The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (2 page)

-Gary North
⁷

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good ... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called on by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.

-Randall Terry
⁸

5
Rev Jerry Falwell,
America Can Be Saved
(Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1979), 52-53, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr,
The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
(Prometheus Books, 2002).

6
Pat Robertson,
The New World Order
, New Ed ed. (Thomas Nelson, March 1992).

7
Gary North,
Political Polytheism: the Myth of Pluralism
(Institute for Christian Economics, 1989). Darling of Christian Reconstructionists, North predicted catastrophe in an a war with the Soviet Union in 1985 and predicted that Y2K would result in global catastrophe. He believes in ultimate Christian rule. He is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America.

8
Reported by
The News Sentinel
(Fort Wayne, IN), 16 August 1993. Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue. Terry, a Catholic, after several extramarital affairs, divorced in 2000 and is now remarried with three children. The long list of Terry’s transgressions against his own beliefs is remarkable, if not unique, among those who are most bombastic in defense of their religion.

We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

-Osama Bin Laden edict
⁹

In each of these quotes hate, intolerance, supremacy and exclusivity are central concepts. An important goal of this book is to explain the power of religion to drive this kind of thinking and behavior.

The Australian philosopher John Passmore once said, “
The chains men bear they forged themselves. Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security
.” This book is about breaking hidden chains, discovering how religion subtly works in our culture and minds and learning how to live without the chains.

I am a psychologist and a student of religion and society. Raised in a fundamentalist Church of Christ environment, I went to a small Quaker college as an undergraduate, later completed a master's degree in religion at a Methodist Seminary and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology at George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. I was an agnostic by my early 30s and an Atheist by the time I was 40. While my journey informs this work, it is not biographical. It creates a framework through which you will be able to see and analyze religious beliefs and behavior, including your own.

I use the term “non-theist” to refer to you, the reader. I wish to be inclusive of all who might fit this category: agnostics, deists, Atheists, freethinkers, spiritual people, etc. You might even be an Episcopalian, Unitarian, Quaker or non-religious, spiritual person. I refer to those who are highly religious, fundamentalists, superstitious or cult members as religionists. It matters not what you call yourself. I will explore with you the power of religion on our lives and bring about a new paradigm for understanding religious behavior in our world.

9
The American Muslim,
Bin Laden's Fatwa: A Call to Harabah
[article on-line] (11 February 2003, accessed 21 November 2008); available from
http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/fam.php/features/articles/bin_ladens_fatwa_a_call_to_harabah/
; Internet.

Finally, I will only capitalize the names of specific gods such as Allah, Jehovah, Zeus and Jesus. The word “god” will be lower case unless it is included in a direct quote.

Beginning with a “big picture” we move down to the social, the psychological and finally the personal. Chapters 1 and 2 take a broad view and state the case for religion’s similarities to the biological world. Chapters 3 through 7 explore the social, political and psychological aspects of religion, including such topics as hypnotic techniques of evangelical preachers, the role of sex, guilt, and morality in propagating religion, and personality and intelligence. Chapters 8 through 10 examine religious influence in your life and family. You may find some new tools for understanding your religious history or upbringing. Finally, Chapters 11 and 12 are devoted to science and the future of religion.

“We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us.”

-Mark Twain

In this chapter, we will examine the remarkable parallels between the propagation methods of some biological systems and the strategies of religion.

Imagine this scenario: You have a serious conversation with a deeply Christian friend. Your friend is intelligent, well educated and knowledgeable. You agree to record the session. The topic is Islam. During the session, you discuss that Mohammed was a self-appointed prophet and that he claimed he talked to Allah and angels. He wrote a book that he claimed is infallible, and he flew from Jerusalem to heaven on a horse.

During the conversation, you agree that Mohammed was probably delusional to think he could talk to god. You agree that the Koran was clearly written by Mohammed and not by Allah. It is ludicrous for him to claim that he is the last prophet and that all others are false. Neither you nor your friend can believe that he flew to heaven, let alone on a horse. It all sounds too crazy, and you both agree it is difficult to see how someone could believe such a religion. At the end of the conversation, you say that Muslims did not choose their religion; they were born into it. Anyone who was exposed to both Christianity and Islam would see that Christianity is the true religion.

Over the next few days, you transcribe the recording onto paper. Then you change all references to Mohammed and make them Jesus. Now the document reads something like this:

During the conversation, you both agree that Jesus was probably delusional to think he could talk to Jehovah. The Bible was clearly written by men and not by Jehovah. You both agree it is ludicrous for Jesus to claim that he is the last prophet and that all later ones are false. Neither of you can believe that he rose from the dead, nor flew to heaven. It all sounds too crazy, and it is difficult to see how someone could believe such a religion. At the end of the conversation, you both agree that Christians did not choose their religion; they were born into it. Anyone who was exposed to both Christianity and Islam would see that Islam is the true religion.

