Gods And Fools

Our Real Religion: Of Mice and Men... and Menacing Mice

This is why I appreciate science.  This Vandy study says more about what humanity's real religion is than a hundred theology books could.  And it matter-of-factly explains and predicts the tendencies of the human animal more reliably than, say, a Methodist minister could... or heck, even a Calvinist.

What I mean by this is that science can predict how every kind of religion in every era and every culture will be manipulated by the majority of its adherents to justify and sanctify the very forms of war, tribalism and oppression that its highest ideals shun. 

Sure, a Calvinist may claim that his doctrine of human depravity predicts the same stuff about human nature that science predicts.  But his religious exclusivism and triumphalism inevitably lead him in a far different direction, in which he will always take a far more charitable view of the overall impact of his religion and far less charitable view of the impact of rival religions.  Science would predict that cognitive error on his part, but he will refuse to see it as an error.

From the article on the Vandy study:

"Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food," said study team member Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "We have found that the reward pathway in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved."

For the experiments, the researchers placed a pair of mice, one male and one female, in a cage. Then, the female was removed and a so-called male intruder mouse entered the cage. That triggered aggressive behavior in the resident male. The tell-tale signs of aggression included tail rattle, an aggressive sideways stance, boxing and biting.

After the initial scuffle ended, the resident male mouse was trained to nose-poke a target to get the intruder to return. Results showed the home mouse consistently poked the target and fought with the introduced mouse, indicating, the researchers say, that the aggressive encounter was seen as a reward.

"We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it," Kennedy said.

To figure out whether the brain's reward pathway was involved, the scientists treated the home mice with a drug to block dopamine in certain parts of the brain known to be involved in rewards like food and drugs....

Kennedy explained that the experiments have implications for humans. The reward pathway in the brains of humans and mice are very similar, he said.

He's no Ein-Steyn: Suffering the Classless Clown

I've begun reading Mark Steyn's new America Alone book, and Andrew P is spot-on in characterizing Steyn's stuff as "back of the classroom hootings."

So far what I've been able to understand is that Steyn insists that his concern about the demographic decline of the West isn't a concern about the loss of white people but a concern about the loss of people who favor Western culture.  But mainly, he's worried that these people, who mostly are white, aren't breeding enough to overtake the brown hordes.

He then points out that he's only doing this for the welfare of those silly lefties who are more worried about ecological threats than by the "Islamist threat."  He  contends that he'll be able to survive an Islamist takeover far better than the feminists and gays, and that he's just trying to help them understand what's at stake for them.

He's quite a noble sort, isn't he?  All this time we thought he and his peers were fighting against gays and feminists.  It turns out that he's actually fighting FOR those folks, against conservative Muslims who  agree with him on many of his favorite issues.

Uh-huh.  He seems to reveal, inadvertently, that this is really a generalized jingoism -- a desire to find some suitable target for a rage that in past times targeted other religions or races.   But he expects us to treat him as a prophet and a saint and a comedian, with his myriad witty slams of Al Gore and the global warming crowd. 

I'll have to speed-read through this stuff.

The Danger

This stuff is deeply troubling to me. In articles like this, I plead for Westerners to show patience and understanding in dealing with South-Asian and Mideastern communities, yet in articles like this and this I beg such communities to push back harder against their fanatics.

I want to find more ways of focusing on the latter theme, hopefully in ways that don't put people on the defensive (which only shuts down dialogue).

In Response to Andrew

This is a belated response to Andrew's comment.

I think that Andrew and I do have common ground, especially when he says that we seem to agree with my piece’s “core conclusion: that Christianity and especially jingoistic Christians (GAFers) have a log in their eye as with regard to criticism of Islam.” He does note that he believes “the piece is hindered by the relatively context-free way it cites scripture and historical references.”

There is indeed disagreement between me and Andrew (as well as between me and pretty much all evangelicals) on the issue of context. I did take Deuteronomy 20 and push it in everyone’s faces at face value. I did so in much the same way that atheists Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins do so in their newest books critiquing religion.

I quoted DT 20 “out of context” even as someone who for many years was indignant if someone else pulled that stunt. Why have I done a flip-flop, then? I suspect it has resulted from my mounting fatigue in the four-part sport of 1) taking a very elastic reading of the text that allows me to believe that the God who demands the killing of all the men, women, children, cattle, cats and chickens in a land is consistent with the God of the Sermon on the Mount, and 2) holding all other faith traditions to a rigid and uncharitable interpretation of their own scriptures, and 3) refusing to believe that past or present extremists in my camp in any way define the limitations of my camp, and 4) using any extremists in other camps as living evidence of their camps’ untruth.

