by Damon Martin

Finding humor and easy to understand facts as an atheist isn't always an easy thing to do.

Being an atheist myself, I'm always searching out new ways to help people understand science, as well as why I reject faith and religion as a whole. Sometimes it involves long conversations over several hours, other times it's watching a film like Bill Maher's Religulous.

More often than not however it's the suggestion for that friend, co-worker or acquaintance to read a book that I've devoured in the hopes that they will find something interesting or intriguing to capture their attention within it. Normally, I tell them to read the Bible cover to cover and they are almost assured to become an atheist, but that's a conversation for another day.

Two such books have been released recently. One will make you laugh, but also question things like faith and religion. The other is a fantastic exploration of science triumphing over myth that could be used as a text book for any middle school.



Penn Jillette, the talking half of the famous magician duo Penn and Teller, released a book in late summer titled God No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales in which he presents his version of the ten atheist commandments.

The book was actually inspired by noted conservative and Mormon Glenn Beck who suggested while interviewing Penn once that atheists should have their own commandments to live by, much like those in the Bible that Christians claim to follow on a daily basis.

Penn explores his commandments with a slew of personal stories and encounters, while going right for the jugular with subjects like atheists vs. agnostics (the chapter is entitled “Agnostics: No One Can Know For Sure But I Believe They're Full of Shit”).

His stories are told in a way that will definitely keep you laughing, but much like his atheist brethren Ricky Gervais, when Penn gets serious and wants to make a point, his writing is crisp, striking and well thought out.

God No! is a great introduction for anybody wanting to learn more about morality in the atheist world, while also finding humor in everyday situations that many atheists will encounter or in Penn's case have encountered.



While Penn's book is more of a straight forward slap in the face with reality about being an atheist, famed biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins' new book The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True is a spellbinding narrative of the wondrous world of science and how it compares to the myths that seemingly capture our attention as youths.

The book is aimed at children ages 12 and up, and really could be a science manual for kids who are intrigued by science and how things work.

Dawkins along with illustrator Dave McKean weave a beautiful scientific picture of the world while explaining things like where a rainbow comes from, why there are so many different animals, and who the first man was. The questions and myths are laid out and Dawkins sets out to not only disprove them, but explain how science works to give answers that are just as mystifying and amazing.

Dawkins takes the myths and tales that we all learned as children and debunks them in a way that not only makes sense, but makes things fit together like a puzzle.

Throughout the book, Dawkins even admits there are some things he doesn't know the answer to, but unlike myths and religion, he admits to it and doesn't try to come up with a story to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

The Magic of Reality is a book that can be taught to children, but many adults will find just as enthralling. There is also an iPad version of the book (which I purchased), which is a fantastic way to read the text and watch the illustrations come to life.

With either book, God No! by Penn Jillette or The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins, science and atheism are explored, examined and explained in some form or fashion. Both books are well-written, well thought out and a great addition to a library.

Even if you're not an atheist, everyone can learn something from Dawkins and Penn.





by Damon Martin

Have you been looking for a new way to let Jesus into your life? Well, this list of God-related businesses, products and services might provide the answer. And before you ask, no we didn't make any of these up.



[Al in Habit]

10: Gamers 4 Jesus (free / advertiser supported)

Blowing people up on Call of Duty is fun, let's admit it. But you know what's even more fun? Blowing people up on Call of Duty while letting everybody know you're holding hands with Jesus the whole time! This website is for strictly for gamers who love the Son of God; to join you must agree with their statement of faith. They even hold bible study sessions. And once you've finished reading your scripture, you get to smite thyne enemy with God on your side!

9: Christian Life Coaching (Silver Self Coaching $29 per month / Gold Interactive Coaching $209 per month)

We all have goals we want to achieve in life. Whether it's starting a new business, a new job, meeting the right person or just coping with everyday stress. But there's a better way - Godly way. Yep, that's right, if you plop down some money a "qualified professional" will show you how to apply "proven truths from Scripture" so you can
discover "the unparalleled adventure that we call the Christian Life!"

8: Christian Soulmates (free / donation supported)

If you're looking for that special someone, and God is not leading you down the right path, let the internet do it for you! On this dating website, the front page lays it all out for you: "It's all Christian, all single and all here!" You know it's Christian because they use the word 19 times on the home page alone. Yes, it's just that Christian!

7: JC's Girls (free / donation supported)

If you're an exotic dancer, but you just can't get that relationship with Jesus going, this ministry has you covered. Started by an ex-dancer, JC's Girls provides spiritual guidance for those involved in the sex industry. Also knows as the Pussycat Preacher, Heather Veitch calls herself a 'modern day Mary Magdalene.' Just makes me want to start putting clothes on to avoid this one.

6: Pole Dancing for Jesus ($20 per class / free with church program*)

Yes, Texas has figured out a new way for people to look at their state and shake their heads in shame. As if rewriting textbooks to include creationism wasn't bad enough, a fitness studio in the Lone Star State is offering pole dancing classes in the name of JC. The first 11 lucky ladies that bring their church programs to the studio on the 2nd Sunday of each month get admitted for free! Nothing says "I love you God" like reading scripture while hanging upside down from a pole. (*restrictions apply)

5: Holyland Experience (Tickets $35 / Annual Jerusalem Gold Pass $120)

Based in Orlando, Fla. this amusement park is a living, breathing Bible experience. They feature full sized replicas of buildings that are described in the Bible, as well as a live action crucifixion of Jesus! The best part about the Holyland Experience? Free parking! (Sadly their "Pastors Appreciation" promotion is all sold out.)

4: Confession: A Roman Catholic App ($1.99)

Need to unburden yourself but don't have time to make it to the local church? No worries the Catholic confessional app has you covered. You can confess your sins through your iPhone and, based on conscience, choose from 7 different acts of contrition. You also have the "ability to add sins not listed in standard examination of conscience." Angry Birds? How about Confessing Catholics!

3: Windy Ridge Trapper (fees paid for pelts vary from $0.25 for a short green raccoon hide to $60 for a 36" grade I bobcat).

Yep, he's the preacher who buys fur. Based out of West Virginia, this born again Christian wants to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to you, just don't keep any exotic animals around or he's liable to skin them for their fur. He apparently believes in love thy neighbor, just not love thy animal.

2: Miracle Soap ($13.95 / 22oz)

Nothing says clean like being washed in the spirit of the Lord. This family based company has developed a cleansing product stripped of all the harmful chemicals that poison us on a daily basis, replacing them with...yep, you guessed it...Jesus! The sales pitch for their Miracle Soap reads: "The only product that is made in the world that can wash a newborn baby or clean up an oil spill and everything in between." So if your baby ever falls in an oil spill, you're set with a bottle of Miracle Soap!

1: The Catholic Church - Nuff said.

***

Related Posts
Atheists Are Good Without God (And It's Not A War on Christmas)
Christopher Hitchens: A Light That Continues To Burn
South Park Creators Go Mormon

by Brad Warner

My friend John Graves sent me a photo of a billboard that's been appearing all over Los Angeles. The one he took a picture of was right near The Grove, in one of the highest rent districts in one of the highest rent cities in the whole world. The billboard says: "The Bible Guarantees Judgment Day May 21, 2011, ...Cry mightily unto God - Jonah 3:8, Mon-Fri 5:30 - 7PM, 1280 AM Radio FamilyRadio." Next to these words is a photo of a guy who is either kneeling to pray or in the throes of a painful bout of constipation.




According to friends of mine these billboards have also been spotted in the San Francisco Bay area, Minneapolis, Dallas and even here in Akron, Ohio. For those who want to know exactly how they worked this date out, there is a convenient website that explains it all. Frankly, I couldn't get past the second paragraph.

A little bit of research on the Internets reveals that the billboards are based upon the work of a Christian broadcaster by the name of Harold Camping, president of something called Family Stations, Inc. a religious broadcasting outfit based in California. Back in 1992, Camping published a book called 1994? in which he claimed that the End Times, in which the world will undergo severe tribulations in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming, would start in ’94.

He and his followers stood outside the Alameda Veteran's Memorial Building on September 6th of that year with their Bibles open heavenward to await Jesus' return. Jesus never showed up. Camping said he may have made a mathematical error. Now he says his new calculations are certain beyond a shadow of doubt. The folks at a website called The Thinking Atheist have produced this video explaining some more about Camping from their perspective.

