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The Psychology of Religion
The first and most important thing to realize about religions is that they consist wholly of people believing things only because other people tell them to believe them (with spoken or written words), plus a tiny handful of people who believe things their minds have invented but, for reasons of mental defect, cannot tell apart from reality, and a similarly tiny handful who do not believe but tell others what to believe (though even among religious leaders, almost all are themselves believers to some degree). The only alternative to obeying religious edicts is heresy, a term that derives directly from the Greek word for "choice". Thus freethinkers are by definition heretics, and only heretics can think freely.
Humans have a hereditary predisposition toward mystic faith (certainty without evidence) in particular and religion (social institutions founded on tenets of mystic faith) in general. This predisposition was adaptive in prehistory (while humans were evolving to their present form), when the rational approach, however doggedly followed, would not lead one to a satisfactory understanding of nature. The advantage of religion is that the human mind's inherent and otherwise insatiable curiosity, and the risks and expenditure of time, energy, and mental resources associated with its care and feeding, are checked, preventing it from engaging in a vain exploration of the yawning chasm that is the whole of reality.
Arguably, this is still adaptive for most people, as anyone who has attempted to master differential geometry, unified field theory, systems neuroscience, or indeed nearly any area of math or science currently undergoing development in academia, can readily attest. The life sciences and the social sciences, particularly economics, are now uniting with the mathematical constructs of complex dynamical systems theory to create a bulwark of very powerful models intellectually accessible to only a tiny sliver of humanity.
Thanks to Irving Wolfson MD and his brief contribution to the Evolutionary Psychology forum for the above idea.
People who believe in their futures, and that providence will favor them, are more fecund than those who do not. At least that's the case anywhere that's even remotely civilized. The statistical evidence for this is overwhelming. In the 2004 election cycle, in terms of public and media-popularized perceptions, the presidential candidate of secularism (and of abortion availability) was John Kerry, and the candidate of theistic faith (and of abortion abolition) was George W. Bush. Thus election results can be used to effectively measure popular religious sentiment on a county-by-county basis, although inevitably there are other influences that color the results.
Bush-voting counties have significantly higher growth rates than Kerry-voting counties (many of which actually have shrinking populations). 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the US voted for Bush in 2004. This is part of a phenomenon that David Brooks of the New York Times calls ``natalism''. In The American Conservative, Steve Sailer finds that Bush carried 25 of the 26 states with the highest white fertility rates, while Kerry carried the 16 states with the lowest rates. In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe that ``Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas.''
In January 2005, the Petris Center at UC Berkeley released the results of a survey of mental health markers for the counties of California. Respondents were asked, among other questions, if they were "downhearted and sad". There is a correlation between counties with poor mental health as measured in this study, and counties with high margins of victory for Kerry. Similarly, there is a correlation of high mental health with high margin of victory for Bush. The two counties identified by the study as having the worst mental health, by their composite measure calibrated for economic circumstance, were also the two counties with the highest margins of victory for Kerry (68% in San Francisco County, and 51% in Alameda - those are margins, not totals!). The 18 counties sharing the highest health ranking were, with few exceptions, carried by Bush, most with a margin greater than 20%. Some of the exceptions tend to prove the rule. Sacramento is an urban core in a Kerry state that Bush came within a whisker of winning (Kerry by 285 votes, of 454310 total votes cast, a margin of .06%). Alpine (Kerry by 8 percentage points, of 699 total votes cast) and Mono (Kerry by 7 votes, of 5322 votes cast) counties may appear in the healthiest category only because they were aggregated with 5 counties all carried heavily by Bush. And it's highly significant that San Diego, the only major urban core in the healthiest category, was also the only major urban core in California won by Bush. Of the eight counties in the next-to-healthiest category, only Sonoma and Yolo were carried by Kerry, albeit in 36 and 21 point landslides respectively.
One would intuitively and logically expect that personal religion and a sense of a personal god, clearly comforting and affirming psychological influences, would be correlated with belief in a future wherein providence will be favorable -- in short, that theistic faith will be correlated with a lack of depressive psychological conditions. Likewise, one expects that a lack of personal religion and of a sense of a personal god would be correlated with doubt that the future will be providential, and so in affliction by depressive psychological conditions. As recounted above, this intuition is borne out by fairly decisive evidence. It is also inevitable that belief in a providential future correlates with fecundity, since children rely on future prosperity. This too is clearly borne out by the evidence, as discussed above. The negative sense is also amply evidenced. A recent (2005-Jan-22) headline in The Scotsman reads ``Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth''. France, indeed, has disastrously low fecundity, like the rest of Europe, and its secularization is rather advanced, as it is throughout Europe. Again, the exception tends to prove the rule: only the Muslim immigrant population in France (and elsewhere in Europe) has a high birth rate.
