– St. Teresa of Avila, Divine Locutions (1565)

“[Asking Jesus to enter my life] really was a physical thing. I mean I felt it physically, in that there was a change in my body and I felt something going into me. I felt it. I knew it. Like it was from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. I could feel it just tingling inside of me. And it was the presence of the Lord. And it came into me like it was poured into my heart. And I felt it start in the center of me and just go out. It was very real. It wasn’t just, okay the Bible says I’m saved, but I know it! I felt it also.”

– Sarah, Religious America: Lighthouse in Loleta (WGBH 1972)

I was reminded of Teresa’s and Sarah’s ecstasy after seeing Kenny Paul Smith’s 2011 nomination for worst book cover in religious publishing:

Doyle is an astute and confessional observer. This is from the opening chapter (“Women Have Great Power to Influence Men”):

There are a lot of saved and unsaved women in this world who don’t have any idea of how much power that they have inside of them. Women are very persuasive, and have the power of leading men into doing a lot of foolish things.

In order for a woman to discover the power and potential that God has blessed her with, she must be saved and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If a woman has enough sense to resist the devil, she would become very powerful towards God’s ministry.

God has blessed a woman to have a persuasive power toward men. I believe that if all the women in the world were to get saved and live their lives for Jesus Christ, there would be more men in the world who would get saved.

Though I’ve yet to pinpoint everything going on in these passages, or why I’ve juxtaposed them, it reminds me of an erotic religious street with traffic flowing in all directions.

You can order Doyle’s book (in hard or e-format) here for only $27.

Though I haven’t kept up with the literature, this interview with the psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that the field is as provocative (and perhaps right) as ever. Some key excerpts:

The question then is: are people actually liberated by all this freedom? A study came out more than ten years ago, that actually showed that when you give people too much choice, instead of being liberated, they get paralyzed.

You’re not shackled the way your parents or your grandparents were, what could be better? It just turns out that when you give people this kind of unconstrained opportunity to reinvent themselves, they don’t know what to do. Or if they do it, they look over their shoulders, convinced that they’ve made the wrong decisions, made the wrong career move, the wrong romantic choices and so on.

So you are plagued with doubt, you are always dissatisfied with whatever you’ve chosen because just around the corner there’s a better option. And I think we see this in the explosion of people seeking psychotherapy. In this land of milk and honey of unimagined freedom and affluence, everybody seems to be miserable.

When choice was limited, I think people’s aspirations and expectations were limited. And so you could live a decent life and feel good about it. But living a decent life just isn’t good enough anymore. Why would you settle for decent when anything is possible?

It seems to me that Schwartz’s insights have some relevance to religious choices (i.e., whether to believe, what to believe, etc.).

On a distantly related note, some birds make better choices when they have less information.

Anyone who has perused Fluff-Po’s Religion section knows it is filled scientific sounding metaphysics and countless articles by progressive religionists telling us that their non-progressive counterparts have gotten it all wrong. The non-progressives (i.e., the majority) apparently just need to be better (i.e., more liberal and ecumenical) readers.

Because non-progressive religionists don’t read Fluff-Po, the progressives are talking mostly to each other about what the texts “really say” and how the traditions should be “properly understood.” It’s all about love and understanding and tolerance, you know. It is nice to see the Rodney Kings (or Karen Armstrongs) of religions all trying to get along.

This is all fine and good but when an evolutionary psychologist tells us (on good authority of the pope) that resurrection does not contradict nature or science and death is not really death, FluffPo Religion makes my Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I may have to lift the ban for Graziano (though I do wish he would post in a more serious and substantive forum).

Graziano is a neuroscientist at Princeton with an impressive list of publications, dealing primarily with the motor system, perception, and consciousness. His writing is not, however, limited to neuroscience; Graziano is also a novelist and has written several popular books, including God, Soul, Mind, Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World. I haven’t read it yet but will report back after I do.

As for Graziano’s recent article, I have questions about the following assertions, which are pivotal to his argument:

Awe, for example, is at its root a social emotion. Its utility lies in shaping our behavior toward others, especially others that we perceive to be wiser or more powerful than us. It is one ingredient in hierarchical social structure.

Awe of a beautiful landscape, awe of music (another spiritual experience I’ve written about before), awe of the spread of stars as you look up at night, all of these instances of awe are traditionally connected in a hazy way in people’s thoughts and feelings with awe of a larger, deistic presence.

Religious awe may belong to a category of biological trait along with male nipples and the gill slits in human fetuses. It has an understandable evolutionary past.

