The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (8 page)

In biology, some hosts are more susceptible to a certain virus than others, and various mutations have differing effects on the population as a whole. That is why you might get a cold but your spouse does not.

It is similar for god viruses. While Jehovah’s Witnesses are unlikely to become the dominant religion of Russia, their particular virus has the ability to infect a certain portion of the population, as do those of Scientology, Pentecostals and Baptists. These are aggressive viruses that propagate through proselytizing, a more parasitic religious approach. The parasitic approach uses a horizontal strategy whereby new people are infected by the virus by jumping across social and family lines. A symbiotic approach, on the other hand, is more vertical – passing the virus down from one generation to the next. Most religions use both types of propagation to some degree but emphasize one more than the other.

Highly parasitic viruses tend to pick out hosts who are most susceptible and then dramatically control them. Thus, parasitic viruses are likely to tear intact families apart in order to break the convert away from potential diluting influences. A good example is the Unification Church or Family Federation for World Peace and Unification founded by Sun Myung Moon, also known as the Moonies. The Unification Church requires sexual abstinence before marriage and insists that all marriages must be approved, if not arranged, by the church. Thus, Sun Myung Moon has selected for marriage hundreds if not thousands of people from different cultures in an effort to propagate his virus across traditional cultural boundaries.

Not surprisingly then, one of the main complaints against the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia is its impact on families and society. According to an May 25, 2004 article
¹⁶
by the organization
Religious Tolerance
:

Moscow courts have found the community guilty of forcing families to disintegrate, infringing the person, rights and freedoms of the citizen, encouraging suicide or the refusal on religious grounds of medical aid to the critically ill, and inciting
citizens to refuse to fulfill their civil obligations established by law. Under Article 14 of the 1997 law, a religious organization may lose its legal status and have its activity banned on these grounds.

16
ReligiousTolerance.org
,
Jehovah's Witnesses Oppression in Moscow, Russia
[article on-line] (June 17, 2004, accessed 20 November 2008); available from
http://www.religioustolerance.org/witness9.htm
; Internet.

Parasitic religions demand a lot from their members and have strict behavioral or membership standards. Since they are constantly bringing in new members, the indoctrination and supervision must be rigorous. The hierarchy of the parasitic virus demands sacrifice of money and time from converts. Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hare Krishna and the Unification Church all behave in this way.

Many religions are less parasitic and more symbiotic. For example, the Druze religion of Lebanon, Syria and Israel is closed to outsiders. It has not accepted converts for over eight hundred years. This is a vertical strategy, propagating down generations largely within family and cultural boundaries. Other religions have similar strictures, such as the Yazidi of Iraq or the Amish in the United States. If you are not born into the community, you cannot become a member. If conversion is allowed, the requirements are such that it is practically impossible or very difficult.

This can be a successful strategy. The community keeps the virus strong and, in turn, the virus binds the community closely together. Symbiotic religions, like the Druze, Yazidi and Amish, have so completely infected their members that the strictures of the religion become totally integrated into daily life. Many Hindu sects might also be seen as symbiotic as might Hutterites.

Many religions play both a parasitic and a symbiotic card depending on current circumstances. The Catholic virus tends to be somewhat symbiotic while at the same time having parasitic outbreaks. The Catholic virus was about as parasitic as possible during the conquests of Central and South America in the 16
^th
century. The deaths of millions of native people were directly related to the practices of Catholic priests in facilitating the conquests. Despite the heroic efforts of a handful of priests like Bartolome
de Las Casas
¹⁷
, priests accompanying conquistadors and later settlers gave justification for the genocide and enslavement of whole peoples in the Americas. This is about as parasitic as a religion can be.

Of course, biological viruses and bacteria killed as many or more than the Catholic soldiers and priests, but the two acted in tandem one facilitating the work of the other. Pope Benedict showed a surprising lack of awareness about the devastation his church caused when he made a major speech to the Bishops of Brazil in September 2007:

... what did the acceptance of the Christian faith mean for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean? For them, it meant knowing and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious traditions. Christ is the Saviour for whom they were silently longing. In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.
¹⁸

Needless to say, his words evoked outrage among native groups and even many local priests. How can anyone be so blind unless he is completely infected with a god virus? Were people to say that the Jews were waiting for Hitler to show them the light, they would be called to task for such ignorance, but the Pope seems to get a free pass with such calloused statements.

Today the Catholic virus in Africa is going through a parasitic stage. By actively attacking condom use and birth control, the god virus facilitates the HIV virus. The result is conversion to Catholic sexual practices or death from HIV. Ironically, Catholicism has become extremely weak in its own home – Italy – where birth rates are among the lowest in the world. Somebody must be using condoms or birth control in Italy, or Italians have become remarkably celibate!

17
Bartolome de Las Casas (1484–1564) was a Dominican priest involved in some of the earliest voyages of conquest and settlement. He was largely responsible for starting a debate and protest in Spain over the conquistadors’ treatment of Native Americans. He attempted to be the conscience of the King, Queen and Pope but largely lost the battle as priests accompanied by soldiers marched on in search of gold and slaves.

18
A Catholic Life,
Pope Benedict XVI's words on Native Americans to CELAM
[article on-line] (May 15, 2007, accessed 20 November 2008); available from
http://acatholiclife.blogspot.com/2007/05/pope-benedict-xvis-words-on-native.html
; Internet. Also found in the
LA Times
, 14 May 2007.

