I read a really good post today by David Horton on the rise of religiosity among professional athletes. Of course I’ve heard them thank their lordandsavior for the win and seen them drop to their knees in the end zone. That was always annoying, but I just felt sorry for the poor, dumb jocks and wished the camera people wouldn’t subject us to that crap.
But I didn’t know till I read David’s post that pro teams in the US have their own chaplains. I instantly pictured some fat cat wearing a backwards collar sitting in a big leather chair with two strippers on his lap and a pile of coke on the table in front of him…
David, a scientist and atheist, writes often about the scourge of fundamentalism around the world, particularly the rise of the Evangelicals, since he lives among them. He’s Australian, and that country is as bad as America when it comes to the godlies.
Even though I share his views on religion completely, and religion is a subject that gets me really worked up, I haven’t talked about it much here, mostly because I’m just resigned to the fact that there’s no reasoning with those people. So I’ve never written a post entirely on the subject. But there’s a first time for everything…
By the time I left the US in 2006, the ubiquitous religiosity had become truly oppressive. The number of God is my co-pilot bumper stickers was increasing at an alarming rate (bumper stickers are a surprisingly reliable indicator of trends in American values). I pondered the phenomenon over the years as it became markedly worse, wondering why it was getting so out of control (and plotting to escape to Canada before I found myself living The Handmaid’s Tale).
I developed a theory. The world is just changing too fast for people to keep up. There is too much strangeness, and they don’t have the coping skills to deal with it. So more and more of them are retreating to the panic room that is religious fundamentalism.
Belief in a higher being and purpose has always been nothing more than a coping mechanism. Primitive men invented gods back when eclipses scared the shit out of them and rainbows seemed like magic. And then there’s fear of death, of course, the primary reason God is still in business, if you ask me. Animals get scared when they can’t comprehend or control what’s going on around them and when they feel threatened. They flee and hide or they fight. Lower-brain responses. It took higher brains to create gods and religions, but religious faith is a lizard-brain response.
There are people who, upon seeing a seething anthill, will run and get some gasoline and a match. There are others who stand and marvel, who expand their comprehension of the universe, who are glad to walk away from the anthill with more questions than answers, and who will often poke it with a stick to see what happens. Which of these are you?
The antkillers don’t want questions, they just want answers. Religion gives them those, although, ironically, those answers are so ambiguous, you’d think they wouldn’t satisfy the antkillers’ needs. But they circumvent this little problem by simply interpreting the “answers” as they see fit and giving the matter no further thought. Thought, after all, stirs the anthill.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with the Internet, a seething anthill if ever there was one. That’s what’s bringing the big, scary world too close for the antkillers’ comfort.
The only solution to the problem, as I see it, lies in early childhood education. We have to teach kids to use that higher brain. We have to make sure that children are exposed to the widest possible range of philosophies and that they’re taught to think critically. This is especially crucial for the millions of little antkillers-in-training who are being brainwashed with religion at home. Childhood education is your only hope if you want to counter that effect.
What you have now is crazies firing teachers for teaching evolution, and crazies in classrooms passing out fundamentalist tracts saying evolution is linked to Nazism…
Frankly, I think it’s too bad the federal government can’t impose a humanistic curriculum on the entire country, rather than leaving something so critical in the incompetent hands of the states… That’s how it’s done in France (where a 15-year-old can define communism and socialism and capitalism because he’s been introduced to the concepts and encouraged required to dissect and compare them all in a neutral environment).
But in the case of the US, such a move would be way too risky; it’s only a matter of time till you have another pea-brained religious wackjob like Bush in the White House. Can you imagine what Sarah Palin would do if she had control of the national curriculum? I shudder. In fact, it might look a lot like the Texas curriculum, which just boggles the mind.
So where does that leave you? It’s the schools and the kids that are going to make or break you, America. So do what you can to increase public education funding, do what you can to stop the government (federal or state) from funding religious schools (often masquerading as “charter schools”), and do what you can to influence what is taught in schools. Even if you don’t have kids.
You could start by paying attention to the shenanigans of your state and local school boards. For example, did you know that the Full Curriculum Commission and Subject Matter Committees, an advisory group to the California Department of Education, holds meetings that are open to the public? That you can watch videos of San Diego school district board meetings? If that doesn’t thrill you, you could launch a ballot initiative in your state making it illegal to teach creationism (or the euphemistic “intelligent design”) in public schools. Maybe you can get some ideas from Humanism.org.uk, which is actively fighting the encroachment of religion on education.
