for you it’s only about censorship. It folds nicely into the meme that you are warring: “perpetuating the Supernatural Entity at all costs”. This perhaps prevents consideration understanding or agreeing with another meme: “brother’s keeper” (in the sense that Milosz means, restraining from committing psychological violence- as per CCM’s post) which to my mind is at least an equal or competing if not higher moral precept.
That’s our point of departure.
These few lines have stirred up enough for Milosz lying peaceful in his grave.
So we disagree peacefully on this and agree on other things.
Memes seem like a good tool and thinking in those terms are helpful even revolutionary. I would like to read more on this. Maybe we also have to be careful with them?
Potter: if my notion that ‘meme’ is a ‘lens’ — then yes, we must be careful not to let so much light through the lens at once that it ignites the pine needles underfoot and burns the forest to ash.
Dennett also, and often, in his book advocates a gentle investigation of religion as a natural phenonemen.
I can only reiterate my plea that all concerned citizens of the globe (meaning you!) read the thing and ponder its message.
Lastly, my friend: for all my writing and reading, I have a tin ear for most poetry!
(I’m a constant listener but this is my very first post.)
I’m having trouble getting my mind around memes as “natural phenomena.” Doesn’t the analogy with genes go too far? After all, we can physically isolate strands of RNA, can’t we? (Not sure on that.) Memes do not exist outside of human cognition – and don’t actually have a “life of their own” in a natural sense – and yet they are social, interpersonal phenomena. Wouldn’t it be impossible to isolate a pure meme? The meme for major league baseball must be slightly different in each individual. Would we say that the memetic information for baseball _as it exists on my synapses_ is an identifiable and natural phenomenon?
Rather than call them “natural phenomena,” why not call them “synthetic phenomena”?
I also want to add my voice to those calling for a return to this subject on ROS. Chris just didn’t seem at the top of his game or prepared for Bennett, and thus didn’t really give the ideas justice.
LLL welcome! Good points. That’s what I meant when I said, maybe we have to be careful with this meme thing.
LLL: Who knows why, but the show seemed rather ‘rushed’. Which, considering the number of guests available, is odd. We only had a 28-hour ‘Warm Up’, which, considering the length of this thread, was in retrospect a disservice to its topic.
And, with all due respect to Chris, I’m very, very skeptical that he’d read the book as purported. He didn’t understand the book’s basic premises. Katherine? You’re our resident ROS-goddess for this thread; what happened?
My speculation is that Dennett became available before Chris was ready, and so clever Katherine lassoed together some guests who had read the book and understood enough of its topics to carry the conversational load. This, however, led to many more opinions being aired, and Dennett’s book slowly receding into the distance over the hour. The talk remained stuck on the book’s foundational premises, and never went on to discuss the book’s development of its important ideas.
Now, having said all this, I hope I’m wrong, and will welcome a correction.
LLL & Potter: ‘memes’ are exactly as ‘natural’ as arithmetic – they are concepts – just like numbers are. They are analogous to genes, but genes are physical – ideas are not. Not one ‘meme’ existed before Dawkins coined the term – and not one ‘genus’ existed before Linnaeus began his (somewhat arbitrary) taxonomy.
Memes are as ‘true’ or ‘false’ as a Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night (now that’s a helluva meme!). A natural creature named Vincent created that gorgeous painting, and so Starry Starry Night is exactly as ‘natural’ as its creator. i.e., it’s an artificial representation of a natural scene, yet a creative extension of a natural creature’s mind at work – which makes it natural and artificial at once. It’s a ‘memetic lens’ for its night-sky subject that’s more emotionally provocative than a photo would be. Memes, on the other hand, are an attempt to photograph the evolution of ideas – although they’re less technological than a photo, and so more like a drawing done with the intent to reproduce its subject with ‘photographic’ accuracy.
Let’s try it this way: if using the concept and lingo of memes describes the evolution of ideas as effectively as “7 x 6 = 42� (or any other arithmetic formula) is it ‘true’, or ‘real’, or ‘natural’?
It’s important to distinguish between the concepts themselves and the realities they attempt to describe.
As is, what’s more ‘true’ or ‘real’ or ‘natural’:
1. Mount Rainier?
2. The words (name) ‘Mount Rainier’?
3. A photo of Mount Rainier?
4. A painting of Mount Rainier?
Memes are an attempt to describe the evolutions of ideas like an artist’s paintings might attempt to convey, in a ‘time-lapse’ sequence, the geological actions that made Mount Rainer – the volcano’s emergence, its growth via ongoing eruptions and lava deposition, its eventual quietude, and, as the sequence’s final painting, all the life now clothing its lower slopes and the glaciers frozen onto its upper slopes.
That’s it!
Nothing more, nothing less.
The question is: how convincingly does it describe its subject?
(Read the book and decide for yourself!)
I find memes an excellently convincing lens for understanding the evolution of ideas. Yet, and for the record, I had some trouble grasping it on my first read through the book. Thus, only until, say, the second chapter wherein Dennett uses the meme lens, did I begin to ‘get it’. Even so, I’m still in the process of gaining a sense of fluency with the concept – like a kid understanding multiplication or division as a concept instead of as a memorized set of tables.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure whether Dawkins or Dennett understand that their meme notion is only a tool – just like Linnaean taxonomy is. (Of course I suspect that they do, however. They use conceptual tools all the time after all, and must therefore comprehend the nature of these tools better than the rest of us. At least, one would hope so.)
