SJA #21 - 29 October 2018 - The Afterlife, Intersectionality, and Republican Violence

Afterlife
This skeptical topic isn’t in the skeptic’s dictionary, oddly enough. I mean, it’s one of the most popular woo beliefs in the world; why wouldn’t they cover it? A lot of skeptics restrict themselves to “non-religious woo”. Things like obvious pseudoscience, pseudohistory, so-called “alternative medicine”, ghosts, aliens… those are all fair game. Anything that’s “supernatural”, or “ spiritual” or New Age, but not mainstream religion. They do have Christian ultrafundamentalism (or CUF). I haven’t read that yet, but, judging by the name, it’s restricted to the extreme fringes of Christianity.

This fear of discussing popular religion and religious beliefs is common in skeptic movements. They’ll go after ghosthunters and cryptozoologists, chiropractors and homeopaths, but not preachers or prayers. Faith healing is a popular target, faith itself is not.

There’s probably a complex interplay of reasons for this. Among them, I suspect it’s… prudence. Discretion. Rank cowardice. The majority of the public will leave you alone if you’re only attacking the fringes of society, but if you turn your skepticism on the popular beliefs of the majority, they’ll turn their rage on you. So, an instinct for self-preservation will probably drive most skeptical organizations to refrain from attacking religion. It will limit conflict (conflict will of course be unavoidable).

Another major reason, I think, is that a lot of skeptics are going to be religious. That’s inconsistent; if you seek to apply skepticism to your beliefs, then you should end up rejecting religion. However, expecting complete consistency in people’s beliefs is expecting a bit too much. I think it may even be impossible. The human brain isn’t a homogeneous entity, but a collection of regions with different functions, that are interconnected and communicating in various ways. And those regions, having different functions, will often be in conflict. We should expect people not to be consistent in their desires and beliefs.

So all of this is to say that, yes, the afterlife and all associated concepts are fully deserving of skeptical analysis.

What is the afterlife? People believe (or want to believe) that, after a person dies, some “essence” of the person continues to exist in another form. This essence can be more or less coherent, more or less related to the person who died. For example, here in the US, we’re most familiar with the protestant and Catholic Christian belief that a human being has a soul that, after death, will have all of that person’s memories and beliefs, and which will be punished or rewarded for the person’s actions in life.

South Asian beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism can be very similar in their belief in reincarnation. Though Buddhism states that a person is in a constant state of growth and development, always changing, and that this process of change continues after death so that the person at reincarnation is different from the person who died, there is nevertheless a thread of continuity that can be traced from one to the other.

You can also get a New Age belief in spiritual energy that returns to the universe as a whole. When a person is born, they get some portion of this energy that returns after death. It plays on the theme of reincarnation, in that a person can be reborn with spirit energy from someone else, but, like pouring water into the ocean and scooping water back out, you’re simply not going to get all of the same spirit energy from a person who has died.

Note my use of the word “energy” right there. That’s not limited to discussing New Age beliefs. It’s incredibly popular with them, as it’s a cultural movement that arose in the west in the wake of the development of mass media and popular awareness of physics. “Energy” is a term that is vital for understanding physics, chemistry… any kind of physical science. However, it’s also a slippery concept, difficult to understand, and thus is subject to abuse by mystics who want scientistic support for their beliefs.

However, it absolutely is not limited to New Age hippies. Anyone who wants to argue in favor of the soul is perfectly free to adopt the term, and they frequently do. Whether you’re talking to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, it is likely that they’ll at some point say, “Energy is neither created nor destroyed; where does a person’s energy go when they die?”

The first part of that, the statement, is true. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. To the best of our ability to determine, the energy of the universe is constant, it can never be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.

The second part is a lie.

It’s a lie because it assumes that there is some energy that has gone somewhere. It can more charitably be called a fallacy of equivocation, where a term is introduced using one definition, but is then used to make or support an argument under a different definition. “Energy” is introduced into the argument by noting what is clearly true, that people are made of matter and that every process of the human body is driven by chemical energy derived from the food we eat.

However, the equivocation arises when they start talking about a soul or spirit as some form of energy and saying it has gone somewhere. This introduces two new assumptions that have not been granted, but are instead the subject of discussion. The soul, whether physical or supernatural or “some kind of energy” has not been demonstrated to even exist. The other assumption is that some energy was present in the body which is now absent.

Physicist Sean M. Carroll (to more clearly differentiate him from the biologist Sean B. Carroll) once, while discussing this subject, brought up something like a Zen Koan “Where does the flame go when the candle is out?”.

The answer is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t go anywhere. It isn’t a thing and doesn’t do anything.

A candle’s flame, like a human being, is a process and the result of a process. Heat melts the wax, draws it up the candle’s wick, boils it, and ignites it. The burning of the wax releases more heat, which melts more wax. The heat of the burning wax also causes the resulting gases to move outward and upward, away from the source of the heat, while the pressure from the cold air around the candle pushes it inward, producing the characteristic shape of the flame. The heat also strips electrons away from the gases, producing a translucent plasma, which releases light in its efforts to return to a stable, low-energy state. All of this is the candle’s flame.

