Tag: Neuroscience
October 8, 2021 October 7, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Religion, The Long Reads
It Takes a Different Person…
… to be a Christian.
… to be a Christian and then an atheist.
Not different like, "Um… that's different." Not a different kind of person — a different person, period – a person who's been transformed into somebody else.
That was message losers like me got when we became Christians. It came in stentorian tones, right out of the Bible:
"Be transformed by the renewal of your mind."
Romans 12:2 ESV
Transformation is the ultimate makeover — a change to our form – how we're shaped, constituted, put together. Transformation alters self and life by rewiring our brain and all the biological functions that feed it. It starts in our "mind" – sense of identity, worldview, perspective, biases — what we see and don't see, the way we habitually experience the world — and extends from there to the entire ecosystem that is who we are and how we live, inside and out. On the inside, transformation is biological, neurological, physiological, chemical, hormonal. On the outside, transformation is sociological, communal, societal, institutional.
Formation is growing up and growing into. Transformation is growing out of and into something else. Transformation gets started lots of ways — trauma, financial and job stress, health issues, moves, big decisions, surprises — but belief might be the most powerful.
Belief is transformational by definition. Belief conforms us to its realities — we don't just believe this or that, we become people who believe this or that. Once we become those people, we carry on life accordingly, alongside other like-minded believers. Belief shapes our minds individually and collectively, which shapes our behavior so that we think, do, see, say, and are the right stuff. Belief results in a constant, moment by moment steeping, soaking, marinating, saturating of the brain and the rest of our neuro-biological architecture with all the requisite doctrines and dictates, rites and rituals needed to generate conforming actions, experiences, thoughts, impressions, responses, and sensibilities, which in turn generate conforming identity and behaviors.
While that's happening on the inside, everything on the outside goes with it. Life reshapes itself –environment, community, culture, customs – around what we believe, informing what we see, hear, and feel, what we're surrounded with and immersed in, what we think about, our assumptions and expectations, how we respond emotionally, how we dress and decorate ourselves and our environments, who we hang out with and who we avoid, where we live and don't live, what we own and don't own, what we eat and don't eat, what we wear and won't be caught dead wearing, what we do for work and fun and… the whole package.
We learn to believe by growing into it physically –belief takes up residence in our cellular structure. The more we practice what we believe, the more our biological selves conform our experience of "reality" to what we believe. Since that belief-based "reality" authenticates what we believe, we believe it more fervently. And around we go in a self-reinforcing loop, becoming stronger and more rooted in our belief, inside and out.
Belief fully formed sinks its roots into the deepest, oldest, most evolutionary and instinctive parts of our brains, where it becomes a survival skill. At this point, our lives depend on what we believe. When our beliefs are threatened, we are at risk.
We believe, we live. We don't believe, we die.
That's why we hold our beliefs so fervently, defend them so ferociously — doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on belief keeps us safe. Belief does all that for our own good.
Belief makes sure we are assimilated.
Belief makes sure we stay assimilated.
And yes, resistance is futile.
We transform only when we have to. Transformation is about adapting and reacting, but our brains trend to status quo and predictability. Their default setting is entropy, the current trajectory. Left unchecked, transformation is ongoing, in constant movement. Our brains won't allow it. So we hunker down, settle in, dig in, calcify, resist, isolate, polarize, fortify.
It takes psychic dynamite to dislodge our beliefs.
I had to become a new person to be a Christian. When I drifted away, I had to become a new person to not believe anymore. It's not that the Christian person I used to be somehow came up with a different opinion about God. Instead, I became a different person –zapped, scrambled, rearranged, shifted – and God became irrelevant. To my former self, "atheist" was never an option. I didn't choose it, I became it. I became a different person in a new place, with no way to get back. That different person was an atheist — a nonbeliever, one of the godless, the faithless, the backslidden. I didn't decide my way into that much change. I had to be transformed to get there.
Transformation is change too big to be measured, described, or understood, — change that rampages, doesn't respect, isn't abashed. It had no problem propelling me to where I could never have possibly gone.
"Transformation" sounds so spiritual. We have this idea that it's going to be cool – we'll be more aware, enlightened. So we take vacations and patronize spas, head to a monastery for a week of silence. Churches sponsor retreats, corporations lay out five-star spreads for off-site strategic planning. It works: put yourself in a new setting, you think new thoughts, feel new feelings. What used to be unthinkable and impossible becomes your new to-do list. The new normal is imminent, yours for the taking — transformation on demand.
Then comes re-entry. Go away and get inspired, then try to take it back to the shop and everybody wants to know what you've been smoking. The old normal can't tolerate it.
You forgot something. You can't just paste all that newness on your old self, your old life. Do that, everything rips apart. You need to become new. The reason you're not already doing the new thing is because you're not a person or organization that does the new thing. If you were, you'd already be doing it. Duh. You want to do the new thing, you need to be transformed. You need to be made new so that you can do and be new. Trying to mix old and new just isn't going to work. That's in the Bible too:
"No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved."
Matthew 9: 16-17 ESV
Books about new wine and new wineskins were making the rounds in my early Christian days. They were books you could use at retreats – fodder for earnest conversations and strategizing — new spurred on by resounding sermon moments about how very Gospely everything was going to be.
Every now and then somebody would find out about St. John of the Cross and his "dark night of the soul," and quote it in a sermon. You didn't have to know who he was or actually read anything he wrote — the poetic phrase stood on its own. Apparently transformation could be a major downer. Well, maybe that worked for a 16th Century mystic, but the rest of us had jobs.
On the way out of Christianity I crashed for awhile in the self-help world and thought it would be cool to be one of those speaker, writer, consultant dudes. I got as far as writing some blog posts and making a few trips to do workshops. I got great reviews – earnest, beautiful "this seminar changed my life" reviews. But then I started to think I was actually ruining people's lives, which is pretty much what had happened to mine. Transformation is messy, mean, uncaring. I didn't wish it on anybody, so I started telling attendees that they would suffer if they tried to make big changes – they would find themselves in the throes of transformation. I warned them not to use the material because I knew it would work, and when it did they would regret it. I got the impression people thought I was doing a reverse psychology number on them. After awhile I quit doing the workshops. It was unethical to give people a great retreat experience and send them home knowing they would get clobbered and give up.
Who would submit themselves to the kind of transformation that would turn a commando Christian (me) into an atheist?
In a word, nobody. Not even me.
But then I did.
I'm not bragging. You can't brag about an accident.
We all know we don't change unless and until we have to. Which means the usual transformation catalyst is…
Trauma.
We've all seen the major stressors lists. Mine were career, money, health. For starters. When trauma gets rolling, it likes company.
Trauma brings grief. Grief rewires our brains – it puts the stress response (flight or fight) in charge, furloughs the part that makes us feel we're in control. Memory and strong emotions hog the stage, decision-making and planning move out. Fear about how we're going to live without what's been lost goes on permanent reruns we can't shut off. We get disoriented, lose track of time and place. We go wandering, literally and figuratively. Our whacked out symptoms take up residence.
Trauma and grief stay until the dark night is over. Change catalysts like religious retreats and self-help seminars have the same effect — they suspend our status quo ties to "normal," heighten emotions, promote reality-bending experiences, warp our risk tolerance, enhance receptivity to new versions of reality. But then the weekend is over and we go back home, where the symptoms quickly fade. We resent it, but it's better than the alternative, which is trauma and grief staying with it until the job is done.
Trauma and grief is a potent cocktail of transformation. Drink it, and there's going to be trouble. You're going to suffer.
You might even lose your faith.
You might join the ranks of the nonbelievers and wonder what wormhole you went through to get there.
That's what happened to me.
You might be next.
September 12, 2021 September 10, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Religion, Uncategorized
"The Person of Jesus" Fallacy
"I don't like religion but I like the person of Jesus."
The religion they don't like is Christianity – Jesus' religion. They think it would be better if the church wasn't involved. Separating an institution from its namesake isn't easy under any circumstance, but it's harder here because Jesus and the church are both ancient, and ancient doesn't time-travel.
We hold a myth that it does, but ancient ideas and stories about ancient people preserved in ancient books can't make the trip to today. We think if we could snatch those guys (ancient pronouns are definitely male) out of yesterday and plunk them into today, they would be just like us, dealing with the same kinds of issues, having the same kinds of thoughts. Not a chance. We are not like them and they weren't like us. Our consciousness, experience, and reality are different from theirs. Bring them here or send us there and neither of us would have a clue.
Why? Because everything we feel, think, and do is in context – life happens right here, right now. It all happens in our brains and bodies – neurologically, biologically. We can't escape being organisms. And we can't escape the moment. That's not a cool guru thing to say, it's the way human life works. Contrary to the popular myth, we're not eternal souls living on a higher plane while our bodies slog through the muck. We're all here, like it or not.
Seek and Ye Shall Find
We don't think reality works that way. We think it's "out there," waiting for us to find it. And if it's Christian reality we're after, Jesus promised that if we seek it we'll find it. The only hitch is, the way we find it is by believing it. Christianity doesn't function without belief. It starts with "whoever believes in him [Jesus] shall have eternal life" and goes from there.
Believing it is finding it. We find it by believing it. It's not hard to spot the loop.
And if it's the real Jesus we're trying to find, there's still the God-human problem. Theologians can talk all day about how Jesus was both "fully human and fully God," but there's no way the rest of us have any idea what that's supposed to mean, so we stick with what we've been taught to believe. We major on the God part — we sanctify Jesus, bathe him in holy light, cast everything he said and did in marble, interpret and rationalize it in hindsight. We figure Jesus as God was always in the know so he knew all along what was happening and how it would be viewed by people like us two millennia later. He set everything up so church doctrine would make sense.
Plus our own memory banks are full of our personal history of faith and anything we might have learned about what's happened with Christianity while it's been around. There's a lot of church and religion in those memories – stuff the person of Jesus" devotees want to trade for a fresh look. To do that, they're going to have to be really good at "beginner's mind" – using awareness to seek and destroy biases and assumptions.
I didn't think about the "person of Jesus" when I was a Christian, I mean, Jesus was special because I was a Christian. Sometimes people talked about loving Jesus. I never felt that way, so I worried that my faith was defective. Guilt was pretty much the extent of my "person of Jesus" experience.
Now that I'm not a Christian, I don't like the guy.
It's still shocks me when I write things like that. I never would have, back in the day, But I believed then. I don't anymore.
Still, some people I'm close to buy the "person of Jesus" thing.
So call me Ishmael — I signed on to give it a try.
Jesus was a rabbi. He did what rabbis did: travelled around teaching his take on things, attracted followers who supported him, and argued with other rabbis. (Rabbi arguing is so essential that the nation of Israel pays them to do it.)
Jesus was a rabbi prodigy – he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah by ditching his parents so he could debate other rabbis om Jerusalem's temple. That's like skipping law school for a chat at the Supreme Court. When they found him, in true adolescent fashion he made it their problem that they didn't know he'd be there.
Then the Biblical record skips ahead twenty years – a gap that generates a lot of sappy artwork of him being a carpenter and "My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter" bumper stickers. What was he doing? The same thing he was doing before his temple debut: studying, learning, perfecting his case, preparing himself to be a rabbi for the ages. When the photo op was over, he closed up shop and hit the road.
He was good at it – had personal charisma and a message to match. Recruiting was a snap, and before long he had a retinue and a schedule like a megachurch pastor: he drew huge crowds to public events, taught an inner circle more intensely, and confided intimately with only a handful.
Jesus' rabbi battles were epic. We like the way he put the smackdown on the competition. My overall impression is that he wasn't the nicest guy in the world. Seems like he was often rebuking and scolding– like snarling at a man for not having enough faith while he healed his child. Maybe he was like one of those professors everybody warns is "really hard but you'll learn a lot." Sometimes I took the class, sometimes I didn't – either way, I usually didn't like "the person."