I hope this makes the meme concept a bit less mysterious and gnarly.
Potter, it’s nice to be aboard. Thanks.
Nikos, thanks again for your further exposition on memes. Like you, I’m also just starting to bring myself up to speed on memetics. As for Dennett’s book, I’ve only read the chapter summaries you kindly provided farther up in the thread. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 seem especially powerful. (I gotta get that book soon!)
The sense you get from a web search on memetics is that the field is in such an early stage that concepts haven’t been operationalized yet. These papers might interest you:
http://www.cam.cornell.edu/~rclewley/jom.html
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/gatherer_d.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=memetics+operationalization&btnG=Google+Search
So, could ROS possibly invite Dennett back for a follow-up interview?
LLL: your 2:28’s last sentence belongs in the ‘Suggest A Show’ thread – and if both of us hammer away at ‘em, the wonderfully accommodating ROS staff just might oblige us.
In fact, after posting this, I’m gonna type up a suggestion to that effect – and please feel free to second my suggestion in the ‘Suggestion thread’ you’ll find its link on the right side of the web-page).
We’ll be a tag-team. (Wait, I don’t like wrestling.)
Ah, a relay-runner team!
(Track is better.)
Hey Nikos,
At the bookstore, saw this poem and thought of you…
Lad of Athens, faithful be
To Thyself
And Mystery
All the rest is Perjury
Emily Dickenson
And I thought the Milosz poem was inscrutable!
(I mean, I thought ‘he is not permitted…(to say)’ is essentially censorious, but Potter tells me otherwise — confirming my fear that I’ve a tin ear for poetry, because I don’t understand ‘poetic lisence’. So, I don’t understand the Dickenson either — although Peggy Sue’s post sure did get me laughing! Thanks!)
Done!
http://www.radioopensource.org/suggest-a-show-march-2006/
OK, just read the above posts. – A finger pointing to the moon is not the moon (but it is a real finger). A painting is just as real as a mountain. A painting is not a real mountain. A painting is a real painting. A photograph of Mount Rainer is a real photograph of Mount Rainer even as it may also be a representation of the real Mount Rainer. A sign reading “Mount Rainer” is a real sign and the words are real words that also symbolically refer to Mount Rainer.
I was thinking that if memes are tools of conceptual evolution then it is the artist’s job to tweak the memes. Or as Bertolt Brecht said, Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Does that sound right? (I confess I’m a slow reader and haven’t read the book) but I have watched the video series Darwin’s Dangerous Idea I think it was a PBS series? and they talk about memes.
ps I was paraphrasing Brecht so that may not be verbatim
Aha! Nikos you took “he is not permitted” defensively. I read it as a moral appeal, . That does not mean that you are wrong.
Nikos: We each are ancient stardust made conscious by the seeming miracles that follow Earth’s absorption of sunlight. This is a phrase that you have posted many times in many threads, and it is one of your ideas that attracted me to your writing. You always overlook the obvious implication in this supposition. Inert stardust does not become conscious by the absorption of sunlight. In that model sunlight would destroy life especially with no oxygen to ameliorate the radiation (not to mention spontaneous biogenesis would be rampant if that were the case) but you did mention the seeming miracles which would be true miracles if that’s what happened. Stardust is conscious and hardly inert. You seem to realize (in your more lucid moments) that the Universe (Multiverse) is We and that is 1 of your informing principles (meme) although Dennett would probably say that it is not a useful or compelling meme as it is not widespread in the population and will likely die out due to natural selection, absent reinforcing evidence and beliefs.
Nikos: Is this religion? I just made it all up The preceding paragraph to which your question refers, sounds suspiciously reminiscent of the tenets of Absolute Morality.
Nikos: “Now, you realize that your rejection of the ‘meme’ notion for its parallel to DE might just commend it to the rest of us, don’t you?� It sounds like you are casting the ROS regulars into a group of ODD (opposite defiant disorder) ad hominem advocates. However they might feel about my rejection of DE, my meme analysis bears no relation to my disbelief in DE. I state that the evolution of ideas (memes) which is merely a label for the concepts of lore, individual and mass beliefs, and what passes for knowledge is conflated with DE (which for this purpose does not matter whether it is true or not) for the purpose of riding on the coattails of an almost universally accepted (especially to secularists) phenomenon and thereby acquiring the benefits of Scientific Cachet.
Nikos: Remember please, Jazzman, that memes aren’t ‘true or false’ but simply conceptual tools I never thought that they were anything else, just as I stated above – a jargon name to impress/intimidate laypersons. You state that memes didn’t exist until Dawkins coined the term – clearly the phenomena that the term describes did. Dennett believes by own words that memes are more than concepts. He states that some have a free-floating nature; just hanging out in the memesphere waiting to infect a receptive host. I still maintain that ALL this fancy meme dressing amounts to individual and group beliefs. Music is NOT a meme it is an arrangement of superimposed electromagnetic waves in the frequency range (for human ears) of approximately 15 Hz to 20 KHz which are physically translated into the motion of air molecules. Memes relating to music are the beliefs in the relative emotional value judgments regarding the reaction one internally creates to the arrange