Two Religious Motifs: Demonology & Spirituality

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Religion’s Biology: Communicational States and Human Traditions 7/18/2007 7:23:51 PM

Chapter 2. Two Religious Motifs: Demonology, Spirituality

“[T]he central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error … Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.”
Sam Harris: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, p.13.

“Within [St. Patrick’s] lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.”
Thomas Cahill: How the Irish Saved Civilization, p.110

Religious Dark Motif

People often get along well with each other and certainly plan extensively with quite large brains proportional to body size, large that is, as compared to brains of other animals. But many problems remain, often from the aberrant workings of communicational states. I tried to help people afflicted with some of these in my psychiatrist role. But before aberrancies, let us focus on a normal state.

I turn to something I call audience and in-group bonding communicational propensity state. We connect with other people in the other seats when hearing a concert performance, lecturer, coach, general or preacher. Not only do we crawl over one another finding our seats, but we feel one with the others who also look and listen. We move together, as when we clap. We feel this way when a leader organizes our experience but without one too. Players on an athletic team may feel a coalescence and bonding, of which they sing praises, as after a valued victory (basketball championships echo in the airwaves at this moment as I write). But not only in concert goers and athletes. And not only in people.

J. Anderson Thomson of Virginia talks of male-coalition bonding in chimpanzees and people. Strongly bonded males work together to common purpose in aggressive emotional situations. These connections stem from inherited factors that foster this, factors that have proven adaptive over millions of years (our ancestors branched from our common ancestors shared with chimps and bonobos three to six million years ago). Bonobos present different issues (more on that later), but bonded chimpanzees may attack other chimps they seem to consider alien, or what we call ‘out-group’, killing them when the alien group numbers fewer and the time and place seems right, even when once the two groups shared origins and experiences before they split and went their separate ways.

This startled Jane Goodall when she discovered the phenomenon, along with her fellow ethologists (observers of animal behavior), who included her student Richard Wrangham who with Dale Peterson later wrote Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Influenced by these researchers, Thomson suggests that in humans religious beliefs may amplify parallel human bonding with destructive effects. Religious conviction often rationalizes and otherwise fuels such power.

Human harm may take massive proportions. In nine-eleven, 2001, human males bonded in common purpose attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Hitler and his cabal fomented the holocaust against Jewish people. In a recent New York Times, I read a powerful story of southern Thailand where unknown “ghost” terrorists generate enormous fear and societal disruption. In very coordinated ways – the article emphasizes how tightly bonded the perpetrators must be – they bomb, destroy and murder, increasingly causing different religious groups to segregate from each other after generations of peaceful co-existence. The Thai government states it’s helpless. Previously it took a conciliatory stance and violence increased. Turning to the continued conflagration in Iraq, I heard yesterday on the radio a male Navy commander with 22 years experience argue passionately that the remorseless Muslim enemy bent on killing all heathen absolutely requires our continued presence in Iraq: life. From his experience, struggle must persist against such foes and justifies war.

Back to Andy Thomson. He’s qualified to speak. I know him as an internationally regarded, practicing psychiatrist thoroughly aware of information from molecular biology, anthropology, across-species comparison research, and biology more generally. When I communicate with him, I don’t deny his point and indeed, when in charge of organizing a scientific program a few years ago, I invited him to speak on these ideas as a keynote speaker. But also I respond to him by noting religion can claim much good as well as harm and that such bonding for destruction occurs in settings that deny religions, as the Aryan supremacy ideas of Hitler and his storyline prior to World War II, or the Soviet Union under communism.

And let me note that despite his pessimism, Andy yearly performs as master of ceremonies for an international peace conference obviously wishing that peace might eventuate. He jokes that our two attitudes exemplify cups half empty versus half full. I include our friendly dispute and joking here for another reason: human male bonding may exist without attacking an out-group enemy, unless in our case ignorance constitutes our common enemy. Of course, in contrast to the Thailand story summarized above, at least in our neighborhoods now, or for this moment in early 2007, our government’s protection of civil liberties works sufficiently to allow us the leisure to contemplate these matters and comfortably my friend and I can agree to disagree.

