Recently, I came across an article discussing Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I have not focused on Daniel Dennett’s work, but I wanted to respond to the discussion in the article, and will be adding more to this discussion as I read through the book. One of the largest issues is that Dennett’s position seems to be that Dennett, or at least the author of the blog article, seems to view religious behavior as being indistinct from non-religious belief: “from the meme’s-eye-view, there’s no difference between a Muslim who prays five times a day because he truly believes in Allah and the truth of the Koran, and a Muslim who prays five times a day because that’s what Muslims do.” The second issue is the view that religion perpetuates itself because there is a belief that religion is good. 

Are these statement reasonable? I want to tackle the idea that there is no difference between actions taken because of religious belief and because of the idea that the behavior is just something that we do. While beliefs which have received heavy investment can be somewhat difficult to break, there are differences between religious and non-religious belief. That is a fundamental component of the unified psychological and anthropological model of religion that I have developed. Harris’ work on the neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief are consistent with the theory that there is indeed a difference between religious and nonreligious belief and that the presence of a religious belief activates various parts of the brain related to emotion and identity. It makes no sense that the way people behave would be unaffected by whether or not they actually hold a religious belief relating to the behavior. Indeed, the working definition of belief that I used is “a learned peristant cognitive state which modulates behavior.”

In the discussion with the author of the article on the topic, I tried to explain this point by suggesting a very silly example of rituals arising purely out of tradition, and those backed by a religious belief:

Let’s consider a ritual where a person cooking a turkey breaks the legs off before putting it into the oven. Now suppose there’s another person that does the same thing. The first one just does it because “that’s how you cook a turkey.” The second one does it because “god said so.”

Now how do we break this ritual? In the first case, we can just show that there’s no point to it and that the ritual started because, let’s say the grandmother’s oven was too small so she had to do it to fit the turkey. Do you think the person will persist in the ritual? Probably not. Now let’s consider the second person, and we say that there’s no reason to perform the ritual. Of course the person is going to reject and state quite firmly that god commanded it. Now you either have to break the connection between the ritual and the god belief, or you have to break the god belief.

So even fro the “meme’s-eye-view” there is a difference.

Yes, the example is silly, but it does work as a useful thought experiment. We know that some behaviors are harder to adjust than others, and we see that it can be very difficult to alter rituals that are a result of religious belief. There is an entire additional variable that must be addressed. So the first idea promoted by the author, and possibly Dennett as well, seems to be contrary to our general understanding of the topic, and also neural imaging data. The second issue is just as problematic.

Perhaps the most extreme counter example to the claim that religion perpetuates itself through a belief that religion is positive is Religious Rejectionism. While it is not a critical element of the religion, the negative view of religion, possessed by Religious Rejectionists, and exemplified by those like Harris, Dawkins, et al., acts in opposition to the notion that religion is perpetuated by a positive view of religion itself. Additionally, not all cultures even have a concept of religion vs non-religion. The practitioners of Shinto do not view Shinto as a religion. The word “shūkyō” generally refers only to western conceptualizations of religion. Indeed, while religion has probably existed for well over a hundred thousand years, the concept of religion is fairly new. So in such instances at least, the idea that religion propagates due to belief in religion simply makes no sense.

Now, I admit that there are indeed people do often view their beliefs and practices as being beneficial, and indeed this does act as a motivation resulting in continuation of the cultural elements, but the view presented in Shem’s article is just too simplistic and in many ways counter-theoretical.

The post Breaking the Spell: Unreasonable Views on the Nature of Religion appeared first on The Spiritual Anthropologist.

Prominent individuals in psychology have stated or implied that religion is a delusion. These people are often delusional themselves. I have explained why religion is not a delusion or mental illness in “The Pervasive Nature of Religiophobia” and “Religion is an Illness and Evolution is Wrong (Not).“

In these articles, I have explained that a delusion requires a perception of reality which is contrary to the cultural understanding of the perceiver. Those who believe that “god is talking to them” or has left a sign believe this because their cultural upbringing has taught them to interpret sensory information in that way. But people like Richard Dawkins have a different cultural understanding of the world. Their understanding is one based purely in mathematics and science. If the current scientific body of evidence points in a specific direction, that is what is interpreted as being “true” and if current theory and evidence contradicts a position, that position is interpreted as being false.

