We Are Our Brains (41 page)

FIGURE 27.
Some brain systems involved in emotions. (1) The cingulate cortex, the brain's alarm center. (2) The insular cortex, which is active in emotional experiences and coordinates bodily, autonomic reactions. (3) The caudate nucleus, active in the motor system and emotions. (4) The globus pallidus, active in the motor system. (5) The ventral pallidum/nucleus accumbens, active in reward. (6) The putamen, active in the motor system. (7) The optic chiasm, or crossing of the optic nerves. (8) The amygdala, active in fear, aggression, and sexual behavior. The hypothalamus is indicated by the box.

Like all faiths, the Christian belief has always presented itself as a religion of freedom and humanity. Protestants and other Christians did indeed make heroic efforts to protect Jews living in hiding during the Second World War, and they are still high on the list when it comes to taking in foster children. But humanity, persistence, and courage certainly aren't exclusive to believers; socialists, Communists, and atheists also possess those qualities. Moreover, the good intentions inspired by faith unfortunately often don't turn out at all as envisaged.

Would people be better off without religion? I think they would. Let me give a few examples. Throughout history, countless people have been imprisoned and killed in the name of Christianity and of other religions. The Old Testament is awash with murders, and that can have a stimulating effect. Experimental psychological studies show that reading a Bible text in which God sanctions killing clearly raises levels of aggression—though only among believers. Nor is the New Testament all about love and peace. When Pilate washes his hands of the decision to have Christ crucified, Matthew 27:25 states that the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!” This has been used to justify Christian anti-Semitism and has resulted in the discrimination, persecution, and murder of countless Jews. Moreover, passages like “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34) don't sound very peace-loving.

Pope John Paul II apologized (albeit reluctantly) for the Crusades
and the persecution of the Jews. So far, however, the Catholic Church has yet to publicly condemn Pope Pius XII's silence about the Holocaust during the Second World War, despite being very well aware of it. Nor has it yet apologized for the Inquisition or the Church's contribution to the slave trade (which made the Netherlands so rich) or for discriminating against women, homosexuals, and transsexuals or for banning contraception, thus condemning millions in South America to a life of poverty and millions in Africa to infection with AIDS. In 2005, three million people died of AIDS, and five million people were infected with HIV. And what does the Catholic Church do? It opposes the use of condoms. The president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who one assumes was hardly able to speak from practical experience, claimed that condoms were permeable “in 15% or even up to 20% of cases” and that their use implied “sexually immoral conduct.” In 2009 Pope Benedict maintained, contrary to all the statistics, that the use of condoms would make the African AIDS crisis worse. In recent years the extensive and systematic sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests throughout the world has come to light; the Church pretended that it had never been aware of it. In a tasteless echo of the excuse made by many Germans about the Holocaust after the war, the Dutch cardinal Adrianus Simonis responded with the German words, “
Wir haben es nicht gewusst
” (We did not know about it). It had of course long been common knowledge. It's said that Alfred Hitchcock once saw a priest talking to a child when he was visiting Switzerland. The priest had his hand on the boy's shoulder. Hitchcock leaned out of his car window and shouted, “Run, little boy! Run for your life!” There seems little point in waiting for the pope to save the situation by inveighing against sexual abuse within the church. As George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!”

Blame certainly shouldn't be confined to a single religion. Almost every religion has fundamentalist, outdated ideas that are proclaimed as the “truth” and imposed on others, sometimes at all costs. Nor is
religious extremist aggression confined to a particular faith, as witness the 169 deaths caused by the right-wing Christian extremist Timothy McVeigh (the “Oklahoma City Bomber”) when he blew up a government building; the massacre of 29 Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein, a Zionist extremist and racist; and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 in 2001. The list could go on forever.

Sacrificing children to the gods has taken place throughout the ages. Mexican history has many terrible examples. In 2007, a grave was found near Mexico City containing the skeletons of twenty-four children between the ages of five and fifteen, all carefully laid on their sides facing east. They died between
A.D.
950 and 1150 after their throats were slit by the Toltecs in a mass sacrifice to the rain god Tlaloc. Child sacrifices are still made to this day in the Netherlands by fundamentalist Christians, Bible in hand, who oppose inoculation against polio, German measles, mumps, and meningitis. The Bible is in fact silent on the subject of inoculation, but they see it as conflicting with God's providence. Likewise, Jehovah's Witnesses aren't allowed by their church to sanction a blood transfusion for a sick child. If the child develops some terrible complication, then that must have been the will of God. When she retired, the Dutch judge Anita Leeser-Gassan said how grateful parents were when the courts jointly decided with doctors that children should be given a blood transfusion in such cases. Jehovah's Witnesses base this prohibition on transfusions on a passage from the New Testament, which states, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements. You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality” (Acts 15:28–29).

How can they interpret a reference made two thousand years ago to “blood” as meaning “blood transfusion”? This ban means that women from this sect are six times as likely to die in childbirth. Isn't it appalling that the interpretation placed on that one little sentence prevents a lifesaving intervention from taking place?