Jesus was great in a crowd. He delivered sound bytes you could take home, share with the neighbors — consider the lilies of the field, the very hairs on your heads are numbered, no sparrow falls from the sky without God noticing…. He told great stories – always with a moral, but complex enough that his inner circle sometimes needed a private explanation. People wondered, "Where did he get all this?" "He doesn't teach like the other rabbis," they said.
There's a poly-sci term for it: populism. Populism reverses the pecking order — the elites will be last and the losers first. The new blessed — the poor, meek, abused, despised, outcast, sick, blind, lame, hopeless, powerless – will inherit the earth and see God. God already has their mansions in Heaven under construction.
Not only that, but they get free healthcare.
Jesus healed people at his rallies, sometimes stayed up all night doing it.
The Christianity I was part of believed healing should be a normal part of what Christians do. Not all Christianity thinks so. Plus, we all know the debates about did he really, about what qualifies as a "miracle," and what's this about casting out demons? In our day, the "placebo effect" has been scientifically documented, plus there have been and still are lots of people who heal without surgery or pharma. Debate all you like, but it's undeniable that Jesus's ability to make people feel better super-charged his popularity.
Messianic Populism
Healing people was a big deal. Only the A-list prophets had done it, which meant Jesus might be one of them. There hadn't been one of those in a few hundred years. More than that, healing was more than a prophet marker, it was Messianic – part of what would happen when God made good on Israel's long-promised restoration and golden era.
Start talking Messiah, and the populist buzz goes off the charts.
Jesus' message was clearly Messianic, and he clearly believed he was the Messiah. That's what went down in a very rabbi-like exchange with John the Baptist (though a couple of John's followers). The rabbi exchange works like this: one rabbi quotes scripture, the other responds in kind; and in so doing, they clarify a point between themselves. They're speaking in code, but they get what each other is after.
"Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" And Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them."
Matthew 11: 2-5 ESV
"Are you the one who is to come?" [Are you the Messiah?]
"Go tell John what you see happening around here." [Yes I am.]
The scripture in question was this:
"Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
" and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the mute sing for joy."
Isaiah 35: 5-6 ESV
Jesus made the same point on other occasions, like one Sabbath when he did something else rabbis did – went to the synagogue and read the scriptures, as "was his custom." Only this time he went off script: "The prophet Isaiah was talking about me."
"And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
"And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
Luke 4:16-21 ESV
Fast forward to today. We know that Jesus' Messianic populism didn't go permanent. Instead – according to the church – it morphed into something transnational and invisible that you get in on not by being born in ancient Israel, but by believing that Jesus was a sort of metaphysical Messiah for everybody. A few hundred years later under Emperor Constantine, the invisible Messianic kingdom morphed again into the official Christian institution and infrastructure "the person of Jesus" devotees want to scuttle.
Jesus' populism was a fail, but that's okay. We got something better instead. That's the party line.
Populism Redux
I was a Jesus Freak in the 60's and 70's. We were totally into the populist Jesus– the bearded long-hair barefoot bead-wearing anti-war hippie radical Che Guevara look-alike who called out The Establishment and stuck it to the Man.
Today we've got the Revenge of the Establishment — the Christian Right's Jesus who advances Christian Nationalist racist alt-right anti-democracy militarist fascist authoritarianism end stage capitalism.
I don't know about you, but after the last few years I've had quite enough populism for one lifetime.
"We are the 99%" is why populism fails. Occupy camps out in Manhattan, the mob storms the Bastille (or the Capitol) but once the mess is cleaned up the 1% is back in charge while the newly disappointed and disillusioned 99% are back home wondering, "What was that about?"
So far, Jesus" sharp tongue and populism aren't wining "person of Jesus" points. But how about this:
Jesus Reinvented God
If the Messiah was on the scene, the God of Israel's history had to be recast.
Israel's God was a "man of war. Exodus 15:3 He was both a war criminal and guilty of crimes against humanity – a misogynist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic narcissist who must be worshiped and resented it when he wasn't, a nationalist, fascist authoritarian who openly ordered genocide and gave his conquering soldiers the right to rape and pillage.
You dealt with that God by being afraid – fearing him was "the beginning of wisdom." Proverbs 9:10 No wonder the rabbinical sects Jesus verbally sparred with – the Pharisees and Sadducees –were obsessed with getting everything just right, down to the last "jot and tittle." Do something wrong and everybody suffered.
Of course, ancient Israel didn't think of their God that way. People still don't today. When they think of God, they think of a Nice Guy in the Sky – like the God Jesus introduced as our "Father" — a too-kind, too-generous, too-indulgent, too-loving remake of the old Monster God.
The Monster God destroyed men, women (except the sex slaves), and children and burned their cities down to make room for his chosen people, whom he also turned on if they got it wrong. That wouldn't do if there was going to be a Messianic golden era. So Jesus brought a new God, and a new religion with it.
Jesus Reinvented Religion
Jesus' new religion was based on belief. Belief was the ultimate populist Messianic kingdom strategy. Anyone could believe, even the losers — no temple, no priest, no animals sacrifice required.
Jesus' new religion was today's self-help gospel. When Jesus gets on the topic of belief, he's the original motivational speaker.
"All things are possible for one who believes." Mark 9:23 ESV
"Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him." Mark 11:23 ESV
That's the power of positive thinking and law of attraction, from the pages and podiums of the $20 billion self-help industry. (Christians have adopted self-help as their own – Google "Christian self help" and you'll see what I mean.) Believe what you want, don't doubt, and it's yours. You can move mountains. Nothing will be impossible for you.
It seems Jesus was an original thinker on this point – if it's in the ancient Bible, I can't find it.
If the Monster God was out and the Nice Guy in the Sky was in, then Israel's historical religion had to change. No more annual calendar of animal blood sacrifices. And no more temple.
A little research reveals that there was a rabbinical apocalyptic school of thought in Jesus' time, and some scholars think Jesus was in the club. Maybe, maybe not, but Jesus clearly had an apocalyptic view of his religion's future, which meant the temple's days were numbered – a development he talked about with inner circle about when the troupe made their last trip to Jerusalem.
"Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, 'You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.'
"As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, 'Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?'"
The temple was the nation. Take it away, and everything else went with it — worldview, cultural identity, historical understanding, vision for the future… all the nation's institutions and icons trashed. The Messiah had been promised for millennia, but theoretical good news is one thing, the reality of dealing with it is quite another.
The "Lamb of God" heads off a national security risk
Jesus' country was a theocracy. Messianic populism was a national security risk. Stir things up too much, and the Roman hammer would fall. The other rabbis could see it coming. They had a country to protect. They were human too — the lash of Jesus' tongue hurt. And clearly he was wrong and they were right. No wonder they led the chant "We have no king but Caesar" while demanding Jesus's conviction and murder.
And the amazing thing was, Jesus didn't resist them. And when the Roman authorities wanted to let him go, he refused.
It looks like this came out of nowhere, but it was there all along, ever since John the Baptist made a pronouncement for the ages:
"Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
John 1:29 ESV
At the height of his popularity, Jesus volunteered to be the human sacrifice that would appease Israel's Monster God once and for all. No more imminent kingdom – instead, the settling of an old score. It looks like a sudden change of heart, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.
"From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."
Matthew 16:21-23 ESV
So much for the merry populist ride and the loving new Heavenly Father. In order for the old God and the old religion to be over with, there would need to be one last bloody sacrifice – the "Lamb of God." That would be Jesus's final act.
Trouble is, you destroy the Messiah, you destroy the Messianic golden age. Two thousand years of church doctrine says don't worry about that, because this was the surprise happy ending– the impossibly good news no one saw coming. I'm no longer in the thrall of church doctrine, so I see it differently.
At the height of Jesus' populist ministry, his family staged an intervention – tried to bring him home. They thought he was beside himself, wasn't thinking straight, needed some time to cool off. He blew them off, and shortly after started predicting his death. It's like something snapped in him. Right about then was the transfiguration –Moses and Elijah on the mountain — the lawgiver and prophet — and afterward the populism ran off the rails. Instead of breaking with the Monster God, Jesus announced that he would appease him with his own death. Bringing the Messianic kingdom would be his followers' job, and in the time he had left he focused on preparing them for the job.
This is where I give up on "the person of Jesus" – when his healing, populist gospel turns into an ancient religious death wish.
But then it gets worse.
When Jesus broke faith with his Messianic populist movement, he became fully complicit in ancient Israel's religion and angry God.
Like any sociopath, the Monster God could be kind — the official line was that his "lovingkindness indeed never ceases" Lamentations 3:22-23 Trouble was, his lovingkindness was conditional, on loan. His people could never please him, so they were always building debt they could never repay. Christian theology says that applies to the rest of us too, and that Jesus – "fully God" – knew that, so he picked up the tab for everybody.
But the final reckoning inexplicably stayed on the agenda. Once the world burns in apocalyptic flames, we're all summoned to the Last Judgment, and if we don't believe the right stuff, we're screwed in the worst possible way.
These days, every time I write the stuff the church I was part of used to believe, I'm shocked and stunned all over again. Really — people who seem normal, like I used to think I was — believe all this gory, horrible stuff. No wonder Christians parade Jesus's death by torture symbol like it's the best thing ever. It's a crucifix, for crying out loud! –one of the most horrifyingly cruel, depraved, savage, barbaric, sadistic, blood-lusty instruments of torture the very worst of human depravity has ever devised, and there's a man on it, beaten and whipped bloody, writhing in pain.
Oh, and a father did that to his child. Because he so loved the world.
And the son submitted to it because he loved us and wanted to please his father.
Behold the Lamb of God.
That's the religion Jesus couldn't break from – which two thousand years later was the same religion I joined when I became a Christian – and which is still the same religion I'm no longer part of. Christianity gives lip service to the Father, but it worships the Monster.
By the time I got this far in my search for "the person of Jesus" I realized what I'd found was my own Christian life. Twenty years after my Jesus Freak populism days, the Kingdom finally came. It was full-on Jesus populism. We went after the losers, stayed up all night healing them and finding them under bridges. We built churches in their abandoned store fronts, washed their cars, did their Spring cleaning, hauled away their trash. We fed them and moved them into homes.
Then the worst thing happened. The Evangelicals who'd been on our case extended the olive branch, and our leaders took it. We used to have the Father, now we had half the Father and half the Monster. Occupy was over. The elites were back in charge. The old order was restored.
That's what I found looking for "the person of Jesus."
Writing this now, I think of Judas singing in Jesus Christ Superstar — "Every time I look at you I don't understand/Why you let the things you did get so out of hand." Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.
When I first heard it, I thought it was clever, but trite. Not anymore. Jesus had it going, he let it get away. Sad. Frustrating. I wish his family's intervention had worked. It didn't, and for reasons we'll never know, Jesus took a course that a couple thousand years later has brought us the Christian Right and the Kingdom of Texas, the Proud Boys with their giant crosses that look like they're going to use them on somebody, and all the rest. We get modern barbarity to match ancient barbarity, justified by the barbaric God of a barbaric ancient religion, its devotees hawking doctrinal statements of faith barely indistinguishable from their most wildly fantastical conspiracy theories.
The individual and collective brains of the human race have been groomed with this disgusting source of endless misery for six thousand years since the Bible first declared 'In the beginning, God…."
How about if we start over with, "In the new beginning, no God'?
Not even "the person of Jesus."
Today billions of people around the world still sanctify the church's ideology and idolatry no matter how weird and brutal it is. "The person of Jesus" offers no escape, only more of the same.
Can we please move on?
September 11, 2021 September 10, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Uncategorized
Dopamine No More! (I miss it)
I miss dopamine.
I miss the sweet emotion (queue up the song).