Spiritual Values Motif

So when I respond to Andy, I also point out that the world possesses important values from philosophies and their meanings provided by Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Mahavira (the Jain in India contemporary with Buddha), Abraham, Muhammad, Confucius, and Mother Teresa as well as innumerable other mother goddesses, sages, lamas, monks, nuns, spirits, ancestors, rabbis, hermits, gurus, totem animals, shamans, medicine men, saints and authorities from all the cultures of the world. Religious writings argue for and extol kindness to our fellow humans, tolerance and forbearance. Religious storylines vary greatly, with the already mentioned fundamentalist diatribes against enemies to the opposite inclusive feelings and generosity.

More specifically religious historian Karen Armstrong highlights the Axial Age from about 2700 to 2200 years ago when great sages in many places of the world made amazing parallel impacts on history during a relatively short period. She relates it to societies coming into city states so that their concerns emerged from localized tribal concerns. Local cults existing beforehand no longer sufficed, partly because demonization of out-groups had to give way to some of these once alien people taking on customer roles; one’s well-being depended on lessened demonization! Arguments black and white gave way to shades of gray and empathy with enemies happened.

Armstrong outlines how, for a variety of reasons, a religious spiritual motif gave humanity new values of compassion with care formally important even for society’s more vulnerable. A new assumption of something sacred in each person came with this. It paved the way for Buddhist, Christian and Islamic values. Emperor Asoka, centuries before Christ, led the Indian subcontinent to adopt Buddhism; as mentioned in Chapter 1, the Ajanta caves gained their carvings in the wake of that movement. Buddhism shared some of its values – and perhaps some originating traditions – with Jainism that in turn may perhaps have stemmed from the dim years of the early Indus civilization itself or possibly from Aryan invaders from the west (areas now Iran and surrounding territory). However it came about, Jainism emphasized non-violence and respect for all living entities, along with thriving in trade and economics. Such values stemmed from the great religions which in turn may have affected secular trends. As the 20th century came to an end, democratic societies free of slavery increasingly incorporated values of human dignity that had flowed from religious to secular societies.

So while the excesses of religious fundamentalism dominate daily headlines, humanistic precepts, practices and narratives guide many people’s lives in ways that result in greater good for many people. Plus religious people live longer. People appreciate meditation and attention to their “spiritual” selves – however that variously means – values that originated in multiple religious traditions with perhaps parallel flow with values from one tradition fertilizing those of others. Armstrong not only wrote on the axial age but also on fundamentalism, doing so already in 2000, well before nine-eleven. She wrote The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. In it she deployed the distinctive approach of showing concurrent developments in various religious movements over historical time. She focused on how the Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalist variants had interacted with their economic, social and political times. She notes they represent thoroughly modern developments, not all restricted to the so called fundamentals of historic time; consider for example how they use new technologies to maximum extents and effectiveness.

So the two strongly persisting major religious themes include (1) strong in-group bonding to wage war effectively on out-group enemies. And (2) spiritual values change such enemies to fellow members of an overarching in-group, however errant and disturbing their behaviors, and including the otherwise disfavored by society. Armstrong notes that mercantile concerns may initially have fostered this, concerns for low ranking and needy members somehow increasingly gained status in various religions, and remains as part of official creeds and exemplary of humanistic values independent of particular religions. Perhaps this in part explains the correlation of Jainism’s peaceful values and the mercantile success of its practitioners. On the other hand, warriors say the opponent represents a too stubborn foe and that violence and war must remain. Of course peace may happen by other means, as shown by Gandhi and the British departing India and Martin Luther King with civil rights in the mid-twentieth century U.S. Peace and nonviolent imagery will hopefully replace good war imagery in the imagination of the public and its leaders.

Religious movements depend on prophets, preachers, leaders, as well as those led, followers, devotees, audiences. Biology involves the communicational states of leading and following, bonding and nurturance, of having allies and relying on them, as well as telling the stories that guide actions. Traditions, songs, values and emphasis stem from our voices, brains and ears, all coming from ancestors who had them too, bequeathing them to us over the numerous generations.

