Religious Beliefs and Brain Seizures
  by Phil Stahl

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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