Why does an irrational belief continue to dominate our populace? What is it about human nature that allows the myth of theistic religion to gain ground even as the general level of education continues to rise?
These two questions continue to pester me. I suppose that’s natural when you are always in the minority. But sometimes I wonder why it’s such a big deal to me. Why waste my ever-dwindling mental capacity on something that will not change?
I am very fortunate to have friends who are intelligent, compassionate, and progressive thinkers. Many of them are also life-long Christians. Never-the-less we can discuss a range of subjects together, including politics, science, literature and sometimes even religion. While not always in agreement, we share our differences openly and with respect. But we have to do so carefully—the issue is just too emotional to let our guards completely down.
Occasionally my own passions get the best of me and whenever that happens I’m very tempted to lob a ‘rationality bomb’ towards them. This is done by taking an example from religious mythology and placing it in a modern context. I like to use Santa, but we atheist have many such devices, the best known among them being the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Such arguments bring a smile or too but they never work. Often the only ones smiling are the non-believers; while the believers are deeply insulted or at the very least, feeling hurt. What seems to be happening is that our attempt at rational comparison is backfiring. Religion is one of those areas that seems to get an exemption from rational evaluation.
I know I’m stating the obvious here, but why is that? How can smart people selectively exclude an entire block of their day-to-day life from critical thinking?
I think it’s obvious we atheist spend way too much time debating existence and probability when we really need to focus more effort on this fundamental question. We are not going to out argue believers with facts or rational thinking or deep philosophical reasoning. Maybe it is time to concentrate on why people believe—more importantly, why intelligent, otherwise rational people choose to believe?
Which brings me to the big lie. This term refers to a propaganda technique most notably associated with the Nazi’s and first articulated by Hitler himself. Joseph Goebbels went on to refine it a bit, stating something like this:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Hitler’s propaganda machine certainly used the big lie to evil advantage, but they did not invent it—if anything they simply kicked it into mass production. It was the priesthood that perfected it. After all, filtering, control and manipulation of information has always been the most effective tool of organized religion—starting with tribal shamans; carefully honed by the catholic church; and continuing today around the world—take Iran for example.
The Judeo/Christian myth certainly fulfills ‘big lie’ criteria. First, it’s about as audacious as you can get. A series of brutal, often magical stories designed to spark the imagination of an ignorant and illiterate population. Taken individually these are no more than gross fairy tales. But give them official status and they become unassailable truths.
Repetition is the key to making untruth into doctrine, and doctrine into law. And for most societies I know that repetition starts shortly after birth and continues throughout life. First you hear it from those you love and trust the most, then it’s re-enforced via many channels—from the religious institution itself, but also by the community at large and of course by our governments: local, state and federal.
The big lie is a recipe, not an explanation. It provides a high level methodology for ingraining a belief (rational or irrational) into a populace. But it doesn’t give us a clean way to cut the cord. We’ve no idea how to free ourselves from the situation we are now in. To do that we need to understand why the recipe works so damned well. What is it about this mixture of voodoo, neurons and synapses that give it power? We need an Alton Brown of cognition—someone who can take the recipe and help us understand it—preferably with images of cows and chickens, but that’s just me.
As we understand cognition better we are starting to get an idea of how the rational and emotional minds work together. Imaging technologies are providing glimpses of the brain in action. We are finally able to ’see’ the mechanisms of reward, motivation and pleasure. Today scientist are using this technology on subjects who are actively undergoing what they believe to be religious experiences—from simple prayer to speaking in tongues.
The research is young and far from conclusive. But it’s clear that many of the same cognitive reward mechanisms involved in deep emotional experiences are also evident during religious episodes. It would not surprise me to find that first among these is love. I’m saying that it may be likely that the reason religion is able to be so engrained within human psychology is because at a cognitive level, we are dealing with the same forces that invoke love.
And as we all know far too well—love is blind.
This scares me. Because it shakes my hope that this sociological cancer can be cured with education and rational thinking. It shakes my irrational and emotionally held faith that religion can be outgrown.
Make no mistake, as a whole, I believe religion is bad for humanity. It is a negative manifestation of our evolutionary mind and it continues to be responsible for untold death and sorrow. But were we able to remove religion from our brains, we may also find we have removed the essence of our humanity.
For atheist like myself, the big truth may be that our disbelief is no more rational than their belief. We are both just following King Dopamine down the cognitive happy trail—looking for whatever makes us feel the best, if only for a little while.
© 2009 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.