All of these billboards had me wondering if the whole thing might be some kind of elaborate hoax, a promo for some big budget end-of-the-world thriller. I'm still a little skeptical. But unless whoever is behind the hoax is able to manipulate Wikipedia and Amazon with an impressive degree of skill, as well as post a whole lot of other stuff on the web that corroborates the existence of Camping and his church, this would appear to be for real.

Christianity is in part an apocalyptic religion. Some scholars have argued that Jesus himself was a preacher whose main stock in trade was predicting the coming end of the world. This seems to be borne out by the New Testament as it has come down to us.

One of the biggest problems the early church had was how to deal with Christ's prediction recorded in Luke 9:27 that "there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God." The "some standing here" would appear to refer to his original 12 apostles. When those apostles started dying off, guys who came along slightly later like St. Paul had a hard time explaining themselves since the kingdom of God had yet to appear.

And yet, somehow, they persevered and made their case quite successfully. Christianity has lasted for over 2000 years predicting that the end of the world is coming soon. This they have done mainly by making the definition of "soon" more and more vague. And although many mainstream Christians have switched over to viewing Christ's apocalyptic statements as some kind of metaphor, there are still some who take it literally and try to work out the exact day it's all supposed to happen.

The Jehovah's Witnesses famously predicted the end of time to begin in 1917, which they then revised to 1918, then to 1925, and finally to 1975. Yet although the Rapture did not come on any of those dates, the Jehovah's Witnesses continue to thrive and ring doorbells all over the world.

One would assume that if somebody prophesized the end of the world on a given date and that given date came and went without major incident, everyone who had once believed in the prophecy would lose interest and whoever made the prophesy wouldn't be listened to anymore. But this has not been the case. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true. Prophecies of the end of the world do not have to work out for them to have power.

Camping has obviously got some money behind him. That billboard near The Grove in Los Angeles alone must have set him back a load of cash. This would indicate that he has a healthy following. I would not expect that following to decrease markedly after May 22nd. I'm sure they'll be just fine. I predict that Camping will come up with a justification for his seeming failure and the troops will rally behind him to await the next prophesy. Maybe he's working on that even now. It's a time-honored pattern and I see no reason why this one will be any different.

I'll assume most of you reading this probably share the belief of most people who have studied the New Testament. The consensus of contemporary scholars is that the New Testament is cobbled together from various sources. Many of its writers were not even who they claimed to be according to Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman in his new book Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Most of us here, then, don't even give a second thought to the notion that Camping or any of the others who prophesize the destruction of the world based on Biblical calculations are correct. Yet obviously quite a few people believe it and maybe quite a few more, though not believers, still wonder if it just might be true.

Like you, I am at a loss to understand why anyone at all believes this stuff or even gives it a second thought. It's been pointed out by those who study organizations like this that their members are often people who would otherwise be regarded as having a high degree of intelligence. Although I know of no studies of Camping's group, I've seen studies of other religious organizations that believe similarly bat-shit crazy things and who have many members that are highly educated and seemingly sane. So one can't simply write off those who believe this stuff as merely stupid. Well, I would say that they're stupid to believe such things, but many of them are not stupid according to our usual methods of judging people's intelligence or lack thereof. They may well be college educated, socially adept and so forth.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Matters of belief, whatever those beliefs may be, are things by which we define our sense of self. Most of us hold our sense of self as the most precious thing we possess. We'll go to any lengths to defend it. We'll lie, we'll steal, we'll sometimes even kill to protect this sense of self.

Holding on to a set of beliefs is a great way to reinforce the sense of self. If that set of beliefs is an unpopular one, this can work even better. It really sets us off against everybody else. It's a tremendous way to establish your unique ego.

Plus, organizations like this often offer a tremendous sense of community to their membership. This is one of the things our contemporary society really has trouble with. I know I often feel alone and alienated. It's hard to find a community in the world we live in these days. But we so desperately want that sense of belonging that if it means believing in bat-shit crazy ideas, the trade-off doesn't seem so bad.

I just wonder what these guys are going to do on May 22nd.


***

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

by Keith Daniels

The Bible is often presented by believers as a monolithic creation, as if it descended from Heaven whole, perfect, and in King James' English. The truth, as in so many things, is so much more complicated and interesting. The text of the Hebrew Tanakh which became what Christians dismissively call the "Old Testament" began as an oral tradition that was eventually written down in Hebrew and Aramaic by unknown scribes over hundreds of years in what's called "abjad" script - a system of writing in which only the consonants are set down and the reader is intended to fill in the vowels. These individual writings were eventually collected into a generally accepted canon by around 400 BCE and finally codified at a later but unknown date, probably by 100 CE.

And that's just the "Old Testament".

Similarly, the New Testament is a disparate collection of texts from numerous and mostly unknown authors - despite traditional ascriptions - writing from between around 50 to 200 CE. None of the books of the New Testament were written during the lifetime of a historical Jesus. And according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the popular conception of one singular ancient council of the Church that decided what books were in and what were out is inaccurate:

That Tridentine Council didn't happen until 1545, at which point the 27 books we now know as the New Testament were finally confirmed. There are other books, though. Among them are texts which describe teachings of Christ that the modern Christian religion would find awkward to say the least, like the Gospel of Mary, which rejects the traditional depiction of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, argues for female leadership in the church, and depicts Jesus as a Buddha-like philosopher urging his followers to find salvation in their own minds.

There is a theory that books like the Gospel of Mary were rejected from the New Testament by the male hierarchy of the early church who sought to cement their own dominance. Many of these books were deemed heretical and only existed in the references of their orthodox condemnations until the rediscovery of caches like Nag Hammadhi.

Similarly, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated that the Hebrew Bible in its early incarnations was much more varied before its codification than had been supposed. What if the early Jews or the scholars who translated their writings also omitted any subjects which might have been politically inconvenient? What if, for example, God - Yahweh - once had a wife?

Well, University of Exeter senior Theology and Religion lecturer Francesca Stavrakopoulou believes just that.

Stavrakopoulou isn't the first to make this claim, and other religious scholars agree with her. J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research says:

Hat tip: RichardDawkins.net Happy birthday, Mr. Dawkins!

by Blogbot

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Tarion in Decadence: Are Atheists Your Cup Of Tea?]

This week we commune with Tarion Suicide and get the gospel on her fave SG group: Atheists.

• WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: I have no idea where people find half this stuff but it's always good for a laugh or at very least a good vent. This group is the A-Z or atheist topics and jokes and is extremely active. It's full of very interesting individuals and is a fantastic group if you are like-minded.


• DISCUSSION TIP: Always have your facts straight!


• BEST RANDOM QUOTE: "I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence."


• MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: At the moment it's "Prayer caused the Japan earthquake???"


• WHO'S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Come all ye unbelievers, freethinkers, blasphemers, doubters, heathens, heretics, infidels, scoffers, skeptics - hell even you wishy washy agnostics.

by Damon Martin

During the holiday season, atheists in America and Canada are letting everyone know they are still good without God. The message has been spread across buses and billboards throughout North America to send an alternative message during this normally oversaturated time of religious rejoice.

Groups like Secular Samaritan, American Humanist Association, and the Centre for Inquiry are responsible for the Christmas time ad buys. The gospel they’re trying to spread with these billboards is that goodness and morality are not in the exclusive domain of those that believe in a higher power.

Several secular and Atheist groups have done similar campaigns around the holidays before, with many Christians, especially in America, claiming such groups are declaring “War on Christmas.”



[Tekky Suicide in Steals Christmas]

One of the most prominent advertisements that set off such alarms this year was a billboard bought by the American Atheists on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel just outside of New York City. The billboard says: “You know it’s a myth. This season celebrate reason.” The Catholic League promptly responded with a billboard of their own on the New York side of the Lincoln Tunnel stating: “You know it’s real. This season celebrate Jesus.”

The Centre for Inquiry in Canada has purchased bus ads and transit signs that state: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Below this headline the group lists religious figures like Jesus Christ and Allah, mythical creatures like Bigfoot, leprechauns, and the tooth fairy, and practices such as prayer, astrology and ESP. The group will also be holding in-person educational events featuring expert speakers.

