The Folly of Fools (43 page)

At the same time, many, many people believe religion is the received truth from the Almighty—or, more to the point, that
their
religion is. Some have a book—a Torah, a Bible, a Koran—all of whose words are true, often literally so. Their view has as little backing as the viral-meme story and appears at first to be nothing more than a deep form of self-justification. If their own religion is God’s own truth, then competing religions are often seen as anti-truth, or the work of the devil, the ultimate target. So we begin with two very extreme views of religion, with the truth probably somewhere in between, but where exactly and why?

First we need to separate the truth value of religious statements from the possible benefits of believing in them, and likewise separate partaking in religious ceremonies from the truth value attributed to them. Then we need to analyze beliefs and behavior in a more fine-grained way so that we can evaluate the meaning and function of particular beliefs. In my own view, there is often an internal struggle within religions between general truth and personal or group falsehood. That is, the essence of religion is neither self-deception nor deep truth, but a mixture of the two, with self-deception often overwhelming truth.

Religions tend to increase within-religion cooperation at the cost of lowered cooperation with outsiders. Often this involves a false historical narrative and shared group self-deception: “We are the chosen people or the original people from creation or those whose beliefs [e.g., in the divinity of Jesus] cause God to favor us [or whatever].” In short, religions often act as templates for in-group/out-group biases. Insofar as they encourage in-group cooperation, many benefits may accrue, but insofar as they encourage in-group cooperation in aggressive attacks on out-groups, they both inflict harm on others as a price of their cooperation and inflict harm on self when they fail (which, in warfare, is roughly half the time).

At the same time, certain features of religion provide a recipe for self-deception, removing nearly all restraints from rational thought. The universal system of truth espoused by a religion usually gives special status to the believer. Various phantasmagorical things are easily imagined, and “faith” is permitted to supersede reason.

Religion has a complex relationship with health and disease. On the one hand, health may be a major selective factor favoring religious behavior and beliefs. Not only do religions often preach healthy behavior, but there also is evidence that religious belief and association improve individual survival, immune function, and health. Even music, so common in religion and courtship, has positive immune effects. Medicine was originally embedded within religion, and both provide strong placebo benefits to at least part of the population.

A completely unexpected association between disease and religion emerges when we study the entire globe for degree of religious diversity (number of religions per unit area) as a function of parasite load (roughly, degree of human loss due to parasites). Here we find many more religions (and languages) per square inch when parasites are high. Since splitting of religions is also naturally associated with ethnocentrism and ethnic differentiation, parasites are a factor expected to degrade general religious truth value over time and thus to be positively associated with in-group deceit and self-deception. This may be especially true of the polytheistic religions, but with monotheism came additional forces of self-deception associated with global conquest and a single, dominant spirit.

Finally, we consider the role of prayer and meditation, specific teachings against self-deception, and the contrast between the social and internal sides of religious devotion.

COOPERATION WITHIN THE GROUP

By logic, religion ought to increase altruistic and cooperative behavior among group members—of obvious potential benefit—but it may do so along with reduced such behavior toward nonmembers and, worse still, outright aggression and murder. That is, an increased degree of hostility toward neighboring groups can heighten the within-group bias (and vice versa). This is the double-edged sword of religion, inside and outside: a religion urges its own members to treat each neighbor as they would treat themselves, yet also to slaughter every nonbeliever and outsider, as is ordered in the good book, for group after group, down to every last man, woman, and child. At the extremes, some religions advocate in-group love and out-group genocidal hatred.

In some religions, people imagine that God is watching and evaluating their every action. Reputational concerns are expected to have obvious effects on human cooperative tendencies. One study shows that even a pair of eyelike objects on a small part of a computer screen can unconsciously increase cooperative behavior in an anonymous economic game. An awareness of observing, judging god(s) may have similar effects. Indeed, providing a “God prime” hidden in a game of sentence creation increases cooperative tendencies to about the same degree that primes of secular retribution do (police, courts, etc.). Insofar as fear of God’s judgment entrains more moral behavior on our part toward others, it can be seen either as a device that costs us some occasional selfish behavior but protects us from the greater cost of such behavior being detected by others and of being aggressed against, or as a form of imposed self-deception by others, in effect, scaring us into greater group orientation.

A tendency to detect agency in nature likely supplies the cognitive template supporting belief in supernatural agents transcending the usual limitations of nature. Since only in some religions do these gods watch, monitor, and respond to human behavior, it would be most interesting to know which religions do so and why. Is this, in part, a means of increasing in-group cooperation?

Although those Christians who frequently pray and attend religious services reliably report more altruistic behavior—such as charity donations and volunteer work—it is uncertain how much this applies only within the religious group or even whether it applies at all. This is because various measures of religiosity repeatedly have been shown to correlate with higher false opinions of self, suggesting an obvious self-deceptive effect of religion: you think better of yourself than you otherwise would. In Islam, it is mandatory to give to the poor, but there must be variability in doing so, and it would be most interesting to know what such variability correlates with.

One interesting fact on the effect of religion on cooperation emerges from comparing small religious organizations—“sects”—with small nonreligious communes. There is a striking tendency for the religious to outlast the secular (at least in the United States). In each year, the religious sect is four times as likely to survive into the next year as the secular. So religion provides some kind of social glue that makes organizations based on them more likely to endure than those based on nonreligious themes. Living in a cohesive and mutually supporting organization would be expected to have immune benefits as well, since one is less isolated and more likely, in a crisis, to be able to draw on the resources of others. As we have noted, the placebo effect is based partly on its expected association with caring acts by others.

