| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Katt" |
| Date: |
16 Jun 2005 04:21:36 PM |
| Object: |
Jolly good stuff about the religious mind-virus! |
extract from:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1993-summervirusesofmind.shtml
-------
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for
their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that
you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus
might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might
you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might
describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be
male).
1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner
conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that
doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless,
he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a
belief as ``faith.''
2. Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and
unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel
that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief (see below).
This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue where faith
is concerned has something of the quality of a program that is
self-sustaining, because it is self-referential (see the chapter ``On Viral
Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures'' in Hofstadter, 1985). Once the
proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself.
The ``lack of evidence is a virtue'' idea could be an admirable sidekick,
ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral
programs.
3. A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the
conviction that ``mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to
solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their
insolubility.
Any impulse to solve mysteries could be serious inimical to the spread of a
mind virus. It would not, therefore, be surprising if the idea that
``mysteries are better not solved'' was a favored member of a mutually
supporting gang of viruses. Take the ``Mystery of Transubstantiation.'' It
is easy and non-mysterious to believe that in some symbolic or metaphorical
sense the eucharistic wine turns into the blood of Christ. The Roman
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, however, claims far more. The
``whole substance'' of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ; the
appearance of wine that remains is ``merely accidental,'' ``inhering in no
substance'' (Kenny, 1986, p. 72). Transubstantiation is colloquially taught
as meaning that the wine ``literally'' turns into the blood of Christ.
Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the
claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to
the normal meanings of words like ``substance'' and ``literally.''
Redefining words is not a sin, but, if we use words like ``whole substance''
and ``literally'' for this case, what word are we going to use when we
really and truly want to say that something did actually happen? As Anthony
Kenny observed of his own puzzlement as a young seminarian, ``For all I
could tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated....''
Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept
that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances,
refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery makes
everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind well prepared by
background infection. Exactly the same trick is performed in the ``mystery''
of the Trinity. Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to
strike awe. The ``mystery is a virtue'' idea comes to the aid of the
Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the
obvious nonsense of the transubstantiation and the ``three-in-one.'' Again,
the belief that ``mystery is a virtue'' has a self-referential ring. As
Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of the belief moves the
believer to perpetuate the mystery.
An extreme symptom of ``mystery is a virtue'' infection is Tertullian's
``Certum est quia impossibile est'' (It is certain because it is
impossible''). That way madness lies. One is tempted to quote Lewis
Carroll's White Queen, who, in response to Alice's ``One can't believe
impossible things'' retorted ``I daresay you haven't had much practice...
When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'' Or
Douglas Adams' Electric Monk, a labor-saving device programmed to do your
believing for you, which was capable of ``believing things they'd have
difficulty believing in Salt Lake City'' and which, at the moment of being
introduced to the reader, believed, contrary to all the evidence, that
everything in the world was a uniform shade of pink. But White Queens and
Electric Monks become less funny when you realize that these virtuoso
believers are indistinguishable from revered theologians in real life. ``It
is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd'' (Tertullian again).
Sir Thomas Browne (1635) quotes Tertullian with approval, and goes further:
``Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active
faith.'' And ``I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for
to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion [sic].''
I have the feeling that something more interesting is going on here than
just plain insanity or surrealist nonsense, something akin to the admiration
we feel when we watch a ten-ball juggler on a tightrope. It is as though the
faithful gain prestige through managing to believe even more impossible
things than their rivals succeed in believing. Are these people testing ---
exercising --- their believing muscles, training themselves to believe
impossible things so that they can take in their stride the merely
improbable things that they are ordinarily called upon to believe?
