Religious Parasitism, Part Two

My posts may continue to be delayed, because I and all of my computer connections are filled with viruses. I am posting this from a spare computer in a classroom.

In an earlier entry I mentioned three responses a child might make to extremely religious parents. The first two were to reject religion, or to embrace a more nurturing form of religion.

The third kind of response of a child to an extremely religious parent is for the child to follow in the footsteps of that parent. This is what Marjoe Gortner did, and continued to do even after he knew that his parents’ “ministry” was just a way of getting money and the admiration of followers. This is what Frank Schaeffer did, following the fame of his father Francis. He was particularly fond of writing conservative political screeds, as he described them. He later rejected this approach to religion. Herbert W. Armstrong convinced the Worldwide Church of God that his theology, about the coming utopia of God upon the Earth, headed by the United States and the nations of Western Europe, was uniquely correct, and they followed him. His son, Garner Ted Armstrong, used the same theology and had amazing charisma (on radio and television) besides. They got the church and its college to buy them a private jet, and they flew around the world to tell heads of state, everyone from President Suharto of Indonesia to the Duchess of Grand Fenwick, that God was going to usher in a utopia. Garner Ted used his influence for sexual exploits as well. In my early teens, I thought about becoming a follower of the Armstrong cult. One of my uncles (unknown to me until after his death) did so. Tulsa, Oklahoma, is famous not only for the late Oral Roberts, who openly admitted that his ministry was a very profitable business, but also for the way his son Richard notoriously abused ministry and university funds for private pleasures. I am currently a resident of Tulsa. I can’t seem to get away from these guys.

These are clear examples of people who parasitized the religious passion of their followers. In some cases, the parasitic leaders may be sincere in their delusion. In other cases, they may be in it solely for wealth and admiration, like Sinclair Lewis’s fictitious Elmer Gantry. Some, like Oral Roberts, may be a little of both. Oral Roberts considered the wealth he amassed from his followers (including my wife’s grandmother, who like many others sent him almost everything she could spare) to be evidence of God’s approval. He even said that he saw a 900-foot-tall Jesus telling him that people should give him money for a big hospital building as part of his ministry. Jesus died poor, but many religious leaders appear to believe that the rules have changed.

Religious memetic parasitism began nearly as soon as religion did. The Cro-Magnon caves contained drawings and hand paintings in their deep recesses. But in the outer caves, the chambers not far from the entrance, artists painted their most extensive artwork. David Lewis-Williams interpreted these entryways as being where the tribal members assembled to listen to the stories of their religious leaders. It must have been quite an experience: paintings of huge animals, still stunning to observers today, revealed then concealed by flickering lamplight or torchlight, with ecstatic voices ringing and echoing off of the cave walls, accompanied by wind instruments and percussion. Lewis-Williams said that it was not just the hills but the caves that were alive with the sound of music. This pattern of cave art can be found even in Chauvet, the oldest of the major Cro-Magnon caves (32,000 years old). There can be little doubt that tribal leaders used religion as a way of gaining power.

Agriculture allowed civilization to begin. A slave could raise enough food to feed more than just his own family, so others were free to be full-time priests, artists, and warriors, all roles that were less professionalized in tribal society. The leaders of earliest civilizations, including Egypt, Sumeria, and perhaps also Çatal Hüyük on the Anatolian peninsula, proclaimed themselves to literally be gods. Later civilizations, such as the Israelites, considered their leaders to be chosen by God. The use of religion for power is very nearly the story of human history. When a genius named Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that the federal government could not establish a religion, it was truly one of the most radical departures ever made from the direction of history.