Social Doings Involve Bodies

Remember how Andy Thomson pointed to male-bonding as a facet of biology. Let me now broaden that to pointing out something obvious: any social interaction features biology. Start with communicational reception and perception. The baby at the beginning of life takes in more signals than he or she expresses. Of course, the power in the baby’s cry more than makes up the lack of precision for what the cry happens to function for, although some experts in infant communication – think of grandmothers –decipher the newborn’s varied signals reasonably well. But regardless of precision, think of the attention we must pay – annoyingly obliged to pay – when a baby cries persistently on the airplane. One wishes the parents would do something.
I heard a presenter at a scientific meeting tell his colleague’s conjecture that the baby’s cry evolved not only to bring the mother to it, but to constrain the parents to calm it. The annoying nature of the baby’s cry owes its qualities to how people in the surround get disgruntled – they find themselves upset – think of hearing it in the nearby tent or shelter. The baby’s cry therefore put pressure on the responsible parents indirectly, from adult peers. Parents may now live in isolated nuclear families but ancestral humans traveled in hunter-gatherer times, they doubtless intermingled in larger family groups, where propitiating the larger group would help the new family. Only in crowded airplanes does the small group of the tribe get reconstituted.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Stephen Jay Gould called such an interpretation a “just-so” story and I forward it as nothing more. I like stories though, and fanciful or not, I find this one appealing, especially since it takes onus off beleaguered parents, and also how it reduces my personal sense of stress. Thus, when I hear a baby cry on the airplane now, I still feel initial irritation, but typically I then remember this story and feel less anger towards the parents towards whom I feel new sympathy, recalling my own traveling experiences with infants when I’d been a parent in that circumstance, wishing I could remember the name of that long ago presenter, so I might thank him or her. Stories function to help us and the scientific accuracy may take second place. But such a story represents an hypothesis too: maybe a graduate student will find a clever way to devise alternate hypotheses and then systematically approach truth by disproving such other possibilities.

For all of us, large and small, auditory and visual senses detect signals from other people and from the world more generally, from anything that moves or for that matter, doesn’t move, like a large man dressed in black, who might just seem to wait watchfully, in what could be a threatening posture if you happened to have traveled to a strange neighborhood or one you know dangerous. Any one of us makes meaning easily. Our brains elaborate sensory information into perceptions with meaning. For instance, artists know we see faces in almost anything vaguely resembling eyes and the other facial features. Vision and hearing feature distance receptors but we know the power of the close-in senses. Think of smell, as with aversion of a disgusting body odor or positively, attraction to an alluring woman’s perfume. Touch conveys emotional power –how special for an intimate someone to caress your forearm or give a hug.

And taste as well, as when lovers kiss. Recall a special birthday meal when you were small.
On the signal-making side of things, muscles of the mouth and larynx powered by lungs and breathing generate language. Emotion flows from what one chooses to say as well as on how it gets said, with bombast, disdain, tenderness and disgust all possible from the identical words, added to by pauses between them. A pause may express more than particular words do. Think of facial expressions, habitual posture and poses, and on how eloquent speakers punctuate sentences with hand gestures. How do we move on the street, sit or stand in waiting rooms, or position ourselves with others as the automatic spacing one finds oneself doing if on the elevator with others?

And not just other people, but for at least 10,000 years of humanity, pet animals play meaningful roles. Lapdogs, show dogs, retrievers and pit bulls each exhibit the particular purposes generated by selective breeding over very many generations. By now you have some idea about why in concert with my GAP colleagues, I call the organ between our ears, eyes and mouth, the “social brain,” the adjective emphasizing how much communication depends on this nervous structure. It exquisitely, even miraculously – if you accept a religious metaphor – modulates all the complexities of daily life.

Language with its metaphors takes central stage for people. And when using it, figures of speech, each one telling its little story, play major roles. Metaphors organize us.
Now let me move us to brain features perhaps unique to humans that powerfully organize our lives: story-using and ally-using. I conclude that only these two core social brain features distinguish humans from other animals, although perhaps in degree only. Think of the pet dog dragging its leash to the door, then dropping it and looking to you expectantly. There’s a story there, one that Rover acts in and in which you will participate either by walking him then or signaling how you will postpone the inevitable. Dogs too represent story-using, ally-using animals, though they use the features less than do their co-evolving fellow human species.
Well, language seems unique enough. Maybe religion too. Readers will argue so, and they may be right, but I suggest that language implements story formation and reception – true – much more extensively and dramatically, but an implement to make stories, not an end in itself. Well, it all depends on what you mean by stories. I think of story in the simplest possible fashion. A subject and predicate suffice: “Rover runs.” “Suzanne exists.” “A bicycle crashed.” “Let’s go for a walk.” Or stories elaborate and become extraordinarily pervasive and they power traditions, as we see in religions, new and old, extensive and limited. Heroes and persuasive figures figure in statues and symbols, each one stories physically realized in themselves though the carver and person who commissioned the work intending something quite other than subsequent receivers of the signal, such as moderns viewing the Ajanta caves two millennia after their origination.