Meanwhile back in the United States, the Secular Samaritans, have purchased ads on buses servicing the campus of the University of Illinois that promote a particularly powerful message. The ads feature public figures such as Bill Gates. The slogan that runs alongside an image of the Microsoft founder says: “Second richest person in the world. Donated over $26 billion to charity. Bill Gates is good without God.” However it’s been reported that some religious folks in Illinois are outraged that the bus ads are allowed to run, regardless of the overwhelmingly positive message.

However such prejudice against the secular community is not uncommon. A poll done in 2006 by the University of Minnesota revealed that over 47% of people surveyed would disapprove of a family member marrying an atheist. Nearly 40% of people interviewed listed atheists as people they would identify with the least to share a vision of American society. Others interviewed saw atheists as “amoral” or involved in criminal behavior or drugs.

Given the religious community’s poor view of non-believers, it’s especially ironic that atheists and agnostics were shown to be the most knowledgeable about religion in a recent Pew Research Center poll. The results of a test which asked Americans what they knew about religion, were somewhat staggering – especially to those who profess to know better. Out of 32 questions posed, on average 16 correct answers were given. Atheists and agnostics scored the highest, just over half of the Catholics knew why they took communion, while Bible-belt Southerners scored the lowest of any identified group.

Some would argue that the billboards and ads are somehow combative and that atheists are trying to take away the religious aspects of the season. Atheists (myself included) are just following the lead of free thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris that say we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about our non-belief, even at this time of year. In the end, campaigns or not, atheists will continue to not believe in God, we will continue to believe in science, and, BTW, no one is declaring war. Well, unless you’re Daniel Baldwin.

***

If you’re an atheist and want to find like-minded souls, you might want to join SuicideGirls’ Atheist Group (for members only).

Further reading: The Evolution of Religion, Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective, and Filtering the Truth: Religion – Friend or Foe?.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see R. Elisabeth Cornwell’s articles The Evolution of Religion and Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective in these pages recently. Could Suicide Girls become a journal of serious discourse on religious matters? Incredible. And to think there are a bunch of “Buddhists” out there who say I shouldn’t be writing here.

You can’t argue with Cornwell’s thesis in her latest piece that women have generally been extremely poorly treated by religion and yet continue nonetheless to propagate the very beliefs responsible for their often sorry position in society. You hear a lot of talk about primitive matriarchal religions that treated women well. But most of those religions are so ancient and so thoroughly dead that what we can say about them is mainly conjecture. The powerful patriarchal religions of the modern world have mostly treated women like shit.

Except for Buddhism.

You knew I’d say that, didn’t you? But it happens to be true. Historically Buddhism has been much better to women than any of the other major religions*. To be sure, there are examples of times when certain Buddhists have treated women just as badly as any other religion. But in doing so these Buddhists have gone against the explicit directions of the founder of their faith.

Buddha’s first order of monks was an all-boys club with a big “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door. But there was a group of women, including Buddha’s step-mom (his mom had died giving birth to him and he was raised by an aunt) and the wife he ditched when he first went on his quest for the truth**, who hung out with the monks, listened to Buddha’s lectures and practiced the meditation he taught. One day Buddha’s step-mom went to Buddha on behalf of these women and asked that they be admitted to the order. Buddha said, “Forget it.”

But a little while later, Buddha’s right hand man Ananda asked Buddha, “Are women less intelligent than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as intelligent as men. Ananda said, “Are women less capable of reaching enlightenment than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as capable as men of reaching enlightenment. Having thus backed him into a corner Ananda went for the kill and asked, “Then why don’t you admit them into the order?”

Buddha had to admit that his initial decision had been wrong. So he opened the order to women. But he was a realist. He knew India in his time was a male-dominated society and would look very much askance at a religious order that admitted women. Plenty of people were already bitching at him for a lot of the radical stuff he’d done. So he made up a list of rules women had to follow that were much stricter than the ones men had to observe and he separated the boys from the girls into different monasteries. He also predicted the order would eventually fail because of this decision. He was wrong there.

Once Buddha was dead, though, less sexually liberated men took control of the order. After a while some male monks developed a stupidly superior attitude that led a lot of them to take ridiculous vows such as that they would never touch a woman or speak to one, some even vowed never to so much as look at a woman. The founder of the Buddhist order in which I was ordained, Dogen Zenji, called bullshit on that.

Dogen wrote a piece called “Prostrating to The Attainment of the Marrow” (Raihai Tokuzui in Japanese). You can read it in volume one of his masterwork, Shobogenzo.

Dogen says, “nowadays (nowadays, in this case, being the year 1240) extremely stupid people look at women without having corrected the prejudice that women are objects of sexual greed. Disciples of the Buddha must not be like this. If whatever may become the object of sexual greed is to be hated, do not all men deserve to be hated too? As regards the causes and conditions of becoming tainted, a man can be the object, a woman can be the object, what is neither man nor woman can be the object, and dreams and fantasies, flowers in space, can also be the object. There have been impure acts done with a reflection on water as an object, and there have been impure acts done with the sun in the sky as an object.”

I can vouch for that last bit. I used to work in a group home for mentally handicapped adults. We had one guy there who had a thing for shoes. You didn’t dare take yours off when he was around lest you find a sticky present inside when you put them back on! Dogen says, “if we hate whatever might become the object of sexual greed, all men and women will hate each other, and we will never have any chance to attain salvation.”

I always think of this when I hear people talking about the supposedly great virtue in the way some religions force women to cover their bodies lest men become sexually greedy. If we follow that logic then an oil magnate who owns a flashy Cadillac ought to drive around with it covered in a burlap sack to keep those who can’t afford such cars from suffering the sin of envy. We’ve all got our own specific objects of greed and it’s up to us to deal with that ourselves. It’s not up to other people to shield us from temptation.

Dogen goes on to say, “Even in China, there was a stupid monk who made the following vow: ‘Through every life, in every age, I shall never look at a woman.’ Upon what morality is this vow based? What wrong is there in a woman? What virtue is there in a man? Among bad people there are men who are bad people. Among good people there are women who are good people.”

He cites numerous famous female Buddhist masters whose understanding far surpassed most men, saying that a guy who took a vow like this would never get a chance to learn from them. He then derides the then-current Japanese custom of not allowing women to visit certain temples.

To get back to what Cornwell wrote, in her article on women and religion she says, “In order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support that it offers.” This is truer than I think even she realizes.

One of the greatest marks of Buddha as a real man of genius was that he didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He realized religion and spirituality were pretty fucked up. But he also understood the very important role they play in human society. As Cornwell points out in her article on the evolution of religion, religion serves a need much, much deeper than anything the intellect can ever hope to reach.

This is why atheism, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for religion. It’s like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food. It’s an intellect-based solution for a problem that has nothing at all to do with the intellect.

Buddhism did away with deities and belief systems, but did not do away with ritual and practice. Buddhist temples, though they aren’t strictly speaking “religious temples,”*** look like religious temples and the things you do in Buddhist temples seem like the same things you do in religious temples. You chant, you prostrate yourself in front of statues, there are people in funny clothes inside, there are rules to be followed, there is a community of fellow adherents, and all the rest. Thus the deep need we all feel to belong to that kind of an institution is satisfied. Yet there is no pretense that some big guy with a beard who lives up in the sky will smite you if you fail to do these things or reward you if you get all the steps just right. It’s all up to you.

I know I sound like a shill for Buddhism here. But I’m not really interested in converting anyone. If you can find another philosophy that does all these things, by all means go for it. Or if Buddhism’s just not for you, that’s fine too. No skin off my ass either way.

Although technically I am a Buddhist monk, I’m also a bit of a reluctant Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist because I have to admit that Buddhism really is the best thing on offer. I tried the rest and went with the best. But I don’t really self-identify as “a Buddhist” unless I’m specifically called upon to do so (such as when I’m asked to write a column about Buddhism for a pin-up website).

Still, I think in its attitude towards women and in its immensely practical attitude towards religion itself, Buddhism hasn’t been bested yet. Maybe someday. But not yet.



*Actually I don’t consider Buddhism to be a religion at all. But for the purposes of this article I’m treating it as one. It’s not a religion in the sense that it doesn’t have a deity and it isn’t based on spirituality. It is a religion in terms of its age, its function in society and its number of adherents. This subject is much too deep to get into in a footnote, though!