Religious leaders have parasitized religion not only for personal profit and pleasure but also for influencing political opinions of their followers. The most widespread examples are of televangelists telling their followers to support the conservative wing of the Republican Party, starting with the late Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the 1980s. Pat Robertson has enough followers that he can maintain his own broadcasting network. He announces all of his own opinions as if they come straight from the mind of God, and none of his followers dares to dispute him. A typical example of one of his rants in 2008 (which I had to listen to in the hospital waiting room before a colonoscopy) can be summarized as, “Send money send money send money bomb Iran send money.” In January, 2010, a powerful earthquake brought incomprehensible misery to the nation of Haiti. The dead, those that could be pulled from the rubble, were piled along the same streets in which injured survivors writhed in pain. Some survivors covered themselves with rubble, only to be run over by vehicles whose drivers did not see them. Not even a day had passed when, on January 13, 2010, Pat Robertson announced that this earthquake was God’s punishment on the Haitian people. They had, he claimed, made a pact with the devil two hundred years earlier, that they would worship the devil in return for having the French colonialists ousted. I marvel that Robertson’s thousands of followers believed (or at least made little objection to) even this most outrageous and hateful statement, which was clearly intended to undermine political support for the Obama Administration’s relief efforts.

However laudatory some churches and religious leaders may be, it is clear that forces of selfishness and oppression have made extensive use of religion.

This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

Religious Parasitism, Part One

Once religions and mythologies were in place, they became a resource whereby one person or group could manipulate another person or group. That is, they became the medium through which religion memes and religious leaders could become parasitic.

Richard Dawkins explains some of the characteristics that make religious memes so effective. Humans have a desire for some kind of faith; many religion memes offer false nutrition for this desire. But that is not all. As Dawkins explains, very religious people “make a positive virtue of faith’s being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief” (emphasis in original). A related meme is one that says that the article of faith is a “mystery” that the human mind will never be able to understand, and the fact the article of faith seems like a howling self-contradiction is actually evidence of its truth. An example is the meme that says God is Love but that God will send everyone who is not a member of your church into hellfire, where they will suffer consciously and eternally. True believers will not even notice the contradiction between a God who is infinite love yet who will torture somebody forever without having given them a chance to avoid their fate. Some Christians even believe, as the fourth century cleric Tertullian of Carthage taught, that the blessed spirits in heaven will be able to watch the torture of the damned in hell forever.

To the person whose mind religious memes have subverted, any evidence against the memes proves them to be right, not wrong. Weaknesses become strengths. This is a positive feedback system that makes the believer fall ever deeper into religious memetic infection. “Scientists say the Earth is more than a few thousand years old? Well, what would you expect them to say? This only proves they are evil and that all of their so-called evidence is just lies.” This is not a quote that, to my knowledge, has actually been published, but it is the clear meaning behind some actual books that have been published for use in American Christian home-school science instruction. Another meme in this set is the one that says you should be intolerant, even hateful, toward people who believe differently, especially apostates who have left your religious sect.

How could such ridiculous memes have spread? Dawkins (following on ideas from evolutionary biologists Helena Cronin and Amotz Zahavi) says that successful religion memes are those that prove the faithfulness of the believer. If all you believe is that God wants you to love other people, why, almost anybody can do that. But if God wants you to believe that you have to prove your faith by shooting a doctor who performs abortions, right out in public while he is attending church (as happened in Kansas in 2009), now, that is a little more difficult. Very few people have demonstrated this much devotion to their religion. Dawkins calls this the principle of costly authentication. There seems to be a self-reinforcing cycle of costly authentication of religious zeal among the Islamist suicide bombers.

This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

My Experiences with Religious Memes

Religion memes can take over a mind so much that it supplants most other human thoughts and connections. The example I know best is my own grandfather. Neither I nor any other living descendants of Jacob Aville Rice know much about his early life. Jake and his companions would travel from one Holy Roller church to another and preach. There is no evidence (from any subsequent family wealth) that money was the motivation. Jake devoted himself so much to his religion that he left his family without enough money to meet their essential needs. He virtually ignored my father who nearly died in childhood from infection that followed appendicitis. My father carried the physical scar of the surgery, and the mental scar of his father’s emotional rejection, for life.