Plus, humans more than other animals more flexibly turn to other humans as potential allies – even if unrelated or remotely related strangers. Religion since Karen Armstrong’s axial age especially illustrates this. Robin Dunbar and John Allman focus on the enormous growth of the human brain compared to that of the chimpanzee and bonobo, the two closely genetically connected non-human animals that likely descended, all of us, from a common ancestor. William Calvin points out that a human’s cerebral cortex spread out would occupy a surface area that six letter-size sheets of paper can cover. A chimp’s brain spread out the same way would occupy the surface of one. Dunbar and Allman, calculating independently, computed a high correlation between brain size and animal group sizes. They concluded that we evolved elaborate neuronal machinery to collaborate, deceive, mate, parent and overall, provide aid to allies while bonding to punish enemies. I add to this that much of how this presently happens depends on narratives and comparisons. Some things resemble other things. Cultural story lines guide actions. Metaphors, exemplifying stories, allow expression in new and amazing ways other more primitive communicational states that other animals share with us.

The Religious Metaphor of Demons

Labeling, isolation and characterization of “the enemy” (demonizing) represents a well established mobilizing tactic for many religious and other in-groups who then coalesce to unite against the hated other, more easily focused on when more discernable and clearly evil. Demons once labeled supernatural enemies believed in for millennia. Such bad guys represent the out-group towards whom the in-group mobilizes to combat – remember the less favored chimpanzees whose demise disturbed Jane Goodall’s image of “the noble savage” – to that point she’d assumed that image (that storyline) for chimpanzees.

Shortly after beginning this manuscript, I discovered the paperback edition of philosopher Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. He first published it in 2004 (I have the hard cover edition) but from its going to paperback publication, we know the work represents a publishing success – lots of readers, many book-buyers. He blasts fundamentalists waging violence, but beyond these zealots, he also asserts that at the base of any creed, religion presumes intolerance of those not part of their believer group – whomever they define as the others. He does not tolerate that intolerance. For him belief gone awry represents the source of evil.

Harris presents a good plot to readers who seek understanding and those of us who appreciate a good and gripping narrative. Eventually conquering an uncomplicated enemy motivates many a good read. Many doubtless sympathize with this particular case because he focuses on the harm perpetrated by religious fanatics on nine-eleven that any of us in the U.S. and other parts of the first world may now find ourselves touched. Threatened, we no longer feel privileged and protected as we did before. He focuses our anger. Harris also puts a scientific lens on it, as he sees religion – all religion – just like alchemy in its day, something scientific chemistry replaced in an inevitable march of science, reality and reason. I have no problem with his arguments that religious intolerance poses problems, but do take issue with the demonizing strategy.

More recently, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, refers approvingly to Harris’s approach. The world-famous biologist tells of his similar convictions. The title alone suggests how he gives people of faith the status of psychiatric patients, people in need of help, but people with thinking errors; delusions define kinds of thought disorders. Harris and Dawkins lead efforts that declare religion not only outdated but harmful, compared to science. They assume that any rational person will see this happen naturally once the arguments gain clarity. Both authors campaign for their position, arguing the battle must join, reminding me in their passion of the 22-year U.S. Navy veteran mentioned earlier (remember? – he spoke of the incorrigible enemy). Harris and Dawkins both outline the pernicious ills of religious thinking in their “crusade” against religion even as Dawkins decries the Christian-Muslim crusades of history as examples of the badness of religion. They define the religiously faithful as an out-group not to be hated perhaps, but certainly to be defeated. No other image suffices. This represents, in their view, a simple reality.
Am I myself demonizing Harris and Dawkins? Probably – I too of course wish to galvanize my plotline.