**Yes it's true, Buddha left his wife. But he didn't exactly dump her in a roach infested tenement with four screaming babies. Buddha was a prince at the time and knew his wife would be very well cared for when he was gone. There was a tradition in India of householders leaving home on spiritual quests and there were, and still are, customs and legal regulations in place to deal with such cases. And please note that later on his wife too entered the Buddhist order. Again, this is way too big for a footnote!

***See first footnote.

For further reading check out this page on the history of women in Buddhism.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

As we celebrate the 200th birthday of the godfather of evolution, Charles Darwin, mankind still looks to religion for answers that his theories have tangibly brought fourth. Statistically speaking however, womankind is even more likely to believe and pass on religious dogma, which presents a logical dichotomy given that they're the gender most oppressed by their faith.

Following on from her previous article on The Evolution of Religion, R. Elisabeth Cornwell explores the evolutionary reasons why women endure and pass on the bondage of belief.



Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective

R. Elisabeth Cornwell, PhD

Religion has both revered and reviled women, exalting their fertility and fearing their sexuality. While religions throughout history have mutated, gone extinct, and propagated -- the position of women within their ever expanding reach has usually fared poorly. Yet, women are far more likely to be religious, attend religious services, and inculcate their children with their beliefs*. Why are women so willing to give in to religious dogma and subject themselves to the degradations often inflicted upon them? This is a fascinating question, and is especially perplexing when you consider the great strides toward equality women have gained in the West. Yet, without women passing on faith, belief, and dogma, religion could not survive through the generations.

The answers we seek shall neither come easily nor be all-encompassing. As with all things psychological, we must account for individual differences, culture, family, friends, media and politics. However, we can begin to unravel the mystery of why women willingly submit to male domination through religious hierarchies by examining our most evolved psychological adaptations. While it is not possible to cover all the details necessary to treat such a vast and complicated subject, I hope to tease you into considering ideas that challenge long-held assumptions.

Sexual Selection: Why Men and Women Differ

In case it has escaped your notice (or fallen foul of your political sensibilities), men and women differ. In terms of our physical differences, women on average are smaller, weaker, more gracile, and distribute fat differently. There are a number of physical secondary sexual characteristics, that is, characteristics that are not necessary for reproduction but differ between the sexes, some of which are obvious such as more muscular development in men and exaggerated breast development in women**. Other characteristics are more subtle; For example, women have fuller lips, larger eyes, and smaller chins on average than men. These characteristics are mediated by hormones, largely testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone.

But the physical characteristics we can see are not the only differences that come about because of hormones. Our brains are awash in hormones throughout our fetal development, during our childhood, and then the familiar (some might say ominous) surge during adolescence. As adults, our hormones still continue to affect us and as we age, the waning of hormones affects us as well.

It is because of hormones that male and female brains differ. While there is no evidence for differences in intelligence (as was believed in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth - women were not even allowed to vote until 1920!), to deny that differences exist is simply wishful thinking. Evolution cares nothing for either misogyny or feminism; it cares not for what is moral or immoral, just or unjust: without caring at all, it builds survival machines to carry genes into the next generation.

But what has this to do with religious beliefs among women? Quite a bit actually. When we look at some of the behavioral and psychological differences between women and men, we can glimpse some of the adaptations necessary for our ancestors' survival. What makes humans human is our large brains, and in order for our brains to develop, evolution had to 'intervene'; Ancestral women had to develop a wider pelvis to allow the large head of a newborn through the birth canal. Another way to facilitate and accommodate big brains was to give birth to premature infants. This is why human neonates are so helpless compared to all other primates.

As hominid brains grew in size and complexity, so too did the need for extended childhood, late-onset reproduction, and extended life-span. The vulnerability of infants and children would have led our ancestral females to select mates who were more likely to stay around, as well as to rely heavily on support from the group. Women would have relied on close female relatives to provide both emotional and practical support. Males within the group would have provided protein and defense against invading males. It was not only a woman's individual survival that was dependent on the group, but more importantly it was essential to the survival of her offspring. In other words, the future of her genes.

With this in mind, we can begin to understand why it is so essential for women to fit into their social group. Exclusion would have meant extinction since those women who could not live in accord with the other members of their group would have had fewer or no descendants. Thus, the evolutionary pressures that shaped the need to live in harmony with the group pressed more strongly on women than on men. This is not to suggest that there were not strong evolutionary pressure for males, too, to conform, indeed there were. However, males who risked upsetting the status quo and did so successfully would have gained an advantage in their own reproductive success. Females who tried the same would not.

Before going on, I need to go touch on a rather obvious but extremely important element of male/female differences: unequal reproductive success. This simply means that men are capable of producing a far greater range of offspring than women. Reproductive success of the average male equals that of the average female. But the most successful male is far more successful than the least successful male, and than any female. Males can hold harems (which means that some males never reproduce at all). Females cannot hold harems - or at least there would be no point in their doing so. Sperm is cheap, wombs are costly and gestation time consuming. Women are limited in the number of offspring they can produce, while men, feasibly, could sire thousands of infants if only they could find willing partners. Thus, where women tend to range between 0 and 5 offspring, men can range from 0 to double digits (and beyond!). This very simple fact makes it far more advantageous for men to risk everything, including social exclusion and death, if there is a chance they can gain sexual access to a substantial number of women. However, women gain very little by risking it all, since they cannot increase their ability to have more offspring by increasing their number of sexual partners. Women therefore would have been under much stronger evolutionary pressures to 'play it safe' and remain with the status quo. Let the man take the risks, and if he succeeds choose him as a sexual partner.

Religion and Cultural Norms

It is not my purpose here to discuss the relationship between religion and culture, but I will suggest that, for as long as written history has existed, cities, states, and empires have enlisted the help of religious leaders, and religious leaders have relied on the protection of the state. This is true of all the major religions of today, with no exception.

Religion is a human invention, the gods and goddesses that have come and gone during our short history have all displayed the best and (more often) worst human traits. They fell in love, jealousy was common, revenge, anger and trickery prevailed, the struggle for power was universal, and all could be brought to folly and woe due to excessive hubris, greed, and lust. Soap operas pale in comparison! What concerns me, though, is that religion reflected the culture of the times - and, for better or worse, the religions most prominent today are all rather ancient beasts that grew out of a time when women were subservient to men, and often considered as property to be bartered, battered, and controlled.

So we are back to our original question: Why do women today continue to fall victim to an archaic system of beliefs that foster misogynistic behavior? Why are women even more likely to be religious than men? The simple answer is that it is safe. Please don't take this as a slight against women -- it isn't. Male/female differences exist, but I'm certainly not suggesting that risk taking is a better option than playing it safe. After all, women are less likely than men to die doing incredibly stupid things (check out the Darwin Awards it is nearly exclusively male 'winners'). But the fact that women are less likely to push the status quo for fear of social exclusion and even retribution makes a lot of evolutionary sense.

I acknowledge that some women have in fact taken extraordinary risks and have paid the ultimate price. And I am not saying that the majority of men will risk everything in order to achieve a particular goal. But we are looking at general trends, and men overall take more risks.

Religion and Kinship

Religion creates the illusion of kinship, and kinship is crucial to a woman's reproductive success. Even today, single mothers (and fathers) who receive support from family often avoid many of the pitfalls that single parents without support endure. Family support reduces stress through emotional support as well as practical support, and throughout the last 100,000 years would have been a critical factor in raising an infant to reach reproductive age.

The instant support group that religious institutions offer remains today. Churches, synagogues, temples, mosques offer immediate female fictive kin (assumed family). Raising a child, with or without a partner, is a difficult and daunting task. Women, especially new mothers, seek out other women for advice, encouragement, and support. Certainly, women who were raised with a religious upbringing would be more likely to become dependent on these intimate social relationships with other women. This inter-dependency taps into deep psychological needs, and being excluded from it would trigger a very primal fear response.