While I was writing this, the Guardian (July 29, 1991) fortuitously carried
a beautiful example. It came in an interview with a rabbi undertaking the
bizarre task of vetting the kosher-purity of food products right back to the
ultimate origins of their minutest ingredients. He was currently agonizing
over whether to go all the way to China to scrutinize the menthol that goes
into cough sweets. ``Have you ever tried checking Chinese menthol... it was
extremely difficult, especially since the first letter we sent received the
reply in best Chinese English, `The product contains no kosher'... China has
only recently started opening up to kosher investigators. The menthol should
be OK, but you can never be absolutely sure unless you visit.'' These kosher
investigators run a telephone hot-line on which up-to-the-minute red-alerts
of suspicion are recorded against chocolate bars and cod-liver oil. The
rabbi sighs that the green-inspired trend away from artificial colors and
flavors ``makes life miserable in the kosher field because you have to
follow all these things back.'' When the interviewer asks him why he bothers
with this obviously pointless exercise, he makes it very clear that the
point is precisely that there is no point:
That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason given is
100 per cent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It
is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So
that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will. But,
if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat
and peaces at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is
because I have been told to so do. It is something difficult.
Helena Cronin has suggested to me that there may be an analogy here to
Zahavi's handicap theory of sexual selection and the evolution of signals
(Zahavi, 1975). Long unfashionable, even ridiculed (Dawkins, 1976), Zahavi's
theory has recently been cleverly rehabilitated (Grafen, 1990 a, b) and is
now taken seriously by evolutionary biologists (Dawkins, 1989). Zahavi
suggests that peacocks, for instance, evolve their absurdly burdensome fans
with their ridiculously conspicuous (to predators) colors, precisely because
they are burdensome and dangerous, and therefore impressive to females. The
peacock is, in effect, saying: ``Look how fit and strong I must be, since I
can afford to carry around this preposterous tail.''
To avoid misunderstanding of the subjective language in which Zahavi likes
to make his points, I should add that the biologist's convention of
personifying the unconscious actions of natural selection is taken for
granted here. Grafen has translated the argument into an orthodox Darwinian
mathematical model, and it works. No claim is here being made about the
intentionality or awareness of peacocks and peahens. They can be as sphexish
or as intentional as you please (Dennett, 1983, 1984). Moreover, Zahavi's
theory is general enough not to depend upon a Darwinian underpinning. A
flower advertising its nectar to a ``skeptical'' bee could benefit from the
Zahavi principle. But so could a human salesman seeking to impress a client.
The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favor skepticism
among females (or among recipients of advertising messages generally). The
only way for a male (or any advertiser) to authenticate his boast of
strength (quality, or whatever is is) is to prove that it is true by
shouldering a truly costly handicap --- a handicap that only a genuinely
strong (high quality, etc.) male could bear. It may be called the principle
of costly authentication. And now to the point. Is it possible that some
religious doctrines are favored not in spite of being ridiculous but
precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe
that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real,
red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transubstantiation.
If you believe that you can believe anything, and (witness the story of
Doubting Thomas) these people are trained to see that as a virtue.
Let us return to our list of symptoms that someone afflicted with the mental
virus of faith, and its accompanying gang of secondary infections, may
expect to experience.
4. The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly towards vectors of
rival faiths, in extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths.
He may be similarly violent in his disposition towards apostates (people who
once held the faith but have renounced it); or towards heretics (people who
espouse a different --- often, perhaps significantly, only very slightly
different --- version of the faith). He may also feel hostile towards other
modes of thought that are potentially inimical to his faith, such as the
method of scientific reason which may function rather like a piece of
anti-viral software.
The threat to kill the distinguished novelist Salman Rushdie is only the
latest in a long line of sad examples. On the very day that I wrote this,
the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was found murdered, a week
after a near-fatal attack on the Italian translator of the same book. By the
way, the apparently opposite symptom of ``sympathy'' for Muslim ``hurt,''
voiced by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Christian leaders (verging,
in the case of the Vatican, on outright criminal complicity) is, of course,
a manifestation of the symptom we discussed earlier: the delusion that
faith, however obnoxious its results, has to be respected simply because it
is faith.
