Conservatives are Missing the Point, part one

I have begun reading a book by Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern. Kern is infamous not just in Oklahoma but around the nation for certain inflammatory remarks she has made regarding gays, as well as her attacks on evolutionary science. So I decided to read what she has said about herself in her book, The Stoning of Sally Kern.

What was it that she said that has become so infamous? In a speech, which was secretly taped, she compared gays to a cancer, and implied that they were worse than terrorists. Gays will cause America to collapse: this is her clear message.

I would like to make four points, in this and upcoming essays, about what Sally Kern said in her speech and in her book.

First, she seemed genuinely surprised that she received so much hate mail and public notoriety for her statements. She received thousands of emails, many of them filled with unprintable invectives. Protests against her public appearances have been vitriolic. Her opponents have treated her with extreme disrespect, and have passed on some false information about her. For example, they said that her son had been arrested for homosexual activities, and that she was therefore a hypocrite. But, as it turns out, the man who was arrested had the same first and last names, but not the same middle name, as her son. I am not aware that Kern’s critics have retracted or apologized. She repeatedly describes herself as a cookie-baking grandmother who loves everybody, including gays—she really wants God to heal them of their evil.

But, of course, she should not have been surprised at the response. Gays believe themselves to have been born gay. Therefore to criticize their sexual orientation is to criticize their very biological identity.

Gays respond to such criticism the way minorities respond to racism: with a deep visceral anger. I have only the slightest experience with this. A woman in our neighborhood has repeatedly displayed evidence of racism against Native Americans. As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I felt deeply offended and became angry far past the bounds of logic and reason. And yet I am only part Cherokee. How might fullbloods have felt? One of my former neighbors, a young Native woman, cried as she told me about the woman’s racist remarks, almost a year after they had been made. When you condemn someone for who they are, rather than for something they have chosen to do, they will react violently. In a similar way, gays responded to Kern’s message with their guts, which is where she kicked them, rather than with their heads. It’s not right, but it’s very human and only to be expected.

Second, Kern presents her brand of Biblical conservatism as the only alternative to amorality. She defends her position by explaining how America, like any society, has to have some concept of right and wrong. This is true, of course; but her brand of morality is not the only possible ethical standard upon which a nation can be built. She uses the same faulty reasoning that the creationists use: you have to believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and believe in the Flood of Noah, or else you are an atheist. Not surprisingly, Kern is a creationist who is as infamous for her creationist legislation as for her attacks on gays.

Third, Kern focuses her attention on a relatively minor issue and ignores the big ones. There is no evidence that homosexuality has ever caused a nation to collapse. But there is evidence that nations have collapsed as a result of environmental catastrophes. Kern appears to be opposed to any policies that would encourage environmental stewardship, choosing instead to embrace the so-called free market. The Old Testament clearly links the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah to their failure to take care of the land (see next essay), rather than to gays and lesbians.

Fourth, Kern also totally ignores the problem of poverty, as a legislator. She works in a food kitchen for the poor but defends the economic system that keeps them enslaved in poverty. The Old Testament prophets, especially Isaiah (see later essay), clearly link the problems of Israel and Judah to their oppression of the poor, never once saying that gays and lesbians caused God to punish them.

Politics and Religion again

At the moment I am writing numerous other things, which at the moment are not connected with this blog. But I hope to write more things for this blog very soon. I just want to reassure you that this blog is not dead. If you have not checked on the archives, particularly some of the earliest posts, please do so. An agnostic is not someone who carelessly decides to not bother thinking about what, if anything, God might be, but one who is always asking new questions and looking for new ways of thinking about what God might be.

But I have noticed that in the tumultuous landscape of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are the leading contenders. Both are bedeviled with sexual scandals--those of Cain alleged, those of Gingrich confirmed. The Republicans still consider themselves the defenders of Christian family values. But it is Barack Obama, and his family, that actually live in a Christian manner. Christianity is not something you say but something you do.

Darwin Celebrates Halloween

Last Monday was Halloween (or, in the traditional spelling, Hallowe’en, or Hallowed Evening). I taught my evolution class that morning. I wore a T-shirt with a skull on it, with the word “Evolution” over it. Evolution is the name of a little store in the Soho section of New York City which sells items that are vaguely connected with evolution (e.g., tarantulas in plastic).

I then put on a zombie mask and screamed out to the class, “Brains! Brains! BRAINS! BRAINS! I’m Charles Darwin and I’m going to eat your brains and your children’s brains and turn you all into atheists!”