I’ve stated strongly that the Muslim world must reform, and that moderates must step up to bat, here and here, for instance.

But my concern is also that American jingoists and hyperevangelicals (found in great quantities at Front Page magazine, World Nut Daily, etc.) are hijacking the current situation to score their own points. In so doing, they will polarize moderate Muslims away from this task and into the arms of their extremists, at the worst time possible.

The hyperevangelicals struggle to figure out what to make of this: Bernard Lewis has rightly been seen as the eminent Western historian of the Islamic world, and the title of his bestseller, What Went Wrong, is revealing. It indicates that something obviously had been going right for Islamic civilization before the wheels fell off. As Lewis noted (p. 156 of the Perennial edition), it was in the Islamic world that

“old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences created; it was there that new industries were born and manufacture and commerce expanded to a level previously without precedent. It was there, too, that governments and societies achieved a degree of freedom and thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee for refuge from Christendom to Islam. The medieval Islamic world offered only limited freedom in comparison with modern ideals and even with modern practice in the more advanced democracies, but it offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and most of its successors.”

Lewis is no Muslim apologist; he has been cited by lots of neoconservatives, and he feels modern Islamic civilization urgently must reform. But Lewis notes too that Islam’s golden age happened closer to the point of its original inspiration under Muhammad, within a few centuries of his passing, further undercutting the view that Islam is “inherently” anti-civilization.

Lewis also characterizes modern anti-Semitism within the Islamic world as a “contribution” of European society rather than an indigenous phenomenon (p. 153). As Lewis states the matter—and you can find this documented amply in Israel—“In most respects, they [Jews] were better off under Muslim rule than under Christian rule, until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

My context may seem harsh in a sense, and yet not one person you could find on the street would be aware of the manner in which Christianity’s greatest theologians fostered anti-Semitism and repression 1600 years into the Christian experiment (which is 200 years more than the current Muslim experiment, a notable fact in light of the additional reality that Islam had a golden age of civilization that preceded that of the West). The Apostle Paul did say that it was our business to judge those inside the church, not outside it—but hyperevangelicals and their jingoistic friends find it more cathartic to judge those on the outside while rationalizing away what happened on the inside.

"I Ain't No Fortunate Son": Dumb, Dumber and Enlisted

What he said.

If You Can't Govern, Attack

Jacob Weisberg is a Financial Times columnist and editor of Slate. Here's a column of his about Republicans (my party, remember?) having mastered the art of the character assault. Yay!

Last week, I turned on the television in a hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, where I was attending a conference. The first commercial I saw, for a vulnerable Republican congressman named Rick Renzi, was an effusion of pure, political poison. In a voice rancid with contempt, the announcer declared: “Over 100 Democratic elected officials are opposing Democrat trial lawyer Ellen Simon. Liberal Ellen Simon served as the president of the ACLU, a radical organisation that defends hardcore criminals at the man/boy love association, a national group that preys on our children. One Democratic mayor called Simon’s actions ‘utterly disgusting’. He’s right. Ellen Simon: radical, liberal and wrong for Arizona.”

The viewer sees key terms superimposed on the Democrat’s face: “LIBERAL”; “Served as the president of the ACLU”; “Radical organisation defends hardcore criminals”; “ACLU defends child molester group”; “Preys on our children”; “utterly disgusting”; “radical liberal”.

We Strange Monkeys

Democracy represents one of humanity's highest aspirations, a true symbol of homo sapiens' "new brain."

But the key to winning an election is to reach the "old brain," the reptilian-natured, primal lump of white matter that is driven by passions, instincts, threats and fears.

Republicans have long understood this paradox and mastered it -- even while often denying evolution.

"Cut & Fun" in Iraq

You have to admit, even if the President continues to tightly clutch the world as he swirls into a political black hole, he will have provided us all with plenty of humor as compensation:

President Bush and his aides are annoyed that people keep misinterpreting his Iraq policy as "stay the course." A complete distortion, they say. "That is not a stay-the-course policy," White House press secretary Tony Snow declared yesterday.

Where would anyone have gotten that idea? Well, maybe from Bush.

"We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed," he said in Salt Lake City in August.

"We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course," he said in Milwaukee in July.

"I saw people wondering whether the United States would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed," he said after returning from Baghdad in June.

But the White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." A phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that seems to grow worse by the week, Republican strategists say. Democrats have now turned "stay the course" into an attack line in campaign commercials, and the Bush team is busy explaining that "stay the course" does not actually mean stay the course.

Sibling Religious Rivalry

This incarnation of my latest op-ed theme is a bit more personal.

Smugger than thou

A little more context: Read this smug little piece before reading my attempt to counter that sort of thinking.