Murder is an extreme, of course. But there is an even more extreme symptom,
and that is suicide in the militant service of a faith. Like a soldier ant
programmed to sacrifice her life for germ-line copies of the genes that did
the programming, a young Arab or Japanese [??!] is taught that to die in a
holy war is the quickest way to heaven. Whether the leaders who exploit him
really believe this does not diminish the brutal power that the ``suicide
mission virus'' wields on behalf of the faith. Of course suicide, like
murder, is a mixed blessing: would-be converts may be repelled, or may treat
with contempt a faith that is perceived as insecure enough to need such
tactics.
More obviously, if too many individuals sacrifice themselves the supply of
believers could run low. This was true of a notorious example of
faith-inspired suicide, though in this case it was not ``kamikaze'' death in
battle. The Peoples' Temple sect became extinct when its leader, the
Reverend Jim Jones, led the bulk of his followers from the United States to
the Promised Land of ``Jonestown'' in the Guyanan jungle where he persuaded
more than 900 of them, children first, to drink cyanide. The macabre affair
was fully investigated by a team from the San Francisco Chronicle (Kilduff
and Javers, 1978).
Jones, ``the Father,'' had called his flock together and told them it was
time to depart for heaven.
``We're going to meet,'' he promised, ``in another place.''
The words kept coming over the camp's loudspeakers.
``There is great dignity in dying. It is a great demonstration for everyone
to die.''
Incidentally, it does not escape the trained mind of the alert
sociobiologist that Jones, within his sect in earlier days, ``proclaimed
himself the only person permitted to have sex'' (presumably his partners
were also permitted). ``A secretary would arrange for Jones's liaisons. She
would call up and say, `Father hates to do this, but he has this tremendous
urge and could you please...?' '' His victims were not only female. One
17-year-old male follower, from the days when Jones's community was still in
San Francisco, told how he was taken for dirty weekends to a hotel where
Jones received a ``minister's discount for Rev. Jim Jones and son.'' The
same boy said: ``I was really in awe of him. He was more than a father. I
would have killed my parents for him.'' What is remarkable about the
Reverend Jim Jones is not his own self-serving behavior but the almost
superhuman gullibility of his followers. Given such prodigious credulity,
can anyone doubt that human minds are ripe for malignant infection?
Admittedly, the Reverend Jones conned only a few thousand people. But his
case is an extreme, the tip of an iceberg. The same eagerness to be conned
by religious leaders is widespread. Most of us would have been prepared to
bet that nobody could get away with going on television and saying, in all
but so many words, ``Send me your money, so that I can use it to persuade
other suckers to send me their money too.'' Yet today, in every major
conurbation in the United States, you can find at least one television
evangelist channel entirely devoted to this transparent confidence trick.
And they get away with it in sackfuls. Faced with suckerdom on this awesome
scale, it is hard not to feel a grudging sympathy with the shiny-suited
conmen. Until you realize that not all the suckers are rich, and that it is
often widows' mites on which the evangelists are growing fat. I have even
heard one of them explicitly invoking the principle that I now identify with
Zahavi's principle of costly authentication. God really appreciates a
donation, he said with passionate sincerity, only when that donation is so
large that it hurts. Elderly paupers were wheeled on to testify how much
happier they felt since they had made over their little all to the Reverend
whoever it was.
5. The patient may notice that the particular convictions that he holds,
while having nothing to do with evidence, do seem to owe a great deal to
epidemiology. Why, he may wonder, do I hold this set of convictions rather
than that set? Is it because I surveyed all the world's faiths and chose the
one whose claims seemed most convincing? Almost certainly not. If you have a
faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith
as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring
music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most
important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The
convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely
different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had
happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.