I then removed the mask and explained that Darwin was not a zombie, and that I had no intention of turning anybody into an atheist. I said something like this. “Now, if your religion requires you to believe things that are scientifically disprovable, then I will have to tell you that you are mistaken. But science cannot tell you whether or not there is a purpose behind the universe, or even if there are other universes, or whether this purpose is a personal God. Many scientists believe in God, without any contradiction with their roles as scientists.”

Then I told them about Darwin’s American friend, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who was the chief defender of Darwinian evolution in America, but who was as traditional and orthodox a Christian as you could hope to find. A Sunday school teacher, no less. Darwin explained in a letter to Gray how much he regretted that he could not agree with Gray on a religious view. Darwin wrote to Gray, “With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.”

I then told them about the correspondence I have been maintaining with a prisoner in California. He first wrote to me a couple of years ago when he read my review of an evolution book. He must already have been pursuing an understanding of evolution, because he got my name from a book review I wrote for the National Center for Science Education Reports. He has written to me with many questions, and I have sent answers back to him. I have also sent him paper printouts of things I have written (hardcover books are not allowed in prison mail delivery).

At one point, the prisoner wrote to me about becoming an atheist and the freedom of thought that this allowed him to have. I wrote back to him recently, explaining that atheism was not necessary in order to accept science in general or evolution in particular, and that many scientists are religious. I do not want to lead anyone to atheism. In this way, I am doing exactly what Darwin did. I have not yet received a reply from the prisoner.

I used Halloween as a humorous opportunity to bring up a discussion of this important topic.

Don't miss my YouTube video about this!

What Galileo Saw

Last night (October 29), Jupiter was in opposition to the Earth, which means that it is exactly opposite the sun, and that it is as close as it is going to be this year. I do not know if it is the closest that it has ever been to the Earth, but it is close enough that even an inexpensive telescope will allow you to see its banded clouds. I have not yet seen the red spot, however. Jupiter is easily the brightest object in the sky after sunset. It rises about 8:30 local time.

The most amazing thing about looking at Jupiter is that you can see its moons. If you look at it on successive nights, you will see that the moons move quite rapidly—not rapidly enough to see, but enough that they are in strikingly different conformations each night. It was not just the moons, but the movement of the moons, that Galileo observed, and which led him to understand that Jupiter was a planet with its own moons. Jupiter was not just a bright light on a sphere that turned around the Earth. When Galileo made these observations, the medieval view of the cosmos fell apart, and those whose power depended on the medieval mindset (the Church) reacted with ferocity. The outcome of the Church’s attack on Galileo is well known.

You can get out a telescope and observe the very thing that got Galileo in trouble and changed the human view of the cosmos.

Christianity’s Long Tradition of Hating Science

I highly recommend the movie Agora, which depicts the life and death of the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in Alexandria, about 400 CE. An agora is a marketplace, in this place the marketplace of ideas in ancient Alexandria where Egyptian paganism, early Christianity, and early science were all in public view. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the Christians of Alexandria seized power and suppressed the marketplace of ideas, replacing it with religious dictatorship. This was the main theme of the movie: both the leader of a Christian terrorist organization, and Cyril, who is today esteemed as a great figure in church history, used violence to suppress scientific inquiry. In particular, Cyril used a passage from the writings of Paul (which, it turns out, was inserted into Paul’s writing by a later religious leader) to condemn Hypatia for being a woman who dared to teach men. You cannot watch this movie without coming away with a dark understanding that the early Christian church, far from being a community of love that welcomed the downtrodden of the world into its embrace, was little different from a terrorist organization, and hated scientific inquiry. The Christian terrorist leader gave bread to the poor with the conscious purpose of recruiting them as rioters to take over the city of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, at the end, the Christians strip Hypatia, stone her, mutilate her, and drag her through the streets of Alexandria for the glory of God and Jesus Christ.

Of course, we all know that many Christian thinkers have embraced scientific inquiry. But the historical facts, as dramatized in this movie, show that this is not how the Christian church got started. It got started as a way of violently repressing all freedom of thought. Christian philosophers and scientists came later, and always represented a minority within Christianity. To this day, among conservative Christians, there are far more people who merely want to use religion as a way of controlling the minds of others, and of grabbing political power, than people who truly want to understand the universe from a Christian viewpoint. Back when I was a Christian intellectual, a member of the American Scientific Affiliation and a professor at Christian colleges, it was clear to me that Christian intellectuals were as out of place in most conservative churches as were non-Christian intellectuals. Christian scientific inquiry exists, but is almost invisible against the flames of conservative Christian suppression of science. The pursuit of knowledge was, and is, an artificial and withering graft onto the corpus of conservative Christianity.

