In an earlier article, "Mind Viruses and Memes:
(May 9-15, 2002), I showed how and why religion acts as a mind virus,
including appropriating the machinery of the mind to its own purposes
(just as a physical virus does with the cells of the human body).
The premise was based on the the meme concept first articulated by
biochemist Jacques Monod in his extraordinary book Chance and Necessity,
1968. |
Monod noted that the ideas with highest "infective
potential" were typically those that assigned humans a place
in the cosmos featuring an "immanent destiny" or a "safe
harbor where anxiety dissolves." |
Could there actually be a physical basis for this? Can
this show that every human is at risk for religious infection unless
s/he takes precautions for self-innoculation? |
Michael Persinger has provided an excellent insight
into this idea in his research at Laurentian University, Sudbury,
Ontario. In his astonishing landmark work, The Neuropsychological
Basis of God Beliefs, Persinger showed that religious beliefs
and visions arise from temporal lobe abnormalities. |
Most astounding, he discovered that all manner of ritualistic
religio-mystical displays-meditating, praying, kneeling on a church
pew, babbling in "tongues," and frenzied religious dancing,
all altered the temporal lobes in ways that made these micro-seizures
(what he called "temporal lobe transients") more likely
to occur. Thus, such religious "acting out" correlated with
instability in the temporal loves - which worsened each time the behaviors
were repeated. |
Consider prayer for example. For millennia the religious
have been brainwashed into thinking their prayers alter some outside
physical circumstance or personal condition. Persinger's work discloses
this is pure delusion and a byproduct of temporal lobe instability.
|
In fact, prayer boils down to an incomprehensible, personalized
patter that triggers mild micro-seizures in such a was as to quiet
the existential anxieties of a particular brain. It's nearly universal
(associated the the existential dread that accompanies being orphans
in a meaningless cosmos). |
It works - not on any ontological level, but at the
subjective level, - for the person who invokes it, much as transcendental
meditation works for many others (saying or singing 'OM' repetitively
triggers alpha rhythms in the brain). Prayer is for the pray-er, therefore.
It doesn't alter reality one iota. Possible brain dysfunction - insanity
- enters when people, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe
it does! |
Consider the so-called "prayer experiments"
performed in the last few years in US hospitals. It is interesting
that NONE of them has had adequate controls, or control populations.
Therefore, in the context of accepted scientific procedures, the "experiments"
are essentially worthless. In addition, the statistical samples were
far too small to even warrant being subjected to the simplest statistical
tests. |
What may we conclude and generalize from Persinger's
work? For one thing, that the recent activism of the Christian Right
- to harness the Constitution and government with its fundamentalist
values crusades - is misguided. Their activism is less about reclaiming
the liberty of a particular group than it is the group's will to dominate
all other groups on the basis of collective brain seizures and delusions.
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