When you extinguish the candle, you have ended the process. The candle’s flame is no more. The flame itself was an illusion. It was an illusion in the same way that all objects are illusions. Every physical “thing” you see is a collection of atoms and molecules, held together by forces that can be overcome by outside intervention. Every object, no matter how stable, is only temporary. The candle’s flame is exceptional only in that the temporary and conditional nature of its existence is so obvious.
When you extinguish the flame, nothing has gone anywhere. The matter of the candle is still there. The chemical energy stored in the wax is still there. You can easily re-ignite the candle, restart the process. The potential for the flame exists within the candle, the flame is produced by the candle, the flame is not a thing that exists.

You are likewise an illusion. You are a process and the result of a process. The many, many complex processes that produce that process likewise produce the “you” that we all acknowledge. Every cell within you is a city, every organ a nation, you are an ecosystem. When you die, the process stops, the processes stop, the ecosystem is shattered. The matter is still there, the energy is still there, but the illusion of “you” is no longer being sustained.

A candle can be reignited. Sometimes a person can as well. If knowledgeable people with the right equipment can get to the body in time, the process can be restarted. The window for that is very short, because the processes that make up a human being are magnitudes more complex than a candle.

A candle in its entirety can be described in a few words. The process of the candle likewise. The systems that make up a living being cannot. We have dedicated centuries to the study of life and have come to understand much. What we know can fill books, does fill books. What we don’t yet know will fill many more.

One of the things we know is that there is no soul. The energy that would have been used for the process of the human being is still there after the process has stopped. Nothing has gone anywhere. The reason you have only a short window to reignite the person is because the matter and energy will very quickly be used by other processes. By the many organisms that live in your body that do not share your DNA, and that, at best, only incidentally help to keep you alive.

As soon as a person dies, they will begin to transform the matter and energy of that body into matter and energy for their own lives, their own processes. When the process that is a person stops, the flesh immediately becomes food, and starts turning into bacteria shit.

There is no afterlife, because there is no soul. You will not continue to exist after your death except in the memories of those who loved you. You will not be punished, you will not be rewarded. You will not know or experience anything, because there will be no you. Like the candle’s flame, your body’s life will cease, and the illusion will end.

If any of that is upsetting to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. If you demand reward and punishment, you will have to work to create that here and now. If you demand an afterlife, you will have to take copious notes here and now. Here and now is all you have. Here and now is what matters.

Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a concept that is often misunderstood, often deliberately distorted and misused. Since it’s central to the modern struggle for social justice in the US, I think it’d be a good thing for people to understand, generally.

The term originates with Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate, leading scholar of critical race theory, and professor at the UCLA and Columbia schools of law. It appears that she was the first person to use the term in the context of social justice back in 1989, in a paper titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

In the paper, she discussed a legal case brought against General Motors in the mid-70s, suing the company for not hiring black women. The company argued in court, and the courts agreed, that they weren’t racist and they weren’t sexist. Their evidence that they weren’t racist was that they had hired black employees, and their evidence that they weren’t sexist was that they had hired female employees. The problem with theirs and the court’s analysis was that they failed to note that the company had only hired black men and white women.

In her discussion, Crenshaw stated that the experiences of black women cannot be understood simply as the experience of blackness and the experience of femaleness. That is to say, they are not just black in a white world and women in a man’s world. They experience racism, and they experience sexism, and they experience the world as black women. The combination of blackness and womanness creates new situations, new obstacles for them to navigate, experiences that neither black men nor white women will ever face.

For example, women have always been sexualized and treated as objects and black people have always been hypersexualized and treated as objects. However, black women experience the combination of these objectifications in a fashion that is different, sometimes horrifyingly so, from black men and white women.

The hypersexualization and objectification of black men has, since the 1600s, positioned them as an imminent threat, as violent beasts always one wrong move away from breaking free and injuring white people, specifically white women. The racist propaganda of black men as violent rapists is thus a century older than even the United States. It was used to justify slavery and to fight against abolition, and the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the War on Drugs.

The objectification of white women sees them as objects, as property to be transferred from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. They are thus subject to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault as a normal part of their everyday lives. Some men are simply convinced that women are available for all of those things at all times, and that they have no right to object because they’re not fully human.

Black women meanwhile are subject to the objectification of black people as being hypersexual and naturally violent and to the objectification of women as being always available for the sexual use of men, particularly of white men. Because of the white supremacist belief that black people always want sex, it was simply a fact of law that black women could not be raped. The courts believed that black women always wanted sex, and that saying no was just playing, and fighting back was just their natural violence.

Whereas if a white woman accused a black man of rape it was automatically believed and the man immediately murdered, a black woman accusing a black man of rape was greeted with a shrug because they were both believed to be violent animals, and she really wanted it anyway. Her accusation of rape was transformed in white eyes as just another expression of black violence.

And if her rapist was white? Fighting back probably wasn’t even an option. A white man could kill her and walk away with the public having no doubt that he had done so. Women, in the face of present violent assault, always face the difficulty of knowing that fighting back could get them killed and not fighting back means their later claim of rape won’t be believed. Black women face the certainty that both options are dialed up to 11 because of racial stereotypes.

Thus the world a black woman interacts with is racialized in a way white women don’t experience and sexualized in a way black men don’t experience. Racism alters the misogyny they face, and misogyny alters the racism they face. Neither one can be studied in isolation.

All of this is to say that the world is a complicated place, and culture creates a difficult interaction of different forms of oppression and bigotry. A disabled black woman’s experience of oppression simply cannot be compared to the experiences of a gay white woman.