Dopamine makes us want to do things. Dopamine inspires and motivates, conveys purpose and meaning, makes us believe that dreams can come true.
Our hairy ancestors apparently needed it. Otherwise life was just too hard, so why bother to survive? Evolution said that won't do – here, take a shot of this, that'll get you going.
I was a dopamine junkie. I overdid it. Dopamine fuels belief, belief gets the internal resolve going, which fuels more dopamine which fuels more belief… The more you use, the more you want. The more you use, the more you need. You're invincible when you're on it, an anxious slug when you're not.
The addictive cycle.
Pretty soon you're out of touch. Your risk-reward regulator goes out of whack. The further out you get, the closer you get to the edge, the more thrilling it is. You've gone beyond surviving, now you're thriving. No normal drudgery life for you. You're the exception.
So you think.
It's a lie. And the crazy thing is, people who have their dopamine under control buy the lie with you. They cheer for you, say you're inspiring. You're on a Hero's Journey. You're living the Redemption story – the Hollywood standard: get a crazy idea, sacrifice everything, lose everything, everybody turns against you, you crash and burn, all is lost, everything is hopeless…and then… you did it! Happy ending! Hero worship! Glorious sunset! Stirring overture!
I miss all that.
I read an article about "dopamine fasting." It's an anti-self-help self-help technique that's been making the rounds for a few years. I could see that. I've been working on it myself for about that long. Once I saw how dopamine had ruined my life, how fraudulent and full of lies and false promises it is, how it would keep ruining my life if I didn't get it under control, I swore it off. No more periodic crash and burns for the sake of a survival need that started with getting our butts out of the cave to join a Mastodon-clubbing party.
I meant well, but I lapsed now and then. I couldn't seem to go cold turkey – dopamine was too sneaky. One little hit – one idea that seemed so cool in the moment – and I was back in the cycle. So I needed safeguards, needed to learn not to trust my ideas, how to squelch my hopes, not follow my dreams. Life was still on the edge, but not the fun kind of edge. The new edge was overlooking The Void — an imminent drop into meaningless, purposelessness, despair.
It helped that I was overtaken by a dopamine-impairing neuro-muscular disease. It advanced slowly at first, didn't get diagnosed for a few years. By the time I got diagnosed, it was like somebody else said – "I got diagnosed, and 6 months later I had aged 15 years." It also helped that I became poor. Old, impaired, and poor – three things I thought I'd never be, and now I was. All three hammered my dopamine supply. Crazy ideas need lots of energy and money. If you're old and impaired, you don't have the energy. If you're poor you don't have the money. It helps.
No, I don't sit around whining. I've learned to do things without feeling like it, learned to live without motivation and inspiration, without hope and joy. Don't be disgusted at my crappy attitude. I'm not wallowing. I'm living an experiment. How do you live without all that good stuff? How do you rise above slug level when your brain doesn't have the chemical it needs to keep you squirming along?
I can't tell you, but I do it every day.
Truth is, there's still some dopamine flowing up there, or I'd be done. Enough to keep me surviving, although sometimes I wonder. Enough that I still lapse now and then. My routine now is treat it like an annoying child – stop what you're doing, give it attention, hear it out. And then, once it's feeling better, go away and wait. That might be enough.
If it comes up again, try to find out why. What's the hook? Soothe the idea, make it feel better at the source. You can't do anything about it anyway – you're too old, infirm, and poor, remember? No, it doesn't want to hear that. It's a child – it doesn't process adult limitations like affordability or mobility challenges. It just wants to play. So go ahead – after awhile you'll want to sit down and rest. Maybe it will pester you again, maybe not. It might go away right away, maybe overnight, maybe a couple days. Usually no more.
Dopamine episode solved.
You're safe until your dopamine idea-maker fires off another one.
Rewind, repeat.
I've learned to deal, but I miss it. I miss believing, hoping, trusting. I miss having dreams and visions, feeling like I can do cool stuff. Life was more fun when it was full of magical thinking and delusion.
I sometimes think how easy it would be to get on meds — instant chemical relief for crappiness and despair. But then I think I've had quite enough magical thinking and delusion for one lifetime. When Nietzsche recognized that God had died, he worried that people wouldn't be able to live without the sense of meaning and purpose that God had given them. His solution was to invent Superman.
It takes a lot of dopamine to be Superman. Lots of testosterone, too – another survival drug.
Superman was a disaster. Thanks anyway Friedrich, but we'll sit this one out. No Superman for me.
And for now at least, no meds either. I'm more interested in finding out if you can actually live on the edge of The Void. I know, I know… it's just another version of my old living of the edge – kind of a pathetic version at that. But despair is what I've got right now, so I'm working with it. I work out, do my learning and reflecting and reading, create my artwork. I do it because I do it. I do what I do because that's what I do. No Hero's Journey, no Hollywood, no motivational speaker self-help guru fame and fortune. Just getting stuff done whether I feel like it or not.
It's probably a phase – another fit my inner child is throwing. I'd like to be a child again. I miss that, too. I never wanted to grow up. All the magic, delusion, dopamine highs.
But no. Here's to survival! To the Void! To despair! To the nothingness Nietzsche was worried about!
And all that other adult shit.
August 27, 2021 August 26, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Consciousness and the Self, Religion, The Long Reads
It Takes a Different Person to be a Christian and Then an Atheist
Not a different kind of person, but a different person, period.
You look in the mirror and don't recognize yourself.
Other people don't either. There's something different about you, hard to say what – a different energy maybe, like your wiring got scrambled.
That kind of different is why I'm not a Christian anymore. The old me didn't change my mind about God; I became a new person, and God didn't fit anymore. It wasn't just a tweak here and there, but the whole ecosystem of me — self, life, world, inside and out – got shifted, zapped, scrambled, rearranged to the point that it's not that I don't believe in God anymore, it's that I can't. I'm repulsed by the idea. I'm stunned, shocked, and amazed by what I used to believe. I wonder how I could have. What was I thinking?
Now here I am — a nonbeliever, among the godless, the faithless, the backslidden. I never would have believed it. Atheist wasn't possible – it was never on the life choices list. It still isn't. I didn't choose it, I became it. I became a new person in a new place, with no way to get back. It wasn't change, it was transformation.
"Transformation" has grandiose overtones. It sounds spiritual. We talked about transformation when I was a Christian. It's right there in the Bible:
"Be transformed by the renewal of your mind." Romans 12:2 ESV
The context and the rest of verse is dressed up with pious isn't-transformation-going-to-be-wonderful language. No it's not. It's going to tear you down, and everything else with it. Transformation is destructive and painful, a depressing grind. Try to make big changes and everything comes unglued. I don't wish it on anybody.
Transformation is inside and outside – the entire ecosystem that is you and your life. Ecological change on the inside is biological, neurological, physiological, chemical, hormonal. On the outside it's sociological, communal, societal, institutional. When transformation has made a mess of all that it's just getting warmed up. Now you've got to figure out how to carry all that into a new life.
Good luck with that.
Personal ecosystem change is why we take vacations and patronize spas, go to a monastery for a week of silence. It's why churches sponsor retreats, why corporations lay out five star spreads for off-site strategic planning. It works: put yourself in a new setting, you think new thoughts, feel new things. What was unthinkable and impossible before became your new to do list.
Personal ecosystem change is why re-entry is so hard – go away and get inspired, then try to take what happened out there back to the shop and everybody wants to know what you've been smoking out there. Meanwhile you're scheming to turn no-way-I-can-go-back into the new normal. All that inspiration and new thoughts while you're away vs. all that dread and drudgery when you go back to the grind – it's evidence of ecological change.
Self-help is fraudulent pseudo-religion for a lot of reasons, but it's biggest fraud is that it doesn't tell us about the need for ecosystem change if we want to make big changes in our lives. Self-help makes it sound like we can just paste some new things onto what we already are, have, and do. Nope. Won't work. The reason we're not already doing the new thing is because we're not the kind of person who does the new thing. If we were, we'd already be doing it. Duh. If we want to do the new thing, we need to be transformed.
"Transformed" is change on an ecological/systemic scale. That means nothing left out. Nothing left out means this is going to hurt. A big part of the trouble is that transformation can't mix old and new — get far enough into the process and the old is out for good. That's in the Bible, too:
There were a couple popular books about new wine and new wineskins making the rounds in my early Christian years. (The Taste of New Wine and Wineskins.) They were the kind of influential books you could use at ecological change retreats – lots of earnest conversations and strategizing ways to make the new wine flow, like getting people into home Bible study and prayer groups, plus lots of great sermon moments about how very Gospely everything was going to be.
Our understanding of the concept was silly shallow. Every now and then somebody would find out about St. John of the Cross and his "dark night of the soul," and quote it in a sermon. Nobody actually read what the 16th Century mystic wrote — the poetic phrase stood on its own: transformation could be a major downer — not something you preach about on Tithing Pledge Sunday. If it got mentioned at all, "dark night" transformation got a makeover into something like a bad case of the flu you could get over.
The real thing?
I once thought it would be cool to be one of those self-help speaker, writer, consultant dudes. I got as far as writing some blog posts and making a few trips to do workshops. I got great reviews – earnest, beautiful "you changed my life" reviews. But then I started to worry that I was actually ruining people's lives, which is pretty much what had happened to mine when I decided it was time to believe my way into my dreams – just like you're supposed to. So I started telling audiences that they would suffer if they tried to make big changes. I warned them not to use the material because I knew it would work, and when it did they would regret it. Every would changed, and they'd have to deal with it and it would be no fun. I think people thought I was doing some kind of reverse psychology number on them. When it was clear they weren't believing me, I quit doing the workshops. It was unethical to give people a great retreat experience and send them home knowing they would get clobbered and give up.
We've all seen the major stressors lists. Mine were career, money, health. For starters – when trauma gets rolling, it likes company.
Trauma brings grief. Grief rewires our brains – it puts the stress response (flight or fight) in charge, furloughs the part that makes us feel like at least we're in control. Memory and strong emotions hog the stage, decision-making and planning move out, fear about how we're going to live without what's been lost goes on permanent reruns we can't shut off. We get disoriented, lose track of time and place. We go wandering, literally and figuratively. Our whacked out symptoms take up residence. We enter what science and environment writer April Reese calls The Fog of Grief.[1]
"I was a churning maelstrom of emotions: sadness, confusion, anger, disbelief, fear, regret, guilt. At times in those first hours, days and weeks after his death, it was hard to breathe. I couldn't concentrate. I forgot things. Fatigue was a constant, no matter how much I slept. I came to understand what Joan Didion meant in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a chronicle of her grief over the loss of her husband, when she wrote: 'I realised for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.'
"This fog of grief, it turns out, is as common as grief itself. When the neurologist Lisa Shulman lost her husband to cancer nine years ago, 'there was some serious sadness, but that wasn't the main problem,' she recalls. 'It was the disorientation. I felt like I was waking up in a completely alien world. Because the whole infrastructure of my daily life was fundamentally gone.'
"She found herself becoming lost in time, ending up in familiar places without knowing how she got there, she recalls. 'It's not simply a matter of discomfort or anxiety. It's frightening,' she says. 'Because you feel like, as Didion said long ago, you feel like you're going crazy.'
"Grief has such a powerful effect on us, I learned, that it rewires the brain: the limbic system, a primal part of the brain controlling emotions and behaviours that ensure our survival, takes centre stage, while the prefrontal cortex – the centre of reasoning and decision-making – retreats to the wings.
"'From an evolutionary standpoint, we are strongly hardwired to respond to something that is a threat,' Shulman says. 'We oftentimes don't think of a loss of a loved one as a threat in that way, but, from the perspective of the brain, that's the way it is literally perceived.'
"That perception of threat means that our survival response – 'fight or flight' – kicks in, and stress hormones flood the body. The work of the psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor at the University of Arizona and others has found heightened levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the bereaved.