And of course all of us demonize all the time. Think of the hated weeds and fire ants in the garden. If you happen to be or know a gardener or park-user, think of the hate you and your fellows feel for the exotic species that don’t give native species a chance, such as buckthorn in the north brought over to foster better hedgerows or the kudzu of the south and the joy when allies appear, such as goats in some muncipalities who devour kudzu. And we disapprove of – even hate –miscreants who took such plants from their native lands to places we now realize are vulnerable. Other animals too, think of the rabbit-pests of Australia that arrived from Europe and took over the ecological niches once occupied by native marsupials; the list goes on.

But I hope my focus works mostly against an argument and mode of thinking, not on Harris and Dawkins as “bad guys.” Certainly I respect their scholarship and passion and of course like any author, I examine carefully what they write for the things they cite that support my own arguments.

Their demonizing contrasts, though, to the more subtle and nuanced suggestions of Armstrong, who makes her points less dramatically. In a television interview she laughed at herself, wondering aloud how she, a former nun, might find herself taken so seriously by so many. In my case, hearing her once give a lecture in a University series and then reading her steady prose, I have no problem understanding this. To me her work resembles the plodding, careful, detail-oriented, carefully reasoning Darwin in the way she steadily accumulates well articulated detail, now placed in twenty well regarded books on religious narratives, movements and major figures. She builds her case with logic and precision, not always immune from criticism, but resilient in her detail accumulation and steady work. For instance, a decade ago she wrote a Muhammad biography after the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie. Some critics then felt she bought too much and too uncritically into the exhortatory efforts of Muhammad’s followers. More recently asked to write a short biography of the prophet, she wrote a completely different work in 2006, one that I note addresses the earlier criticism.

Conciliation Theme

Armstrong contrasts to Harris and Dawkins because she works to go beyond a demonizing religious metaphor underpinning her world view. I prefer – and hope to emulate – her approach of an even-handed scholarly search for understanding, as evident in her The Battle for God. Not that she’s dispassionate. One of her books, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, depicts her own struggles with religion and she presently claims no religious allegiance. Yet she feels enormous respect towards the many faiths, customs and major figures of which she writes with enormous knowledge and empathy. She squarely confronts the ills of religious zeal including coalitions of males – or for that matter, coalitions of both sexes easily seen in humans. For her religion’s not the enemy, but a curious human phenomenon, however problematic at times. To her religion presents an endlessly fascinating subject of study, not an entity, form of thought, or a group of people that she must enlist others to combat and defeat.

So if Harris and Dawkins go forth to battle in the core themes of their books, Karen Armstrong seeks reconciliation through awareness. I’ve known her work for years and wonder that Harris and Dawkins apparently don’t read or regard her as her name does not show up in my reading of them nor in either of their indices. Perhaps their confrontational world view caused them to dismiss conciliation. Certainly religion so pervasively affects people, and has been so extensively investigated and written about, they hardly lack for data on many fronts. The realm of religion comprises many libraries and omission of a single authority can hardly be held against these authors.

Their omission doesn’t surprise me for another reason: those using combatant metaphors often omit contrary points of view. For such, only fighting images possess reality, only force works; they easily dismiss other viewpoints without internal or external debate. Reading them resembles consulting with generals who don’t or can’t take seriously the historical examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

On the other hand, Armstrong knows religion as a world-wide pervasive activity with roots in the dim beginnings of humanity and she knows it will hardly disappear because fighters using intellectual weapons assault religious believers and their beliefs. Consider fundamentalism. In her Battle for God, she notes the scientifically aware just a generation ago considered that fundamentalists would surely disappear with the continued expansion of science and its obvious effects on the way people think and relate to each other. But as fundamentalism subsequently resurges across the globe, I presume that alchemy must feel to her a trivial metaphor – hardly comparable to religion’s mighty pervasive grasp on the human mind.

She writes hoping that those who read history won’t repeat it even as that expectation feels wan at times – consider in the 2007 during which I write how many have compared the US intervention in Iraq to a previous generation’s adventure in Viet Nam because the plot of these two storylines shows uncannily similar features. Of course many power players certainly do not read or regard history. I’ve very aware that good war imagery prevails at present. Yet as I write now the peace prevails in most of western Europe despite centuries of previous bloody conflict. Might this persist and extend to the rest of the world? Certainly at this moment, the current American president possesses low popularity ratings as he remains bent on pursuing a foreign war. His plummeting reputation tells something about how the U.S. population joins the rest of the world not only in abhorring his administration’s mid-eastern adventures but his administrations’ view of simple minded “others” receiving blame for terrorist activities. It feels arrogant to man. But possessing power, they formidably work to maintain it.