In order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support that it offers. This is especially true in small and/or insular communities where one could face being shunned by family and friends. And in some parts of the world, abandonment of belief would bring a death sentence to be carried out by family members. Women traditionally have had the strongest ties to family compared to men: thus breaking those ties will be more difficult and more psychologically painful. While nobody has done a specific study of atheism and women, it is easy to guess that those women who have been raised in more traditional religious homes, with family and religion closely tied together, are most likely to fear of rejection and isolation if they announce their lack of faith. Some manage to break through, but not without significant loss. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel, shows the strength and courage it takes to leave one's faith and family. The psychologist Jill Myton also reveals not only her own struggles against religious indoctrination, but also documents the struggles of others who left one of the most secretive and exclusive religious cults in the West (see interview).

Humans have the capacity to show great strength, courage and integrity. Sometimes we need just a little push, to encourage us to question those ideas and long-held beliefs we hold most dearly. It is threatening to question not only our own beliefs, but those of our family and friends. We feel safe, even in falsehoods, as long as others believe the same. In order for women to move on from the archaic falsehoods of religion, dialogs need to be opened and our most intimate fears revealed. Women can abandon the tyranny of religion, but it will take courage - the same sort of courage that won women the right to vote, the right to work, and the right to steer their own destiny.


*Sources:

1. The Harris Poll: The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans 2003.
2. Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi (1975). The social psychology of religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3. Francis & Wilcox (1996) Religion and Gender Orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 20, 119-121.

**Other mammals do not display exaggerated breast development, and it is not necessary for lactation.


Special thanks to Andy Thomson for sharing ideas about this topic.

R. Elisabeth Cornwell is an Assistant Professor of Research at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her research includes work in the area of hormones, pheromones, and sexual selection in humans. Her most recent paper can be found in Animal Behavior, regarding evidence in support of various theories of mate selection in humans. Most recently her work has involved differences between theist and atheists on a variety of psychological profiles.

My new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is out now. The nice folks at Borders put an excerpt from the book on-line and you can read it by clicking HERE. I’ll be touring extensively to promote it this year, see below for a link to a list of dates.

I want to talk a little about the book. Not just to promote it (though I won’t deny I’m doing that), but because I wrote it to address a topic I think is really important. And that is, why we can’t seem to accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman. I already ranted in my last column about how Buddhism isn’t spirituality. But here I’m using the word “spiritual” just to refer to that area of life that addresses the deep questions about the nature of things. It’s convenient shorthand. But everything I said last time still stands.

ANYWAY, there’s a long-standing notion that runs through a wide variety of religious traditions that people won’t listen to good spiritual advice unless the source of that advice possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men (and women, of course, but I’m quoting the intro to the old Superman TV show, which was very sexist). Thus it is not enough that Jesus said to love your enemies and advised that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In order for anyone to accept that good stuff, the folks who spread his message thought we also needed to believe that Jesus had magic powers. I mean, why should we bother treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves unless the guy who said we should could change water into wine? D’uh.

This line of thinking runs through all the world’s great and not-so-great spiritual traditions. Buddhists are not any more immune to it than anybody else. There are hordes of stories of Buddha’s miracles and even of his virgin birth. The only real difference with Buddhists is that, by and large, they don’t tend to give a whole lot of importance to whether or not you believe those stories. In fact several major Buddhist lineages discount them entirely. But that doesn’t mean a lot of other Buddhists don’t believe them or even that for plenty of Buddhists those stories aren’t crucial.

The notion that for a spiritual teacher to be believed he or she must appear to be superhuman still carries a lot of weight even today. Of course, nowadays we’re less likely to believe our contemporary spiritual teachers can really do magic tricks -- though lots of people still fall for the sleight of hand of Eastern fakirs and Western faith healers. Sophisticated, worldly urban types tend to expect their miracles to be a bit more subtle than walking on water or turning into fire-spitting whirly-gigs as the Buddha is reported to have done. But we still expect miracles.

Sometimes we like our guys to be Great Ancient Masters reincarnated right in Beverly Hills or possess psychic abilities and beatific vision. And even when we’re not after those sorts of blatant conjuring acts we still look for people who conform to our image of spiritual purity. Those who are spiritually pure shouldn’t be like ordinary people. They need to be perpetually serene and unaffected, liberated from bodily desires and distress. When we find out that they’re people just like the rest of us we’re liable to rebel and turn upon them viciously. The mechanism by which this happens in Zen is well documented in books like Shoes Outside the Door and The Great Failure. Neither Richard Baker, subject of Shoes Outside the Door nor Dainin Katagiri, the subject of The Great Failure, ever claimed to be spiritual Supermen, but that didn’t stop certain of their followers from reacting with anger, distress and even grief when it was revealed they were not.

Of course someone who advocates a meditative practice ought to show signs of that meditative practice having had some good effects on their own lives. That’s perfectly reasonable to expect. What’s not perfectly reasonable to expect is that those good effects should manifest in precisely the manner we imagine they ought to. We can never know what these people would have been like if they hadn’t done their practice. Furthermore it’s not how meditative practice has affected your teacher that’s important. It’s only how meditative practice affects you that matters. And you are the only one who will ever see the full extent of that.

ANYWAY, the reason I wrote Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate was, in part, to try and kill the notion of the spiritual Superman for good and all. The only way I felt I could do that effectively was to character assassinate a specific Eastern spiritual teacher. Since I come from a tradition that believes you don’t find the really important truths by looking outward but by looking inward, it wasn’t good enough for me to do what the authors of the books I mentioned above did and pick out someone else as my target. The teacher whose reputation I was to trash had to be me. Admittedly, I’m not a really good example because so few people actually believe that I am any kind of Great Enlightened Being. Those that do are mostly a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.

Still, since I’ve started becoming more popular I’ve seen people react to me in ways that are a little scary. I’ve only been recognized on the street by random strangers a couple of times. But these days when I walk into a meditation center where they know my work, people’s eyes light up in a freaky way and some even seem to cower when I try to speak to them. To these folks I am no ordinary person. I find that kind of reaction difficult to deal with. Some people are starting to react to me in ways that only make sense if they have begun to project something ethereal upon the image they carry of me in their minds. They expect things of me that they would never expect of each other. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t really want to write this book. It’s hard work exposing your worst side to public scorn and ridicule. This book was physically painful to write. I had at least half dozen other ideas for a third book that would have been a breeze to write and would have been more commercially bankable. But this book screamed at me to get it done until I had no choice but to obey.

There was something very deep that could only be got to by digging around in my own guts. In doing so I discovered that even the tawdriest portions of my life are not all ugliness and horror. In fact, much to my surprise I found very little of that. There’s a kind of beauty to the truth that transcends whether or not you find that truth to be pleasant or objectionable. Plus there’s some jokes in the book too.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions. Because there are still a lot of illusions out there about those of us in this game. The public has been conditioned by the media to believe that teachers in Eastern traditions aren’t like our garden-variety preachers, priests, imams and rabbis. Yogis, Gurus and Zen Masters, we’re told, have this special something called “Enlightenment” that makes them transcend the world of ordinary humans. You can make very good money exploiting that twaddle. There’s even one so-called “Roshi” (i.e. Zen Master) who sells gullible rich people five days in his godlike presence for $50,000 on the grounds that by being in proximity to him they just might get some of this Enlightenment thing for themselves. It won’t happen, so you might as well give the money to me instead!

But just because no spiritual teacher is Superman doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot through the practice of meditation. I happen to believe zazen is the only way humanity has to get out of the mess it’s in. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother shouting about it.

In this media saturated age where every person’s sleeziest action is captured on digital video and put up on YouTube for all to see two hours later, there is nowhere left for spiritual Supermen to hide the pulleys and wires that enable them to do their magic tricks. It has become urgent that we kill the idea of the spiritual Superman and start looking at how we can accept good spiritual advice even from people who burp and fart and -- oh my god! -- fuck just like we do. If we can’t do that there won’t be any way we can accept good spiritual advice from anybody.


Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

At SuicideGirls our mission is to challenge stereotypical ideas (both physical and philosophical) forced on us by society, to encourage free-thinking, and to champion an alternative spirit. In the pursuit of this goal, one of the most hotly debated topics on the Newswire has been that of religion, which is the source of some the most regimented and intransigent examples of human thought found today. We therefore sought the opinion of some highly advanced free-thinkers on the subject. Here, in a special report for SuicideGirls, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, PhD and J. Anderson Thomson, MD, who work alongside Richard Dawkins in support of his Foundation For Reason & Science, share their thoughts on the possible roots of religion from an evolutionary perspective.