"While the cortisol is flowing fast, the brain remakes itself – at least temporarily – to help us endure the trauma of grief. In the weeks after a loss, the brain, like a stern nurse imposing temporary bed rest for itself, suppresses the control centres of higher functions, such as decision-making and planning. At the same time, Shulman says, areas involved in emotion and memory work overtime, gatekeeping which emotions and memories get through. Brain scans of the bereaved show that grief activates parts of the limbic system – sometimes referred to as the 'emotional brain'. Among the limbic regions impacted are the amygdala, which governs the intensity of emotions and threat perception; the cingulate cortex, involved in the interplay between emotions and memory; and the thalamus, a sort of relay station that conveys sensory signals to the cerebral cortex, the brain's information-processing centre.
"So my inability to form coherent sentences or remember what I opened the refrigerator to get is nothing to be worried about, Skritskaya assures me; my brain has simply powered down my thinking to enable me to tolerate the loss. The tradeoff is fuzzy cognition – what I've come to describe to friends as 'grief brain'.
"'Grief takes up a lot of bandwidth in the brain,' Shulman writes in her book. 'Odd behaviour and incoherence are expected consequences of the brain's protective responses following emotional trauma.'"
Trauma and grief stay until the dark night is over. Ecological change catalysts like religious retreats and self-help seminars have the same effect — they suspend our status quo ties to "normal," heighten emotions, promote reality-bending experiences, warp our risk tolerance, enhance receptivity to new versions of reality. But then the weekend is over and we go back home, where the symptoms quickly fade. We resent it, but it's better than the alternative, which is trauma and grief staying with it until the job is done.
[1] The Fog of Grief: The five stages of grief can't begin to explain it: grief affects the body, brain and sense of self, and patience is the key Aeon Magazine (Aug. 10, 2021).
August 8, 2021 August 7, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads
The Trouble is, We Believe
Belief is something humans do.
Beliefism is belief metastasized — belief unmoored, unhinged, runaway, with no object but its own self-referenced purification.
Every belief carries the seed of beliefism– the potential to grow into something toxic, with no purpose but to propagate more of itself.
Which is why…
Belief is a clear and present danger.
Belief should come with a warning — "Handle With Care." But it doesn't, and so we don't — we just go around believing things like it's no big deal. What we believe is a big deal. We should be more careful.
We're probably careless because belief makes life feel better. It provides purpose and meaning and mission, lays out incentives and rewards, hypes us into feeling inspired and enthusiastic, fired up to do great things.
Belief is how we get to act like God.
Belief is how we create worlds, build civilizations, found nations. Belief anchors us in collective and individual identity, defines who's us and who's them, carves out space for us in the world. Our brains are wired to value those things.
Our brains are wired to believe.
Belief is indiscriminate. It doesn't care what's believed, what's fact or fake. As far as belief is concerned, all reality is alternate reality. Our brains have a bad case of "whatever." If we want to believe it, they're good with it.
Belief isn't choosy.
Belief doesn't distinguish fact from fiction, truth from madness, clarity from delusion. It's amoral, indiscriminate, undiscerning. Belief only makes self-referential judgments — what conforms to the thing believed and what doesn't, what to encourage and promote vs. what to punish and ban.
Our brains don't discriminate.
Our brains readily swap belief in this for belief in that — religion, science, humanism, capitalism, fascism, extraterrestrials, self-help, past lives… they're all the same.
Belief is fun.
Beliefism is about getting inspired, believing impossible dreams, going for it, realizing your unique calling, becoming your authentic self – all those things that make Hollywood and self-helpers and entrepreneurial heroes rich and famous.
Belief has been king in the New World for 400 years. The New World brought it from the Old World, where it was king for millennia. Belief is America's root religion. It gave us the Puritans. Now it gives us the self-helpers, alternative healers, life coaches, and evangelizing Christians and atheists. We do belief in the USA. We're belief experts. We got it down.
But there's more: belief morphs into beliefism.
Beliefism is when belief goes public. It's the Unicorn IPO, the blockbuster premiered. In psychological terms, beliefism is when belief emerges – moves beyond internal subjectivity and takes on form and substance in external human reality, becomes ideology, builds institutions, develops its own mythology and metaphors, becomes law and economics, dictates cultural norms.
Beliefism turns what's believed into knowledge.
Beliefism is evident in a street evangelist's pitch for Creationism. "The universe is way too complicated for me to understand," he said, "so there must be a God who does." He could have understood but he didn't. He took a shortcut – he believed instead of knowing. Then he reversed the order: his belief became knowledge — he knew what he believed.
Beliefism is unethical.
Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and reality is whatever belief makes it. Beliefism has no ethics – it runs in a circle; there's no outside reference, no checks and balances, nothing to keep it honest, nothing to validate it. Belief is unaccountable, therefore unethical.
Beliefism polarizes.
Beliefism separates who belongs and who doesn't, who's friend and who's foe. It manages entrances and exits, reinforces conformity, and punishes dissent.
Beliefism radicalizes.
Once it's got a cause, beliefism takes it to an extreme. Belief becomes fundamentalism. If you're not with us you're against us. No neutrality. You go to the edge or you suffer and die.
Beliefism trends to fundamentalism
Fundamentalism decrees doctrine, prescribes ritual; banishes and punishes discourse, doubt, and dissent. It builds silos and hunkers down; lobs bombs at them. Fundamentalism can be religious or secular – same dynamics either way.
Beliefism practices mind control.
Beliefism runs on brain conformity – for the sake of personal identity and survival, for group cohesiveness. Cults are built on mind control. Every belief-fueled cause is a cult in the making. Nations, corporations, religions, academic disciplines, societal institutions… they're all built on mind control. None of them exist if we don't believe them into existence. The process of entering and sustaining membership is the same no matter what.
Beliefism lives in our blind spots.
Beliefism runs in stealth mode. Like a friend of mine used to say, "The trouble with blind spots is you can't see them." We don't notice or examine what beliefism is doing to our perspective, worldview, reality — we just know the reality that emerges from it.
Beliefism promotes delusional thinking.
Beliefism removes belief from examination and critical thinking. Unmoored belief trends to delusion. You become a danger to yourself and others. Your risk/return matrix warps. You drink the Kool-Aid. You storm the Capitol. You flock to super spreader events.
There's good neuroscience behind beliefism.
Beliefism works because we're biological beings. We're powered by hormones, chemicals, electrical charges. We believe from the inside out — our bodies and brains construct our reality from what's around us, including how other people are constructing reality. We share perspective with each other and a shared reality emerges. We build things together to support and perpetuate that reality — institutions, architecture, art, economics, law, government, religion, norms and customs, rituals and practices, metaphors and icons. The "higher" portions of our brains dream all this up, the "lower" portions keep it rolling.
That warning label idea is no joke.
Beliefism has hurt a lot a people for a long time. It still does. It hurt me. It might be hurting you.
Maybe we should talk about it.
May 29, 2021 May 28, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads
Beliefism [5]: The "Do the Impossible" Gospel
Reality. Illusion. Delusion. Possible. Impossible. How do you know which is which?
Did that really happen?!
In 1983 David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of a live television audience.
Except he didn't. The statue was still there, it just looked like it wasn't.
A magician manipulates our attention – we follow the decoy and miss the trick. An illusionist manipulates our perception – we look right at it but don't see it. David Copperfield was performing as an illusionist – he didn't change reality, he changed the audience's perception of it. They only thought he did something impossible.
Impossible can't happen, by definition. The odds against it are infinite. If something impossible happens, the realm of possibility expands to take it in. The thing we declared was impossible wasn't impossible after all – we only thought it was.
Christianity and self-help share the same "do the impossible" gospel. Can they actually pull it off? Let's look at the self-help version first.
Self-Help Does the Impossible
Roger Bannister breaking the "impossible" four-minute mile barrier has become a self-help gospel trope. You can find a version of the following just about anywhere — I found it on a job website:
"Bannister broke the psychological barrier that had held back the greatest runners for over a century. Other runners now believed wholeheartedly that it was possible. It is no surprise then that within a few years, several other runners broke the four-minute mile too.
"For the majority of us who will never attempt to break a running record, the four-minute mile represents the limiting beliefs of what we think is possible to achieve in our lives.
"We tend to limit our goals in business, relationships, finance, health and profession within the realm of what society says is possible or impossible. But throughout history, there are a handful of people like Bannister, who break the limits of what's possible and leave a lasting legacy.
"What makes them different isn't their talent, skills or resources, but their belief system. They'd rather take the lead, step outside their comfort zone and risk failure, than wait in their comfort zone for permission from others to achieve the impossible.
"Followers wait for leaders to show them what's possible. Leaders break the barriers of what's possible.
"Which one will you choose?"
Talk about rewriting history to match your sales pitch….
Raise your hand if you think limiting beliefs and comfort zones and the rest of the self-help mumbo-jumbo was going through anybody's minds at the time.
Now raise your head if you think all the other runners suddenly "believed wholeheartedly" that they could do it, too.
That was 1954. Roger Bannister was a competitive runner – of course he "would rather take the lead." Duh. But now, we've got the four-minute mile self-help gospel memorized. Want something that feels impossible? The problem is your limiting beliefs. Believe you can have it, then go for it — break out of your comfort zone, take a risk. Ta da! – you did the impossible!
Don't you wish.
Christianity Does the Impossible
Self-help has deep roots in Christianity – the original believe-the-impossible-into-existence religion. Here's what Jesus said:
"All things." Nothing left out. Carte Blanche . Believe what you want, don't doubt, and it's yours. You can move mountains. Nothing will be impossible for you.
Raise your hand if you've done the impossible that way, or seen it done that way — live and in person, in real space and time.
Me neither. But that didn't stop me from trying for over two decades.
Reality. Illusion. Delusion.
The idea of doing the impossible plays with our notions of how much "reality" is objective — the thing is really there, whether we think so or not – vs. subjective – the thing is only there because we think it is. If we only think it's there, we can think it somewhere else. But if it's really there, well now that's a different story.
Current neuroscience says it's both and neither. There's external (on the other side of our skin) stimuli coming at us, but we don't have any way to actually find out what's "out there" because our experience of it is entirely shaped inside the hot, wet biology of our bodies and brains (inside our skin). So people like celebrity neuroscientist Beau Lotto think there's no such thing as delusion, because everything is an illusion – reality isn't out there, it's in here, it'swhat we make up inside ourselves. (Yes, there is such a thing as a celebrity neuroscientist, and yes, that's what Beau Lotto is. For lots more, check out and his book, TED talks, and Lab of Misfits.)
I get that… I think… sort of… at least the part about internally processing external stimuli. But I still think there's such a thing as delusion – especially if the topic is doing the impossible – mostly because I'm quite sure I was delusional about it for all those years.
"Then I'll get on my knees and pray/ we don't get fooled again!"
I became a Christian as the 1960's rolled into the 1970's. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and the Jesus Freaks fit right in. Their Jesus served up counter-cultural radical ideas like turning the other cheek ("all we are saying/ is give peace a chance") and loving your neighbor ("c'mon people now/smile on your brother/everybody get together/try to love one another right now"). Their Jesus tossed out predatory capitalism and invited us into charity and community and trusting our "Heavenly Father" for food, clothing, and shelter. Their Jesus upended our assumptions about what was true and how the world worked, and taught us to believe the impossible into existence. Their Jesus was always sticking it to the Man and liked to hang out and party with the losers (freaks) of his day. I was 19 and ripe for a way to be a Hippie without being stoned all the time. Of course I joined up.
Eventually I cut my hair and got a real job, but stayed committed to proving that Jesus's counter-cultural, new truth, do-the-impossible vibe worked in primetime adult life. I wore a suit and tie (!) to work, but still pushed the Jesus Freak agenda to the max, and might still be doing that if I hadn't gotten lucky and got myself kicked out of the "church renewal movement" I was part of for doing exactly what I'd been taught. (A story I've told elsewhere and won't repeat here.)