So what is happening with Dawkins and others like him call religion a delusion or mental illness? In order to make this claim, their perception of reality must be different from the current body of scientific theory and evidence on the topics of mental health and the anthropology and psychology of religion. Their perception contradicts the cultural understanding of reality. By the definition of delusion then, Dawkins et al. are the delusional ones.

So while “religion is a delusion” is wrong, or at least inconsistent with current scientific understanding, that thought process is delusional itself. It is ironic, but it is not surprising. In some ways, these people, who are clearly Religious Rejectionists, have two very different domains of thought: their mundane thought processes, which center around science, and their religious thought, which is centered around the belief that there are no gods, afterlives, etc. It is the latter domain which other religions contradict and therefore result in the conflict which drives them to make the claims that they do.

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Religion is useful, but Genetically Modified Skeptic misses the real point and fails to understand a lot about the scientific study of religion.

I might have to edit this rebuttal later, because I am writing it while a little ticked off at having lost the entire thing when I accidentally closed the tab I was writing in, but Genetically Modified Skeptic makes a number of incorrect claims about religion that really need to be addressed. There are three main ideas that I want to address for now. The first is the idea that something has no real merit if something else can provide the same or similar benefit. The second is the citation of a poorly conducted study on religiosity and altruism. The third is religiosity among scientists. I am not going to cite many scientific studies directly in this article, but my other articles that I cite do link to specific peer reviewed literature used to justify my positions.

The first one is simple. Maybe there are other institutions besides religion which provides benefits similar to the ones religion provides. I would say that any collectivist system provides many of the benefits that organized religion does. But religion does offer a lot of different benefits that might be achievable only through multiple other means. First, organized religion induces altruistic tendencies by connecting sacrifice and some kind of religious belief, such as that of an afterlife. Ancient Egypt, for instance, was highly redistributive society, and that was largely maintained by the idea that the Pharaoh was a god. Religion also tends to have some kind of artificial kin system. This can stem from a creation myth, or the use of familial terms in religious practices such as brother, sister, mother, father, etc. This artificial kin system piggybacks off of the existing psychology of kin altruism. A benefit which does seem to be specific to religion, or religion like beliefs is analgesic enhancement. Indeed, I specifically mention “An fMRI study measuring analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system” in my description of what constitutes a religion. It may be that other beliefs have a similar effect, but it has not been shown.

GMS mentions Decety et. al. 2015, a study which looks at the relationship between altruism and religiosity. This study is highly flawed for a number of reasons. First, it uses religious self identification. Unless everyone agrees on what religion is, self identification does not actually measure true religiosity. The study also tends to conflate atheism with non-religion, but this is incorrect. Because of these two mistakes, the study defines China as being essentially non-religious, but religious self identification in China is dangerous, and even illegal for members of the communist party. Many Chinese believe in afterlives, ancestral spirits, and especially vital life force, which is one reason why traditional Chinese medicine is still so important in China. Therefor all we can ascertain from the study is that those who identify with specific known major religions tend to be less altruistic, not that religion and religiosity are negatively associated.

GMS then jumps to war. He seems to indicate a high degree of relationship between war and religion, but as I mention in “The Pervasive Nature of Religiophobia,” most war is not causd by religion. Also, people need to be aware of emic vs etic perspectives. The emic perspective is what those within a culture believe, while the etic perspective is the scientific perspective on the nature of cultural practices. For instance, within a culture, people might believe that a harvest festival ingratiates the people with the gods, while the etic perspective is that it helps unify the people for a successful harvest. I do not wish to go into politics too much on this site, but religion and war are political. It is argued that ISIS et. al. are the result of radical Islam, but in all honesty, that does not make sense. It does not explain why radical Islam exists where it does and why it emerged when it did. But as I explain in “Middle East Turmoil: Radical Islam or Reaction to Imperialism?” there is a parsimonious answer to the aforementioned questions: radical Islam is a direct response to and rally against western imperialism.

Regarding polytheism and religious war, it did not happen all that much. Polytheists tended to merge pantheons readily. While cities within a polytheistic culture might have had a patron deity that they were proud of, there was little forced conversion. The other polytheists accepted the other gods, they just did not worship them as much as heir own patron deity. It is also incorrect to assign religion to the cause of war campaigns in Rome, etc, which while brutal, were about gaining resources, not about religious conversion.