Whatever else it may be, “awe” is not a straightforward or basic evolutionary emotion. Fear, on the other hand, is. When a social animal recognizes another as more powerful, the resulting ranking or hierarchy owes as much or more to fear than “awe.”

“Awe” certainly is an important aspect of supernaturalism and religion, but it is more properly categorized as a “feeling.” I think Antonio Damasio is right when he says that feelings such as awe are the complex result of basic emotion combined with complex cognition. Feelings such as awe are in no way like physical features such as male nipples or gill slits.

Religious awe arises from intense cultural patterning, which is made possible by a neurobiology that is primed for supernaturalism. Graziano’s “social intelligence theory of spirituality” is but one piece of a much larger puzzle. Supernaturalism and religion are complex phenomena that require multi-causal explanations.

Source: John Young, UK (Creative Commons)

That’s balut, a dish of southeastern Asia. It’s made by boiling a fertilized duck egg. If you’re like me—an American raised on hamburgers and chicken casseroles—your first reaction on seeing balut might not be to salivate. In fact, you might feel disgust. But to people in many cultures, balut is delicious.

Disgust is a powerful emotion that serves a protective purpose. It is closely related to our fear of contagion and has been subject to intense evolutionary selection pressure. This is why we’re disgusted by things that might make us sick, such as rotten food and filth. We are less likely to get sick if we avoid things we find disgusting.

But what disgusts us is also subject to our cultural environment. We’re more likely to find familiar foods delicious and unfamiliar foods disgusting, which is why your reaction to the balut pictured above was probably different depending on whether it’s something you’ve eaten a hundred times before or something totally new.

Disgust is not, however, limited to biological domains: aversion spills over into other aspects of our lives. It is but a short symbolic step from intuitive microbiology (“Gross, don’t touch that!”) to moral intuition (“Gross, don’t do that!”). This explains why we find violations of moral rules, such as unfair division of money, disgusting.

Just as our tastes in food vary across cultures, our moral “tastes” vary in the same way. A recent study suggests that we can feel disgust not only for others’ foods and behaviors, but for their beliefs as well.

In the lab where I work, Ryan Ritter and Jesse Preston studied “belief disgust” using a novel experimental method. Under the guise of a consumer marketing survey, participants drank what they thought were two slightly different versions of a beverage—really the same drink each time, an especially sour lemonade. After tasting each beverage, participants gave their reactions to it, rating how sour, sweet, bitter, delicious, and disgusting it was. In between drinks, supposedly to give them time to cleanse their palates, participants completed a handwriting task. And this is where it gets interesting.

For the handwriting task, each participant copied a passage from one of three texts: The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Qur’an, or Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Because all the participants were Christian, the second two passages (Qur’an and Dawkins) are strong endorsements of ideas antithetical to their own beliefs. The dictionary passage, in contrast, is neutral with respect to their religious beliefs.

The researchers wanted to know if Christians would feel more disgust after reading the outgroup passages than the neutral passage. This is where the beverage tasting is important. If participants rated the second beverage as more or less disgusting than the first, this would be evidence that the passage affected feelings of disgust (since the beverages were identical).

In the Dawkins and Qur’an conditions, participants rated the second drink as more disgusting than the first. In the dictionary condition, however, the second drink was actually rated as slightly less disgusting than the first.

In a second experiment, when participants were given a chance to clean their hands (with a wipe) after using them to write the outgroup texts, there was no difference in disgust between the two drinks. This experiment also used a Bible passage instead of the dictionary passage. Without the hand cleaning, there was no difference between the drinks; however, when participants cleaned their hands after writing the Bible passage, the second drink was actually less disgusting than the first.

From a research perspective, these are exciting results. They show that foreign ideas can trigger the powerful (and largely subconscious) emotion of disgust. They also suggest that moral disgust can be alleviated or “purified” by simple acts such as handwashing. This may speak to the origin of certain rituals, many of them religious.

From a personal perspective, these results are disconcerting. If our intuitive response to outgroup beliefs is disgust (a powerful moral emotion), reducing prejudice and increasing cooperation between groups seems a difficult task.

Then, again, maybe this is good news. Now that we know more about causes of cultural conflict, we may be able to use this knowledge to design interventions with the goal of reducing intuitive (or irrational) disgust responses. After all, if we can learn to eat the foods of other cultures, could we not also learn to “digest” their ideas?