On the way out of Christianity, I stumbled into self-help. It lacked Christian ecclesiology, iconography, doctrine, vocabulary, and historical trappings, so for awhile I thought it was some kind of new psychology-based way to successful living – which is precisely what the self-helpers want us to think. But after awhile, it was all too familiar. "God" was often still "God" but more often "the Universe." The Bible was misquoted in pseudo-Biblical sound bytes. Jesus was mentioned now and then – usually with the lame "good teacher" title — and sometimes was completely reinvented — like when The Secret declared that he was a millionaire. And on it went. Before long it was clear that self-help was a wannabe substitute religion for Christianity. Its belief dynamics were identical. Like Christianity, it declared that doing the impossible could become the new normal if we just believed. Both religions claimed they could show you how believe effectively enough to get the impossible things you wanted.
As far as I can tell, Plato was the first one to write, "wisdom is what works." I pushed the "do the impossible" gospel to the point where it finally failed the "wisdom is what works" test so completely I couldn't make excuses for it anymore.
If that's not delusion, it'll do till the real thing comes along.
Now I'm in recovery. I'm done with doing the impossible. That shit is toxic to me now. I can't go anywhere near it.
Next time, we'll look at the beliefism source code for both religions.
April 30, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, The Long Reads
Beliefism [Part 4]: Believing is Seeing/ Belief Turns Toxic
Believe your way into a new reality – visualize it, set an intention, create a vision board… soon you'll manifest it! You'll get the mansion, the corner suite, the all-inclusive beach vacation! That's how life works – it's the law.
So goes the self-help gospel, and guess what? It works. Well sort of. The world does conform to what you believe. You actually do see what you believe. Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and there it is – right in front of you.
Only trouble is, it's a self-validating loop. You are in fact seeing what you're believing. And that's a problem.
Behold Your Algorithm
Belief works like the Algorithm Gods. You shop something online, now it's all over your feeds. You think, oh come on, that's so obvious. But algorithms are dumb, they don't know any better, they just crunch the data. You looked at some ads, you must want to see more, and never mind that you already bought it — algorithms are slow to get to message. Our brains process belief the same way – they're fleshy lumps of responsiveness. Once you believe something, your brain is on it. Get interested in that car and it's all you see on the road — it's the same dynamic, except once you buy it, your brain is quicker to move on.
The Algorithm Gods offer up social media support to keep you focused and happy so you'll tithe that five-star review. Our brains have been doing the same thing for a long, long time – long before the Algorithm Gods were a gleam in some techie's eye, since the human race developed language about 150,000 years ago. You tell somebody what you believe, and their brain zips through the dummy algorithm belief thing, and now there's two of you with neuropathways installed and running the same outlook on life. Then the two of you then share it with a bunch of other somebodies who share it with more, and soon everybody's brains dutifully line up and you've got a group, team, tribe, cult…
When communal belief goes viral, it consolidates, strengthens its grip on all those brains. They share a similar outlook, which creates similar experience, which reinforces similar outlook, and around it goes. All that similar outlook and experience builds institutions, creates cultural norms, myths, and symbols. Now you've got law, government, economics, religion, literature, history….
The process is known as emergence: what starts inside (as belief) takes on external shape; the word becomes flesh and dwells among us until we share worldview and reality. If you don't see it the way the community does, it's because you don't believe. Change what you believe, and you'll get with the program.
Beliefism 101
I was immersed (baptized – literally) into this communal belief dynamic when I went back to college after becoming a Christian during a gap year. At first I hung out with my old friends in party central, but it was boring, listening to Led Zeppelin when everybody else was taking hits when the joint went around. So I hung out on my new dorm floor, which was not a party animal zoo, and we got busy doing the non-party things you do at college.
I'd see my new Christian friends at meetings, say hi around campus, sometimes join them for lunch… but before long I got the word: I needed to be around more. I needed to stay "in fellowship," needed to sit with the pack at meals, that sort of thing. I was new at the Christian gig, so I complied. I complied so well that pretty soon I'd been selected to be "discipled" by the leadership, so I could help take over and run the fellowship after they graduated.
That was the end of my new friends in my new dorm. My roommate was a nice guy from Iowa, a serious student who'd lived — , mostly as a spectator — in party central where I did the year before my gap year. After I got my calling into campus Christian leadership, I became the Christian Roommate From Hell – never around, always too tired from being up late every night "doing ministry," nothing to talk about anymore, always doing something weird, apparently too uppity to hang out and do the usual dorm stuff. It never occurred to me to change course – my new Christian life was too important.
Beliefism is the same, no matter the object of belief.
What I experienced was communal belief in action – the power of a shared belief system to control thought and behavior – what I now call "beliefism." I have since converted back out of Christianity, where I've learned that what I experienced back then would have been the same if I had joined a different belief system (such as the campus Communists, which my roommate accused me of doing). Beliefism readily swaps belief in this for belief in that — religion, humanism, capitalism, fascism, extraterrestrials, self-help, past lives, you name it, it's all the same.
Beliefism also doesn't distinguish fact from fiction, truth from madness, clarity from delusion. Reason and discernment only enter the frame once beliefism has built its self-referential judgments about what is reality and how things really work – that's when they get busy codifying what conforms and what doesn't, what to encourage and promote vs. what to punish or eradicate. They also start keeping a list and naming names of who's with the program and who isn't, who belongs and who doesn't, who's friend and who's foe, who's us and who's them.
Communal belief and its institutions manage entrances and exits, enforce conformity, and punish dissent, resulting in a special kind of brain shutdown known in other circles as "mind control" as "brain washing" – terms coined in the Korean War and developed in the Cold War, when American fingers pointed at China and the Commies because we're the good guys and we would never do that! Yes we would. We do it all the time. It's an everyday, worldwide experience – it's what happens to the human brain and to human culture when we build individual and cultural identity around beliefs.
Brain Shutdown
Beliefism shuts down nonconforming brain activity. There are some places we just don't go – they're out of bounds, they don't conform. We don't see them because we don't believe them. Our mental options are now limited – like what was going on in the mind of the street evangelist I heard once who made a pitch for Creationism. "The universe is way too complicated for me to understand," went his pitch, "so there must be a God who does." That was his proof for the existence of God, and for Creationism. He could have understood the complicated universe if he took the time to learn the math and physics, but instead he took the shortcut: he believed instead of knowing. But then beliefism led him to take another step: he started knowing what he believed it was The Truth, with two capital T's. His reality was True; the rest of us unsaved people waiting for buses needed to get clued in.
He wasn't in possession of all that Truth and Reality, his brain was possessed by it – his brain was running it over the requisite neural pathways, supported by the requisite brain chemicals. That's why he was certain that he knew something else the rest of us didn't. Being a decent sort of a guy, since he was now in possession of the Real Reality Forever and Ever Amen, it was worth lugging his amp and microphone to the street corner across from the bus station to tell the rest of us about it. He was there on the street corner to help us out, because part of his pitch was that if we didn't get it right, we'd all go to hell. But the good news was, all we needed to do was believe what he believed and we'd be good, no problem.
The Path to Toxic Belief
It's not hard to see how belief's mind control goes toxic. Beliefism runs in stealth mode: we see the things we believe and all the doctrines, ideologies, societal structures, institutions, and practices that support it, but we don't see beliefism at work. Like a friend of mine used to say, "The trouble with blind spots is you can't see them." We don't notice or examine the worldview our beliefs have created, or how that worldview creates and sustains our world. Instead, we see the emergent reality and accept it as The Way Things Are, Forever and Ever Amen. We believe in the things we believe in until we know them. And when we know them, we defend and promote them, we become faithful believers, we become evangelists.
At that point, belief becomes ideology – honored and held sacred to the point where the risk/return matrix gets warped and passionate belief becomes mass delusion and unchecked ambition, where belief's communal mind-control becomes way too powerful for its own good — a clear and present rolling on, gaining momentum because there's nothing to check it, no outside reference, no commitment to an external ethical standard, nothing to keep it honest, nothing to validate it except its own good opinion of itself. Belief-as-ideology consolidates its power, crowns itself with its own authority until we're left with only what is belief-approved – the standard, authorized version.
That's when belief takes its final shape as fundamentalism and fanaticism, committed to the eradication of its longtime nemesis doubt. Power becomes domination becomes oppression, and belief opposes, bans, shuns, shames, punishes, tortures, and murders doubters and unbelievers. It becomes nationalistic and militaristic, launches campaigns of domestic and international terrorism and genocide. The faithful march off on the Crusades. They seek the purity of the race. They drink the Kool-Aid. They storm the Capitol. They repeat history. They replay the western civilization biograph in the name of the western God. And they call it all "progress."
And to think it all began as a release of brain feel-good hormones in satisfaction of an evolutionary survival urge to band together and share information. We needed that, all those 150,000 years ago. We still do. Which is why belief still gives usa sense of purpose and meaning and mission, still provides incentives and rewards, still makes us feel inspired and enthusiastic, fired us up to try to do great things.
But now this….
Continued next time.
March 13, 2021 March 12, 2021 Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads
Beliefism [Part 3]: Evangelists on the Rebound/ Belief is Biological
Evangelists on the Rebound
Life without God offered plenty of substitutes: self-help and its academic sibling positive psychology, "New Thought" churches that tried to make a science out of religion; Age of Enlightenment intellectuals, rationalists, humanists, skeptics who were determined to purge our thinking of nonsense, materialists who think "the meat thinks," and an assortment of New Agers, vortex-finders, shamans, psychics, dietary supplement pushers, energy healers, kinesthesiologists, life coaches, "alternative healers," magical thinkers, and miscellaneous gurus. They were a free-for-all of mixed motives and monetization strategies — confident, happy, friendly, an doften rich , And unlike me — the Christian evangelist failure — they had no problem evangelizing like crazy. Part of that was a sign of the times — evangelizing was trendy back then, corporations were in the first wave of creating job descriptions like "brand evangelist," which meant a salesperson on a higher plane –credentialed, trustworthy, cool.
Plus there was all this God-talk. In my Christian days we were careful about too much God-talk, lest we scare off the lost/unchurched. These Christianity substitutes didn't have that problem. They were religions claiming they weren't religions because they didn't use religious vocabulary — xcept for the ubiquitous "God," which eventually morphed into "the Universe." Free of old religion language meant they were free to carry on like that good ol' time religion – for example the atheist group that met on Sunday mornings for music, teaching, and fellowship. Seriously.
One of the more fascinating new religions was atheism. I was just starting to suspect I'd become one of them when I discovered the "new atheists" and their "four horsemen" (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett). I thought this will be great, these new atheists will help me with my new atheism. I sampled a couple of Sam Harris's books, and they were ferociously evangelistic. They and the other atheists, humanists, rationalists, and skeptics I came across always seemed to be looking for a fight – they were out to convert you. (One exception: Christopher Hitchens and his book Mortality. I read it twice, and we'll talk more aboutthat topic another time.)
I suppose it was like being on the rebound – having just left one broken faith relationship, it was tempting to bounce into another, but for me the temptation wasn't hard to resist. I wasn't ready, all that similarity made me wary. So I kept my foot on the brake, watched, studied, took notes. After a few years, I started to see that the issue wasn't God vs. non-God, religion vs. non-religion, it was believing in the first place. Like Christianity, these new religious substitutes all started with things you couldn't know, you could only believe (or not). The whole structure grew from there.
I was seeing Beliefism in action. As I said last time,
Beliefism is about the dynamics of belief –what happens to us individually and when we believe things in groups.
Belief always works the same way, regardless of the thing believed.