The god virus embodies strategies for survival and propagation. Advanced viruses have defenses that are more effective than others and, as a result, they have risen to dominance over the less developed. God viruses are always mutating, and new ones may break out of viral reservoirs at any time. The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations.

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

-Seneca the Younger (4 BCE–65 CE)

In this chapter, we will show that in modern society, religion and culture are not the same. We will introduce the concept of cultural coupling, which happens when a religion invades an established culture. We will look specifically at the evolution of the civil religion in the United States as a case study in religious coupling.

Culture and religion are different, though related, entities. Culture exists at a broader level than religion, especially in modern societies. Earlier societies, like the North American natives, aboriginals of Australia, Brazilian Amazonian tribes, and others, all had culture-specific religions. That is, the culture and religion were so closely tied together that they could not be separated. For example, it would be inconceivable to an Amazonian tribesman to convert to the Iroquois religion. Religion is a function of being a tribal member – the way the tribe lived and worshipped.

Thus, tribal religion is like a virus that can only live in one species. The virus may prosper in that single species, but if the species gains total immunity or goes extinct, the virus is eliminated. On the other hand, if a virus can mutate to a form that allows it to survive in other species, it can expand and survive in new ways. HIV is a virus that appears to have jumped from apes to humans several decades ago. The leap allowed the virus to go from a potential of a few hundred thousand apes to hundreds of millions of humans.

A religious revolution occurred about 600-400 BCE with the mutation of non-culture-specific religion. Once religion was uncoupled from a given culture, it could spread to any culture. The revolution has occurred several times around the world with similar consequences. For example, Buddhism swept India and China in a short time, wiping out hundreds of local gods. Christianity swept Europe in the same way, eliminating much of Germanic and Celtic religion and culture. Islam swept the Middle East.

Zarathustra,
¹
founder of Zoroastrianism, may have been the first to uncouple from culture around 600 BCE. Beginning in Persia, Zarathustra pioneered the concept of a universal battle between the forces of good, Ahura-Mazda, and evil, Angra Mainyu. Not surprisingly, the concept of Satan comes from this period. Zoroastrianism spread rapidly throughout what is now Iran and Iraq, eliminating many local gods and religions. Shortly after, the Jews were taken into the Babylonian captivity right in the heart of Zoroastrianism.

Judaism was a highly tribal religion until the Babylonian captivity exposed it to Zoroastrianism. After their captivity, the Jews returned to Judea with a fundamentally different understanding of their own religion. From 538 to 330 BCE, the Jews were also under Zoroastrian suzerainty. Zoroastrianism profoundly influenced Judaism. Jewish understanding of its god changed after the captivity and, with the addition of the concept of Satan, began taking on some of its modern trappings.

This set the stage for the complete uncoupling of Judaism and culture by St. Paul almost four hundred years later. If you are familiar with the Christian New Testament, you will recall the conflict between Paul and Peter over the status of gentiles in the new Christian sect. Much of the conflict between St. Paul and St. Peter (and other Apostles) was around the issue of whether Christianity could be uncoupled from Jewish culture. Peter and others believed new converts should be circumcised and perform other Jewish rituals and rites. Paul strongly disagreed, arguing that gentiles not be obligated to become Jews before joining the new sect. St. Paul won the argument.
²
The result was a dramatic uncoupling of Christianity from Jewish culture. This freed the Christian virus to go wherever it could penetrate without the trappings of Judaism to contend with.

While cultural uncoupling allows a religion to spread, the religion seeks to take over a given culture to ensure its survival. The deeper the religious infection, the more secure the religion will be in a given culture. If the
religion is able to infect the target culture sufficiently, it becomes such an integral part that it cannot be separated. Thus, Zoroastrianism became the state religion of Persia, supplanting hundreds of local gods and ensuring a secure place for itself for hundreds of years. One cannot imagine the Middle Ages without Catholicism. How could Saudi Arabia be separated from Islam? Each of these religions coupled strongly to the new culture.

1
The holy writings of Zoroastrianism recount the virgin birth of Zarathustra 600 years before Jesus accomplished the same thing. Zoroastrian sacred texts claims that Zoroaster existed with god and the angels 3,000 years before his birth – shades of the Gospel of John 1:1. There is little in the Jesus myth that was not done by some other deity, often centuries before.

2
Acts 15 and Galatians 2:11-14.

In contrast, it is easy to see the conquests of Alexander the Great in political and military terms without recourse to Greek religion. The Greeks may have taken their religious ideas with them, but they did not impose them on the conquered people, as did Islam and Christianity. At the time of Alexander the Great, Greek religion had not completely uncoupled into a universal form.

Once a religion binds with a new culture, it has a tendency to latch on like a parasite and direct cultural development in ways that ensure security of the religion and propagation. Religion embeds in the culture as a rabies virus embeds in the brain of a dog or raccoon. Successful binding creates the illusion that culture and religion are one, and followers come to believe that the culture could not survive without the religion. Further, other religions cannot easily dislodge it since it is bound up in so much of everyday life. This is the status of Islam in most of the Middle East. For example, Egyptian civil law makes a change in religion a simple administrative procedure, if you are converting to Islam. If you are converting from Islam to anything else, it is legal, but is made practically impossible by the government.
³