The evolutionary consequences of the dynamics outlined above are clear. There is a powerful and persistent pressure to maintain and propagate the hereditary traits that are conducive to theistic religious faith. They will be robustly and inexorably expressed in the population.
The religious instinct is the central enabler of the Hegelian dynamic. The instinct has two barely separable components: a predisposition to embrace premises on faith when the dividends of mental frugality are expected to outpace those of thorough investigation, and a predisposition to embrace on faith only a premise promoted by someone whose authority is respected. This latter predisposition is adaptive in and of itself, because it tends to instill social consistency and cohesion, equipping the community to work effectively as a team. Thus is enabled the cult of specialization, and the whole of Hegelian epistemology: the mutual deceptions of Hegel's heralded bureaucracy (following inevitably from the division of intellectual labor), and the horrors of Idealism and Positivism.
Inevitably, the religious instinct - since it is a prima facie abridgement and violation of reason - becomes a vehicle for those intent on concentrating social control in their own hands. It cannot be overemphasized that the purpose of religions is control over the actions of people, achieved through control over the thoughts of people. Etymologically, ``religion'' derives from the Latin for ``to tie back'', evidencing its binding, constraining character.
The god concept - common to many though not all religions - is the ultimate organizational corruption. A god would have total authority with no accountability. The priests and potentates who cite god as the source of their authority similarly wield total authority with no accountability.
Practical religion is sociocognitive warfare. With this realization, a great deal of what is considered by Americans to be ``culture'' or ``political systems'' is seen to actually be religion. For example, though communism in the USSR was atheistic (denied ``belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world'' (from Webster)), it was obviously a religion. As one peruses the litany of establishment tactics in my introductory essay, the burrowing of religion into the American cultural landscape becomes clear. Many of the tactics squarely aim to subvert reason.
``Religion'' and ``cult'' are two names for the same thing. Typically, the former term is used when referring to centuries-old institutions of sociocognitive warfare, and the latter when referring to new ones or ones which are of intermediate age and include significant doctrine that is inconsistent with, or not ancestral to, the doctrine of an old institution. Both Scientology and Catholicism are both religions and cults. When subordination to a new institution of sociocognitive warfare ceases to be stigmatized by those who are subordinated to older institutions, the new institution ceases to be considered a cult and comes to be considered a religion. Once an institution is considered a religion, it will continue to be considered as such, even if subordination to it is again stigmatized. This has occured with Judaism, the subordinates of which have been stigmatized by a variety of groups for a variety of reasons.
The engine by which mystical ideation becomes cultural doctrine includes three primary components: insanity, evil, and feebleness of mind. The insanity is embodied principally by schizophrenics, though also by individuals with certain other types of brain disease. The evil is embodied by the power lusting second hander. The feebleness of mind is embodied by ordinary people, of ordinary mental fortitude and ordinary susceptibility to memetic infection. By mental fortitude, I mean capacity to maintain rational consistency, particularly when presented with a concerted effort to befuddle.
Schizophrenics have minds that are qualitatively different from those of non-schizophrenics - in a manner of speaking, they do not have human minds. The difference is genetically correlated, and is anatomical and neurochemical in basis. The mind of a schizophrenic has a threshold of awareness and recognition that is either too low or too high. This has a variety of calamitous results for his capacity to think rationally. Of interest here are those whose threshold of awareness and recognition is too low, so that hallucinatory sensations and delusory patterns are perceived. Associations between meme vectors (as discussed in The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity by Liane Gabora) are faulty, since effectively the association filter's Q is too low (that is, its region of sensitivity is too large). The schizophrenic is impaired in the formation and comprehension of fine analogies, since the low Q cannot maintain the distinctness of the two ideas whose symbolic topologies are being mapped together. Instead, they form artificially course analogies, artificially mapping together ideas that are not actually related. This results in their telling fanciful tales of unlikely causality, poesy, and lexical invention. They weave fantastically diverse memes into a largely senseless, but artful and memorable tapestry. L. Ron Hubbard was a schizophrenic.
Second only to the schizophrenics in the habitual confabulation of senseless, artful, memorable tapestries are those with prefrontal or amygdalar dysfunction. When portions of the amygdala or prefrontal lobe of the cortex are degraded, lesioned, or decoupled from the prefrontal lobe or amygdala (respectively), existence loses some of its subjective emotional reality. Crucially, the role of emotional consequence in planning is distorted, reduced, or eliminated. The capacity to reason and to use language can remain largely intact, but the intellectual products of such individuals reflect a distorted or absent emotional context. In fact, sociopathy - in which an individual is prone to the unfeeling infliction of cruelty - has essentially the same anatomy. Immanuel Kant had a prefrontal tumor.
