The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (4 page)

I use examples of well-known religious leaders, but the analyses could be taken from local churches or mosques just as easily. From years of listening to fundamentalist ministers, I can attest to the incredible statements they make from the pulpit with not a whisper of objection from an otherwise intelligent and reasonable congregation.

Both bin Laden and Robertson have fully functioning brains with all the capabilities for logic, reason, study, learning and critical thinking, but the god virus has disabled some of these functions as effectively as
Toxiplasma gondii
disables the rat’s fear of cat pheromones. Nothing else needs to be changed! Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus.

An important part of viral control may be found in inhibitions and prohibitions, which keep the believer focused on rituals and actions that reinforce the religion on a daily, even hourly basis. These are often seen in sexual prohibitions: no sex before marriage, no sex during menstruation, no homosexuality, etc. Many religions also have food prohibitions and rules: Fish on Friday, no pork, fasting during certain holidays. Each religion takes a different approach, but all share the same objective: Keep the infected focused on their own religion and protect the unit of propagation – the family. Muslims accomplish this by severely prohibiting female freedoms and expanding male power to control the female and the family. Catholics accomplish it by requiring parents to raise their children as Catholic and mandating sex as strictly a procreative activity with all extramarital sex prohibited.

The prohibition is seen most dramatically in the celibacy of Catholic priests and nuns. Here the virus self-propagates by forcing the host to forgo procreation in service of passing the virus along to as many other people
as possible. Just as the rabies virus takes over the brain of the raccoon and reprograms it to bite other animals – even at the cost of its own life – the Catholic virus directs the priest to spend all his discretionary energies propagating the virus. This is genetic suicide for the priest’s genes, but gives the Catholic Church a powerful tool for propagation.

Religious vectors use sophisticated methods of preparing and opening potential hosts of the religion. Religious vectors learn preaching techniques that emotionally open up the potential host. (We will discuss this in detail in Chapter 7.) Vectors are expensive for the virus to produce, so they are protected and supported, often to an extreme degree as seen in the protection of priests and preachers in the many recent sex abuse scandals.

Vectors can actually be more efficient as vectors when dead. Examples of efficient dead vectors include Jesus, Paul, Ali (son-in-law of Mohammed), V. I. Lenin (founder of the Soviet Union), Che Guevara (Latin American revolutionary) and Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism). In the case of Joseph Smith, his death was a fortunate event for the whole movement. His usefulness to the virus had probably run its course, and he was less and less successful as a leader. But once dead, he became a martyr around whom the charismatic and brilliant leader Brigham Young could rally the faithful and establish Paradise in Utah.

The god virus programs the host in very specific ways. All god viruses program charity into its followers, but it is a carefully defined charity. I learned this the hard way one Christmas when I was 19 years old. I was a poor college student who paid my own tuition at a private university and worked hard for every dollar I earned. My mom and dad were proud when I budgeted 20 hard-earned dollars for charity that Christmas. I didn’t mention what charity I had chosen, but they assumed it was our church or some church-related charity. Weeks after Christmas my mom
was dying of curiosity and finally asked, “Where did you give your $20?” I told her I gave it to the ACLU defense fund for draft resisters.

I quickly learned that the ACLU is not a charity, and that god would not count that gift. I learned that you always give to the church or a religious charity or it didn’t count. Until then, I didn’t realize that there was an accounting department in heaven. From reading the Bible, I thought I had learned that you weren’t supposed to advertise your giving like the Pharisees (Matthew 6:1-4).
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I figured any giving I did was between god and me. If god didn’t like it, he would let me know. I was feeling pretty good about my choice until then.

Charity and giving are clearly defined by the god virus. Since the survival of the virus depends on regular feeding, it does little good for the virus if you give resources to a non-viral entity, which is therefore not acceptable.

Infected individuals are also programmed to feel guilt if they do not give, or if they give to a charity that does not support the god virus. Catholics generally don’t give to the Baptist college fund. Baptists don’t give to Catholic Charities. No Nazarene gives to the mosque-building fund. No Islamic philanthropist writes a fat check to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. In short, if you and your money are not in service to the virus, it doesn’t count and may even count against you

When I was growing up, in the course of 10 years, three ministers in our church were caught having sexual affairs with members. In two other churches of our denomination, five other ministers were caught in affairs, all within one tiny denomination in the Bible belt city of Wichita, Kansas.

It is especially interesting when vectors engage in prohibited behavior since they probably have the highest dose of the virus. Even more interesting are the excuses others make for that behavior. All too often, the behavior is excused with “he just made a mistake” or “he is only human.” When the senior minister of my church was caught in an affair, he was allowed to keep his position! He repeated the “mistake” three times over a 10-year period before he was finally fired. I have seen this occur many times within churches.

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“…that your alms be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will repay you” (Matthew 6:4).

Why were these folks allowed to stay? Because good vectors are hard to find and expensive to develop. As long as a vector can efficiently feed the virus with money and hosts, the vector will generally remain. Scandal is a small price to pay for a highly effective vector.

Catholic priests are among the most expensive of all vectors. When the Catholic Church learns that a priest is sexually misbehaving, molesting children, having affairs with women or other men, the investment is threatened. That is largely why the church protects the priest-vector rather than the parishioners. It is easier to deal with parishioners than to find and develop a new vector.