Finally, GMS mentions religiosity among scientists. First off, there have been many brilliant scientists who were religious, including Sir Isaac Newton. There still are many, including Freeman Dyson. There is nothing inherently anti-scientific about religion, though there are dogmatic religious elements which do contradict science. The real issue is two fold. One thing is that religiosity may be under reported, as Religious Rejectionism seems to be more common among the academics. Religious Rejectionism is a religion, as classified by the unified model of religion that I cited earlier. The belief that there are no gods does seem to be religioid, as identified by multiple fMRI studies. The belief is integrated with numerous cultural dimensions from Smart’s seven dimensions of religion. But there is another issue beyond failure to identify Religious Rejectionism. As I mentioned in my discussion of Religiophobia, academia itself rejects Christians. It discriminates against Christians and the stigma reduces the ability for Christian students to learn, as the ability for Christian scientists to be hired. Additionally, Christianity, and organized religion itself has more utility when one is of lower socioeconomic status. Therefore a person who is from a lower class is more likely to be Christian, but that same person is less likely to excel in academia and therefore less likely to become a scientist.

Overall, Genetically Modified Skeptic uses much of the same invalid reasoning that other New Atheist religiophobes use to attack religion. It is at best poor science and at worst dogmatic ignorance. While there are issues with highly dogmatic religions, and much of the same can be said about a lot of highly collectivist systems, the arguments that he presents are just bad. I am not arguing that we should all go out and become religious. For one thing, we cannot control our own beliefs; we can only make decisions which affect them. Personally, I cannot accept any position which does not have a scientific and mathematical justification, up to axiom, and choose axioms based on what seems like the only way to make decisions in life. I am not religious, and as long as my view on reality does not change, I never will be. But to each his or her own, so long as that world view is not forced upon me.

Further Reading

• Infinite In All Directions (Amazon)

The post A Rebuttal to “Is Religion Useful…” by Genetically Modified Skeptic appeared first on The Spiritual Anthropologist.

Faith and Belief: Remnants of Our Ancestry Used to Enslave Our Minds, by Glen Vickers, attempts to look at the evolutionary psychology of religion, but fails miserably. It had the potential to be a solid work, however it could have benefited from better fact checking, a more skilled copy editor, and the reliance on citation. It also suffers from clear biases against religion, expressed by the author, rather than scientific objectivity. 

If the author pushed himself to use citation to back up his material, he may not have made so many errors. As it stands, this book is largely a perpetuation of pseudoscience and pseudohistory and is also an example of blatant plagiarism. If the content were at least decent, I could get past the poor quality of writing: the spelling errors, use of incorrect homophones, sentence fragments, run on sentences, and more. After all, I admit that I am not the best writer. However, the content of Faith and Belief does not make up for the poor writing. The following is an overall review and rebuttal of the work. I want to start with the structural issues of the book.

The most glaring issue is the repeated contradictions within the text. Even someone who is not familiar with the topic should be able to pick up on these inconsistencies. The the beginning of the book, the author states that “religion is defined as the belief in a higher power.” But then on the very next page, he asserts that “the literal definition of religion is the belief in a deity or to have a set doctrine.” (pp. 15 – 16) When discussing monotheistic religions, he first claims that “the Jewish faith is the oldest known monotheistic faith on current records.” He follows this with a the assertion: “[Judaism was] not the first monotheistic religion to document their belief and create holy books which claim to be written by the prophets of god.” He then continues on by suggesting that “archeological findings on early civilizations suggest that all religions began as a monotheistic tradition.” (pp. 96 – 90)

Finally, the author seems to want to claim that there is no universal objective morality (pp. 34- 35). And admittedly the existence of one has not been well argued. But he then continues to address the topic of rape and other related actions as immoral, and seems to do so in a way that suggests that such actions are inherently, objectively, and universally immoral.

If the author had provided citations for the last point, I might buy it, but either way, the chain of reasoning is contradictory. If monotheistic traditions preceded polytheistic ones, then either Judaism was the first religion or was not the first monotheistic one. This back and forth continues for the next few pages. The lack of citations is ironic, considering this following point that the author made.