Jake had read in the Bible that in the latter days, which he assumed to mean the 1960s, children would hate their parents and parents would hate their children. He understood this to be prescriptive, not descriptive, and he felt obligated by his religion to hate his children. Old home movies show that he was not entirely successful, as he smiled and joked with them a lot when they were adults. His voice on a 1943 homemade record, sent to my parents, did not sound hateful. And the Bible said nothing about hating grandchildren, so scripture permitted him to be very nice to me.


There may be three possible responses that children can make to a parent who sacrifices their emotional lives on the altar of religion. One response is to practice a nurturing and constructive form of religion. Two of my uncles did this. Another response is to reject religious practice. This is what my father and aunt did. I discuss the third response in a later posting.


My own experience of religious conversion to fundamentalist Christianity was probably the most powerful emotion I have ever felt, more powerful even than being in love. I felt like I was swimming in an ocean of joy, everything seemed to glow with invisible color, and the very air of the San Joaquin Valley was sweet, no matter how much dust, pesticide, and exhaust fume it contained. No wonder that, for centuries, many Christians have interpreted this feeling as actual inspiration by the Holy Ghost.


I believe that I have demonstrated my point, that religion can be a very powerful force, the most powerful force, even the exclusive force, in the human mind. How can one describe a person whose entire reality is religion, except that the person is to some degree crazy? Certainly in the case of many of the famous religious figures from history, it was difficult to distinguish mental illness from religious ecstasy. Centuries ago, there was no recognition of mental illness; religious passion was considered to be either from God, or from the devil.


This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

The Power of Religious Memes

Religious memes are among the most powerful that have ever conquered the human mind and then used it as a vehicle of propagation. They may be the most powerful mediators of human experience and passion. A list of such examples would be as long as human history. I will just offer three.


In the 1950s, a Chicago woman, Dorothy Martin, claimed to have received messages by automatic writing from her mentor, Sananda, on the Planet Clarion. She convinced a number of followers that the inhabitants of Clarion would destroy most of North America, starting with Chicago, on December 21, 1954. These followers quit their jobs and sold their possessions and came to her house on December 20 to await the spaceship that would save the faithful followers. As midnight passed, the followers wondered what was going on. At 4:45 in the morning, Martin claimed to have received another message, in which Sananda announced that the attack had been called off. Martin ended up in Arizona, where she claimed (under the name of Sister Thedra) to receive messages from Sananda until her death in 1992. One person, on the basis of flimsy evidence, had convinced other people of something ridiculous (the name Clarion should have been a dead giveaway); this indicates that the human brain is primed to look for and cling to memes that claim to be religious revelations.


Marshall Applewhite was a director, opera singer, and music professor who had psychological problems. In the 1970s, he gathered followers into his Heaven’s Gate cult, convincing them that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that salvation would come in the form of a spaceship. In 1997, he told them that the spaceship had come and was in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. The whole cult committed suicide, by poison, alcohol, and asphyxiation, in order to board the spaceship.


A preacher named Jim Jones convinced hundreds of people in the United States that he was the supreme representative of God in the modern world. He began to fear that government authorities were prying into his church, the Peoples Temple, and might discover something incriminating or might curtail some of his activities. So he and his followers moved to Guyana and established a village in the jungle called Jonestown. Jones still expected that the end of the world would come in the form of a government takeover of his church, and he had his followers practice mass suicide by drinking fruit punch. A 1978 visit from United States congressman Leo Ryan seemed, to Jones, to be the fulfillment of his fears. Cult members met the congressman and the airport and gunned him down. Jones then told his followers to drink the cyanide-laced fruit punch: this was not a practice drill. They all did it, even Jones himself. Acres were covered with the colorfully-clad corpses of the suicide victims.


This is how powerful religion memes can be. Jim Jones had created a mythology about himself, which incorporated many of the evolved capacities of the human mind. The people thought of the Jones cult as their family, thus tapping into their desire for altruism. He made use of the power of sexuality, convincing his female followers that he was not only their spiritual leader but their physical husband as well. Adherents gave up everything to join his cult, and when it was threatened, they believed Jones when he told them they had nothing more for which to live.


This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just released by Prometheus Books.