Maybe none of this seems terribly exciting to you. I understand. And it’s probably not the kind of thing you’re thinking about two days before Christmas. But, unfortunately, the lizard-brained antkillers are driven by forces they don’t understand to take over the world. So you can’t just sit there.
In my view, imposing religion on unsuspecting children is child-abuse, plain and simple.
All it takes to follow a “moral” existence is to follow the golden rule. End of story.
I liked this post, but I’m wondering if your “lizard-brain” comment isn’t a bit insulting to lizards. After all, when they’re in danger, they don’t get on their knees and pray, they shed a twitching tail and run like hell!
The willful rejection of more practical and advanced knowledge in favor of religion does have a “retreat” aspect to it now that we have more advanced knowledge, but we should remember that homo sapiens probably gained advantage over the Neanderthals by “hunting smarter, not harder”. According to anthropologist Steven Mithen in “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Neanderthals had similar tools to the earliest homo sapiens. Modern humans first gained the upper hand by predicting the actions of their prey so they could lie in wait; their bodies were subject to less wear and tear. The technology that enabled them to make predictions probably was *myth*ology that anthropomorphized animals (and later, for agriculture, the weather and crops). This knee-jerk tendency to anthropomorphize everything persists today with cars that “die” and computers that “go crazy”. Ironically, only animals advanced enough to invent stories of that sort could be dumb enough to buy into religion. Lizards couldn’t handle it.
The trouble is, this tendency misfires often, even in rational people doing rational things. We (and even pigeons, according to BF Skinner) over-analyze random data and “discover” patterns and means of controlling the randomness, even where there is nothing there. This sort of superstition is not just for baseball players with their lucky socks or fundies with their prayers. Even hard-headed stock traders “see” patterns in randomly-generated data using their technical analysis software. I’ve known reputable scientists to over-weight some data points to fit a hunch, only to be caught when others can’t reproduce data to fit their stated conclusions. This is why peer review is so important in science; at bottom, we all think we’re smarter than we really are. We must doubt not only religion, but also our own skills and assumptions.
As for morality, I think religion tends to produce worse morality in its followers, not better. Hitler learned his anti-Semitism in church (and from “special training” in the Austrian army), not from Darwin. The fact that Jesus and Hillel are credited with the “do unto others” principle doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have figured that one out for ourselves. But for otherwise decent people to say that “thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them [Deut 7:2]” is morally authoritative? Only religion can do that.
Hi Rick.
First of all, thank you for your thorough and thoughtful comment, and for so gently filling in the gaps in my “science.”
You’re right, the lizards’ flight response is physical, but the godlies’ is a flight of fancy, again letting brains do the heavy lifting, reducing the need for physical flight just as brains reduced the need for physical chase. Head in sand, terrified, all the same in the end.
I have heard here and there recently that a lot of our problems (inability to deal effectively with the imminent climate disaster, for example) are related to the fact that those brains that won us the Neanderthal/Homo sapiens Superbowl haven’t evolved quickly enough for us to deal with long-term, nebulous threats. Often seems like we’re still pretty lizardish when it comes right down to it. So I don’t find it so surprising that people are still believing in deities, I just find it deplorable and depressing.
That’s a very good point about even the most rational people succumbing to magical thinking and the role our pattern recognition abilities play in that. I hadn’t really thought about the connection, but it’s quite obvious now that you mention it! So people need to discipline themselves to be suspicious of the patterns they see (question their assumptions), even though this ability allows us to parse our world. That’s a tough one. Most of the assumptions we make as a result of connecting dots are probably unconscious too. Not enough emphasis on rationalism in schools…
Anyway, I’m as guilty as the next person of letting myself “believe” in kismet every now and then. It’s gratifying and adds a little spice to life (I was “meant” to find this perfect skirt!). And it’s very hard to resist. Of course, I know things like this are conicidence, but it’s a game people play with themselves, I guess. At this level, it’s fairly benign, but when you’re “meant” to kill all the (perceived) enemies of [pick a god], then it’s getting a little out of hand, as you rightly say.
As for morality and religion, I absolutely agree. There’s nothing more infuriating than hearing fundamentalists of any stripe spew hate out one side of their mouths and claim righteousness from the other. It seems like such a no brainer that the Golden Rule should suffice. And you’d think there’d be ample evidence by now that faith is no more a guarantee of goodness than the lack of it.
There must be a way to get people to see reason…
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and contributing so much!