The power lusting second hander, who is in a position to control the propagation of ideas through an apparatus of publication and censorship, tolerates and perpetuates that output of the insane which is of utility in his efforts to amass and maintain power over people and property. This system is most evident when the insanity is schizophrenia: the second hander acts as the filter which the schizophrenic's mind lacks, but the second hander's filter is malignant. The schizophrenic acts as the creativity which the second hander's mind lacks, but his creativity is madness.
The psychology of the power lusting second hander can be dissected into its two primary components. Power lust has a survival dividend because it tends to place the individual in a position to produce many offspring, and to provide those many offspring with social and material advantages conducive to their production of offspring. Being a second hander is essentially a character flaw, resulting from an individual's fear, lack of confidence, and laziness. It is never caused by a cognitive inability to be a first hander: being a first hander is not at all difficult in terms of the requisite intelligence.
Now, to treat the mentality of the masses, and how they come to be laid low by the above process.
Susceptibility to memetic infection is prerequisite for language acquisition, and since language capability bestows a decisive survival advantage, memetic susceptibility is essentially universal. This supplies the basic substrate by which the tenets of a religion are adopted as a set of ideas and symbols.
Non-linguistic socializability is another form of susceptibility to memetic infection. It is the capacity of an individual to incorporate himself into the community he is born into - particularly, the capability to adapt to social circumstance - the capability and tendency to adopt pre-existing community mores and problem-solving techniques. Failures to adapt or adopt impair one's capability to subsist and reproduce - though there is a sizeable incidence of people who do not adapt to their communities in the manner indicated by socialization, indicating that it is not decisive. The fundamental reason that the unsocializeable are ubiquitous, if relatively uncommon, is that without an insurance policy of cultural diversity, whole tribes can be extinguished by environmental or competitive insults the tribe lacks the collective mental wherewithal to overcome. The biological survival of the collective is necessarily predicated on the continuous actuality of individual diversity. Since the reverse is not true (individual survival is not predicated on survival of the collective), the intrinsic primacy of the individual is self-evident.
Three corollaries of the inborne propensity to socialize are (1) a tendency to adopt community doctrine without critical examination, as a method of minimizing the time and mental effort expended to learn how to avoid socially imposed penalties, (2) a tendency to follow instructions, including an awareness that disobedience leads to penalties, and (3) a tendency to accept the doctrine of service. It is tempting to explain the first as a pseudorationally implicit consequence of expedience (laziness and caution), but more likely, the uncritical adoption of certain behaviors is specifically selected for. The third is likely an inborn propensity, since service is precisely that type of socialization selected for according to the principles outlined in the previous paragraph. The awareness cited in the second is also likely inborne and specifically selected for. A particularly egregious example of instruction is the "command mystery" - that is, an instruction to refrain from contemplating the reasonableness of a tenet or statement. The proscription of idolatry common to Judaism and Christianity is an example of a command mystery, since "To believe, for example, that God literally came down on Sinai and literally spoke to our ancestors is to commit the sin of idolatry, which, in its purest form, reduces God to a natural/human phenomenon. People descend and speak, God does not--except in a mythic way" (quoting The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought by "noted theologian" Neil Gillman).
The cognitive and emotional constellation of phenomena known as "falling in love" evidently has a decisive survival dividend, as the capacity to do so is universal or nearly so. Mystic faith in its most dramatic form co-opts this reason-impairing attachment constellation. The centerpiece of the phenomenon is the uncritical rearrangement of one's values to accommodate the object of the sentiment, and facilitate its realization of its goals.
The capacity to enter trance states, though probably not unique to humans, constitutes in them a state of immensely heightened suggestibility and impaired discriminatory capabilities, often involving delusion, and in some cases involving hallucination. It is not clear if the trance is an evolutionary adaptation, or an incidental characteristic of brains that evolution could not correct, but regardless, its role in the practice and propagation of mystical ideation is evident and well known.
A type of limited trance, which can be described as awe, exists in humans, and is triggered by fixation on an isolated idea. In essence: if an individual is convinced through some means to consider an idea without considering the ideas which naturally relate to it, a more general state of dissociation is precipitated. The trance is largely or entirely a dissociative phenomenon.
Repetition of sensory constellations and of actions is also effective at penetrating the defense mechanisms of the mind and building memes. If an individual can be led by some means to repetition, a covert path to indoctrination is created. Many varieties of repetition can also induce trance states.