– Guest Post by Erika Salomon, A Theory of Mind

Reference:

Ritter, Ryan, & Preston, Jesse Lee (2011). Gross gods and icky atheism: Disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology : 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.05.006

These dark arts are tuned to aspects of human nature that many would like to forget, or at least ignore. Parker begins with a line from James Frazer, inscrutable author of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.” Frazer’s insight reminds me of another by Somerset Maugham: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

It is difficult to know what Frazer or Maugham might have thought about heavy metal, but Parker turns some beautiful phrases on his own thinking:

Since its invention, heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory.

This lower world cosmology traces its roots to the heavy metalists par excellence, Black Sabbath, a band whose aboriginal angst Parker covers with some gorgeous riffs of his own:

Black Sabbath, from Birmingham, England, was heavy metal. No joy here, nor any wisp of psychedelic whimsy. From the first note, this band sounded ancient, oppressed, as if shambling forward under supernatural burdens.

With his use of horror-movie atmospherics—the tension-building tritone or flatted fifth—and the leering majesty of his riffs, guitarist Tony Iommi redirected the spiritual drag of the blues into an uncharted world of bummers and black holes.

Bassist Geezer Butler, a mystical vegetarian, wrote the lyrics. Raised Catholic, Butler as a youngster had entertained thoughts of the priesthood, and for all the band’s occult trappings, his view of things was essentially orthodox, if a little on the medieval side: God over here, Satan over there, man flailing and biting his nails in the middle.

Vocally, [Ozzy Osbourne] filtered Butler’s Boschian sensibility through his own late-20th-century depression, in front of a band almost overloading with musical power: early live footage reveals the musicians “bobbing,” in the superb phrase of the metal historian Ian Christe, like “marionettes in the hands of God.”

The sound itself dramatized a violent, existential bottoming-out, Iommi’s guitar lines rearing and plunging across the awesomely delayed crashes of drummer Bill Ward, percussions so far behind the beat that their impact was interior, nearly glandular, like the drench of adrenaline after hearing bad news.

Although I have my doubts about heavy metal keeping us sane, I have no doubt that Parker’s pen is dripping with the blood of tormented saints. It almost makes me want to put on some Sabbath for a voyage to the netherworlds of Sturm und Drang.

It is also a problem in science, which scorns postmodernism and savages it with satire. Science, and those who play in its fields, is chock full of highly intelligent people who adhere to irreconcilable schools of thought. We can only hope that the schoolmasters involved are, as Heller twice notes, thinking truthfully. Those who are not specialists in a particular field and who rely on experts are entitled, at a minimum, to intellectual honesty.

In this regard, it was refreshing to see an evolutionary psychologist recently make a public confession: resurrection apparently does not contradict science because it is beyond natural law. Death, in a special one-off some 2000 years ago, is not really death. This is on good authority of the pope and tradition.

Prior to this confession, I had long been at a loss to understand the stories this evolutionary psychologist has been telling about the “evolution of religion.” Matt Rossano, psychology professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, has been nothing if not prolific on the subject and recently published a book that purports to explain how religion evolved through “supernatural selection.” At least we now know what has been driving Rossano, and that his use of science and anthropology is not disinterested.

Anthropologists are in general agreement that between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, one or several groups of humans living in Africa experienced some kind of breakthrough enabling them to increase their numbers, leave the continent, and colonize the world. Who these humans were and where they lived remains something of a mystery. What sorts of advantages these humans possessed also remains something of a mystery.

There is no shortage of plausible hypotheses. They could have been the first group(s) to possess fully fluent language or the capacity for symbolic thought. They may have been technological innovators, crafting better tools, weapons, shelters, and clothing than their predecessors. Some or all these things would have resulted in larger group sizes, which surely played a primary role in their success.

Or, as Rossano would have us believe, they were the first to get religion. This is of course possible. But is it probable? Is it parsimonious? Does the majority of the evidence point in this direction? The answers are no, no, and no.

The evidence is uncertain and equivocal, though you would never know this by reading Rossano’s work. As he selectively presents the evidence, you would think that science has the answers and it all points to the adaptive or supernatural, which for Rossano seem to be one and the same. Science does not yet have the answers, and the incredible story Rossano tells about the “evolution of religion” appears to be wishful (or Catholic) thinking.

When it comes to some versions of evolutionary psychology, everything seems to fit and make perfect adaptive sense. This has caused many scholars to dismiss evolutionary psychologists as “just so” storytellers. While a wholesale dismissal of evolutionary psychology is too extreme, we would do well to recall precisely what it is about the discipline that lends itself so readily to the spinning of elaborate yarns.