So despite the upsetting news from Thailand in a morning paper, let me express a hope that a societal tipping point away from the “good war" metaphor will eventuate in the near future, with suddenly more peaceful happenings as folks work in such directions. For example, Clint Eastwood’s pair of movies on Iwo Jima, one from the American and one from the Japanese point of view, chip away at the mutual demonization of the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific front of World War II. A fellow theatre-goer who had happened to sit next to me mentioned casually as we left the theatre (this was a brief casual encounter with someone I had never before met), “Eastwood has come a long way from [his avenger role of] Dirty Harry.” Let’s hope other combatants gain parallel maturity about enemy views of the world, that extremists gain sources of esteem other than wracking harm on their enemies, and that folks generally gain education and join forces against humanity’s common dangers, such as global warming less comfortingly though more accurately named climate meltdown. And though that sounds dire, its accuracy appeals to me better than the religious storyline of Armageddon. I have a science-biased mind.

Whether such sentiments eventuate, or their delay persists, I mean the core approach of this book to echo Karen Armstrong’s values and I wish to extend her explorations to biological frontiers. As you have already perceived, “biology” for me possesses wider meanings than that encompassed by high school botany and zoology, or chemistry and study of cells. I include observation of behavior such as ethology, including human ethology, and suggest that personal experience reflects bodily functions, not just the biology of a distended or overactive gut, pain from a tumor, or changed color from a bile duct blockage. Things said and heard count, as do feelings in a crowd. We turn to that next as I tell you of my background and how I’ve experienced the communicational states on which this book hinges.

Religion’s Biology: Communicational States and Human Traditions

Thanks to friends Myrna Casebolt and Derec Bownds, I embark upon this blog that provides in pieces – slowly – a book-length manuscript to explain the above concept, I suppose like a serial novel but not fiction.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and know these and other friends through a group who attend a mathematics and physics oriented seminar entitled Chaos-Complex Models run by a physicist and poet (also developmental psychologist). Faculty from over sixty departments at the University of Wisconsin provide seminars during the course of the formal school year each week at Tuesday noon. I’ve presented a number of times at this seminar on a variety of topics.

In background I’m an academic psychiatrist who had leadership positions in medical and psychiatric education, a full professor for over 25 years, and head of the psychotherapy committee of the World Psychiatry Association for at several year period. I retired from salaried positions in 1999 and presently function as a mixed media artist and peace advocate. Though at all times I enjoyed practice, and although I’m healthy and feeling capable, I no longer see patients nor have I kept up my medical license, reasons wishing to not work many hours per week to support an office and malpractice insurance. Been there, done that, and I’m grateful to have family members how know how to invest retirement income so that I and my wife can live comfortably and travel (my wife loves to travel!) I worked briefly on a part-time basis in a formal hospital setting shortly after retirement from academe, but it interfered too much with what I wished to do. In addition to doing the mixed media art in my studio, I write a great deal informally (with an extensive set of internet connections), but I’ve been stymied in formal writing to present long held ideas about leadership biology to lag, until this year (2007) when I realized that I should focus upon an illustrative field of human interactions and selected religion. Other of my writing activities will surface as I extend my blog. I hope for interactions with readers so that by the end of it all, I will have experienced more than one editor. I work well and productively with others. Myrna’s musical interest inspired a musical metaphor for my chapters. Let me list these now in this initial submission to bloggers.com.

1. Prelude: The Many Names, Spandrels
2. Two Motifs: Demonology, Spirituality
3. Introspective Mindful Melodies
4. Body Does Stately Music
5. To Dream, To Seize, To Resonate
6. Laughter, Music, and Bonding Views
7. Traditions, Gossip, and Sermon-Lyrics
8. Coda: Names and Spandrels

Chapter 1zzx _Section a-Ajanta Caves BORChapter1-7187 page 1 of 4 1228 words
Religion’s Biology: Communicational States and Human Traditions 7/18/2007 7:36:15 AM

Chapter 1. Prelude: The Many Names, Spandrels

“Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories. Charles Darwin noted this….”
Robin Marantz Henig, Darwin’s God, N.Y. Times Magazine, Mar 4, 2007, p. 39.