Music and dancing (which prominently feature repetitive structures) are tools whereby trance states in particular, and susceptibility in general, can be created. The intertwining of religion, music, and dance, is far older than civilization. Precisely how music exerts its effects on the human mind is yet to be understood, but the effects themselves are well-known. This transcript of GRAY MATTERS: Music and the Brain (1998-Mar) sheds some light on the issue. (Note that there is much in this transcript that I find offensive, in particular the false - in fact, absurd - premise that the dramatic chill sensation that music sometimes produces is a triggering of a phylogenetic baby-is-crying emotional response, and is particularly correlated with sadness and with the impression of a ``lonely, anguished cry in the wilderness.'' Chills are sometimes associated with these, but just as regularly, are associated with their antithesis - with an exultant climax of blaring, massed, densely harmonic sounds and coursing, thumping rhythm. Chills are likely a phenomenon that arises from certain sensory or cognitive transitions or inflections that produce a particularly resonant conscious wavetrain. The resonance is almost surely transduced to visceral state via the amygdala and its brainstem projections. The amygdala is cued to the resonance by the midline nuclei of the thalamus, which are components of the complex of thalamic nuclei that participate in the recruiting response. See The Symphonic Architecture of Mind for more on these themes.)
Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, water deprivation, ingestion of psychotropics, and a variety of other traumatic stresses, also have roles in religious rituals stretching far into prehistory. In a manner similar to but more potent than that of music, these tools induce trances and susceptibility, and particularly, facilitate irrational ideation. They are psychotomimetic, predictably causing delusions and hallucinations. As such, they cause otherwise mentally sound individuals to have encounters with apparitions of the type described by religions, leading them to embrace tenets they would previously have rejected.
The spectrum of techniques enumerated above is the same spectrum used in brainwashing, and religion is simply mass brainwashing.
Opposed to this brainwashing is mental fortitude - the capacity to maintain rational consistency. This capacity varies widely, of course. One determiner of fortitude is intelligence itself, particularly the size, precision, and agility of the various types of symbolic and spatial reasoning facilities and working memories. The thoroughness and precision with which long term memories of utility are registered, the avoidance of registration of memories that are of little or no utility, the integration of memories with each other, the efficiency with which they are organized, the responsive activation of memories of instant utility, and the avoidance of activation of irrelevant memories, are all conducive to mental fortitude. Categorical adequacy is prerequisite. But beyond these basic ingredients, crucial is the firm rejection of any thought which is logically inconsistent with another thought logically established with greater confidence to accurately model reality.
In each mind, the mechanisms of mental fortitude square off against the mechanisms of susceptibility. In an ordinary individual, a rough balance is struck, in which he is rationally consistent in a broad spectrum of routine tasks and mundane subjects, but is not rational in those areas where his community has made a concerted effort to indoctrinate him. Religions by design impart doctrinal tenets which are broad in their impact, so that an adherent's decision-making process is colored by the religion quite often.
In some, mental susceptibility dominates mental fortitude, as discussed by Richard Dawkins in his essay, "Viruses of the Mind":
[...]
Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery makes everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind well prepared by background infection. Exactly the same trick is performed in the ``mystery'' of the Trinity. Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to strike awe. The ``mystery is a virtue'' idea comes to the aid of the Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of the transubstantiation and the ``three-in-one.'' Again, the belief that ``mystery is a virtue'' has a self-referential ring. As Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery.
An extreme symptom of ``mystery is a virtue'' infection is Tertullian's ``Certum est quia impossibile est'' (It is certain because it is impossible''). That way madness lies. One is tempted to quote Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who, in response to Alice's ``One can't believe impossible things'' retorted ``I daresay you haven't had much practice... When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'' Or Douglas Adam's Electric Monk, a labor-saving device programmed to do your believing for you, which was capable of ``believing things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City'' and which, at the moment of being introduced to the reader, believed, contrary to all the evidence, that everything in the world was a uniform shade of pink. But White Queens and Electric Monks become less funny when you realize that these virtuoso believers are indistinguishable from revered theologians in real life. ``It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd'' (Tertullian again). Sir Thomas Browne (1635) quotes Tertullian with approval, and goes further: ``Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.'' And ``I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion [sic].''
[...]
another example, from Newsday/Press Democrat 1990-Dec-23, by David Firestone:
"It remains one of the most baffling yet affecting phenomena in modern religious life: A beam of light or a spot of dirt in an otherwise ordinary place is perceived as the image of the Virgin Mary, and suddenly thousands of pilgrims descend on the site, turning it into a makeshift shrine. ...In previous years, it has been a vision in the sky, a glint off a car bumper, a face in a tortilla, a tear on an icon. ...But while church leaders are often loath to debunk a visionary experience, not wanting to damage the faith of thousands, they are also leery of letting such events get out of hand. If someone who claims to have communicated with the divine begins spreading teachings that are contrary to church dogma, bishops have not hesitated to step in."