Beliefism 101: Belief is Biological
If there's anything we need to understand about belief, it's that belief is all in your head. The phrase usually comes with an eye roll: you're out of touch, delusional. Strip out the accusation and the more precise version is, "At this moment, your brain is creating different beliefs about reality than what my brain and the other brains in our cultural context are creating." Belief is both individual and communal, and it happens in our heads.
Belief is biological. We believe with our brains.. Our brains are cells, tissues, differentiated regions, pathways, circuits, hormones…. That's where beliefs, ideas, dreams, visions, things we imagine, causes we support, ideals we embrace come from. They're all biology in action.
We weren't taught that; we don't think that way. Instead, we think beliefs come from an alternate reality – Someplace Other that's not made of the same cosmic stuff we are. Beliefs aren't grungy like the here and now, they're elegant and aloof, enduringly above the rabble. They have classy names like Mystery, Eternity, Heaven, Somewhere Else, Up There, The Other Side of the Veil. Beliefs give us Spirit and Past Lives and The Universe, the Eternal Soul, God and gods, Angels and Archangels. (Devil and Demons, too, which you'd think we could do without, but not so fast – the bad guys have their own useful purpose.)
If we're going to have there and here, them and us, we need passageways and communication links. Trips back and forth (round trip for supernatural beings, one-way for humans) are invested with special solemnity, fear and reverence, and communications come with special zest and fervency – they're not just more spam, they're revelation, awakening, inspiration, conversion, flashes of brilliance and insight, dramatic impact. We're taking Moses and the Ten Commandments, the voice from Heaven, the disembodied fingers writing "mene, mene, tekel, parsin" on the wall.
All those connections engage and empower us, connect us to Truth and Higher Power. They line us up with all the meaning and purpose that all the supernatural beings and ancestors and wise ones who live in that invisible realm of spirit, soul, truth, celestial glory and power are a position to offer us – all of them "up there" who "look down on us" and care enough to magically set things in motion to teach us a lesson or even give us a hand now and then. We want all that, and we'll go to great lengths to get ourselves properly aligned to keep the channels open.
All for the sake of something that happens in our brains. All that transcendent, invisible, spiritual, mysterious realm that accompanies us through life exists in the spongy stuff inside our heads. Belief in God is generated by the same biology that distinguishes a tree from a toadstool.
Belief is biological.
We need to get that.
We almost never do.
There's a piece of lab equipment they call "the God helmet." The lab tech puts it on you and zaps a certain area in your brain (the same area that's responsible for epileptic seizures), and you have a religious experience. They tested it on a group of nuns. Their response was, "Isn't it wonderful that God put a receptor in our brains so we can communicate with him!" Science can create religious experience, but nobody – scientist or not – can prove or disprove God or anything else that exists in the realm of belief. You can only believe it or not, and when you do, you bring it into existence. You become the belief's God, it's creator and lord. So, brain-zapping lab tech or not, if you want to believe it's God making your religious ecstasy happen, you're going to believe ii.
Most people like it that way. Too much "it's all in your head" makes us feel small. We'd rather follow the grand tradition of dressing up the Other and what it has to say with poetry, and writing it in a book:
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.
"As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Isaiah 55: 8-9
And then, having said that, we fill up the book with God's thoughts, having just said we're not capable of knowing them.
Anybody else see a problem with that?
How can we do that? Easy: God and God's thoughts both exist in our brains. They sit in there not far from each other, with highspeed wiring linking them together. Belief makes the trip from "I can't do this" to "I can do this" in a nanosecond.
Belief becomes Beliefism when it grows up. We'll talk more about it next time.
May 2, 2020 May 2, 2020 Kevin Rhodes Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, Religion, The Long Reads
Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning [Part 2]: The Supernatural
It's Youth Group night at church; I'm a high school senior and have been tapped to give the sermon. I start with, "Religions are the vehicles through which human beings try to make sense of life." Honest, that's what I said. I remember writing it, I remember standing at the pulpit saying it. At home afterward my dad and my sister's seminarian boyfriend (his name was Luther – honest) were snacking on roast preacher. "Where did you get that?" Luther asked, 'Religions are the vehicles through which human beings try to make sense of life' – where did you get that?" He was impressed. I don't know, it was just an idea, it seemed obvious — religion is one of the things humans do.
Making Sense of Things
As we saw last time, religion is a "teleological"[1] strategy – it's one of the ways we invest things, events people, ourselves, our lives, and life in general with purpose and meaning. For many people, religion and the supernatural are the go-to standard for teleological thinking.
"Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, 'Individuals' explicit religious and paranormal beliefs' are the best predictors of their 'perception of purpose in life events"—their tendency 'to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.'"[2]
The prefix "super" in "supernatural" means above, beyond, over, apart from. When we say supernatural, we mean there's something or Someone out there that's not limited to the natural world and flesh and blood, that has it all figured out, sees what we don't see, knows that we don't know, explains what we can't explain, is better at life than we are. The supernatural is personified or objectified in what we call God, who has a better take than we'll ever have: as author Madeleine L'Engle wrote: "I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view."
Religion tries to teach us God's view but generally accepts there are limits. Besides, if we could share God's view, we wouldn't need God anymore, we'd be God. Short of that, we can only believe God has view, and that it's better, more complete, more perfect than our point of view. Which means that, compared to God, we and our existence are lesser, partial, flawed, while God represents the perfected version of us – what we would be if we could be God. And somehow, knowing that's a comforting thought — I know it was for me when I first began to believe in God (a couple years after I gave that sermon), because at least God was better than the alternative, which was me having lost my bearings and making a mess of life.
"From a scientific point of view, we were not created or designed but instead are the product of evolution. The natural events that shaped our world and our own existence were not purposeful. In other words, life is objectively meaningless. From this perspective, the only way to find meaning is to create your own, because the universe has no meaning or purpose. The universe just is. Though there are certainly a small percentage of people who appear to accept this notion, much of the world's population rejects it. For most humans, the idea that life is inherently meaningless simply will not do."[3]
Believe First, Then Rationalize
Enter the supernatural. Now I felt better. And once I was in, I backfilled the case for believing. Over the next few years I built my case, devouring Christian apologetics and other books that were making the rounds of my collegiate fellowship. That ancillary material became part of my new religious narrative, supporting the primary doctrinal narrative.
These days, neuro-psychological research indicates that we believe first, then rationalize. Rationalizing is not the same as acting rationally. Belief in the supernatural is a story – the story we tell about ourselves and our life that gives us identity and our life purpose and meaning. To the believer, it's nonfiction – the way things really are, who they really are. If we're not of similar persuasion, we may think it's fiction – a fish story, or case of "teleological error"[4]. – but neither of us can prove the other wrong. Belief is ultimately indefensible and unassailable – it's a "first thought" from which a host of others originate. Still, we like to think our beliefs are rational, chosen in the exercise of our own free will.
Free Will (or not)
Take away free will, and you take away a key sense of personal power. Free will gives us something we can do in the face of the apparent nonsense of life: we can stem the onslaught of meaninglessness by choosing to believe – in this case, in the supernatural. We still don't understand, we still screw up, but at least we can rely on the supernatural to understand and model what we would be like if we weren't so… mortal.
These days, neuro-psychology also challenges our usual assumptions about the self and free will, holding that our free will isn't as free and intentional and rational as we'd like to think. Maybe so, but at least one leading brain scientist thinks that sometimes it might be better just to fool ourselves into believing we can choose what to believe – at least we'll feel better.
"Psychologist Dan McAdams proposes that when it comes to making sense of our lives, we create narratives or personal myths to explain where we have come from, what we do, and where we are going… These accounts are myths because they are not grounded in reality but rather follow a well-worn narrative path of a protagonist character (our self) and what the world throws at them.
"This core self, wandering down the path of development, enduring things that life throws at us is, however, the illusion. Like every other aspect of human development, the emergence of the self is epigenetic — an interaction of the genes in the environment. The self emerges out of that journey through the epigenetic landscape, combining the legacy of our genetic inheritance with the influence of the early environment to produce profound and lasting effect on how we develop socially. … These thoughts and behavior may seemingly originate from within us, but they emerge largely in a social context. IN a sense, who we are comes down to those around us. We may be born with different biological properties and dispositions, but even those emerge in the context of others and in some cases can be triggered or turned off by environmental factors.
"We may feel that we are the self treading down the path of life and making our own decisions at the various junctions and forks but that would also assume that we are free to make our choices. However, the freedom to make choices is another aspect of the illusion.
"Most of us believe that, unless we are under duress or suffering from some form of mental disorder, we all have the capacity to freely make decisions and choices. This is the common belief that our decisions are not preordained and that we can choose between alternatives. This is what most people mean by having free will — the belief that human behavior is an expression of personal choice and is not determined by physical forces, fate, or God. In other words, there is a self in control.
"However, neuroscience tells us that we are mistaken and that free will is also part of the self illusion… We think we have freedom but, in fact, we do not.
"For example, I believe that the sentence that I just typed was my choice. I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it. Not only did I have the experience of my intention to begin this line of discussion at this point but I had the experience of agency, of actually wanting it. I knew I was the one doing it. I felt the authorship of my actions.
"It seems absurd to question my free will here but, as much as I hate to admit it, these experiences are not what they seem. This is because any choices that a person makes must be the culmination of the interaction of a multitude of hidden factors ranging from genetic inheritance, life experiences, current circumstances, and planned goals. Some of these influences must also come from external sources, but they all play out as patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. This is the matrix of distributed networks of nerve cells firing across my neuronal architecture.
"My biases, my memories, my perceptions, and my thoughts are the interacting patterns of excitation and inhibition in my brain, and when the checks and balances are finally done, the resulting sums of all of these complex interactions are the decisions and the choices that I make. We are not aware of these influences because they are unconscious and so we feel that the discussion has been arrived at independently — a problem that was recognized by the philosopher Spinoza when he wrote, "Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of conscious of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined."
"Even if the self and our ability to exercise free will is an illusion, not all is lost. In fact, beliefs seem to produce consequences for our behavior.
"Beliefs about self-control, from wherever they may derive, are powerful motivators of human behavior.
"When we believe that we are the masters of our own destiny, we behave differently than those who deny the existence of free will and believe everything is determined.
"Maybe that's why belief in free will predicts not only better job performance but also expected career success. Workers who believe in free will outperform their colleagues ,and this is recognized and rewarded by their superiors. So, when we believe in free will, we enjoy life more.
"The moral of the tale is that, even if free will doesn't exist, then maybe it is best to ignore what the neuroscientists or philosophers say. Sometimes ignorance is bliss."[5]
It seems we often greet paradigm-shifting scientific findings with a shrug. Maybe somebody in a lab coat figured something out, but there's no apparent impact on us. Maybe somebody says free will is nothing more than the confluence of multiple neural pathways — okay fine, but we'll take own misguided, self-deceptive sense of agency any day. It's how we're used to feeling, and there's no apparent downside to contradicting a bunch of intellectual hooey. In fact, the downside is all on the side of science, which wants us to think there's no point in anything.
Plus, if we believe in the supernatural, we enjoy the safety of numbers– especially if we live in the USA, where a 2019 Gallup Poll found that 64% – 87% of us believe in God, depending on how the question was asked. (By contrast, also in 2019, the Pew Research Center found that only 4% of Americans said they were atheists.[6])
For me personally, when I first learned about neuroscience's case against free will, it didn't feel devastating or hopeless, didn't throw me into a pit of despair, didn't make me want to wallow. It was weird, but no more. I was skeptical, and still assume there's more to be discovered before we get the whole picture, but in time, I came to like the changes in outlook the absence of God and belief in God offered. Life and my place in it were cleaner and simpler somehow – if for no other reason that I no longer needed to expend the energy belief in the supernatural used to require.