The Evolution of Religion

R. Elisabeth Cornwell, PhD and J. Anderson Thomson, MD



The Human Niche

Humans, like all other living beings, are a product of four billion years of evolutionary processes. We have been shaped and pounded by the rhythms of our planet's geology and climate as well by the continual interplay among biological organisms. You exist because eons of your ancestors, from bacteria to primates, struggled and reproduced successfully. The genes that reside in each and every one of us are the ones that helped our ancestors not only to survive, but to out-reproduce their competitors. And as improbable as it might seem, you are here through the success of billions and billions of generations.

Every living species on the planet -- from cabbages to whales -- has gone through this process, and evolved to fit a particular niche. Our human niche just happens to have emphasized brains over brawn, which has given us language, creativity, curiosity, and the most complicated social system of any species. However, our incredibly powerful brain is locked in a continual battle between reason and ancestral fears. This conflict helps us understand why religion has held such a grip on humanity and why reason must still fight to be heard.

Our ability to solve complex cognitive problems evolved over our long, tenuous, evolutionary history. Many adaptations that squeezed through the sieve of environmental constraints have led up to more and more complex brains. This culminated in fine-tuned software for negotiating the competitive social hierarchies that have been a crucial aspect to primate, especially human, evolution. We humans evolved the uniquely complex communication system that is language, and it in turn drove the evolution of more and more complex social interactions.

Adaptations: Designs for Success

But we are getting ahead of ourselves: we need to consider a host of adaptations that have brought us to where we are today. Adaptations are the physical and behavioral characteristics that equip a species to survive in its own particular way. The human way being as unique and complex as it is, untangling concepts of culture, including religion, is not an easy undertaking and we are only in our infancy in exploring our evolutionary roots. One way to think about these peculiarly human adaptations is as a series of software and hardware upgrades, each dependent on the other.

A common fallacy hoisted up by creationists (including 'intelligent design' sophists) is that adaptations can't work until every part is finished and in place: they ask questions like, "What good is half an eye?" The biologist Richard Dawkins has devoted more than one book to answering questions of that kind. Darwin's theory of natural selection uncovered the mystery of how the tiniest of incremental adaptations over vast amounts of time could lead to the evolution of something as complex and sophisticated as an eye or language [*1]. The mutually supportive development of computer software and hardware echoes how adaptations have built up over time, but orders of magnitude faster. Your laptop is a supercomputer by yesterday's standards, which can dance circles around the giant computers of living memory. Through small incremental steps in both hardware and software, computing technology has advanced beyond the dreams of only a few generations ago (if you doubt this, watch an old rerun of Star Trek and wonder at the huge banks of on-board computers). Of course, the mutations and adaptations witnessed by the computing industry were actually designed by intelligent beings who had specific goals in mind. Biological adaptations, by contrast, were driven by the blind and often cruel hand of natural selection. Evolution has only one goal: successful replication.

In humans, the trajectory that took us from bacteria to fish to reptiles to mammals including primates has left an indelible mark. An interesting and fun read on our unique evolutionary pathway is Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Shubin suggests that when we take a look at how our bodies are put together, an intelligent designer becomes ever more implausible -- there are too many flaws, too many 'patches' that don't quite work right, but good enough to squeak by. The mind is no different: we are a product of millions of tiny adaptations -- and with no one in charge to make certain they all run smoothly and correctly in conjunction -- we end up with all sorts of psychological hiccups. Religion is one of them.

Tool Making: Goals and Process

Early in our hominid past, Homo hablis -- 'handy man' -- developed the ability to make tools. Such a skill required them to plan ahead, to learn from mistakes, as well as to learn from other individuals, perhaps in 'master-apprentice' relationships. Psychologically this might have been the seed from which grew our need to see purpose in not only man-made things but all things -- tools and weapons were made for a purpose, so why not stars and rivers too? Those hominids who became slightly more proficient at tool-making, planning and orienting toward goals would have been more successful, left more descendants -- and those successful individuals became our ancestors. Through tiny mutations, both physical and psychological, our ancestors became more adept at these skills. Adaptations necessary for advanced tool-making and use would have driven the psychological need to see purpose. Picking up a piece of flint, your ancestor would have needed the skill to determine if it possessed the qualities necessary to produce a cutting tool or spear head -- and that skill is the direct result of a purpose driven mind. We will get back to the critical importance of purpose in a moment.

Theory of Mind

The ability to build tools in order to achieve an end goal is only one adaptation that might have predisposed us to cultural and religious beliefs. After all, chimps are capable of making-tools, learning from other chimps, and employ goal-directed behavior. A significant adaptation that guided the course of human evolution has been our capacity to view the world through the eyes of another -- known as 'theory of mind'. This ability, which allows us to attribute mental states such as beliefs and desires to others, and intentions that differ from our own [*2], is so complex, it does not fully develop in children until around the age of four [*3]. While some scientists argue that our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, possess some abilities to perceive the intentions of others -- it is humans who have honed this ability to a fine art.

What does this have to do with religion? As our ancestors developed a sensitivity to the thoughts of others as an aid to second-guessing their outward and visible behavior, they would have started to see an intelligent creative force wherever they looked. An individual watching another chip away at a flint would attribute to him a purpose, similar to his own when he created a tool. So too would he assume that lightning, rain, the sun, the stars, the moon must have had some sort of purposeful creative force behind them. Here lie the very deepest roots of our religious beliefs.

Kinship

One of the most important contributions to evolutionary science was kin selection as proposed by William D. Hamilton [*4]. His theory, which was steeped in complex mathematical equations, was brought to life in Richard Dawkins' ground-breaking book The Selfish Gene. Hamilton proposed that, while passing on our genes directly to our offspring is one way of ensuring our reproductive success, helping those individuals who are closely related to us, even at our own expense, could also ensure the survival of our genes -- more specifically the genes for helping. Any social species where relatives are likely to live in the same troop, band, or flock, would have evolved adaptations to recognize kin, assess their relatedness, and assist those who were most related. This is probably why you are more likely to donate a kidney to your sister than to your third cousin.

While all animals that live in social groups may have varying strategies to recognize and reward kinship, humans are unique in that language has allowed the development of fictive kin. Shepherds have long manipulated the concept of fictive kin within their flocks. When spring arrives and lambing begins, both ewes and lambs die. If the ewe dies, the orphaned lamb will die too unless a ewe is found who will suckle her. However, it is not in the best interest of the ewe to suckle an unrelated lamb, so shepherds have learned that by skinning the ewe's dead offspring and placing it on the orphaned lamb the ewe could be fooled into thinking that the lamb was hers. In other words, she was manipulated into accepting fictive kin.

Kinship recognition in humans comes about in two ways. The primary method is extremely archaic. We simply recognize those individuals who eat with us, share the same sleeping quarters, and provide us with food and comfort as our kin. However, with the advent of language, definitions of kinship became more complex. All cultures throughout the world name and track kinship. As our ancestors formed larger and larger groups, keeping track of kin through verbal definitions of kinship became more and more important (this helps to explain ancestor worship). But this also opened the door to creating fictive kin -- that is, giving kin names to individuals who were not closely related. This would have been extremely useful for group cohesion, especially in times of war [*5].

With the onset of agriculture, land ownership, and accumulated wealth, our ancestors began to aggregate in large, permanent settlements. The birth of villages, towns and cities, brought together masses of unrelated individuals. As these settlements grew and expanded, tribal wars over territory would have been inevitable. In a small group where everyone was closely related, sacrificing one's life in defense of close kin would have benefitted one's own genes. However, in large groups where most people were not close kin, how could leaders convince warriors to die for people who were unrelated? Language acts like the lamb's skin and tricks our minds into attributing kinship where none exists by using kin terms such as 'brother', 'father', 'sister', and 'mother'[*6]. In order to keep a small nation together, fictive kin would have been essential. It is not without reason that even today the military strives to create a sense of 'brotherhood' among soldiers. While language would have provided the platform on which to construct fictive kin, it would have been ritualized ceremonies that solidified it. Next time you attend a baptism, note the ritualization of a child being accepted into 'God's family'.