Which brings us to the myth of the oppression olympics. Right wing douches love to claim that you can only participate in a discussion about oppression if you are yourself oppressed in some way (thus straight white men are ignored… and oppressed!!), and the more oppressed you are, the more social justice cachet you have. According to assholes like Paul Joseph Watson and Ben Shapiro, the god of social justice is a gay black muslim jew native american left-handed red-headed immigrant transwoman victim of rape in a wheelchair.

Nope.

Oppression olympics was first brought up by Social Justice Warriors, noting the importance of not trying to rank oppression. My suffering isn’t greater or less than yours, it’s different. Trying to compare oppression, to compete over who has it worse would only be a distraction from the end goal of trying to end suffering and oppression.

It’s not that white men have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, the problem is that they don’t have the lived experience of most forms of oppression. They don’t have the native understanding of racism or sexism. Straight people don’t live every day with homophobia, nor cis people with transphobia, nor abled people with ablism.

A straight white man can indeed have knowledge of and insight into the oppression experienced by queer folk or black folk or women, but it’s something that has to come with study and effort on his part, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be actively demonstrated, not assumed. And even the most knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated ally can put their foot in their mouth, talk over someone, or take offense where it’s neither intended, needed, nor helpful. When you’re talking about oppression you don’t experience, you’re always going to be speaking in a foreign language, and there’s always going to be mistakes and misunderstandings… and a lot of disingenuous assholes take advantage of that to abuse oppressed people.

Trolls and abusers abound, and any oppressed person who takes an active role in the fight against it suffers from those assholes constantly. Anyone who’s on the privileged side of multiple axes will always, necessarily, be viewed with some suspicion, because there are just so damned many neonazis, sealions, and Fox News dipshits of every stripe just aching derail every conversation and attack decent social justice warriors.

Anywho, that’s oppression and that’s why you need to be calm and respectful in a conversation that isn’t about you. Also, don’t make the conversation about you.

I'm an Atheist

I'm an Atheist - English


I’m an atheist.

The bare minimum to be an atheist is that you aren’t convinced that some kind of god exists. That’s it. You don’t need any more than that. Theism means being convinced there is a god, atheism is the lack of that conviction.

I take it a step further. I believe no god exists. Every religion describes a being that is active, intercessory, involved, participatory. Every action requires a response action. Every act leaves evidence. All changes create history. Any of the gods described by the world religions should be evident, they should all be in some way visible.

And there is no evidence. That’s why we have religionS, and not just a religion.

There’s no Christian Chemistry, Buddhist Biology, Muslim Math, Hindu History. There’s just chemistry, biology, math, and history. In the pursuit of knowledge, we follow where the evidence leads and greater amounts of evidence lead to a single conviction. Our learning always proceeds from mystery to certainty, not the other way around.

Contrast all our fields of knowledge with all of our religions. Christianity began as a crowd of conflicting cults; one cult dominated only because it got lucky in latching on to the mother of an emperor. Even that dominance didn’t last; the church splintered as soon as the empire did. Today there are tens of thousands of branches of Christianity.

If there ever was a historical Muhammad, then his lifetime was the only time Islam was unified. Their own texts tell us that they split as soon as he died.

Judaism was just one of many polytheistic religions among the Canaanite tribes, and one particularly unpleasant cult came to dominate there. Even then, Judaism has never been a single, united religion. From the Maccabees to the orthodox Jews of today, from the Tabiades to the secular Jews of today, Judaism has been as splintered and factionalized as every other.

Is Transhumanism Religious?

The buraq; the flying horse woman thing that carried Muhammad to Jerusalem before his death.

Disney didn't invent this. It's actually a lot older. Like three years older.

The reason for the mattresses? Because soon enough they'll come back down.

Yes, it's a trick. What you might not be able to see is precisely how it works. There's a reason for the cane, the carpet, and the baggy clothes.

He can fly so hard even his snakey stick can fly!

Half Jesus, half Moses, all American.

Clearly flying strikes a chord in human beings. Like transcending death and being able to have the most awesome sex forever, flying is one of those things we all kinda wish we could do. It's not surprising, then, that it crops up sometimes in transhumanism.

First, what is transhumanism? The belief that the singularity cometh! Soon technology will enable us to overcome all human limitations and we will live forever! Because science!

To that end, something as simple as braces is transhumanism. Artificial limbs and eyeglasses are transhumanism. It's just that, unlike most of the promises transhumanism makes, we've actually already got those.

On the more sci-fi end, transhumanism is also cryonic preservation so that at some point in the future scientists can discover the cure for whatever killed you, unthaw you, cure you, and then you can go on your merry way, futuring it up in the science.

Transhumanism is the ability to upload your brain into a computer and wile away the eons until the heat death of the universe.

Transhumanism is the ability to upload your brain into a computer on a space ship and explore the universe forever. I told you there'd be flying.

Transhumanism is the ability to genetically modify yourself so you can grow wings and fly in a more prosaic way.

Transhumanism promises that all of this is just around the corner.

******

In the 19th century, a French cartoonist was commissioned to show what things would be like at the end of the following century (nowish). He showed a room full of students with collanders on their heads getting their lessons transmitted directly to their brains via the electrical fluid.