The Religious Brain
Also back when I first got religion, I experienced something else current neuroscience tells us: that religion shapes the brain as the brain shapes religion. Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and neurology professor at Northwestern University, says that religions and their community behavioral codes helped to make the brain what it is today, and vice versa:
"Neurotheology is important in part because early religious practices helped develop our brains to begin with. 'Religion has played an incredibly important role in human evolution. It's funny, people want to separate the two but in fact they're intertwined,' [Dr. Grafman] says.
"Of course, it's a two-way relationship between the brain and religion. Our brains had to develop the capacity to establish social communities and behaviors, which are the basis of religious societies. But religious practice in turn developed the brain, says Grafman. 'As these societies became more co-operative, our brains evolved in response to that. Our brain led to behavior and then the behavior fed back to our brain to help sculpt it,' he adds."[7]
The mutual reinforcement loop still operates, so that the brain steeped in religion gets better at religion, finds way to reinforce and substantiate its beliefs. As a result, the religious narrative becomes more and more true the more you practice it –experience increasingly conforms to religious dictates on both an individual and community level. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, a pioneer of "neurotheology," observes that the religious brain promotes social cohesiveness and conformity to social moral norms.
"'There's the argument that religion has benefited human beings by helping to create cohesive societies and morals and help us to determine our behavior and interact with the world more effectively,'" says Newberg. 'The ability to think about this from a neuroscience perspective is part of that discussion.'"[8]
As a result, when you stop practicing your religious narrative, as I did, your brain circuits are no longer engaged in actively supporting it, and are now available to process alternatives. As you detach from religious immersion, your prior conviction about its truth – i.e., its ability to explain reality, which was increasingly conforming to it — fades away. At that stage, the brain's formerly religious wiring is equally adept at promoting other individual and communal beliefs and behaviors, as well as other narratives. Andew Newberg's website provides a sample of research findings from his book[9] indicating that the formerly religious brain is equally adept at generating rule-breaking behavior:
"The prefrontal cortex is traditionally thought to be involved in executive control, or willful behavior, as well as decision-making. So, the researchers hypothesize, it would make sense that a practice that centers on relinquishing control would result in decreased activity in this brain area.
"A recent study that Medical News Today reported on found that religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities.
"Researchers led by Dr. Jeff Anderson, Ph.D. — from the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City — examined the brains of 19 young Mormons using a functional MRI scanner.
"When asked whether, and to what degree, the participants were "feeling the spirit," those who reported the most intense spiritual feelings displayed increased activity in the bilateral nucleus accumbens, as well as the frontal attentional and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci.
"These pleasure and reward-processing brain areas are also active when we engage in sexual activities, listen to music, gamble, and take drugs. The participants also reported feelings of peace and physical warmth.
"'When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded,' says first study author Michael Ferguson.
"These findings echo those of older studies, which found that engaging in spiritual practices raises levels of serotonin, which is the "happiness" neurotransmitter, and endorphins.
"The latter are euphoria-inducing molecules whose name comes from the phrase 'endogenous morphine.'
"Such neurophysiological effects of religion seem to give the dictum 'Religion is the opium of the people' a new level of meaning."[10]
These findings explain a range of religious behaviors: charitable good deeds, the use of music in worship, and beneficial "fellowship" dynamics at one end of the spectrum; and clergy sexual crimes, cult abuses, and terrorism on the other end. Plus, the entire spectrum is supported not only by religious neural network, but by the brain's addictive feel-good hormones — right alongside sex, drugs, and rock n roll.
Lost in the Story
Religious narratives draw upon ancient storytelling for their source material, making liberal use of metaphors and allegories in scripture and wisdom literature to create parables, koans, riddles, myths, fables, cautionary tales, and poetry. Religious storytelling illuminates the human condition, illustrates what happens when Earthy existence is aligned or at odds with Heavenly purpose.[11]
Normally, metaphors and allegories are representational: they describe one thing in terms of another – i.e., in the case of religion, worldly, fleshly experience in light of divine, spiritual truth. Sometimes, though, religious practice recasts human experience into literal, explicit religious storytelling, in which the devotee is "in but not of the world"[12] to an extreme. As a result, the zealot dwells in religious metaphor, views themselves and others as religious characters, and interprets circumstances in terms of religious drama. At this extreme, reality becomes a pious fantasyland, in which religious imagery supplants worldly experience. Religious storytelling no longer illustrates and represents, it becomes perceived reality, as the believer remains in a closed, self-reinforcing system. The condition is euphoric, supported by feel-good brain hormones – as close to what it feels like to have God's view as we'll ever get.
I know this experience well — I did this a lot in my religious days, and not just with religion, but also with film, theater, books, and other stories – just as I had as a child. I have a lively imagination and have "the ability to become easily engrossed, such as in movies, novels or daydreams" [13] – traits that make it easy for me to generate religious experience and make me a good subject for hypnosis..
The best example of this kind of religious storytelling excess that I can think of are the lyrics of a hymn I remember singing in the church where I grew up:
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory,
Of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story,
Because I know 'tis true;
It satisfies my longings
As nothing else can do.
'Twill be my theme in glory
To tell the old, old story
I love to tell the story;
More wonderful it seems
Than all the golden fancies
Of all my golden dreams,
It did so much for me;
And that is just the reason
I tell it now to thee.
Tis pleasant to repeat
What seems each time I tell it,
More wonderfully sweet.
For some have never heard
The message of salvation
From God's own holy Word.
For those who know it best
Seem hungering and thirsting
To hear it like the rest.
And when, in scenes of glory,
I sing the new, new song,
'Twill be the old, old story,
That I have loved so long.
I used to wonder why religious experiences were so easy for me, compared to other people, until I became aware of the neurological underpinnings of this cognitive disposition. Discovering it, and learning to keep it from running away with me, turned about to be a key development in my drift away from religion, and from narrative in general.
More on narratives next time.
[1] Wikipedia.
[2] Andersen, Kurt, How America Lost Its Mind – The nation's current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, The Atlantic (Dec. 28, 2017). See also Routledge, Supernatural, op. cit.
[3] Routledge, Clay, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World (July 2, 2018)
[4] See this blog's Narratives-Of-Self-Purpose-And-Meaning-Part-1-Fish-Stories.
[5] The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, Bruce Hood (2012)
[6] /The Pew Research Center report is intriguingly nuanced, and worth a look if you like this sort of thing.
[7] "The Neuroscience Argument That Religion Shaped The Very Structure Of Our Brains," Quartz (December 3, 2016)
[9] Newberg, Andrew, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist (2009)
[10] "What Religion Does To Your Brain,",: Medical News Today (July 20, 2018)
[11] For more on metaphor, see the classic and definitive text Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
[12] See, for example, this online Bible study on the phrase.
[13] See The Five Traits Of A Good Hypnotic Subject, Your Visual Mind. See also Wikipedia re: "Hypnotic Susceptibility."
April 18, 2020 April 18, 2020 Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Consciousness and the Self, Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, Religion, The Long Reads
Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning [Part 1]: Fish Stories
A friend of mine is a Christian, business leader, author, and fisherman. He tells fish stories in each of those roles. At least it feels that way to me, so I take his stories "with a grain of salt." A Roman luminary named Pliny the Elder[1] used that phrase in a poison antidote in 77 A.D., and he meant it literally. Today, it describes how we respond when it feels like someone's story – like the fish – just keeps getting bigger.
I don't care about my friend's fish, I care about him. When he tells a fish story, he's sharing his personal narrative. "This is who I am," he's saying, "And this is how I believe life works."
"Each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative', wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, 'this narrative is us'. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: 'Self is a perpetually rewritten story.' And: 'In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we "tell about" our lives.' Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: 'We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.' And here's the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: 'We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.' And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: 'we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best "faces" on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one's self.'"[2]
"Each of us conducts our lives according to a set of assumptions about how things work: how our society functions, its relationship with the natural world, what's valuable, and what's possible. This is our worldview, which often remains unquestioned and unstated but is deeply felt and underlies many of the choices we make in our lives."[3]
This kind of narrative assumes the self is an entity all its own, with a purpose also all its own, and that if you get both in hand, you'll know the meaning of life – at least your own. Current neuro-psychology doesn't see things that way.
"The idea of there being a single 'self', hidden in a place that only maturity and adulthood can illuminate and which, like archaeologists, we might dig and dust away the detritus to find, is to believe that there is some inner essence locked within us – and that unearthing it could be a key to working out how to live the rest of our lives. This comforting notion of coming of age, of unlocking a true 'self' endures, even though it is out of step with current thinking in psychology, which denies a singular identity."[4]
"From a scientific point of view, we were not created or designed but instead are the product of evolution. The natural events that shaped our world and our own existence were not purposeful. In other words, life is objectively meaningless."[5]
For most people, that scientific outlook is too harsh:
"From this perspective, the only way to find meaning is to create your own, because the universe has no meaning or purpose. The universe just is. Though there are certainly a small percentage of people who appear to accept this notion, much of the world's population rejects it. For most humans, the idea that life is inherently meaningless simply will not do."[6]
Cultivating a sense of identity, purpose, and meaning sounds good, but who's got time? Maslow's iconic "Hierarchy of Needs" pyramid recognizes that adult life puts the basics first.
"Abraham Maslow was the 20th-century American psychologist best-known for explaining motivation through his hierarchy of needs, which he represented in a pyramid. At the base, our physiological needs include food, water, warmth and rest. Moving up the ladder, Maslow mentions safety, love, and self-esteem and accomplishment. But after all those have been satisfied, the motivating factor at the top of the pyramid involves striving to achieve our full potential and satisfy creative goals. As one of the founders of humanistic psychology, Maslow proposed that the path to self-transcendence and, ultimately, greater compassion for all of humanity requires the 'self-actualisation' at the top of his pyramid – fulfilling your true potential, and becoming your authentic self."[7]
Columbia psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman thinks we ought to get self-actualization off the back burner, for the sake of ourselves and our world.
"'We live in times of increasing divides, selfish concerns, and individualistic pursuits of power,' Kaufman wrote recently in a blog in Scientific American introducing his new research. He hopes that rediscovering the principles of self-actualisation might be just the tonic that the modern world is crying out for."[8]
Kaufman's research suggests that making room for self-awareness and growth helps to develop character traits that the world could use more of:
"Participants' total scores… correlated with their scores on the main five personality traits (that is, with higher extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness and conscientiousness) and with the metatrait of 'stability', indicative of an ability to avoid impulses in the pursuit of one's goals.
"Next, Kaufman turned to modern theories of wellbeing, such as self-determination theory, to see if people's scores on his self-actualisation scale correlated with these contemporary measures. Sure enough, he found that people with more characteristics of self-actualisation also tended to score higher on curiosity, life-satisfaction, self-acceptance, personal growth and autonomy, among other factors.
"A criticism often levelled at Maslow's notion of self-actualisation is that its pursuit encourages an egocentric focus on one's own goals and needs. However, Maslow always contended that it is only through becoming our true, authentic selves that we can transcend the self and look outward with compassion to the rest of humanity. Kaufman explored this too, and found that higher scorers on his self-actualisation scale tended also to score higher on feelings of oneness with the world, but not on decreased self-salience, a sense of independence and bias toward information relevant to oneself. (These are the two main factors in a modern measure of self-transcendence developed by the psychologist David Yaden at the University of Pennsylvania.)
"The new test is sure to reinvigorate Maslow's ideas, but if this is to help heal our divided world, then the characteristics required for self-actualisation, rather than being a permanent feature of our personalities, must be something we can develop deliberately. I put this point to Kaufman and he is optimistic. 'I think there is significant room to develop these characteristics [by changing your habits],' he told me. 'A good way to start with that,' he added, 'is by first identifying where you stand on those characteristics and assessing your weakest links. Capitalise on your highest characteristics but also don't forget to intentionally be mindful about what might be blocking your self-actualisation … Identify your patterns and make a concerted effort to change. I do think it's possible with conscientiousness and willpower.'"[9]
But What if There's No Self to Actualize?