The Catholic problem with pedophile priests is a major case in point. I would venture to guess that the Protestant religions have an equally large problem of clergy sexual violations. But because Protestants are more decentralized than the Catholic Church, violations are more easily hidden or violators transferred to another church.

Just as in biological systems, religions mutate frequently. Mutations occur constantly, but most never develop into new religions. The Baptists deal with mutations by simply letting the mutation form a new Baptist movement. It is an easy way to keep the main DNA of the movement close without losing it altogether.

Catholics deal with mutations by eliminating them. The Catholic strategy is to keep the DNA as pure as possible and minimize mutations. Thus, threat of excommunication is a primary method of cleansing, and burning at the stake was once popular.
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The strategies of both Baptists and Catholics work reasonably well.

In biology, occasionally, mutations are so powerful they overwhelm
even the strongest defenses and infect entirely new populations. This can happen when the virus encounters a susceptible population. The same goes for religion – in the 1500s, Martin Luther’s god virus swept through the largely uneducated and ignorant populations of northern Germany.

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While many in the United States are familiar with the Salem Witch trials of 1692, there was a much bigger witch and heresy hunt going on in Europe in the 16
^th
and 17th centuries. Historians estimate that 200,000 people were burned at the stake for various heresies during this time. Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary in England) was responsible for 274 executions by burning over her five-year reign, including the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1556. Burning was particularly favored by the Spanish Inquisition because it did not involve shedding the victim’s blood, which was disallowed under the prevailing Roman Catholic doctrine, and because it ensured that the condemned had no body to take into the next life (which was believed to be a very severe punishment in itself). It was also thought at that time that burning cleansed the soul, which was considered important for those convicted of witchcraft and heresy. Capital Punishment U.K.,
Burning at the Stake
(accessed 20 November 2008); available from
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/burning.html
; Internet.

Luther’s god virus was so powerful that it swept through the European population far faster than the original Catholic virus had done a thousand years before. Once let loose, the Protestant virus mutated rapidly. The Calvinist virus was a direct mutation from the Lutheran. The Anabaptist movement blossomed (Mennonites, Hutterites, Church of the Brethren) along with the French Huguenots, Quakers, German Baptists and many more.

A population that is isolated from other religions and largely uneducated is susceptible to the right kind of mutation or a totally new god virus. Buddhism, a mutation of Hinduism, swept through India from 480 BCE to 180 BCE and became the largest god virus in the world at the time. Islam accomplished a similar feat in the Middle East in only 200 years, from 600-800 CE.

If you are familiar with fundamentalist church services, you probably know that old hymn, “Revive Us Again.” It is a clear call by the infected that they need a booster shot. Revivals are largely aimed at those who already have the virus. When I was a kid, our church had a revival every year. A guest preacher would preach rejuvenation and recommitment. Most of the people who “got saved” were already related to the church in some way. Rarely did someone come off the streets and get saved.

The revival phenomenon is an adaptive method for keeping the local beliefs strong and preventing outside forces from invading or getting a foothold. It could be seen as mutation prevention. It helps keep people on the straight and narrow. My years growing up in a fundamentalist tradition gave me many opportunities to witness revivalism at work. The focus is much more emotional than the regular church services. A charismatic guest preacher generally leads the revival. The best preachers create an emotional high in the congregation that results in more dedication to the god virus and more money to the church. While sacrifice and giving are most often the themes of a revival, the preacher also spends a lot of time preaching against various “temptations” in the world and against the latest things that might
lead the flock astray, like popular television shows, movies or books. One could see the whole exercise as a “keeping the virus pure” process.

Other religious groups have their own methods of viral purification. Catholics tend to use retreats and marriage renewal as well as a tight bureaucracy that keeps close track of the flock. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses have well-organized hierarchies that keep all in line while sanctioning or expelling those who go astray.

Sometimes a mutation can get out of control. The Protestant emphasis on reading the Bible allowed people to draw their own conclusions without priestly interpretation or central ecclesiastical control. As a result, dozens of mutations sprang up in Europe after Lutheranism began. When people were able to read for themselves, inevitably some of them concluded that the whole enterprise was a house of cards. Most kept their mouths shut to avoid losing their heads, but others made the leap to openly criticize religion and its role in society. These early critics of religion were the forebears of today’s freethinkers and the freethinking movement.
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Freethinkers are interested in examining the world without the blinders of religious infection. They generally are non-religious or less religious. Some are spiritual or hold to some kind of spirituality. In many ways, freethinkers have reduced or eliminated their god virus infection.

Biological virus strategies bear a remarkable resemblance to methods of religious propagation. Religious conversion seems to affect personality. In the viral paradigm, the god virus infects and takes over the critical thinking capacity of the individual with respect to his or her own religion, much as rabies affects specific parts of the central nervous system. A simple thought experiment reveals how the god virus works to dull critical thinking. The god virus infects an individual and then inoculates against other viruses. Vectors in biology carry a parasite, virus or pathogen from one reservoir to another. Religious vectors act in similar ways. Priests, imams, ministers, etc., carry the virus and infect new people. The virus carefully directs resources toward it and creates taboos against giving to competing viruses. Sometimes vectors fail. The expense of developing a vector makes it imperative to protect it even in failure as in the case of priest pedophilia. Mutations are constantly produced. Occasionally one breaks out, as in the case of Martin Luther, to infect vulnerable people and cultures.