As the twentieth century progressed and knowledge did the same, our dreams didn't really change. People still assumed that technology would increase human lifespans and make everything that was difficult easy. The promise was always fifty to one hundred years down the road, but soon, science will make it so you can know and do anything, even live forever. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the promise always seemed to be that all of this would happen by the end of the century.

Of course, by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, the end of the century was a little too close for that to be plausible, so the end point for when science would turn to magic kept getting pushed forward. These days, the magic date seems to be 2045.

Sound a little like religion? Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, never jam today.

******

The common link in transhumanism, going back to the 19th century and the French cartoons I mentioned (how I wish I could find them), is that the transhumanists look at the wonderful discoveries made by science and assume that something truly wonderful is just over the horizon. It's far enough away that no one will be able to call them on it when their prediction doesn't work out, but close enough that most people alive today have a reasonable hope of living that long. They always assume that somehow the discoveries of today will lead to some discoveries that will make all our dreams come true... but they never specify what those discoveries will be, not even what they might look like. It's just a nebulous "something".

I really don't think anyone in the transhumanist movement is being deliberately deceptive. Well, perhaps some are milking it for profit, selling books and the like, but the vast majority are probably just engaging in wishful thinking and self-deception. They're just very hopeful that all the things that make life difficult will be magicked away by science. And I'm using "magic" deliberately here.

I think this self-deception and wishful thinking is illustrative of the religious impulse. We don't need to posit some ill-begotten motive or deliberate design to explain the origins of religion. All we need is the ability to imagine that things be not difficult, and the wish that it be so. The frailties of an evolved mind will fill in the blanks with rationalizations and generalizations as needed.

Somewhere in this playlist is an instructive lecture on transhumanism. I wish I could be more precise than a window of 20 hours of video, but it's been a few weeks since I watched them. I'm pretty sure it's in one of the first six, not the last four.

******

Oh, and here's the explanation for the photographs (as contrasted with the drawings) above. It's very difficult to do, but you can jump in the lotus position. Take a picture in mid-jump and you have the appearance of someone placidly meditating in mid-air. That photo's good because it shows someone who achieved that in the middle of the picture and two who rather badly failed, one at either end. You can see that they've jumped.

As for the dude sitting in mid-air with his hand resting on a cane above a square of carpet; that's a rather common trick. It's even more impressive when you see one man apparently sitting comfortably above the head of another. Either way the trick is the same; the carpet hides the base of the stand, the baggy clothes hide the seat, and the cane or bamboo staff is the connection between the two. Notice the baggy cloth of the individual sitting "in mid air". Notice the baggy sleeves of the man sitting on the street. Wouldn't it be nice if you could levitate? All you have to do is give the guy some money and he'll teach you how...

That Jedi Bullshit

Bioware's Jade Empire will be illustrative, I think. Like most of Bioware's RPGs, the game works with a morality system, the Open Palm vs the Closed Fist. Unfortunately, they explain it rather poorly at the beginning and you might not realize what the two are supposed to represent. They look an awful look like the Light Side/Dark Side options of Bioware's KoTOR games, and that's not really a coincidence. They're presented as simple moral options, good on the one side and bad on the other (and that's more or less what it boils down to), but the way of the closed fist is presented badly, as being about personal strength and challenging your station in life. Those both sound like good things, right? But it mostly comes down to being a massive jerk for personal gain.

What the two paths are really about is daoism. Daoism is all about following the dao, the path or way, about aligning yourself with the order of the universe, following the mandate of heaven¹, putting yourself in harmony with the way things are supposed to be. This is the way of the open palm. The closed fist, we now see, when talking about turmoil and "challenging your station" means putting yourself in opposition to that harmony. Thus you create turmoil and chaos, which are opposed to the harmony of the dao. This reaches its dumbest expression with Bladed Thesis, a spirit of a teacher of the Closed Fist.

He asks you to look at a river and describe what you see. The correct answer is, "I see trees tearing and water churning at the rocks, and I see time destroying all of this because it is weak." That answer doesn't mesh with personal strength or just being evil. If you squint right it can look like opposition to the order of the universe... right? Because those natural changes are part of the dao and? No, it's just kind of stupid.

However, the expressions of the way of the closed fist as being in opposition to the dao and the open palm being in harmony with it reach their ultimate expression in the final choice of the game. [spoilers, highlight to reveal]You either restore the harmony destroyed by the emperors by freeing the water dragon, or you further disrupt the harmony by slaughtering her and taking her power for yourself.[/spoilers] The way of the closed fist is disharmony, and challenging your station means challenging the order of the cosmos. Daoism really does its job at keeping the peasants in their place. The game didn't really make it clear at the time, but it really was espousing daoism, harmony with the way of things.

And so does Star Wars. And here's what I actually want to talk about: what is the Jedi Religion? This isn't just pontificating over some fictional philosophy; thousands of people follow the Jedi religion in reality, or claim to, and of course it's based on real religions that millions definitely follow.

A lot of people don't really seem to get what Lucas was trying to put together with his philosophy. Perhaps the greatest confusion was over the prophecy Anakin was supposed to be fulfilling in the prequel trilogy, which said that he would bring balance to the force. A lot of people thought that the end of the third movie was him bringing balance to the force by reducing the light side followers to a bare handful in equality with the bare handful of dark side followers. However, that's not the balance Lucas meant; he was talking about being in balance with the will of the Force (the dao), being in harmony with the order of the cosmos. in Lucas's cosmology, the Sith, the followers of the dark side, are out of harmony; the dark side is opposition to the harmony of the universe. The light side, by contrast, is all about aligning yourself with the harmony of the cosmos and allowing it to act through you. So Anakin didn't fulfill the prophecy until the end of Return of the Jedi when he killed the emperor, turned to the light, and then died; having eliminated the Sith, he had eliminated the imbalance in the force. He had restored harmony.