The first and most important thing to realize about religions is that they consist wholly of people believing things only because other people tell them to believe them (with spoken or written words), plus a tiny handful of people who believe things their minds have invented but, for reasons of mental defect, cannot tell apart from reality, and a similarly tiny handful who do not believe but tell others what to believe (though even among religious leaders, almost all are themselves believers to some degree). The only alternative to obeying religious edicts is heresy, a term that derives directly from the Greek word for "choice". Thus freethinkers are by definition heretics, and only heretics can think freely.
Humans have a hereditary predisposition toward mystic faith (certainty without evidence) in particular and religion (social institutions founded on tenets of mystic faith) in general. This predisposition was adaptive in prehistory (while humans were evolving to their present form), when the rational approach, however doggedly followed, would not lead one to a satisfactory understanding of nature. The advantage of religion is that the human mind's inherent and otherwise insatiable curiosity, and the risks and expenditure of time, energy, and mental resources associated with its care and feeding, are checked, preventing it from engaging in a vain exploration of the yawning chasm that is the whole of reality.
Arguably, this is still adaptive for most people, as anyone who has attempted to master differential geometry, unified field theory, systems neuroscience, or indeed nearly any area of math or science currently undergoing development in academia, can readily attest. The life sciences and the social sciences, particularly economics, are now uniting with the mathematical constructs of complex dynamical systems theory to create a bulwark of very powerful models intellectually accessible to only a tiny sliver of humanity.
Thanks to Irving Wolfson MD and his brief contribution to the Evolutionary Psychology forum for the above idea.
People who believe in their futures, and that providence will favor them, are more fecund than those who do not. At least that's the case anywhere that's even remotely civilized. The statistical evidence for this is overwhelming. In the 2004 election cycle, in terms of public and media-popularized perceptions, the presidential candidate of secularism (and of abortion availability) was John Kerry, and the candidate of theistic faith (and of abortion abolition) was George W. Bush. Thus election results can be used to effectively measure popular religious sentiment on a county-by-county basis, although inevitably there are other influences that color the results.
Bush-voting counties have significantly higher growth rates than Kerry-voting counties (many of which actually have shrinking populations). 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the US voted for Bush in 2004. This is part of a phenomenon that David Brooks of the New York Times calls ``natalism''. In The American Conservative, Steve Sailer finds that Bush carried 25 of the 26 states with the highest white fertility rates, while Kerry carried the 16 states with the lowest rates. In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe that ``Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas.''
In January 2005, the Petris Center at UC Berkeley released the results of a survey of mental health markers for the counties of California. Respondents were asked, among other questions, if they were "downhearted and sad". There is a correlation between counties with poor mental health as measured in this study, and counties with high margins of victory for Kerry. Similarly, there is a correlation of high mental health with high margin of victory for Bush. The two counties identified by the study as having the worst mental health, by their composite measure calibrated for economic circumstance, were also the two counties with the highest margins of victory for Kerry (68% in San Francisco County, and 51% in Alameda - those are margins, not totals!). The 18 counties sharing the highest health ranking were, with few exceptions, carried by Bush, most with a margin greater than 20%. Some of the exceptions tend to prove the rule. Sacramento is an urban core in a Kerry state that Bush came within a whisker of winning (Kerry by 285 votes, of 454310 total votes cast, a margin of .06%). Alpine (Kerry by 8 percentage points, of 699 total votes cast) and Mono (Kerry by 7 votes, of 5322 votes cast) counties may appear in the healthiest category only because they were aggregated with 5 counties all carried heavily by Bush. And it's highly significant that San Diego, the only major urban core in the healthiest category, was also the only major urban core in California won by Bush. Of the eight counties in the next-to-healthiest category, only Sonoma and Yolo were carried by Kerry, albeit in 36 and 21 point landslides respectively.
One would intuitively and logically expect that personal religion and a sense of a personal god, clearly comforting and affirming psychological influences, would be correlated with belief in a future wherein providence will be favorable -- in short, that theistic faith will be correlated with a lack of depressive psychological conditions. Likewise, one expects that a lack of personal religion and of a sense of a personal god would be correlated with doubt that the future will be providential, and so in affliction by depressive psychological conditions. As recounted above, this intuition is borne out by fairly decisive evidence. It is also inevitable that belief in a providential future correlates with fecundity, since children rely on future prosperity. This too is clearly borne out by the evidence, as discussed above. The negative sense is also amply evidenced. A recent (2005-Jan-22) headline in The Scotsman reads ``Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth''. France, indeed, has disastrously low fecundity, like the rest of Europe, and its secularization is rather advanced, as it is throughout Europe. Again, the exception tends to prove the rule: only the Muslim immigrant population in France (and elsewhere in Europe) has a high birth rate.