In 2000, neuroscientists Jaak and Jules Panksepp published “The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology” in Evolution and Cognition. Although several prominent evolutionary psychologists were asked to comment on the article, all declined. What were the alleged sins leading to this demurral?

1. The Sin of Time Travel: Evolutionary psychologists engage in “creative speculations” about Plio-Pleistocene environments and selection pressures that may or may not have any relevance to current human social adaptations.

2. The Sin of Species Centrism: Because evolutionary psychologists focus on humans and ignore features of brain-mind that we share with all mammals and primates, they “construct intellectual houses of cards” that appear to be (but which are not) uniquely human.

3. The Sin of Adaptationism: Although most scientists have become sensitized to the perils of Panglossian thinking, evolutionary psychologists ignore the neuroscientific evidence for massive, general purpose cortical tissue and the “exaptations and spandrels” that are the result.

4. The Sin of Massive Modularity: While it is obvious that humans have innate faculties or “modules” for basic sensory perceptions and motor functions, there is little to no evidence that additional, highly specialized modules for cognitive functions such as “social reciprocity” exist.

5. The Sin of Conflating Emotion with Cognition: Although neuroscience has long distinguished between subcortical emotions and cortical cognition, evolutionary psychologists erroneously conflate the two when they speculate about complex, interwoven feelings such as “guilt” and “shame.”

6. The Sin of Brain-Neuron Ignorance: Despite major advances in our understanding of brain anatomy and neural function over the past several decades, evolutionary psychology ignores biology and relies instead on dubious computer-based metaphors to describe the mind.

7. The Sin of Equating Brains with Computers: While there are superficial similarities between brains and computers, evolutionary psychologists mistakenly think that because some brain functions can be simulated with computers, the brain is nothing than a “computational device” that processes algorithms.

Despite these sins, the Panksepps have high hopes for an evolutionary psychology that is constrained by empiricism and tethered by neuroscience. Indeed, this kind of evolutionary psychology can be quite robust when applied to specialized and unique human brain-mind functions such as language:

What makes humans unique, perhaps more than anything else, is that we are a linguistically adept story-telling species. That is why so many different forms of mythology have captivated our cultural imaginations since the dawn of recorded history.

Evolutionary psychologists also have many intriguing stories to tell, but if we are committed to a deep evolutionary view, their current speculations should not be accepted as credible foundations for our fundamental nature.

The danger, of course, is that language is linked to — and surely enables — an imagination that knows no bounds. If we are going to tell stories that are not myths masquerading as science, we must first acknowledge that wishing something to be true does not make it so.

Reference:

Panksepp, Jaak, & Panksepp, Jules (2000). The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology Evolution and Cognition, 6 (2), 108-131

After dismissing James Joyce as a writer who lacked ideas and could not carry a story (an appraisal many would-be readers of the insufferable Ulysses will appreciate), Bradbury commented on his approach:

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel.

People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story.

Although there is much more to modern world religions than metaphor, Bradbury’s comment is well taken. These religions were built on earlier storytelling traditions that attempted to make sense of the world — or construct a cosmology — through metaphor. There is a sense in which the sound of thunder is at the heart of all religions.

Fascinated by the high-priced world of celebrity objects, George Newman and colleagues decided to test “the degree to which contagion beliefs, in contrast to other motivations such as associations and market demands, account for the valuation of celebrity items.” Drawing on a substantial body of anthropological literature, the authors define “contagion” as “a form of magical thinking in which people believe that a person’s immaterial qualities or essence can be transferred to an object through physical contact.” Before dismissing such ideas as nonsense, we would do well to consider just how pervasive such thinking actually is.

The most obvious examples come from supernaturalism and religion. Early anthropologists often commented on the tribal fascination with things like fetishes or medicine bundles, usually considering them to be markers of “primitive” culture. They apparently did not notice the same ideas at work in Christianity, which has long trafficked in magical-sacred objects including the Holy Grail, Shroud of Turin, Spear of Destiny, bones of saints, blood of martyrs, splinters of the cross, and most importantly, the Holy Prepuce — Jesus’ circumcised foreskin. In a slightly different vein but working on the same principles, some Jews insist on eating kosher. Although magical objects or relics abound in nearly all religions, even the most committed materalists have similar ideas.