A secondary theme in the movie was the utter joy that Hypatia experienced when she finally understood how the planets revolved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. This joy was in her heart as she walked out into the street to offer herself as a sacrifice to the Christian terrorists. We do not know if the historical Hypatia figured out the discoveries usually attributed to Kepler, over a millennium later, but she might have: her works have all been destroyed, perhaps by Christians of fifth-century Alexandria who insisted that a flat, unmoving Earth was the only belief that should be permitted.

The dark repressive attitude of the Christian church, even in its earliest centuries, contrasts starkly with the brilliant embrace of wisdom that Jesus had. Within a century of Jesus’ death, his church had turned into a political force that would gladly have impaled its own founder on a stake for daring to preach love and forgiveness and for going out onto the hillsides to try to learn about the world through observation.

Even today, most churches are merely mechanisms for extracting money from and exercising control over the minds of people who are looking for love. Not all churches are like this, and there are individual exceptions within most churches. But as an expression of human thought and a conduit of love and altruism, religion has little to recommend it. If you want to learn the truth about the world and how to live, study science, and read the words of Jesus, but don’t bother with any Christianity that came after Jesus.

The Evolution of Religion, part two

The following is a continuation of the entry, “religion, evolution of,” from the Revised Edition of my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012.

Memes: The Software of Religion

The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. The above experiences, such as a sense of disembodiment, will create a compulsion to explain them, an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and the result is a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.

Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by altered mental states, induced by natural compounds (such as psilocybin in some mushrooms), sensory deprivation (as in a cave), ritual rhythmicity, or particularly vivid dreams. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made humans eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. Humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences, and religious memes satisfied this desire.

One of the most important religion memes is guilt. Throughout human prehistory and history, religious leaders have parasitized the human capacity for guilt to reinforce their power over the minds of their followers, and religion has been one of the principal means by which they have done so.

The Evolutionary Advantages of Religion

Religion would probably have been a local aberration in early human populations had it not provided some evolutionary advantage. In modern tribal societies, shamans who claim to have exceptional religious experiences have considerable social power, which can translate into greater resources and reproductive opportunities; no doubt this was also the case during the prehistory of Homo sapiens. David Lewis-Williams points out that this would be the same in the Lascaux cave as in modern charismatic Christianity. Religious leaders would gain the within-population fitness advantage that is necessary for natural selection. Once the trait was established or at least common within a tribe, this tribe would have advantages over tribes that did not possess it—for example, social cohesion and identity that allowed them to prevail in conflicts. Clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would experience a cascade of benefits.

Another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated is the instinct of biophilia. Humans have a natural passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping and roaring inhabitants. To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them. Biophilia, and religious expressions of it, is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in, and has probably helped numerous individuals and tribes to persist through unspeakable hardships.
Although all Homo sapiens groups have religion, there was a striking development of religion when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and later when the most recent ice age forced Northern European tribes southward where they encountered disturbingly intelligent people that already lived in Southern Europe. Religion then functioned in tribal identity. Evidence for the tribal identity function is that there were geographical differences in types and styles of artwork—for example, different caves specialized on different animals, reflecting differences in established traditions.

There have been many different attempted explanations of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Some anthropologists say that the paintings were sympathetic magic to promote successful hunting. However, as David Lewis-Williams points out, the set of animals in the paintings is not the same as the animals that the people ate (for example, they did not eat bears and lions), and only 15 percent of the paintings show animals with spears. The paintings resemble animal visions that people might have seen during hallucinations. The animal paintings are often accompanied by geometric symbols that resemble the images seen during migraines. The animal images are not in their natural habitats, and appear to be floating, and sometimes lack hooves.
To the Cro-Magnon, as to many recent tribal peoples, the wall of a cave may have represented an interface between the outer world and the underworld. When the prehistoric people entered a cave, they were literally entering the underworld. In the darkness they would hallucinate from sensory deprivation, and possibly also from the high levels of carbon dioxide. Then when the lamps were lit, they would paint the images they had seen. Sometimes the artists would also paint their hands, leaving either positive or negative images of them, as a mark of direct contact with the underworld. Hand contact with the wall, and the process of spit-painting, were part of the overall religious experience. The visionary quality of the paintings is particularly evident in the deepest recesses of the caves, some as much as a kilometer underground, where quick sketches of many animals overlapped.