The evolutionary consequences of the dynamics outlined above are clear. There is a powerful and persistent pressure to maintain and propagate the hereditary traits that are conducive to theistic religious faith. They will be robustly and inexorably expressed in the population.
The religious instinct is the central enabler of the Hegelian dynamic. The instinct has two barely separable components: a predisposition to embrace premises on faith when the dividends of mental frugality are expected to outpace those of thorough investigation, and a predisposition to embrace on faith only a premise promoted by someone whose authority is respected. This latter predisposition is adaptive in and of itself, because it tends to instill social consistency and cohesion, equipping the community to work effectively as a team. Thus is enabled the cult of specialization, and the whole of Hegelian epistemology: the mutual deceptions of Hegel's heralded bureaucracy (following inevitably from the division of intellectual labor), and the horrors of Idealism and Positivism.
Inevitably, the religious instinct - since it is a prima facie abridgement and violation of reason - becomes a vehicle for those intent on concentrating social control in their own hands. It cannot be overemphasized that the purpose of religions is control over the actions of people, achieved through control over the thoughts of people. Etymologically, ``religion'' derives from the Latin for ``to tie back'', evidencing its binding, constraining character.
The god concept - common to many though not all religions - is the ultimate organizational corruption. A god would have total authority with no accountability. The priests and potentates who cite god as the source of their authority similarly wield total authority with no accountability.
Practical religion is sociocognitive warfare. With this realization, a great deal of what is considered by Americans to be ``culture'' or ``political systems'' is seen to actually be religion. For example, though communism in the USSR was atheistic (denied ``belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world'' (from Webster)), it was obviously a religion. As one peruses the litany of establishment tactics in my introductory essay, the burrowing of religion into the American cultural landscape becomes clear. Many of the tactics squarely aim to subvert reason.
``Religion'' and ``cult'' are two names for the same thing. Typically, the former term is used when referring to centuries-old institutions of sociocognitive warfare, and the latter when referring to new ones or ones which are of intermediate age and include significant doctrine that is inconsistent with, or not ancestral to, the doctrine of an old institution. Both Scientology and Catholicism are both religions and cults. When subordination to a new institution of sociocognitive warfare ceases to be stigmatized by those who are subordinated to older institutions, the new institution ceases to be considered a cult and comes to be considered a religion. Once an institution is considered a religion, it will continue to be considered as such, even if subordination to it is again stigmatized. This has occured with Judaism, the subordinates of which have been stigmatized by a variety of groups for a variety of reasons.
The engine by which mystical ideation becomes cultural doctrine includes three primary components: insanity, evil, and feebleness of mind. The insanity is embodied principally by schizophrenics, though also by individuals with certain other types of brain disease. The evil is embodied by the power lusting second hander. The feebleness of mind is embodied by ordinary people, of ordinary mental fortitude and ordinary susceptibility to memetic infection. By mental fortitude, I mean capacity to maintain rational consistency, particularly when presented with a concerted effort to befuddle.
Schizophrenics have minds that are qualitatively different from those of non-schizophrenics - in a manner of speaking, they do not have human minds. The difference is genetically correlated, and is anatomical and neurochemical in basis. The mind of a schizophrenic has a threshold of awareness and recognition that is either too low or too high. This has a variety of calamitous results for his capacity to think rationally. Of interest here are those whose threshold of awareness and recognition is too low, so that hallucinatory sensations and delusory patterns are perceived. Associations between meme vectors (as discussed in The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity by Liane Gabora) are faulty, since effectively the association filter's Q is too low (that is, its region of sensitivity is too large). The schizophrenic is impaired in the formation and comprehension of fine analogies, since the low Q cannot maintain the distinctness of the two ideas whose symbolic topologies are being mapped together. Instead, they form artificially course analogies, artificially mapping together ideas that are not actually related. This results in their telling fanciful tales of unlikely causality, poesy, and lexical invention. They weave fantastically diverse memes into a largely senseless, but artful and memorable tapestry. L. Ron Hubbard was a schizophrenic.
Second only to the schizophrenics in the habitual confabulation of senseless, artful, memorable tapestries are those with prefrontal or amygdalar dysfunction. When portions of the amygdala or prefrontal lobe of the cortex are degraded, lesioned, or decoupled from the prefrontal lobe or amygdala (respectively), existence loses some of its subjective emotional reality. Crucially, the role of emotional consequence in planning is distorted, reduced, or eliminated. The capacity to reason and to use language can remain largely intact, but the intellectual products of such individuals reflect a distorted or absent emotional context. In fact, sociopathy - in which an individual is prone to the unfeeling infliction of cruelty - has essentially the same anatomy. Immanuel Kant had a prefrontal tumor.
