The Holy Spirit: An Experiment

Back when I converted to Christian fundamentalism when I was in high school, I was told in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was absent from me before I was baptized, and that it would enter into me at the moment of baptism. The details were unclear; would the Holy Spirit merge with my own spirit, or would they remain separate like two battling Zoroastrian entities? (Modern Zoroastrians seem to be the only cultural group that every major religion wants to slaughter.) It was also unclear whether the Holy Spirit would ever leave. But at least if I should stop adhering to fundamentalist beliefs, the Holy Spirit would become inactive.

Therefore my conversion experience, and my subsequent rejection of organized religion, followed the classic ABA experimental design. Situation A, my previous unconverted self; B, my converted self; then back to A, my post-fundamentalist self. My spiritual experiences during B should be significantly different from those during A.

It is true that, during B, I had deeply and soaringly religious experiences. My feeling of inspiration was sometimes so strong that I could hardly breathe. The whole world radiated colorful beauty. The problem is that I also had these experiences before, during the first A. Somewhere around age nine I started feeling unspeakable inspiration when I was surrounded by beautiful natural scenes. Once at a Presbyterian church camp (which clearly did not meet fundamentalist standards) up in the Sierra Nevada we wrote little skits. I was Paul Bunyan going to heaven, and I said that if heaven didn’t have trees I didn’t want to go. The feeling was so strong that I experienced it even when riding my bicycle through endless acres of pesticide-drenched monocultures of orange or olive trees. I can still remember the scent of Malathion. I identified this feeling with God. And I believed the basic Christian doctrines. But I had not yet been baptized.

Many years later, when I left theology behind, I continued to have these experiences. Just this past summer I felt inspiration over and over as I beheld the wonders of nature (see my evolution blog). I am not an atheist like Sir Richard Dawkins, but even he likes to quote someone who described him as “a deeply religious nonbeliever.” If I am indeed still experiencing the Holy Spirit, which really does make me love everybody and the Earth, then why is it still a palpable presence in my post-doctrinal life? Why did I have these feelings before and after my time as a fundamentalist? A statistician would say that my experiences (the dependent variable) during A vs. B (the independent variable) were not significantly different.

I experience the mental state that many (most?) other people experience, and I experience it more often than nearly everyone I know: I feel breathlessly inspired by nature, and I love altruism. (I also hate those times when people defy altruism. Those are the only times I get really, really angry.) But those experiences are not associated with the presence or absence of belief in fundamentalist doctrines.

We’ve been sold a big lie. Fundamentalists insist that everyone who has not joined their ranks is an abject sinner who lives only for pleasure and is constrained from harming other people only by the fear of Hell, and that when you join them you become a new person who is filled with the spirit of love. Both of these assertions are wrong, and are lies. There are perhaps billions of non-fundamentalists who behave in the way the Bible says we can recognize as Christian, except for the doctrines and rituals; and there are at least thousands of Christians in America who are constrained from acting aggressively toward you only because they fear the secular law of the land.

The Evolution of Human Behavior

Everything we do, and every feeling we have, is controlled by the brain. The function of the brain is determined by genes and environment. The genes determine the brain chemicals and the brain structures. This is why some people tend to be evil, others good; some angry, some calm. The environment influences how the genes work. This is why two people who might be identical in their brain chemicals and structures may behave very differently: a man with a tendency to do evil things may have learned, from his family and experiences, and as reinforced by society, to just say no to his evil tendencies. If you want more detail, there are plenty of books you can read (for example, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, by my fellow Prometheus Books author Barbara Oakley). You can read about this in my evolution blog also.

The conclusion for this blog about religion is that what we think, feel, and do is determined by the brain, not by spirits or Spirit. This does not excuse bad behavior, of course. Part of our environment is, after all, our own habits of behavior and thought. Our brain cells are always losing old connections and growing new ones; you can train your brain to be different. Some people have brains so evil that they cannot do this, but most of us can be better if we try.

Fundamentalist churches want you to think that the Holy Spirit makes people good; the corollary is that people without the Holy Spirit are bad. This is not true. It is a reinforcement of group identity, and many religious leaders use it as a way of gaining power and opportunities for evolutionary fitness. It is these very leaders who are often evil and then tell their followers to ignore evidence of their evil. That is, the Holy Spirit does not make all Christian leaders (or followers) good. I nkow fundamentalists who have brains that bring them to the borderline of violence—but they do not see this as a problem; instead, they see it as the zeal burning in their heart because of the Holy Spirit.

Even worse is the corollary. Fundamentalist groupthink causes its members to ignore the evidence of goodness in people outside of their group: people in other protestant churches, in other branches of Christianity, in other religions, of no organized religion. Some of these fundamentalists actually think that the rest of us are just pretending to be good in order to hide our black hearts. But the evidence is very clear. You don’t have to study genes, neurotransmitters, and brain anatomy very long before you see that the brain is in control of an individual. A simple mutation cannot make a person evil, but can create such a strong tendency to evil that it is nearly impossible to resist becoming evil. A simple mutation can also make a person pathologically good (Williams syndrome, from a mutation on chromosome 7).

So, Bible thumpers, do not send your kids to college. Why? You might think it is because they will end up in a natural science class taught by an evolutionist, like me. But that is not your main worry. What you really want to stay out of is those psychology classes. The more you learn about your brain, the more you see that your spirit, if any, is a perfect shadow of the brain, so much so that discarding the soul hypothesis makes no difference whatever in understanding your thoughts, feelings, and behavior.