If there's no unified self, then there's no beneficiary for all that "concerted effort to change" and "conscientiousness and willpower."
"The idea of there being a single 'self', hidden in a place that only maturity and adulthood can illuminate and which, like archaeologists, we might dig and dust away the detritus to find, is to believe that there is some inner essence locked within us – and that unearthing it could be a key to working out how to live the rest of our lives. This comforting notion of coming of age, of unlocking a true 'self' endures, even though it is out of step with current thinking in psychology, which denies a singular identity.[10]
Again, it's hard for most of us to live with that much existential angst[11]. We prefer instead to think there's a unique self (soul) packed inside each of us, and to invest it with significance.
"From a scientific point of view, we were not created or designed but instead are the product of evolution. The natural events that shaped our world and our own existence were not purposeful. In other words, life is objectively meaningless. From this perspective, the only way to find meaning is to create your own, because the universe has no meaning or purpose. The universe just is. Though there are certainly a small percentage of people who appear to accept this notion, much of the world's population rejects it. For most humans, the idea that life is inherently meaningless simply will not do.
"Instead, people latch onto what I call teleological thinking. Teleological thinking is when people perceive phenomena in terms of purpose. When applied to natural phenomena, this type of thinking is generally considered to be flawed because it imposes design where there is no evidence for it. To impose purpose and design where there is none is what researchers refer to as a teleological error."[12]
Teleological thinking finds design and purpose in the material world[13] to counter the feeling that we're at the mercy of random pointlessness. We prefer our reality to be by design, so that we have a chance to align ourselves with it – a form of personal empowerment psychologists call "agency."
"Each of us has a story we tell about our own life, a way of structuring the past and fitting events into a coherent narrative. Real life is chaotic; life narratives give it meaning and structure."[14]
The Coming of Age Narrative
Further, we look to a specific cultural rite of passage – when we "come of age" in late adolescence — as the time when we first discover and take responsibility for our unique self and its identity and purpose. From there, we carry that sense of who we are and where we fit into responsible adult life.
"The protagonist has the double task of self-integration and integration into society… Take, for instance, the fact that the culminating fight scene in most superhero stories occurs only after the hero has learned his social lesson – what love is, how to work together, or who he's 'meant to be'. Romantic stories climax with the ultimate, run-to-the-airport revelation. The family-versus-work story has the protagonist making a final decision to be with his loved ones, but only after almost losing everything. Besides, for their dramatic benefit, the pointedness and singular rush of these scenes stems from the characters' desire to finally gain control of their self: to 'grow up' with one action or ultimate understanding.[15]
The Redemption Narrative
The coming of age story is a variant of the "redemption" narrative, in which we learn that suffering is purposeful: it shapes and transforms us, so we can take our place in society.
"For the past 15 years, Daniel McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois, has explored this story and its five life stages: (1) an early life sense of being somehow different or special, along with (2) a strong feeling of moral steadfastness and determination, ultimately (3) tested by terrible ordeals that are (4) redeemed by a transformation into positive experiences and (5) zeal to improve society.
"This sequence doesn't necessarily reflect the actual events of the storyteller's life, of course. It's about how people interpret what happened – their spin, what they emphasise in the telling and what they discard." [16]
Redemption narratives make us good citizens, and never mind if there's some ego involved:
"In his most recent study, the outcome of years of intensive interviews with 157 adults, McAdams has found that those who adopt [redemption narratives] tend to be generative – that is, to be a certain kind of big-hearted, responsible, constructive adult.
"Generative people are deeply concerned about the future; they're serious mentors, teachers and parents; they might be involved in public service. They think about their legacy, and want to fix the world's problems.
"But generative people aren't necessarily mild-mannered do-gooders. Believing that you have a mandate to fix social problems – and that you have the moral authority and the ability to do so – also requires a sense of self-importance, even a touch of arrogance."[17]
Coming of age and redemption stories have been culturally and neurologically sustained in Western and Middle Eastern civilizations since the Abrahamic scriptures wrote about the Garden of Eden 5500 years ago. Americans, as heirs of this ideological legacy, have perfected it.
"For Americans, the redemption narrative is one of the most common and compelling life stories. In the arc of this life story, adversity is not meaningless suffering to be avoided or endured; it is transformative, a necessary step along the road to personal growth and fulfilment.[18]
"The coming-of-age tale has become an peculiarly American phenomenon, since self-understanding in the United States is largely predicated on a self-making mythos. Where, in Britain, one might be asked about one's parents, one's schooling or one's background, Americans seem less interested in a person's past and more interested in his or her future. More cynical observers have claimed, perhaps rightly, that this is because Americans don't have a clear history and culture; but the coming-of-age tale has also become important in the US because of a constant – maybe optimistic, maybe pig-headed – insistence that one can always remake oneself. The past is nothing; the future is "everything.
"This idea of inherent, Adam-and-Eve innocence, and the particularly American interest in it, is perhaps tantamount to a renunciation of history. Such denialism infuses both American stories and narratives of national identity, said Ihab Hassan, the late Arab-American literary theorist. In any case, the American tale of growing up concerns itself with creating a singular, enterprising self out of supposed nothingness: an embrace of the future and its supposedly infinite possibilities."[19]
American capitalism relies on the redemption narrative as its signature story genre.
"From a more sociological perspective, the American self-creation myth is, inherently, a capitalist one. The French philosopher Michel Foucault theorised that meditating and journaling could help to bring a person inside herself by allowing her, at least temporarily, to escape the world and her relationship to it. But the sociologist Paul du Gay, writing on this subject in 1996, argued that few people treat the self as Foucault proposed. Most people, he said, craft outward-looking 'enterprising selves' by which they set out to acquire cultural capital in order to move upwards in the world, gain access to certain social circles, certain jobs, and so on. We decorate ourselves and cultivate interests that reflect our social aspirations. In this way, the self becomes the ultimate capitalist machine, a Pierre Bourdieu-esque nightmare that willingly exploits itself.
"Even the idea that there is a discreet transition from youth into adulthood, either via a life-altering 'feeling' or via the culmination of skill acquisition, means that selfhood is a task to be accomplished in the service of social gain, and in which notions of productivity and work can be applied to one's identity. Many students, for instance, are encouraged to take 'gap years' to figure out 'who they are' and 'what they want to do'. ('Do', of course, being a not-so-subtle synonym for 'work'.) Maturation is necessarily related to finances, and the expectation of most young people is that they will become 'independent' by entering the workforce. In this way, the emphasis on coming of age reifies the moral importance of work." [20]
As usual, Silicon Valley is ahead of the game, having already harnessed the power of the redemption story as its own cultural norm:
"In Silicon Valley these days, you haven't really succeeded until you've failed, or at least come very close. Failing – or nearly failing – has become a badge of pride. It's also a story to be told, a yarn to be unspooled.
"The stories tend to unfold the same way, with the same turning points and the same language: first, a brilliant idea and a plan to conquer the world. Next, hardships that test the mettle of the entrepreneur. Finally, the downfall – usually, because the money runs out. But following that is a coda or epilogue that restores optimism. In this denouement, the founder says that great things have or will come of the tribulations: deeper understanding, new resolve, a better grip on what matters.
"Unconsciously, entrepreneurs have adopted one of the most powerful stories in our culture: the life narrative of adversity and redemption."[21]
Writing Your Own Story
There's nothing like a good story to make you rethink your life. A bookseller friend's slogan for his shop is "Life is a story. Tell a good one."
"The careers of many great novelists and filmmakers are built on the assumption, conscious or not, that stories can motivate us to re-evaluate the world and our place in it.
"New research is lending texture and credence to what generations of storytellers have known in their bones – that books, poems, movies, and real-life stories can affect the way we think and even, by extension, the way we act.
"Across time and across cultures, stories have proved their worth not just as works of art or entertaining asides, but as agents of personal transformation."[22]
As a result, some people think we ought to take Michel Foucault's advice and meditate (practice "mindfulness") and journal our way to a better self-understanding. As for journaling:
"In truth, so much of what happens to us in life is random – we are pawns at the mercy of Lady Luck. To take ownership of our experiences and exert a feeling of control over our future, we tell stories about ourselves that weave meaning and continuity into our personal identity. Writing in the 1950s, the psychologist Erik Erikson put it this way:
"To be adult means among other things to see one's own life in continuous perspective, both in retrospect and in prospect … to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it.
"Intriguingly, there's some evidence that prompting people to reflect on and tell their life stories – a process called 'life review therapy' – could be psychologically beneficial."[23]
Consistent with Scott Barry Kaufman's comments from earlier, the more you can put a coming of age or redemption story spin on your own narrative, the more likely journaling will improve your outlook.
"A relevant factor in this regard is the tone, complexity and mood of the stories that people tell themselves. For instance, it's been shown that people who tell more positive stories, including referring to more instances of personal redemption, tend to enjoy higher self-esteem and greater 'self-concept clarity' (the confidence and lucidity in how you see yourself). Perhaps engaging in writing or talking about one's past will have immediate benefits only for people whose stories are more positive.
"It remains unclear exactly why the life-chapter task had the self-esteem benefits that it did. It's possible that the task led participants to consider how they had changed in positive ways. They might also have benefited from expressing and confronting their emotional reactions to these periods of their lives – this would certainly be consistent with the well-documented benefits of expressive writing and 'affect labelling' (the calming effect of putting our emotions into words).
"The researchers said: 'Our findings suggest that the experience of systematically reviewing one's life and identifying, describing and conceptually linking life chapters may serve to enhance the self, even in the absence of increased self-concept clarity and meaning.'"[24]
An American Life
My friend the storyteller is an exemplar of all the above. He's an American, a Christian, and a capitalist. And when he starts his day by journaling, he believes he's writing what he's hearing from God. I was most of that, too for the couple decades he and I shared narratives and teleological outlook. I've since moved on: at this writing, we've had no contact for over three years. I wondered if I could still call him a friend — whether that term still applies after your stories diverge as entirely as ours . Yes you can and yes it does, I decided, although I honestly can't say why.
Religion: Teleological Thinking Perfected
Personal narratives – especially actually writing your own story – aren't for everyone. They require quiet, solitude, and reflection, plus doing that feels egotistical if you're not used to it. Religion offers a more common teleological alternative, with its beliefs, rituals, and practices designed to put you in touch with an external, transcendent source of your identity, purpose, and meaning. "Don't look inward, look up," is its message.
We'll look at that next time.
[1] . Wikipedia. Pliny the Elder was a naturalist, military leader, friend of the Emperor, and a victim of the Vesuvius eruption.
[2] I Am Not a Story: Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative? Aeon (Sept. 3, 2015)
[3] Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning (2017)
[4] The Coming-Of-Age Con: How can you go about finding 'who you really are' if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication? Aeon (Sept. 8, 2017)
[5] Routledge, Clay, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World (2018)
[7] Do You Have A Self-Actualised Personality? Maslow Revisited. Aeon (Mar. 5, 2019)
[10] The Coming-Of-Age Con op. cit.
[11] Urban Dictionary: existential angst..
[12] Routledge, Clay, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World (July 2, 2018)
[13] Wikipedia.
[14] Silicon Phoenix: A Gifted Child, An Adventure, A Dark Time, And Then … A Pivot? How Silicon Valley Rewrote America's Redemption Narrative, Aeon Magazine (May 2, 2016)
[15] The Coming-Of-Age Con, op cit.
[16] Silicon Phoenix, op. cit.
[20] Silicon Phoenix, op cit.
[22] The Power of Story, op. cit.
[23] To Boost Your Self-Esteem, Write About Chapters of Your Life. Aeon (Apr. 5, 2019)