The Conflict Between Archaic Minds and Reason

Very late in our journey to modern humans, we evolved the ability to think abstractly. We could not write this article without the ability to abstract and reason, and you could not comprehend it without these abilities either. To think in such a fashion is apparently unique to humans, and even then not everyone is able. Pre-adolescent children simply do not have the brain configuration to do so. The brain configuration of a pre-adolescent child is far different from the one she will possess as an adult. It takes about 12 years or so for the frontal lobes to develop fully after reaching puberty [*7]. Our frontal lobes are key to social behavior, abstract thinking, planning and solving complex problems. Humans have evolved the most elaborate set of frontal lobes on the planet -- it is our evolutionary niche.

But highly developed frontal lobes came late into the game, and they have to compete with the archaic brain that was the engine behind our evolutionary success. Just as Shubin argues that our bodies are more like bits and bobs from a rummage sale that have been shoe-horned together and sort of work...the brain too is made up of parts that are often in conflict because they have different jobs and priorities.

Let's call our frontal lobes the 'smart-self' and the more archaic part of our brain the 'primal-self'. Our smart-selves know that over-eating and under-exercising is bad for us, leading to heart disease, diabetes, and a shorter life-span. But our primal-selves are still primed for the risk of starvation, thus it simply cannot understand why the smart-self would deny you a nice Big Mac with a large order of fries and a chocolate shake. It throws fits as you drive by those Golden Arches, and causes your brain to send messages that scream 'STOP or we could die!’. The smart-brain is just not designed to prevent the primal brain from taking over because the abundance of food most of us are surrounded by is a fairly new development in human history. Perhaps given another few thousand years, those individuals with the will-power to resist all that tasty fat, protein, sugar and salt will out-reproduce those that don't.

The point is, that there is an instant conflict between what we know is good for us and what we feel we want -- and we often fall victim to our more primal needs even when we know they are harmful.

Religion As The Ultimate Big Mac

Religion's success is undeniable. It is in every culture, and in every corner of the world. We spend billions and billions of dollars on building monuments to it, supporting it, and of course proselytizing on behalf of our own favored brand of it. Individuals give up sex and eschew family and friends for religion. Beyond that, we sacrifice time and effort to its rituals, and indoctrinate our children and grandchildren to do the same. We are even willing to kill for it.

Modern science, particularly modern biology, has given us the freedom to shuck off the idea that our existence and the existence of the universe requires an intelligent being. In fact, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in The God Delusion, invoking an intelligent being doesn't explain anything -- it just pushes the question back to 'Who designed the designer?' Despite the illogic of believing that some great being in the heavens, capable of creating not only the laws of physics, the principles of evolution, and the vastness of time also cares a great deal about whether or not you use your left hand to clean up after defecating, eat a cracker while sinless, or not mix cheese with chicken, we still seem to sup it up like mother's milk.

The reason religion is so successful is that it taps into our primal-brains in much the same way that a Big Mac does -- only more so. Religion gained its foothold by hijacking the need to give purpose at a time when humans had only their imagination -- as opposed to the evidence and reason that we have today -- to fathom their world. Spirits and demons were the explanation for illnesses that we now know are caused by bacterial diseases and genetic disorders. The whims of the gods were why earthquakes, volcanos, floods and droughts occurred. Our ancestors were driven to sacrifice everything from goats to one another to satisfy those gods.

Along with the need to attribute purpose, our faculty to intuit the intent of others spills over into a predilection for determining the intentions of gods and goddesses (or spirits, demons, and angels). Of course the major problem has been that we can never quite agree among ourselves about god's intentions, which often ends in unfortunate violent discussions. Our evolved proclivity for aggression feeds into that as well. We justify our prejudices, hatred, murders, and war by attributing our own biases to a god. As long as we kill in god's name, we are doing good.

Our primal-brains that keep track of kin can be easily hijacked through language and rituals, which is why religion uses terms such as 'god the father', 'Mary the mother of heaven', 'brother', and 'sister'. Rituals reinforce fictitious kin through feasts, worship, and ceremonies such as marriages and funerals. Despite our smart-brains being able to recognize the difference between real kin and not, those ties created within religious organizations bind tightly. Leaving the faith one was born into would certainly have led our ancestors to being shunned if not worse. In Islam, the punishment for apostasy is death. And in Western cultures, it is not uncommon to hear of individuals whose families and friends have turned their backs because they have disavowed their religious beliefs.

The fear of losing family and friends is a powerful force for keeping people in tow. It is far easier to ignore the evidence that there is no god than to give up the love and friendship of a community. Our survival depends much more on being part of a community, even in today's modern world, than on abandoning religion. Psychological studies strongly suggest that our social network, that is family and friends, are essential to personal happiness. For our ancestors it was more than that, it was necessary for our very survival itself. Exclusion would have meant death, and our primal-brains have not forgotten. We did not evolve to be solitary creatures, nor to be independent of social support. Religion has, for better or worse, always offered a ready social network, an entire (fictive) extended family. Our primal brains are designed to not only strive to maintain close family and social relationships, but when coupled with the attribution of our own primal fears to the mind of god along with our tendency for aggression, we are more than willing to commit the most heinous acts to protect our fictive kin and beliefs.

Of course there are other factors that contribute to this tangled web, such as the desire for power, land, wealth, and, where men are concerned, access to females for reproduction. All of these extant drives ingrained in the human psyche have also been justified through religion. No matter how terrible the deed, by attributing to god our own fears and hatreds -- anything could be justified. Religion and gods were extremely useful to the ruthless and power-hungry.

The Battle For Reason

Our archaic brains, which served us so well during our evolutionary past, now threaten our very existence. While our smart-brains have given us modern technology and science and the privilege of understanding not only ourselves but our universe, our primal brains are stuck in the stone-age. Reason must always fight our tendencies to give way to superstitions and fears. This is especially true when we have the capability to destroy not only ourselves, but our planet.

Much of the world's population still believe in a god forged out of the fears of a desert people and, worse, fully believe not only that their view of god and his wishes are right, but that those who disagree must be converted or face eternal torment (sometimes even offering some help to get there). The primal fears instilled by religious fever act as impenetrable walls to reason. According to a recent Gallup poll, 66% of the US population agrees strongly with the statement 'God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years'. Given the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence to the contrary, such obstinate belief should frighten any reasonable thinking person. It also is testimony to the wealthy and powerful religious organizations who spend billions of dollars on public relations, creating controversies where none exist and spewing lies about the evidence for evolution [*8]. But none of this would be possible without our brains being ready and available to take in the message they are delivering. It is easy enough for atheists and humanists to chuckle at the credulity of believers, but we do so at our own peril.

Religion needs to be taken seriously. Understanding its roots, how it can seize command of our psychology and take control of our culture, may well be one of the most important endeavors we pursue. For even with all our grand technology, modern medical advances, and volumes of knowledge, if we do not stop our archaic past from overriding our modern reason we are surely doomed.


For further information on this on this topic:

We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers (parts 1-3) -- J. Anderson Thomson

Why They Kill -- J. Anderson Thomson

Why We Believe In Gods -- J. Anderson Thomson

Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus

Please visit RichardDawkins.net for more discussions, articles, and videos concerning religion in the modern world.


Notes:

*1. For more on this matter read Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable.

*2. Premack, D. G & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 515-526.

*3. Lewis C & Osborne A. (1990). Three-year-olds' problems with false belief: conceptual deficit or linguistic artifact? Child Development 61(5):1514-9.

*4. Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I and II -- Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-16 and 17-52.

*5. Thomson, J.A. (2007). We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers -- AAI 2007 conference in Washington, D.C.

*6. For example, in English the word 'King' is thought to be derived from the Old English word cynn, which means family or race.

*7. For more on this matter read Barbara Strauch's The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids.

*8. Forrest, B & Gross, P (2004). Creationism's Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent design.


R. Elisabeth Cornwell is an Assistant Professor of Research at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her research includes work in the area of hormones, pheromones, and sexual selection in humans. Her most recent paper can be found in Animal Behavior, regarding evidence in support of various theories of mate selection in humans. Most recently her work has involved differences between theist and atheists on a variety of psychological profiles.