Another interesting difference between the two kinds of communes is that the more costly the requirements imposed on group members in a commune (regarding food, tobacco, clothing, hairstyle, sex, communication with outsiders, fasts, and mutual criticism), the longer the survival of a religious commune, though there is no association between cost and survival in the nonreligious. This raises two questions: Why should cost be positively associated with commune survival, and why should this hold only for religious ones? According to cognitive dissonance theory, greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity. Why do religions provide more fertile ground for this process than secular communes? Perhaps because religions provide a much more comprehensive logic for justifying beliefs and actions. In religious communes, men’s participation in group prayer predicts their degree of sociality in an experimental economic game.

RELIGION: A RECIPE FOR SELF-DECEPTION

Whether religion is entirely devoted to self-deception from its very foundation to its every last branch seems unlikely, but the fact that this is even a theoretical possibility suggests the degree to which religion has been infected by forces of self-deception. Even a casual glance at most religions suggests that there is far more nonsense than revealed truth. Some of the key features of Western religions (and some Eastern ones) are the following.

A Unified, Privileged View of the Universe for Your Own Group

Most religions propose this view. Either you are the founding people and all others degenerate dogs, or else yours are the “chosen people” either by ethnicity (Jewish) or by attachment to this or that prophet (Jesus, Muhammad). Of course, any general system of thought that places you at the center is useful to you in interactions with others. In defense of religion’s inadequacies, it should be remembered that for many thousands of years, there was nothing else other than religion. Certainly no organized science, no Newton or Darwin, but still this alone can’t justify the strong egocentric biases of religion.

There May Be a Series of Interconnected Phantasmagorical Things

For example, there may be an afterlife; a giant spirit who controls all but is amenable to human persuasion on the most trivial matters; a prophet capable of performing miracles, whether parting the seas, raising the dead, or feeding the masses; a prophet who is born without a human father, only God himself, and who stays dead for only three days; and so on. Once you have signed on to a few of these notions, there are hardly any boundaries left, and very small details can turn out to be critical features of dogma.

The supreme spirit (or God) is typically given a masculine name that on biological grounds seems most dubious. Besides imparting an image of God as a fearsome tyrant, there is no such thing as an all-male species in nature. Not a single one. Only females can reproduce by themselves, females preceded males in evolution, and to this day they are still the critical sex as far as biological work is concerned. God should be interpreted as mostly female, and I will do so throughout. A male God has many unfortunate features, including the heartlessness and aggression associated with men and their divorce from reproduction, producing a series of horrors—pedophilia in all-male “celibate” castes; hostility toward women’s interests, especially efforts to control their reproduction and sexuality (banning sexual activity, abortion, in vitro fertilization, etc.); honor killings; indeed every kind of anti-female horror including mass rape during warfare in the name of God.

The Deification of a Prophet

The deification of Jesus is unlike the treatment of prophets in either Islam or Judaism. His birth by unheard-of means, miracles ascribed, and of course, his very brief death, so that now he is one-third of the show: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The basic story was put together after his death in the years that Christianity was a small, persecuted sect. To believe in his divinity became the key test, one that automatically shrank and exalted the group. The bigger you make Jesus, the smaller you make God. Not only are other gods no longer real but also God herself has lost a good part of her powers to a (dead) human being.

It is also ironic that the more you deify the prophet, the less attention you pay to his actual teachings, since the key distinction then becomes whether you believe in his divinity, not whether you believe in any of his teachings. “I
believe
, Jesus, I
believe
in you as the Lord, my personal savior.” Yes, but do you believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, that blessed are the peacemakers, that you should treat
all
others as you wish to be treated yourself, and so on? I doubt it. Deification of Jesus also makes more likely patently absurd beliefs, such as intercessory prayer, since Jesus now joins God as someone you can beg favors from (and the Catholics add yet another layer, Jesus’s mother, the Virgin Mary), no matter how many laws of nature need to be violated in the process. Among prophets, Jesus was an extreme case—hung on a cross until he gave up his life—but do not imagine that the earlier prophets in the same tradition were welcomed (whether Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or whoever). During their time, they were often persecuted and rebuked, only later restored in memory to prophetic status.

Sometimes a Book Is Treated as Received Wisdom Direct from God

This allows plenty of room for interpretation. Sometimes every word is literally true, even if this results in numerous contradictions within the book itself, never mind the larger world. Other times, metaphor is permitted, and indeed encouraged, giving plenty of latitude for how this divinely generated document is interpreted. The key is that you—or your group—control the document and the interpretation. If God literally created the world in seven days about six thousand years ago, then all of astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology must be nonsense. Did God really give “the land of Israel” in perpetuity to a people who wrote a book a few thousand years ago saying he did?

Faith Supersedes Reason

Sometimes anti-logic is directly pushed, as in the notion that “by faith ye shall know them”—indeed, an attachment to reason may be evidence of sacrilege. The degree to which we believe something now becomes a determinant of its truth value. Once again, this joins a long line of features that tends to remove all rational boundaries from religious thought, permitting any and every deceptive ploy and self-deceptive concept.

We Are Right

And here comes the critical, all-encompassing self-deception: we are the measure of what is good, we represent the best, we have the true religion, and as believers we are superior to those around us. (We have been “saved”; they have not.) Our religion is one of love and concern for the world, our God a just God, so our actions can’t be evil when they are done in God’s name.