Now, tell your friend, “I made a transcript of our conversation about Islam and would like to go over it with you.” As you read it, watch her reaction. How does she respond to each statement? How soon does she get defensive? How quickly does she start making elaborate arguments that have no more factual basis than the first conversation? If you persist in this line of parallel reasoning, how long before she gets angry or breaks off the conversation? Could this conversation damage your friendship?

You can do the same experiment with other prophetic religions. For example, substitute Joseph Smith for Mormonism or Moses for Judaism. This experiment illustrates the god virus at work. It infects the brain and alters critical thinking skills. It leaves the skill intact for other religions but disables critical thinking about one’s own religion. Keep this thought experiment in mind as we explore the virus-like behavior of religion in individuals and in society.

Have you ever observed somebody go through a religious conversion? The person seems perfectly reasonable to you and has no particular concern for religion. Then a parent, friend or child dies or he gets a serious illness or is involved in a car accident. In just a matter of weeks, he seeks out and finds the answers to all of life’s questions and starts studying and spouting all sorts of doctrine. During such a window of vulnerability, religion can commandeer a person’s brain. In many cases, the person will join some kind of fundamentalist or charismatic group.

An associate of mine recently lost his father to cancer. Before this family trauma, he was a non-religious person. After his father’s death, he got a severe case of religion that changed his personality dramatically. An evening spent over a good meal in a restaurant became an ordeal in Jesus references. There was no way to have a conversation with him on any subject without religion creeping in. It became very tiresome. Soon I stopped seeing him altogether.

Religious visions and conversions have been reported for centuries. They bear remarkable similarities regardless of religion or culture. William James noticed the similarities over a century ago in his book,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902). What would make an Islamic conversion look and sound like a Christian one? Why would a Hindu epiphany bear a close resemblance to a native American vision quest?

Neurological science has shown that such experiences can be created with brain stimulation. Thus, simple neurological stimulation can evoke mystical experiences. Native Americans using Peyote, or Dr. Timothy Leary using LSD, demonstrated this long ago. We know that experiences that appear mystical are very likely neurological responses to any number of naturally occurring things in the environment or the brain. The near-death experiences reported by people for centuries and across all cultures have remarkable similarities to those reported in neurological stimulation experiments.

Dr. Olaf Blanks, a neurologist at Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, concludes from his research on brain stimulation, “It may be tempting to invoke the supernatural when this body sense goes awry, the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain’s attempt to make sense of conflicting information.”
¹

What has been called “mystical” for centuries can now be reproduced in Dr. Blanks’ laboratory with electrical probes of the brain.

Some people who experience a religious conversion seem to undergo a personality change. They can be quite congenial and easygoing when talking about mundane things, but when they start talking about their “faith,” their demeanor changes. Their tone of voice modifies, their smile becomes tense, and they become defensive when questioned about their evidence for belief. It becomes difficult to have a friendly conversation with them. It looks like a scene from the cult movie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978), where alien pods take over the brains and bodies of people and change them into emotionless automatons.

Once a person has converted to a religion, it is difficult to have a rational conversation about the irrational aspects of his religion. It is as though something invaded the person and took over a part of his personality. You can no longer talk to him directly. Instead, it seems as if communication is channeled through a religious being that lives inside of him. Well-rehearsed answers come out of his mouth. Things like, “It is a mystery and we are not meant to understand it.” Or “God expects us to follow his commands
without question.” “Jesus spoke to me and I know he is in my heart.” It is quickly evident that rational analysis of these statements is not permitted.

1
Sandra Blakeslee, “Out-of-Body Experience: Your Brain Is to Blame,”
The New York Times,
3 October 2006 and Shahar Arzy, et al, “Induction of an illusory shadow person,”
Nature,
443 (21 September 2006): 287.

Richard Dawkins and others have noted the similarities of religions to parasitic behavioral control of certain animals. For example, Daniel Dennett writes about religion as a parasite in
Breaking the Spell.
I don’t intend to replicate their work but to build on the idea of the parasitic nature of religion in a way that gives us guidance on how to live in a religious world.

For the balance of this chapter, we are going on a tour of religion using the metaphor of viruses. I make no claim that this metaphor works in every way, but it has remarkable power to explain much about individual and group religious behavior and gives religious skeptics a framework by which to understand the subtle influences of religion. Those familiar with Richard Dawkins’ revolutionary idea of
memes
will quickly see the viral metaphor as another way to talk about a religious meme. I chose to use the “virus” concept instead of “meme” because viruses are well known to most people, and the biology of viruses creates a useful parallel for our discussion. In either case, I owe a great deal to Dr. Dawkins and his pioneering work, especially in his groundbreaking books,
The Selfish Gene
and
The God Delusion.
²