The power lusting second hander, who is in a position to control the propagation of ideas through an apparatus of publication and censorship, tolerates and perpetuates that output of the insane which is of utility in his efforts to amass and maintain power over people and property. This system is most evident when the insanity is schizophrenia: the second hander acts as the filter which the schizophrenic's mind lacks, but the second hander's filter is malignant. The schizophrenic acts as the creativity which the second hander's mind lacks, but his creativity is madness.
The psychology of the power lusting second hander can be dissected into its two primary components. Power lust has a survival dividend because it tends to place the individual in a position to produce many offspring, and to provide those many offspring with social and material advantages conducive to their production of offspring. Being a second hander is essentially a character flaw, resulting from an individual's fear, lack of confidence, and laziness. It is never caused by a cognitive inability to be a first hander: being a first hander is not at all difficult in terms of the requisite intelligence.
Now, to treat the mentality of the masses, and how they come to be laid low by the above process.
Susceptibility to memetic infection is prerequisite for language acquisition, and since language capability bestows a decisive survival advantage, memetic susceptibility is essentially universal. This supplies the basic substrate by which the tenets of a religion are adopted as a set of ideas and symbols.
Non-linguistic socializability is another form of susceptibility to memetic infection. It is the capacity of an individual to incorporate himself into the community he is born into - particularly, the capability to adapt to social circumstance - the capability and tendency to adopt pre-existing community mores and problem-solving techniques. Failures to adapt or adopt impair one's capability to subsist and reproduce - though there is a sizeable incidence of people who do not adapt to their communities in the manner indicated by socialization, indicating that it is not decisive. The fundamental reason that the unsocializeable are ubiquitous, if relatively uncommon, is that without an insurance policy of cultural diversity, whole tribes can be extinguished by environmental or competitive insults the tribe lacks the collective mental wherewithal to overcome. The biological survival of the collective is necessarily predicated on the continuous actuality of individual diversity. Since the reverse is not true (individual survival is not predicated on survival of the collective), the intrinsic primacy of the individual is self-evident.
Three corollaries of the inborne propensity to socialize are (1) a tendency to adopt community doctrine without critical examination, as a method of minimizing the time and mental effort expended to learn how to avoid socially imposed penalties, (2) a tendency to follow instructions, including an awareness that disobedience leads to penalties, and (3) a tendency to accept the doctrine of service. It is tempting to explain the first as a pseudorationally implicit consequence of expedience (laziness and caution), but more likely, the uncritical adoption of certain behaviors is specifically selected for. The third is likely an inborn propensity, since service is precisely that type of socialization selected for according to the principles outlined in the previous paragraph. The awareness cited in the second is also likely inborne and specifically selected for. A particularly egregious example of instruction is the "command mystery" - that is, an instruction to refrain from contemplating the reasonableness of a tenet or statement. The proscription of idolatry common to Judaism and Christianity is an example of a command mystery, since "To believe, for example, that God literally came down on Sinai and literally spoke to our ancestors is to commit the sin of idolatry, which, in its purest form, reduces God to a natural/human phenomenon. People descend and speak, God does not--except in a mythic way" (quoting The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought by "noted theologian" Neil Gillman).
The cognitive and emotional constellation of phenomena known as "falling in love" evidently has a decisive survival dividend, as the capacity to do so is universal or nearly so. Mystic faith in its most dramatic form co-opts this reason-impairing attachment constellation. The centerpiece of the phenomenon is the uncritical rearrangement of one's values to accommodate the object of the sentiment, and facilitate its realization of its goals.
The capacity to enter trance states, though probably not unique to humans, constitutes in them a state of immensely heightened suggestibility and impaired discriminatory capabilities, often involving delusion, and in some cases involving hallucination. It is not clear if the trance is an evolutionary adaptation, or an incidental characteristic of brains that evolution could not correct, but regardless, its role in the practice and propagation of mystical ideation is evident and well known.
A type of limited trance, which can be described as awe, exists in humans, and is triggered by fixation on an isolated idea. In essence: if an individual is convinced through some means to consider an idea without considering the ideas which naturally relate to it, a more general state of dissociation is precipitated. The trance is largely or entirely a dissociative phenomenon.
Repetition of sensory constellations and of actions is also effective at penetrating the defense mechanisms of the mind and building memes. If an individual can be led by some means to repetition, a covert path to indoctrination is created. Many varieties of repetition can also induce trance states.