As far as Islam is concerned, we can cite honor crimes, the killing of innocent people by suicide bombers, the hacking off of right hands, and the decapitation of hostages and apostates (people who convert to another religion) as a few examples of violent actions blessed by religion. In Iran in July 2007, a man was stoned to death for adultery. The local judge was the one who threw the first stone. And then there's violence against women, including female circumcision, a mutilation that still causes the deaths of large numbers of young girls every year and ruins the lives of countless women. In Sudan, almost 90 percent of girls under ten are circumcised, and a WHO report published in 2006 revealed that 100 million girls and women around the world have undergone this mutilation. Female circumcision isn't prescribed by the Qur'an, and many Christian women in Egypt are also circumcised. But the practice is confined to the Islamic world and is strongly endorsed by reactionary clerics, who give reasons for their stance. The Egyptian scholar Yousuf Al-Badri believes that female circumcision would solve many problems in the Western world. “Western women are not circumcised and behold the result: a licentious society. Women always want sex. Over 70% of the children are illegitimate. A large proportion of the Egyptian women have a clitoris of over 3 cm. They need to be circumcised, in order for them to be able to control their emotions and sexual desires. Otherwise they will be continually excited and frustrated, because they do not get satisfied.” The consequences of female circumcision are appalling; women who have undergone it often suffer the most excruciating pain during urination, menstruation, and sexual intercourse. In Africa, almost 50 percent of babies born to circumcised women die during or shortly after birth. The mothers themselves often have severe hemorrhages during childbirth.

Piety, alas, isn't often linked with an ability to see things in perspective or with a sense of humor. There isn't a single joke in the Bible. Islamic governments whip up popular frenzies at the slightest
reason. In September 2006, twelve cartoons making fun of Islamic extremism were published in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten:
One showed suicide bombers being told at the heavenly gates that they needed to wait because the supply of promised virgins was running low. The cartoons enraged the Danish Muslim community, which subsequently mobilized Muslims in the Middle East. In Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries, Danish products were taken off supermarket shelves. The Muslim Brotherhood, Syria, the Islamic Jihad Union, the interior ministers of Arab countries, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference all behaved as if they were themselves models of tolerance toward other religions and demanded apologies. The paper's editor in chief apologized to any Muslims who felt offended by the cartoons, but that didn't appease feelings. Mobs took to the streets in many places, and deaths resulted. In 2006, during an address at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict linked Islam and violence. In order to demonstrate their peaceableness, Islamic fundamentalists responded by burning down Christian churches in West Jordan and killing the Italian nun Leonella Sgorbati in Somalia. It seems that the Islamic world isn't yet ready to respond to perceived slurs with intellectual debate.

Extremist organizations like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah in Lebanon are rapidly gaining in popularity and strength. And once again, this isn't a specifically Muslim problem. Under the Bush administration, fundamentalist Christians in the United States frequently stirred up public opinion with their fanatical pro-life campaign, their anti-Darwinist ideas, and their homophobia. Jewish right-wing extremists have been similarly active in Israel. For the time being, religions around the world will continue to take their meaningless toll. It's a shame, because there's no need to indoctrinate children with religion. Their spirituality can be put to excellent use in art, science, and the environmental sphere or simply to make the lives of the less privileged happier.

Some apparently bizarre religious precepts have a rational basis. The ban on Jews and Muslims eating pork was probably very sensible in an age before meat had to be passed by a health inspector. The concept that menstruating women are “unclean,” expressed in both the Bible and the Qur'an, is less easy to fathom. Leviticus does not allow any room for doubt on the subject, making it clear that anything a menstruating woman “lies on … will be unclean and anything she sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches her bed will be unclean.… Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean … till evening.… If a man has sexual relations with her … he will be unclean for seven days.” After each menstruation, women are obliged to make a sacrifice and “purify” themselves by taking a ritual bath, a mikveh. I can see no hygienic reason for this precept, but it does benefit reproduction. According to the law, a woman who has menstruated (usually for around five days) has to wait seven days in order to “purify” herself on the eighth day, which falls on the thirteenth day of her cycle—right around the most fertile period. Clearly, ending periods of sexual abstinence precisely when fertilization is most likely promotes the survival of the group. Might that be the clever reasoning behind this misogynistic rule? Whatever the case, the idea that you need to steer clear of menstrual blood is common to many cultures. Before Mao's day, menstruating women in China not only were held to be unclean, they were also deployed in battle on account of their magical powers. Lined along the city walls, they waved their sanitary towels in a bid to deflect the enemy's cannon fire.

It seems that the fear of menstrual blood has not greatly diminished since Leviticus. According to Vincent de Beauvais (1478), menstrual
blood could prevent wheat from germinating, turn grapes sour, kill herbs, render fruit trees barren, make iron rust, tarnish bronze, and cause rabies. And these ideas didn't die out in the Middle Ages. When my mother-in-law was menstruating, she wasn't allowed to enter her grandmother's kitchen when fruit from the garden was being canned. Surinamese women still aren't allowed into the kitchen when they are menstruating. According to certain traditions, a menstruating woman can cause bread to grow moldy, meat to rot, and plants to die—simply at a touch or even a glance. During the Cultural Revolution in China, however, the traditional Chinese rule that only non-menstruating women were allowed to prepare food for the ancestors was done away with, along with many other traditions.