J. Anderson (Andy) Thomson received his B.A. from Duke University and his M.D. from the University of Virginia. His academic publications address PTSD, suicide terrorism, narcissistic personality disorder, religious identity, religious belief, and evolutionary theories of depression. He has done international conflict resolution work in Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, the Republic of Georgia, South Ossetia, and Kuwait. Currently he is a staff psychiatrist at the University of Virginia Counseling and Psychological Services, and at the University's Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy. He maintains a private practice in adult general psychiatry and forensic psychiatry, and is a trustee with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

SuicideGirls would like to thank Richard Dawkins for facilitating this article.

I should like to start with a slight apology. I am unable to link directly to the story I am discussing, as The New Yorker does not have all stories from every issue available online. However, the abstract is available, and the complete story can be found in the June 30, 2008 issue, starting on page 28.

Evangelical Christianity has long been a confusing subject for me, and likely for many others. I was raised as a Catholic, went to Sunday School every week until I was 14, then went to Wednesday Night bible meetings for another two years. I've read the Bible, I was an altar boy (no jokes, our priest was a living saint), and even spent a week at a Catholic Bible camp. I tell this so that there is no misunderstanding: I have studied the Bible, from front to back and around again. I am no expert, but I think I have the general idea.

And this is what confuses me. The Bible, at least the New Testament, talks about love, forgiveness, caring for the poor, helping those who need help, loving your neighbor, and generally living a life of peace. There was nothing in there about setting off bombs, killing for Christ, or generally anything about smiting. Quite truthfully, 2008 years ago, smiting was supposed to be right out.

Somewhere, that message got mixed up. And those who did the mixing are quite easy to identify. Go down any bookstore's "Religion" aisle and look at the names: Dr. James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. These were the men who shaped modern Evangelical Christianity into a political powerhouse for right-wing fundamentalism, known as The Christian Right.

Their followers are fairly easy to find. They are the ones picketing Planned Parenthood buildings, at school board meetings pushing Intelligent Design as a science (I pause, for laughter), and claiming that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation . . . in general, ignoring reality.

But things are changing, but slowly. Frances Fitzgerald, in her article "The New Evangelicals" writes about how the "big names" have bullied their personal agendas into evangelicalism. But there is a change. Lesser known, but up-and-coming preachers are pushing for a return to traditional Christian ministry of working with the poor, the outcast, of being peacemakers. This doesn't mean they are dropping their anti-abortion, anti-homosexual stances, but that they are shifting focus to areas that can be changed instead of areas that cannot. They are talking about curbing global warming, immigration reform (of the good, productive kind, instead of the punishment sort), and denouncing the racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism long characterized in Christianity.

One of the new leaders in particular, Joel Hunter really impressed me. After he got married, he was well on his way to becoming one of those slick-haired/spray-tanned/smug gits who weep while asking for money, then buy a new fleet of shiny cars for their "personal ministers." But he realized where he was heading and took a position in a parish of 200, who had just lost their own pastor. He took that dying church, poured himself into it, taught his simple, traditional message of helping others, and ended up with a huge multi-national congregation, pretty much without wanting one.

Sadly, this is a slow process. But this is time of change, and it looks like Evangelical Christians are joining in on the change. They are supporting Barack Obama, pitching in at disasters, and are pulling away from the loudest mouths that have been showing the worst side of Religion for the last few decades.

Now, of course, I am not advocating everyone rush out and get saved. Far from it. But, it may be time to re-evaluate some of the stereotypes that keep people who could be allies separated.

Coyotemike has not gone to church in 10 years, and rather enjoys sleeping in on Sunday mornings.

When the man played famously by Charlton Heston witnessed the Plagues, parted the Red Sea, and fought all those damn dirty apes, they may not have been acts of the Lord, but Moses simply tripping balls.

The marriage of drugs and religion is nothing new. In 2003, the BBC reported that Jesus and the Apostles used cannabis to heal the crippled. Many Hindus use pot in worship of Shiva, who is said to have sought shade under a marijuana plant and then gave the plant to mankind as thanks.

Shanon noted Moses being stoned on a Biblical scale is plausible, given the goods available as well as the professor's own personal experiences.

Of course, the narcs of the Orthodox Jewish community were not amused by this claim.

All in all, it gives new credence to the little known 11th Commandment:

"Thou shalt not get high on thy own supply."


The closest thefreak ever got to seeing God while high was watching Tron.

While sitting in JFK last month reading Green Hermeticism, a book inspired by the eponymous conferences held by the Suluk Academy on alchemy and ecology, I was struck by a quote from the German Romantic philosopher Novalis, translated "the sciences must all be made poetic." I sympathize. Despite the generally laughable efforts of creation "scientists," we (not to be too West-normative) seem to frame faith and science not as complements but as combatants. Rationalists and nonbelievers feel like Romans watching barbarians approach intent on sacking our institutions and libraries; the religious feel that their concerns are ignored in favor of the sweeping indoctrination necessary for our liberal, humanistic society. This image of Christ and Darwin fighting bareknuckled in a steel cage is, of course, oversimplified and polarized in a way to appeal to the idiots on either side. The complex relationship between Faith and Science isn’t inherently a conflict, and its substance isn’t all evolution and fluff.

There are a great many areas of fascinating and unusual intersections between the natural sciences and spiritual belief; the "Law of Attraction" popularized in The Secret claims provenance in quantum mechanics, specifically the (heavily disputed) interpretation that the observer’s consciousness causes wave function collapse. ("What the hell are you talking about, Fluxy?"). Does human (or other) consciousness affect the universe in a demonstrable physical way or is it just pseudoscientific rubbish? Beats me, but all my attempts to materialize a ziti pizza whilst writing this article have failed. I call bullshit!

The Bahá'í, Faith teaches that science and faith are harmonious, with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá writing that

Philosopher Karl Popper rejected classical empiricism, the idea that theories can be "proven" through observations of the natural world, in favor of a standard of falsifiability. A scientific theory can’t be confirmed, only proven false or found to "correspond with the facts." I tend to view the world in a manner similar to this: a collection of plausible explanations and non-falsifiable theories rather than a world ordered by Cartesian rationality or by the hand of deity. As such, I have a hard time grokking the die-hard atheists or the true believers; I apply Fluxy’s Razor to everything.

So, back to Green Hermeticism. The authors argue that the beginnings of the Enlightenment occurred as a battle between non-dualist Rosicrucians and dualist Cartesians. Isaac Newton wrote more about alchemy than about physics, but eventually the worldview we’ve come to associate with him won out. Later, Romanticism and its affection for the natural world were crushed by Industry and the inevitable clash between capitalist and Marxist ideologies. So homeboys suggest that we revive our sleeping hermetic tradition and take the Gaia hypothesis to the next level; that we create a joyous spiritual ecology that recognizes that we are part of, not separate from, "Nature."

Nature: It’s not just national parks anymore!

This isn’t really new. The movement called "deep ecology" has argued essentially the same thing for years, albeit from a less alchemical angle. But consider this:

Not to be too much of a frou-frou new age hippie ("too late!" you say), but to me, there’s something worthwhile to such a worldview, and not just in the Fluxy’s Razor sense. We are part of the vast biological system that is this planet. Some people wonder if we’re the cancer afflicting Gaia, but being the happy-go-lucky optimist that y’all have come to know and love and loathe, I suspect that perhaps we are her brain. If we can accept that spirituality has a healing effect when used judiciously and graciously, then why not act as the soul of that which has come to be called creation? I’m not talking about communing with your crystal dolphin inner child in the name of the great mother goddess (although if that blows your skirt up, by all means, go for it.) No gods necessary, but perhaps a little faith in ourselves and our ability to change and to heal our world. Without that, we’re stuck in fatalism and in death.

In 1982, stood before the Nobel assembly and spoke of the soul of Latin America:

García Márquez was speaking of the ability of humanity to triumph over tyranny and disaster, but this optimism applies just as powerfully to the world in which we live, so long as we use all the tools available to us, be they "Religion" or "Science." Science informs us, and spirit (whatever that may mean to you) inspires us.

Nothing is written. Everything is permissible, possible, and alive. So now, my chilluns, go out and change the world.

Flux got really drunk and started writing a leftist spiritual manifesto that revolves around hilarious, tongue-in-cheek pantheism a few weeks ago. She promises that this article isn’t an attempt to fish for prospective book deals. She swears.