We also see daoism in the disdain for passion. The Jedi remove all emotion; they meditate and bring themselves in peaceful harmony with the force.

There is no emotion... There is peace.
There is no ignorance... There is knowledge.
There is no passion... There is Serenity.
There is no chaos... There is harmony.
There is no death... There is the Force.

The Sith revel in passions, focusing on, channeling, encouraging strong emotions: hatred, anger, fear, love.

Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through passion, I gain Strength.
Through strength, I gain Power.
Through power, I gain Victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.

Wait, love? What? Yeah, Lucas thinks love and marriage are bad, and that peace and harmony cannot be gained if you fall in love. Love, like other passions, leads to disharmony. Jedi are free to bang, but not to love. Anakin's fall to the dark side was precipitated by falling in love with Padme. He became a slave to passion, and thus disharmony.

Daoism, like Buddhism, believes passion to be an impediment to achieving oneness with the cosmos, as Stephen Sawyer puts it,

What is essential to this state is that the Taoists are removing the false constructs of desire, prejudice and passion, and in this way integrating the forces within the body. It is the Taoists' goal to accomplish "oneness" throughout the body, mind and spirit. Thus at this stage they are en route to realizing the "one" within the self.

At the end of the day, the Jedi religion is just Space Daoism and, like all religions. It's based on faith. Faith is nothing more than a broken epistemology, a bad way of knowing things. It leads to false beliefs. Jedi, space daoism, is as unconnected with reality as any other religion. Like Christianity and Islam, it simply fails as a way of connecting with the world. Even worse, it fails at connecting even with the fictional world of Star Wars. Perhaps the most damning indictment of Lucas's philosophy is the Star Wars Extended Universe, the collection of novels, cartoons, comics, and video games that others have written for the Star Wars franchise.

Perhaps Lucas should have exerted more control over the EU, since the many authors who explored his fictional reality were more than happy to also explore the consequences of the Jedi philosophy. One of the things they realized was that the philosophy is ultimately incoherent. The Jedi and Sith philosophies are absolutely opposed, yet both allow you to control the Force, which is supposed to be the very substance of the cosmos... if the essence of harmony itself can be controlled by deliberately invoking disharmony, there must be something wrong with the philosophy. I believe this reaches its apotheosis with Knights of the Old Republic II, which manages simultaneously to deconstruct computer role playing games at the same time it picks apart Lucas's crackpot religion.

The game, despite being rushed and put on shelves incomplete, is an excellent and absorbing game. Perhaps its best feature is that it points out that Lucas's philosophy makes no damn sense and simply does not work, even in the framework of his fictional universe. It's bad enough that supernaturalism is incoherent, but Space Daoism is incoherent even when the very fabric of reality has been defined around it.

1 - The Chinese word "Tian" or "T'ien" is usually translated as "heaven", but it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes it's heavenly worlds (Buddhism) and sometimes it's a god or gods, and sometimes it's the cosmos or blue sky,as opposed to the earthly realm, (daoism). It serves as a higher realm/being/perfect way and provides the order to the world and divine mandates in almost all cases.

Whence Religion?

If there's no good evidence for the god hypothesis, then where did it come from? What purpose does it serve? Why do people keep believing it?

I'll answer these questions briefly and in order.

Whence religion?
I think religion is a by-product of two different drives. The first is general to all thinking creatures (ie. most animals), the second isn't specific to humans, but has definitely found, I suspect, its greatest expression in humans. The first is that we learn, the second is that we teach.


I don't know that all animals learn; sponges and other brainless animals certainly do not. At least one researcher believes the primary purpose of the brain is movement, and other purposes are all secondary. I'm not sure I agree, though he makes a compelling argument. However, one of the things our brain does is allow us, and many other species, to learn. We are pattern-seeking creatures, we seek to master our environment, we want nummy candies and to win in fights and to get laid and all the other things that will help see to it that we have grandchildren (which the first step to evolutionary success).

To that end, we can become addicted to gambling and coffee.

Actually, that's an unfortunate by-product of the learning process. If you know someone who loves his coffee in the morning, you may notice he has a certain way of doing things. It has to be a certain brand of coffee. A specific flavor, region, roast... He might grind it himself and prepare it in his own little French press. He definitely, no question, has his favorite coffee mug, and probably drinks it at a certain time of day; usually it's part of a larger set of "getting up in the morning" rituals.

One of the things caffeine does is short circuit the part of the brain that lets you know you've won. Whether it's a good grade on a test or solving a puzzle or getting a new iPhone, you know that feeling when part of you lights up and does a little happy dance. Of course, a week later that test is crumpled up on the floor of your locker, the puzzle is in the recycle bin, and your phone is no longer to be carefully placed on its own altar on your dresser, but to be thrown casually onto the bed with all the other crap in your pockets. That feeling goes away because you need to move on to the next challenge, figure out the next thing, master your environment more fully.