“In a country with natural wonders such as Uluru, where every major topographic feature was endowed with mythological significance, it was not part of Aboriginal culture to build monuments such as megalithic tombs or pyramids.”
Josephine Flood: Archeology of The Dreamtime, Yale U Press, 1983, p.251

Ajanta Caves

How can we describe religion in a way that we can agree on, so that we can then discuss its biology, its origins in a person’s body? Anyone knows the meaning of that noun, and we could wander to the dictionary or the internet’s Wikipedia to see what they say.[1] But with any formal definition, personal experience and belief systems and those of one’s family, friends and community will make for great differences in what it truly means and a common ground recedes. Regardless of how the brain works logically, we feel and evaluate any definition according to whether we engage in devout rituals performed regularly, or to less formal spiritual feelings during meditation to avid work for “Freedom From Religion” movements to regular or occasional church attendance mostly for the community of other people who also participate (who feel like family, all members doing something in common, regardless of particular beliefs). I know my own background shaped my approach, so I provide some of my own development and family views in Chapter 3.

But for the moment, to sidestep whatever one brings to the conversation, let us begin as natural historians, as observers attentive to history, and look to places with known religious significance. We’ll start with the Ajanta Caves of India abandoned for many centuries, though now they possess tourist importance (and travel next to elsewhere in India, Australia and Italy). I know of course that billions of large and small buildings and natural sites possess religious significance by people over many millennia all over the world.

Human religious needs originated the significance of places of worship and celebration of religious beliefs. I see needs as “biological. To satisfy such needs, people give and receive need-related messages that involve cells, molecules, personal actions and reactions, and community-related behaviors. Such sometimes leave traces that last for many years, sometimes past their period of usefulness such as Bellini’s Restaurant near Capital Square in Madison, Wisconsin (I just passed it coming here); the restaurant’s charm stems in part from its having been built a church, accompanied by some sadness at the passing of that community. And such as the Ajanta caves of India, discovered by a British soldier wandering the countryside who in 1819 wandered a byway and found them for the modern world, after previous worlds had forgotten, leaving no seeming trace in history nor tradition.

Buddhist carvers made the thirty caves in a wall of a horseshoe bend of the Waghara River in two phases, one period about the time of Christ, beginning two centuries before him and ending in the first century A.D., then recommencing in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Large numbers of people spent generations accomplishing the carvings as well as paintings still visible on the walls. We especially see statues of Sumedha, who became the enlightened one, the Buddha, in his characteristic poses in the paintings, pillars and bas relief carvings that compel the viewer’s attention, partly because they seem typical, part of modern experience here, as where I write now in Madison. Signaling the power of tradition we see at Ajanta that this goes back two millennia. Figures of the Buddha we see there vary little from these early examples undisturbed for centuries (though some others have been destroyed by forces such as the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan of recent decades, who destroyed giant Buddha statues for their own religious reasons). By contrast, as I review what I caught through my camera at Ajanta, I see many respectful curious visitors, some sari-clad, western-clad, some men wearing Nehru hats.

We read on Ajanta information boards that the caves functioned as places of worship, prayer halls and monastery quarters. Two and a half centuries before our common era, before Christ lived, the Indian emperor, Asoka, spread the idea of Buddhism widely throughout south and southeast Asia, establishing monasteries over widespread regions and sending missionaries to other Asian countries. Southeast Asia, China and Japan presently exhibit Buddha’s statues, some of immense size, carefully attended, respectfully remembered and religiously used. Buddha’s values may live on in other ways. Holger Kersten, religious historian from Freiburg, Germany, suggests in a book entitled, Jesus Lived in India, that Jesus’ values echoed Buddhist ones, and that in fact evidence exists that shows him found by those searching for a next Dalai Lama in a bright two year old (the famous wise men in another guise following astrological signs, hence going far to the west and finding “Issa” then training him for his appearance at the moneychangers. Gaps in his life from Biblical sources gain explanation from religious training well east of Jerusalem. Kersten found Issa’s grave in Kashmir and suggests it likely Jesus lived until past 80 years in age, having survived the crucifixion, though he retained scars from the ordeal.