In addition to the individual religious experience, there was also a communal aspect. Religious shamans could gain admiration from their followers by taking them deep into the caves to see the evidence of their religious experiences. Meanwhile, the shallower reaches of the cave served as the assembly rooms for the general population, and it is in such places that the large, vivid images are found. The cave paintings may therefore have served to increase the social status and the fitness of religious leaders.

With the advent of civilization, religion was usually dominated by priests and kings and used as a way of controlling people. The power structure that provided an advantage of some people over others in a society could also allow one city-state to dominate another. This role of religion continues to this day. At the same time, there has been a parallel lineage of prophets who criticize social norms. In ancient Israel, for example, practically all the prophets were outcasts who lived in huts and caves and were sorely hated by the priests and kings. Governments still use religion as a tool of domination in some countries. In the United States, there are many large religious organizations that obtain a great deal of monetary and other kinds of support from their adherents, and these organizations have great influence on national and local politics. Religion is at least as much a tool of power and fitness opportunities as it was at the time of the Cro-Magnons.

Even though religion is not a single adaptation, its memes are closely enough tied together that they will probably all be with the human species as long as it exists. With a rush of Enlightenment optimism, Thomas Jefferson said in the early 19th century, “There is no young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian.” Evidently he was wrong.

Evolution of religion, part one.

The following entries are from the Revised Edition of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012. I have taken them from the entry, “religion, evolution of.”

Homo sapiens is a religious species. This is one of the few behavioral universals of the human species. Though there is individual variation in the strength of this trait, no society is without it; those that tried to eliminate it have failed. Religion appears to be ineradicable. There is clearly no biological basis for particular religions, but it is likely that there is a biological basis for the capacity for religion.

Neandertals apparently did not have religion. The contrast between the religious artifacts of Homo sapiens and their absence in Homo neanderthalensis in their regions of overlap could hardly be greater. While Homo sapiens had intricate burials (a burial of two children in Sungir, Russia, contained 10,000 shell beads each of which took from one to three person hours to prepare), Neandertals apparently dug the shallowest possible graves to keep the body from stinking. The Shanidar burial of a Neandertal with flowers, even if it is confirmed, is a rare and isolated instance. Neandertal pendants associated with the Châtelperronian culture have been mostly dismissed as imitative of the Aurignacian culture of the Cro-Magnon, and even if they were not, their connection with religion is unclear. Neandertal caves totally lack the wall art that abundantly and resplendently represents Cro-Magnon religious experience. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams calls Neandertals “congenital atheists.” Yet Neandertals had brains at least as large as those of modern humans. Other groups of H. sapiens, all over the world, had a similar abundance of religious practice.

What is Religion?

Religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. Many scientists have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. Therefore when scientists say that religion is universal among humans, they mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. They cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. Social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others.

The Brain: The Hardware of Religion

Human brains increased in size over evolutionary time for numerous reasons, including the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it the evolution of intelligence. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size, including the parts associated with the following capacities:

• Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can create a feeling of transcendence (ex- means out of, stasis means place).
• Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. The sensation of having a defined body is something that the brain creates. Some kinds of strokes cause their victims to experience reality as a stream of sensations, without an awareness of embodiment. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.
• Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, and one for which religion clearly provides an outlet. One of the principal components of altruism is guilt, which reinforces the likelihood that people will act altruistically.
• The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this may be a vestige of a child’s worship of parents.
• Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that he or she will die, and the possibility that he or she will be preoccupied by it.
• Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them.

Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. Specific areas and functions of the brain have been implicated in the mystical, religious experience. Neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have been particularly active in researching the brain activities associated with religion. They point out, for example, that when humans enter an altered state of consciousness, the orientation association area of the brain (which in the left lobe is associated with the sensation of having a limited body, and in the right lobe with the sense of space that a person occupies) contribute to out-of-body experiences.

Religion is not pathological, but brain pathologies can help scientists to understand its neurological basis. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe by electrodes (or pathological stimulation by epilepsy) produces experiences closely paralleling the near-death experience of passing through a tunnel towards the light. Similar effects are also produced by the drug ketamine.

Announcement: On my other blog I begin an October series about the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. On my YouTube channel, Darwin visits these dinosaur footprints.