Caffeine cuts right to the chase and gives you that happy without having to actually solve, win, or buy anything. Your brain, trying to figure out what it's won at, just randomly attaches importance to whatever's going on when you get your buzz on. Over time, the importance accumulates on things that stay the same: the time of day, the kind of coffee, the coffee mug, the way you prepare it... All of these things become important to you not because they actually make the coffee better, but because your brain has been wired to say WRONG if any of that changes. What was a valuable learning tool has been totally screwed by chemistry.

And gambling? That learning process is meant to find patterns so that we can take advantage of them. Dice don't have patterns, so our system goes completely haywire and, again, starts attaching undeserved importance to meaningless rituals. That is to say, gamblers are superstitious because their brains are on their metaphorical knees, crying their metaphorical brain-hearts out. Okay, that's just why gamblers are superstitious. Addiction is more complex and has to do with the fact that losing feels much more bad than winning feels good. As with any other addiction, you do it not because it feels good but because it feels bad when you don't. How good does it feel? The more certain something is, the easier it is to figure out and the less incentive their is to master it. I'd venture a guess that the most popular games at casinos are very nearly 50/50 odds (played correctly, craps and blackjack are, I'd say that, in the long run, so are competitive games like poker).

Anyway, we aren't the only creatures to develop superstitions in the face of an uncontrollable and somewhat random universe. Psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that pigeons, given food at regular intervals with no reference to the pigeons' behavior, quickly developed superstitions regarding what causes food to drop. Lest you think, "Well, pigeons, yeah, they're stupid. Terry Pratchett said so." and believe yourself immune, more or less the exact same thing has been observed in humans in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Players rapidly conceived the belief that using a certain skill absolutely improved the loot dropped from treasure chests and could not be dissuaded from that belief (note: they were wrong). When the developers made it impossible to use that skill on treasure chests, there were massive fan complaints that their skill had been rendered useless.

In the face of a large and uncaring world where small mistakes can cause massive dying, superstition was and is inevitable. We are all of us autodidacts to a degree, and we all develop these silly habits. Thus learning can make fools of us all.

What about teaching? Animals teaching their young has been observed in the wild, but nowhere to the degree that it's found in humans. Compared to pretty much any animal you care to name, we are weak, blind, and deaf. We might as well not have noses, and our teeth and claws are a joke. We are completely helpless for several years after birth, and our maturation process is an incredibly protracted part of our lives. How the hell do we manage in a dangerous world? By passing accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next. Far more than any other creature I know of, the human animal passes knowledge from one to another. Long story short, if our children didn't listen to us, credulous to a fault, it would be much, much more difficult for this to happen. And, yes, I mean that literally; children are credulous to a fault. They'll believe any damn thing you say.

What this means is that children, lacking critical thinking skills and, I believe, primed to believe everything they're told, absorb their parents superstitions as readily as their hunting skills, their knowledge of interpersonal relationships, and how not to poop in your food.

This notion has spawned the study of memetics, essentially a branch of information theory that might be considered an analog of biological evolution, where ideas and information travel through their space (inside our heads) and warp and mutate based on a much more loosely governed analog of genetic evolution. Think of it this way: a good idea, how to make a really awesome spear, say, maintains itself because deviations make the spear less effective and its demonstrable efficacy discourage deviations; a bad idea, like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the balls to control the urge to masturbate, weeds itself out because it's demonstrably not effective, and anyway masturbating's not actually a bad thing; a neutral idea, like turning around three times and spitting when you jinx something, can just hang around and mutate and warp because it doesn't have any impact one way or the other. After all, since there's no such thing as a jinx, whether you turn before or after you spit doesn't make much difference. Though the schism and five generations of bloody warfare between the preturners and the posturners were quite hard to watch, and let us not speak of the genocide of the widdershin turners by the sunwisers.

Thus it's quite easy to see religion as another superstition and the result of thousands of years of memetic evolution, an evolution that continues today as sects split and diverge and merge and mutate. Whereas most superstitions hang on just because and we don't necessarily attach much importance to them and really belong just to the individual (like the unfortunate ball-players who neither change nor wash their underpants...), religion is a collection of self-supporting memes. It piggybacks on the morality of sanctity by forbidding the questioning of ideas, on on in-group loyalty by providing visible markers of kinship. It produces an internally consistent structure with little or no external reference, nor much need for one. When it does impinge upon the outside world, it but co-opts other learning (societies that were originally pastoral show it in their myths wherein they hate farmers, see Cain and Abel. Societies in arid countries all hate pigs, which require lots of water. Populations prone to bee allergies learn to despise honey.).

In short, modern religions are crude amalgams, a cobbled together attempt to understand and explain the world consisting mostly of superstitions, the crude xenophobias of the world in which they were born, and occasionally useful rules of thumb from bronze age culture. Useful only in a bronze age culture, mind.

Okay, so much for talking briefly. That's where religion came from. Next, what's it for?

Evolving Beyond Religion

The Bible says, "Thou Shalt Not Kill".

Actually, it's "Thou Shalt Not Murder". And the act of murder can only be committed on human beings. And that really only applies to your fellow X. Heathens are fair game.

That was the interpretation for thousands of years. The law said that if you threw a stone into a crowd of heathens and accidentally killed one of your fellow faithful, then it wasn't murder because your clear intent was to kill a heathen.