The Buddha did not claim god-status but centuries later seemed to be one for many people in any event. Indeed, at some point our guide tells us that Hinduism co-opted Buddha by subsuming him in the Pantheon of the many Hindu gods so that the religious movement lost its momentum in the country of its origin. Perhaps this reflects truth; certainly we know conquerors to foster their own religions at the expense of the “obviously incorrect” ones of those conquered. But respectful attention may nevertheless ensue, with good tourist dollars resulting. For example, Ajanta now a World Heritage site just north of Aurangabad in western India, has hosted millions of travelers, we amongst them in 2004. Note that this short description mentions Buddhism, Hinduism, the Taliban form of Islam, and Christianity. Through mention of Aurangabad, we see additional reference to Islam, as Aurangzeb, an ardent Muslim who gave his name to the city, had reigned as the last really prominent Moghul, one of three competing sons of Shah Jahan, the one who won out.

We turn to Fatehpur Sikri’s story now, determined by Shah Jahan’s grandfather, but I pause to review the discussion so far.

1. Religions exhibit histories of widespread movements leaving physical, historical traces in the form of explicit and implicit histories, stories of tradition, some conjectural, some documented, some unchanging, some hotly debated (Kersten’s suggestion of Jesus as in the Buddhist tradition, for instance, has not much permeated Christian thinking).

2. The nature of deities varies with region, religion and also era. Where Buddhism once reigned leaving traces in stone next to the Waghara River, Hinduism now rules instead, along with Islam.

3. Human politics and economics affect religious practices. Think on the generations of stone carvers and painters who earned their livelihoods in those caves, supported and employed by religious figures or other funding entities such as a local royalty with Buddhist sympathies.

4. Religions exhibit human territorial features; how clever to have co-opted Buddha as a Hindu god in fostering conversions to the new way of thinking and feeling!


[1] Wikipedia: A religion is a set of beliefs and practices generally held by a community, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.

Introduction to Religion's Biology

Religion’s Biology: Communicational States and Human Traditions

Thanks to friends Myrna Casebolt and Deric Bownds, I embark upon this blog that provides in pieces – slowly – a book-length manuscript to explain the above concept, I suppose like a serial novel but not fiction.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and know these and other friends through a group who attend a mathematics and physics oriented seminar entitled Chaos-Complex Models run by a physicist and poet (also developmental psychologist). Faculty from over sixty departments at the University of Wisconsin provide seminars during the course of the formal school year each week at Tuesday noon. I’ve presented a number of times at this seminar on a variety of topics.

In background I’m an academic psychiatrist who had leadership positions in medical and psychiatric education, a full professor for over 25 years, and head of the psychotherapy committee of the World Psychiatry Association for at several year period. I retired from salaried positions in 1999 and presently function as a mixed media artist and peace advocate. Though at all times I enjoyed practice, and although I’m healthy and feeling capable, I no longer see patients nor have I kept up my medical license, reasons wishing to not work many hours per week to support an office and malpractice insurance. Been there, done that, and I’m grateful to have family members how know how to invest retirement income so that I and my wife can live comfortably and travel (my wife loves to travel!) I worked briefly on a part-time basis in a formal hospital setting shortly after retirement from academe, but it interfered too much with what I wished to do. In addition to doing the mixed media art in my studio, I write a great deal informally (with an extensive set of internet connections), but I’ve been stymied in formal writing to present long held ideas about leadership biology to lag, until this year (2007) when I realized that I should focus upon an illustrative field of human interactions and selected religion. Other of my writing activities will surface as I extend my blog. I hope for interactions with readers so that by the end of it all, I will have experienced more than one editor. I work well and productively with others. Myrna’s musical interest inspired a musical metaphor for my chapters. Let me list these now in this initial submission to bloggers.com.

1. Prelude: The Many Names, Spandrels
2. Two Motifs: Demonology, Spirituality
3. Introspective Mindful Melodies
4. Body Does Stately Music
5. To Dream, To Seize, To Resonate
6. Laughter, Music, and Bonding Views
7. Traditions, Gossip, and Sermon-Lyrics
8. Coda: Names and Spandrels