You can trust the delivery of knowledge from a person as much as you can trust the delivery of knowledge from the written word. Claims can be made by both the written word and the spoken word. The difference between the deliveries does not matter as much as the source of the knowledge and the evidence to support the You can trust the delivery of knowledge from a person as much as you can trust the delivery of knowledge from the written word. Claims can be made by both the written word and the spoken word. The difference between the deliveries does not matter as much as the source of the knowledge and the evidence to support the knowledge. (pp. 103 – 104)

The author recognizes the importance of the source of the knowledge and the evidence to “support” it, but fails to provide citations. Of less significance is the repeated issues with grammar and spelling. There are numerous sentence fragments and run on sentences. One of many examples is as follows: “It seems that the only species that makes moral decisions for survival of a species is humans. At least on this planet, we can’t speak for any other life in the universe.” (pg. 29) There are also misused homophones, such as the use of manor rather than manner (pg. 93). Again, if the content made up for the poor quality of writing, I would not mind. But that is not the case.

The most important failure of the text is the presence of scientifically and historically inaccurate information. This includes the perpetuation of the historically inaccurate view that Medieval Europe viewed the Earth as flat. More importantly the author has a poor understanding of early human development. Finally there is a similar misrepresentation of the history of the development of religion and literalist vs interpretationist stances on the bible.

Starting with the most benign misconception, according to the author, it has “been less than 600 years since we discovered that our earth was not flat” (pg. 14). However, according to current historical understanding, this was not the case. In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Burton Russell tears apart the historically falsified myth that the medieval world thought the Earth was flat. He also explains how the argument that Columbus set out to settle was not whether the Earth was flat or round, but rather how big it was. Modern history books no longer include this myth, but it is likely that the author was taking classes before the corrections occurred in the 80s.

Later on, the author claims that “religion existed when we lived in caves” (pg. 33). While according to current theory religion did exist during the paleolithic period (citation needed) the view that humans lived in caves is not an archaeologically valid statement. With a few exceptions, early humans did not live in caves. They did engage in certain rituals involving caves, but that was generally the extent of their interaction with the environment. (A Caveman’s Home was Not a Cave). This view of early human brings me to another related point. The author repeatedly uses the word “primitive.” I will try to add further citation later, but a Reddit AskAnthropology Q&A does a fairly good job of explaining the issue: “primitive” is a poorly defined term which, in terms of looking at groups of people, was developed as a way to expressing a false sense of superiority over other groups. (Reddit AskAnthropology)

The author’s lack of understanding of early humans creates other issues. Part way through the second chapter, the author invokes the concept of the alpha male, saying that if a person survived and became the alpha male, he is now the leader of the tribe (pg 73). There are a number of issues with this position. The existence of alpha males in humans is not well accepted and is not part of the current body of scientific theory. The are a number of sources which address the topic, including Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, “Are Alpha Males Myth or Reality,” “The myth of the alpha male,” and “Play as a Foundation of Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence.” The final source is quick to point out that early human populations were not tribal but rather exited in mobile bands with fluid membership. Overall, when it comes to the development of modern humans, I think the author would benefit from reviewing a basic anthropology textbook. Transition from a fluid collection of small bands to complex societies with leaders is even addressed in intro anthropology texts like Principles of Archaeology.

I touched on the issue of the author’s lack of understanding and clarity on the development of religion, when I mentioned the repeated contradictions in his discussion of monotheism and polytheism. Another issue is that the author seems to view interpretationist policy of the bible as a rather new development. However, Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis gives us a solid example of opposition to literal interpretations of the bible, which far predates modern thought. Ælfric of Eynsham was a monk and writer.  He was asked to translate the bible from Latin into Old English, as very few could read Latin, in England, by that point in time. (The Ælfric of Eynsham Project: An Introduction) However, Ælfric was cautious about engaging in such an act. While he could not disobey the king’s request, he provided a preface to his translation. Within the phrase, Ælfric writes the following: “we also said before that the book is very profoundly spiritual in understanding and we will write no more than the naked narrative. Then it seems to the unlearned that all that meaning is locked up in the simple narrative, but it is very far from it.” This is a recognition that a purely literal understanding of the “naked word” is not enough. (Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis: A Translation)

Overall, I am glad that I picked up a copy of this book, not because it was informative in terms of the evolution and function of religion, but rather it gives me additional insight into the minds of people like Dr. Glen Vickers. It also allowed me to touch on some common misconceptions about human evolutionary history, the evolution of religion, and other falsified “secular” myths that are still perpetuated by some members of the population.

Further Reading

The following are a few texts which are related to the topics mentioned in this article. Many of the books have been useful to me in the past.

• Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
• Archaeological Laboratory Methods
• Ecclesiastical History of the English People
• Towards Being Secular

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