In ancient pre-history, we lived in small family groups of a few dozen to a few hundred. As our populations grew, we encountered, who knows how many times, the Stranger Problem; how can you live with the constant fear of the stranger without killing him? In order for civilization to exist, this problem had to be overcome. The earliest forms were probably the discovery of distant kinship, as small groups living near each other probably had tenuous blood connections due to the outbreeding necessary to prevent serious genetic difficulties. Also available, particularly at trading confluences, was honorary kinship, the sacred guest rights. But those are cumbersome and were replaced by religion, by civilization, eventually by nationality, and in due time the rule of law. In some places.

Why is it that in times past, the most horrific acts of cruel barbarity were commonplace wherever two people got together to kill a third? And why is it that in much of the world, these acts are becoming much more rare? Indeed, why is it that a mere five thousand years after the Bible began being written, a modern reader can look at it in astonished horror that these things were considered just and moral?

Because we're still evolving. For a few million years, we evolved to live in small family bands, and it shows. I used to scoff at the notion that small towns were just nicer and safer and all that, thinking it was provincialism at its worst*. It turns out that small towns are safer, nicer, more polite. And that's because everyone knows one another. First, there's social pressure to be nice; when word gets around (and it *will*) your life becomes that much harder if you're a jerk. Of course, the sword swings both ways, the social pressure requires you to conform in all things, not merely in social niceties; Garrison Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion once said that moving to New York from his small home town was a huge relief because he could finally relax and just be himself away from prying eyes. Another aspect of city vs town life is the presence of strangers; being surrounded by strangers raises your stress levels, making you more unhappy and quicker to anger. Whereas the townsman is open and friendly, the city dweller maintains a personal shield of privacy, ignoring others as much as possible. City dweller, when's the last time you started a conversation with the person sitting next to you on the bus/subway?

Strangers used to represent an entirely potent threat; a stranger was someone who, at the least, might kill you and take all your stuff just because. After a few thousand years, that reflexive fear hasn't gone away.

But I suspect it's starting to, because I don't believe we could have spent 500 generations living with the constant presence of strangers in cities of tens of thousands, and now tens of millions of people without weeding out those people who simply could not abide strangers, without selecting for people who are more tolerant of strangers, more willing to live and let live. Where once it took a great deal of effort to live with strangers, where it was once the case that civilization only managed to independently arise in a very few places, where once we had to invent an omnipresent and angry skybeard to keep us from murdering one another, we can now walk down the street in relative safety.

The world is by no means a perfectly safe place, but it is not what once it was. We have spent thousands of years and hundreds of generations learning, in our bones, how to cope with a civilized world. The changing and advancing of the zeitgeist such that slavery has vanished and racism is waning could be explained by happenstance, by random cultural shift, or it could be that evolution is shifting us away from the paranoid, family-bound apes that we were into an open, embracing humanity ready to live in a global society.

I believe that we developed religion as a desperate necessity to allow us to build our cities, and I look forward to the day when we realize that, like xenophobia, it is a tool that was once useful but which is no longer necessary.


* In the sense that where I live is awesome and everywhere else sucks, not in the sense of a naive misunderstanding of the way the world works.

Sanctity/Purity and Civilization Part 2

So the problem of a growing population is that a reason needs to be found to not kill strangers. We've happened upon a number of these over the course of our development. One example is the sanctity of blood kinship, however tenuous. The highlanders of Papua New Guinea, as described by Jared Diamond, when they encounter one another on the trails, will immediately launch into long and detailed genealogies describing the many forkings of their family trees until a connection is found and a reason not to kill one another is established. In a much more tragic fashion, African slaves did the same thing in the New World, though perhaps more to be able to maintain a sense of community and continuity as their families were repeatedly torn apart.

Another example is that of sacred hospitality. Once someone is under your roof, they are honorary members of your family and cannot be harmed. A violation of this custom and the shock it inspired was rather graphically included in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series in the form of the Red Wedding, when the host slaughtered the visiting wedding party. This custom was upheld in the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah when Lot offered up his daughters to the mob instead of his guests (his guests were part of his family, his daughters were just property. Valuable property, but chattel property nevertheless. Never confuse the Bible for a source of good morals.).

In both of these cases, kinship and guest rights, the third pillar of morality elucidated by Jonathan Haidt of In-Group Loyalty (also known as kin selection in evolutionary biology) is expanded to include those not of the group. These are two potential strategies for overcoming the Stranger Problem, but the first is awkward and time-consuming and the second strictly temporary. In order to overcome the Stranger Problem long term, a method needs to be found whereby the default position is "Do not kill a stranger unless he first gives you cause." rather than "Stranger! Danger! Kill! KILL!".

Once a population expands beyond the four to five hundred person limit*, a long term solution needs to be found. Initially, a monopoly on inter-personal violence can be a successful strategy. After the egalitarian band, what generally evolved was a proto-chiefdom, with a "big man" acting as a de facto authority figure by virtue of being, well, big. This co-opted the fourth pillar, Respect for Authority, and repurposed it to a long-term survival strategy for the population rather than a short term cooperative strategy. Simply put, Jim doesn't kill Dan because Big Dave will get pissed. Jim and Dan don't need to know one another for this to work, they just both have to know Big Dave. And Big Dave doesn't even have to know Jim or Dan, he just has to make sure they know him by being a visible presence.