6. If the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different
religion from his parents, the explanation may still be epidemiological. To
be sure, it is possible that he dispassionately surveyed the world's faiths
and chose the most convincing one. But it is statistically more probable
that he has been exposed to a particularly potent infective agent --- a John
Wesley, a Jim Jones or a St. Paul. Here we are talking about horizontal
transmission, as in measles. Before, the epidemiology was that of vertical
transmission, as in Huntington's Chorea.
7. The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly reminiscent of
those more ordinarily associated with sexual love. This is an extremely
potent force in the brain, and it is not surprising that some viruses have
evolved to exploit it. St. Teresa of Avila's famously orgasmic vision is too
notorious to need quoting again. More seriously, and on a less crudely
sensual plane, the philosopher Anthony Kenny provides moving testimony to
the pure delight that awaits those that manage to believe in the mystery of
transubstantiation. After describing his ordination as a Roman Catholic
priest, empowered by laying on of hands to celebrate Mass, he goes on that
he vividly recalls
the exaltation of the first months during which I had the power to say Mass.
Normally a slow and sluggish riser, I would leap early out of bed, fully
awake and full of excitement at the thought of the momentous act I was
privileged to perform. I rarely said the public Community Mass: most days I
celebrated alone at a side altar with a junior member of the College to
serve as acolyte and congregation. But that made no difference to the
solemnity of the sacrifice or the validity of the consecration.
It was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the priest to Jesus,
which most enthralled me. I would gaze on the Host after the words of
consecration, soft-eyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his beloved...
Those early days as a priest remain in my memory as days of fulfilment and
tremulous happiness; something precious, and yet too fragile to last, like a
romantic love-affair brought up short by the reality of an ill-assorted
marriage. (Kenny, 1986, pp. 101-2)
Dr. Kenny is affectingly believable that it felt to him, as a young priest,
as though he was in love with the consecrated host. What a brilliantly
successful virus! On the same page, incidentally, Kenny also shows us that
the virus is transmitted contagiously --- if not literally then at least in
some sense --- from the palm of the infecting bishop's hand through the top
of the new priest's head:
If Catholic doctrine is true, every priest validly ordained derives his
orders in an unbroken line of laying on of hands, through the bishop who
ordains him, back to one of the twelve Apostles... there must be
centuries-long, recorded chains of layings on of hands. It surprises me that
priests never seem to trouble to trace their spiritual ancestry in this way,
finding out who ordained their bishop, and who ordained him, and so on to
Julius II or Celestine V or Hildebrand, or Gregory the Great, perhaps.
(Kenny, 1986, p. 101)
It surprises me, too.
-------
Katt.
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| User: "quibbler" |
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| Title: Re: Jolly good stuff about the religious mind-virus! |
17 Jun 2005 12:09:24 AM |
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In article <A3mse.19595$m4.8101@newsfe3-gui.ntli.net>,
seruhshjaudn@dfhu.net says...
extract from:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1993-summervirusesofmind.shtml
-------
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for
their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that
you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
yeah, unless they have one of those religious viruses with all the
annoying popup ads :) I hate that one, don't you. All kinds of little
windows appearing saying, "God commands you to kill the infidels", "go
drown your child in the bath tub", etc, etc. Fortunately EAC industries
makes GawdWareBlocker version 6.66 that can remove most of those
annoying infestations.
Accepting that a virus
might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might
you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might
describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be
male).
1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner
conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous:
It can also cause one to send spam prayer-mail every night at bedtime
and occasionally hijacks one's telephone and calls televangelists, who
demand large sums of money be billed to the caller's credit cards.
a conviction that
doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless,
he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a
belief as ``faith.''
2. Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and
unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel
that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief (see below).
The gawd virus is always renaming and reinventing itself too. Sometimes
it says it's the father, sometimes the son and sometimes the holy
spirit. Other times it calls itself a "gawd of love", but other times
it says its jealous and vengeful, making it look like a completely
different virus definition.
--
Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com)
"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the
threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow'
disease, and many others, but I think a case can be
made that faith is one of the world's great evils,
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to
eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins
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