How else to explain the enormous sums of money paid by baseball enthusiasts for balls, bats, and gloves used by the game’s greatest players? There is of course the lucrative world of celebrity memorabilia and its evil twin “murderabilia.” Who wouldn’t want to own a lock of Charles Manson’s hair, an Adolph Hitler painting, or a Jeffrey Dahmer tool? Strangely, owners of odious items don’t like to touch them — this curious fact brings us full circle back to contagion or the belief that certain objects have magical properties that can be transferred through touch.

Contagion has a biological basis and deep evolutionary roots in a universal human emotion: disgust. In their article “Dirt, Disgust, and Disease,” Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran explain:

In their exploration of Darwinian medicine, Nesse and Williams (1995) suggest that an instinctive disgust may motivate the avoidance of feces, vomit, and people who may be contagious, and that disgust is one of the mechanisms crafted by natural selection to help us keep our distance from contagion. Pinker (1998) proposes that disgust is “intuitive microbiology,” and that this explains our aversion to objects that have been in contact with disgusting substances: “Since germs are transmissible by contact, it is no surprise that something that touches a yucky substance is itself forever yucky.”

We believe that the line of argument proposed by Nesse and Williams and by Pinker, which explains disgust as an adaptation to the threat of disease, holds the key to the puzzle. Microbes and parasites have always provided a potent selective force driving the evolution of the defenses of higher organisms. Whether micro-parasites, such as viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, or macro-parasites, such as internal worms or external arthropods, these organisms play a role analogous to that of predators in driving adaptation in animal populations.

In the arms race between animals and their parasites, parasite attackers have evolved to exploit all the available ports of entry. Their hosts have evolved to protect these ports with all available defenses. In humans, the airways, the gut, the genitals, and the skin are the four main routes of entry for parasites seeking nourishment and reproductive opportunity.

Over the past decade, geneticists have discovered certain “hot spots” in the human genome — regions where there is evidence of intense and sustained selection pressure. Many of these hot spots code for immune response or regulate the immune system, which is something we would expect in a world filled with invisible pathogens. It is but a short symbolic step from intuitive microbiology (“Gross, don’t touch that!”) to metaphysical veneration (“Awesome, let me rub it!”).

References:

Newman, George, Diesendruck, Gil, and Bloom, Paul (2011). Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects. Journal of Consumer Research, 38 : 10.1086/658999, Stable URL

Curtis V, & Biran A (2001). Dirt, Disgust, and Disease: Is Hygiene in Our Genes? Perspectives in biology and medicine, 44 (1), 17-31, PMID: 11253302, Open Access

This national-security state derived its raison d’être from — and vigorously promoted a belief in — the existence of looming national peril. On one point, most politicians, uniformed military leaders, and so-called defense intellectuals agreed: the dangers facing the United States were omnipresent and unprecedented. In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia, dubbed this perspective “military metaphysics.”

This metaphysic insidiously piggybacks on neurological structures that are evolutionarily ancient.  The amygdala or its equivalent is found in all vertebrate lineages and is over 500 million years old.  With proper sensory inputs, the amygdala generates avoidance behaviors and in humans, fear responses.

In a world filled with predators, fear is unequivocally adaptive.  Too much fear, however, quickly becomes maladaptive and debilitating.  In humans, too much fear — a state of constant alarm or irrational assessment of risk — is known as phobia.

The trick, for anyone interested in sustaining a certain kind of political or religious order, is to generate just enough fear — on a constant basis — to keep everyone in line.  If the fear can be internalized then all the better.  As a process, it brings to mind the twinned notions of habit and hegemony from Of Revelation and Revolution, the 1991 classic by Jean and John Comaroff:

This kind of nonagentive power proliferates outside the realm of institutional politics. What is more, it may not be experienced as power at all, since its effects are rarely wrought by overt compulsion. They are internalized, in their negative guise, as constraints; in their neutral guise, as conventions; and, in their positive guise, as values.

[T]he making of hegemony involves the assertion of control over various modes of symbolic production. That control, however, must be sustained over time and in such a way that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

For it is only by repetition that signs and practices cease to be perceived or remarked; that they are so habituated, so deeply inscribed in everyday routine, that they may no longer be seen as forms of control — or seen at all.

Therein lies not only the genius but also the longevity of such metaphysics.  Fear becomes so internalized and habitual it is scarcely noticed, yet is so deeply insinuated in society and mind it generates a kind of discipline that masquerades as virtue.  It is deliciously dialectical that the love of something, whether it be gods or countries, must be rooted in and regulated by fear.