As the population grows larger, the Big Man's presence becomes more distant; it becomes unfeasible for him to be personally known to several thousand people. The Chief/proto-king has to rely on a presence more visible from a distance. Not coincidentally, this is where conspicuous consumption became an art form; no longer a matter of biological ornamentation like our long hair or a peacock's tail, but a matter of artificial ornamentation. Hawaiian kings wore capes made from thousands of parrot feathers. Greek and Roman nobility wore clothes dyed a brilliant vermilion hue, which necessitated the gathering and careful crushing of thousands of sea snails to achieve (and which was relegated to the nobility by law on pain of death).

But this next phase didn't happen in a vacuum. Along with increased displays of wealth and power was a greater division of social hierarchy. And religion.

There are two reasons the title 'Oedipus Rex' is wrong. First, putting a Latin word in the title of a Greek play is just asinine, like eating shepherd's pie with chop sticks. More importantly, Oedipus wasn't a king (basileus), but a tyrant, one who came to power through "unofficial" channels. In ancient Greece, as in the rest of the world, the king was a sacred person/position, appointed by the gods if not semi-divine himself. Chinese dynasties were founded on the Mandate of Heaven; the Fisher King's impotence strikes the land; Herakles, Jesus, and how many others are divine sun kings, sacrificed at the end of winter to bring forth the new harvest.

In short, Respect for Authority/Elders combined with Sanctity/Purity to create religion so as to reinforce a distant hierarchy of thousands of strangers and maintain a peaceful civilization. But first, how could Sanctity/Purity play a role in this and second, what role did it play?

As I said many posts ago, Respect for Elders first comes into play as a learning tool; children are credulous to a fault and take in all they are told and store it. This expedites the learning process so that the child can learn how to survive in a hostile world in the abbreviated time his elders are available to teach him. However, as Richard Dawkins and others have noted, this comes with a price. Children absorb and take at face value nonsense just as readily as they do genuine knowledge. And then they hold fiercely to it, rejecting attempts by others to dislodge the noise. "Are you calling my father a liar?!" The Sanctity/Purity drive, which I suspect was initially simply a disgust response to keep animals from eating or drinking what was bad for them, in this model becomes a means of buttressing the Respect for Authority drive, insuring that learned information is more readily stored. The unfortunate consequence of passing on pointless superstitions about witches and blood and the full moon are a small price to pay for seeing to it that important information be passed on intact.

Further, if the information is truly valuable it will be repeatedly reinforced by contact with the real world (make a spear this way and it works, make it *this* way and you get killed by an elephant in a painful fashion, which sucks), whereas superstitions and other noise, having no real world reference, are free to mutate and change and act, in all ways, as noise. In short, valuable information stays the same, everything else is more or less harmless (unless it kills you, in which case you don't get the chance to pass it on anyway. Win-win).

I suspect that by this means, visible symbols, as tangible icons of ideas passed on from one generation to the next, became the fortunate heritors of this legacy. Sanctity/Purity attaches not just to food and water and not just to what we're taught by our elders, but also to the symbols that represent those ideas. Thus a nation's flag represents all the ideas and ideals of that nation, burning it is as much an affront as burning the nation itself. Desecrating a holy text or a holy symbol is as horrific as desecrating a loved one's corpse, not least because the ideas it represents was passed on to you by that loved one. Not everyone attaches the same importance to the sanctity of symbols, but it becomes more comprehensible in this hypothesis.

But how does it benefit a burgeoning civilization? By turning a stranger into someone who's not a stranger. It's not merely the king who benefits from the highly visible symbols of his holy office, nor just the priests in their recognizable hats. Everyone in a religion, and indeed a culture (which is often so interwoven with religion as to be inseparable), adopts certain visible signifiers. As Tevye said, "For instance, we always keep our heads covered, and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition." The Jews have their yarmulkes, Muslims have their taqiyah (mostly central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa), Christians have crucifixes. It goes beyond that, with the hijab, the payot, and everything Amish, all cultural rather than explicitly required by the texts (maybe), but still visible identifiers for who is in and who is out.

Through the complex and involved process of looking at someone, it became possible to identify someone as being a stranger one could not kill**. And other visible identifiers said, "This person is of a higher rank than you. Go out of your way not to piss him off." or "This person is a slave, go ahead and poo on his head if you want. He'll smile and thank you for it, though his owner might not." and because all of this was wrapped up in the repurposed Respect for Elders/Sanctity/Purity drives, it was all passed along and kept intact. Unlike most superstitions, these had real-world ramifications because without them civilization would collapse.

I believe that the development of religion and civilization had to happen simultaneously. Religion can only exist in the large populations of civilization and the large populations of civilization could only exist with the support of the first. Think of religion as an epidemic of the mind; it can only sustain itself in a large population. I deliberately shifted verbs from "can" to "could", though, because I believe that we have spent the 10,000 years since the development of agriculture, civilization, and religion evolving. As with all populations, our evolution is slow and multifarious, but I suspect that one aspect is that we no longer need religion to survive. This I will discuss in Evolving Beyond Religion.


* That being the rough maximum number of people one can know, as in to put a face to a name and a name to a face. Check out a school website and match up the number of vice principals to the number of students.

** The Biblical proscription against killing should more accurately read "Thou shalt not kill thy fellow Jew". Rabbinical and Christian interpretations for thousands of years have been, "Killing a fellow Jew/Christian is murder and punishable as such. Killing a heathen? Meh. Have at it, hoss."