Music and dancing (which prominently feature repetitive structures) are tools whereby trance states in particular, and susceptibility in general, can be created. The intertwining of religion, music, and dance, is far older than civilization. Precisely how music exerts its effects on the human mind is yet to be understood, but the effects themselves are well-known. This transcript of GRAY MATTERS: Music and the Brain (1998-Mar) sheds some light on the issue. (Note that there is much in this transcript that I find offensive, in particular the false - in fact, absurd - premise that the dramatic chill sensation that music sometimes produces is a triggering of a phylogenetic baby-is-crying emotional response, and is particularly correlated with sadness and with the impression of a ``lonely, anguished cry in the wilderness.'' Chills are sometimes associated with these, but just as regularly, are associated with their antithesis - with an exultant climax of blaring, massed, densely harmonic sounds and coursing, thumping rhythm. Chills are likely a phenomenon that arises from certain sensory or cognitive transitions or inflections that produce a particularly resonant conscious wavetrain. The resonance is almost surely transduced to visceral state via the amygdala and its brainstem projections. The amygdala is cued to the resonance by the midline nuclei of the thalamus, which are components of the complex of thalamic nuclei that participate in the recruiting response. See The Symphonic Architecture of Mind for more on these themes.)
Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, water deprivation, ingestion of psychotropics, and a variety of other traumatic stresses, also have roles in religious rituals stretching far into prehistory. In a manner similar to but more potent than that of music, these tools induce trances and susceptibility, and particularly, facilitate irrational ideation. They are psychotomimetic, predictably causing delusions and hallucinations. As such, they cause otherwise mentally sound individuals to have encounters with apparitions of the type described by religions, leading them to embrace tenets they would previously have rejected.
The spectrum of techniques enumerated above is the same spectrum used in brainwashing, and religion is simply mass brainwashing.
Opposed to this brainwashing is mental fortitude - the capacity to maintain rational consistency. This capacity varies widely, of course. One determiner of fortitude is intelligence itself, particularly the size, precision, and agility of the various types of symbolic and spatial reasoning facilities and working memories. The thoroughness and precision with which long term memories of utility are registered, the avoidance of registration of memories that are of little or no utility, the integration of memories with each other, the efficiency with which they are organized, the responsive activation of memories of instant utility, and the avoidance of activation of irrelevant memories, are all conducive to mental fortitude. Categorical adequacy is prerequisite. But beyond these basic ingredients, crucial is the firm rejection of any thought which is logically inconsistent with another thought logically established with greater confidence to accurately model reality.
In each mind, the mechanisms of mental fortitude square off against the mechanisms of susceptibility. In an ordinary individual, a rough balance is struck, in which he is rationally consistent in a broad spectrum of routine tasks and mundane subjects, but is not rational in those areas where his community has made a concerted effort to indoctrinate him. Religions by design impart doctrinal tenets which are broad in their impact, so that an adherent's decision-making process is colored by the religion quite often.
In some, mental susceptibility dominates mental fortitude, as discussed by Richard Dawkins in his essay, "Viruses of the Mind":
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Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery makes everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind well prepared by background infection. Exactly the same trick is performed in the ``mystery'' of the Trinity. Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to strike awe. The ``mystery is a virtue'' idea comes to the aid of the Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of the transubstantiation and the ``three-in-one.'' Again, the belief that ``mystery is a virtue'' has a self-referential ring. As Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery.
An extreme symptom of ``mystery is a virtue'' infection is Tertullian's ``Certum est quia impossibile est'' (It is certain because it is impossible''). That way madness lies. One is tempted to quote Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who, in response to Alice's ``One can't believe impossible things'' retorted ``I daresay you haven't had much practice... When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'' Or Douglas Adam's Electric Monk, a labor-saving device programmed to do your believing for you, which was capable of ``believing things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City'' and which, at the moment of being introduced to the reader, believed, contrary to all the evidence, that everything in the world was a uniform shade of pink. But White Queens and Electric Monks become less funny when you realize that these virtuoso believers are indistinguishable from revered theologians in real life. ``It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd'' (Tertullian again). Sir Thomas Browne (1635) quotes Tertullian with approval, and goes further: ``Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.'' And ``I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion [sic].''
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another example, from Newsday/Press Democrat 1990-Dec-23, by David Firestone:
"It remains one of the most baffling yet affecting phenomena in modern religious life: A beam of light or a spot of dirt in an otherwise ordinary place is perceived as the image of the Virgin Mary, and suddenly thousands of pilgrims descend on the site, turning it into a makeshift shrine. ...In previous years, it has been a vision in the sky, a glint off a car bumper, a face in a tortilla, a tear on an icon. ...But while church leaders are often loath to debunk a visionary experience, not wanting to damage the faith of thousands, they are also leery of letting such events get out of hand. If someone who claims to have communicated with the divine begins spreading teachings that are contrary to church dogma, bishops have not hesitated to step in."