Religion Explained

Reading

William Ellery Channing was a giant in the Unitarian church in the early 1800s, an independent, controversial speaker whose sermons were widely reprinted and debated. Channing had been criticized for interpreting the bible, rather than just taking it at face value. This is from his address at the Ordination of Rev. Jared Sparks in The First Independent Church of Baltimore on May 5, 1819—185 years ago.

"We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers. We indeed grant that the use of reason in religion is accompanied with danger. But we ask any honest man to look back on the history of the church, and say whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous. Besides, it is a plain fact that men reason as erroneously on all subjects, as on religion. Who does not know the wild and groundless theories which have been framed in physical and political science? But who ever supposed that we must cease to exercise reason on nature and society because men have erred for ages in explaining them? We grant that the passions continually, and sometimes fatally, disturb the rational faculty in its inquiries into revelation. But the passions do not distract the reason in religious any more than in other inquiries which excite strong and general interest; and this faculty, of consequence, is not to be renounced in religion, unless we are prepared to discard it universally. The true inference from the almost endless errors which have darkened theology is not that we are to neglect and disparage our powers, but to exert them more patiently, circumspectly, uprightly. The worst errors, after all, having sprung up in that church, which proscribes reason, and demands from its members implicit faith. The most pernicious doctrines have been the growth of the darkest times, when the general credulity encouraged bad men and enthusiasts to broach their dreams and inventions, and to stifle the faint remonstrances of reasons, by the menaces of everlasting perdition. Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it. We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril."

And now a musical interlude that sounds random, but which will help illuminate the sermon that follows.

Interlude

Old Dog Tray/ Old Folks at Home by Stephen Foster
(Performed by Susan-Marie Stedman)

Sermon

My topic is Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. It's a book by Pascal Boyer, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and sections of my talk are essentially lifted right out of it.

Now while I can discuss the book Religion Explained in 10 or 15 minutes, I can't really "explain religion" in 10 or 15 minutes—at least not to everyone's satisfaction. A central tenet of the book is that what we call religion is really a confluence of many systems in the normal human brain, each of which evolved for a specific purpose that had little to do with what we think of as religion. It takes Boyer 330 pages to describe these systems and explain how they result in making the surprising sorts of belief you see in religion so compelling. I get only about ten pages.

Also, Boyer's arguments require following some pretty complex research in cognitive science, anthropology, and neuroscience. It took me a couple of tries just to get through the book.

But at some point, it became transformative. I felt like Neo in the move The Matrix, who takes a red pill that allows him to see the world as it really is. All sorts of seemingly inexplicable things—things far removed from religion—became clear to me. For example, why does someone taking the parking space I have been waiting for make me nearly homocidal? Why does it tick me off when someone cuts in line at the CVS—when it's not even my line! Some part of me knows that my reaction is exaggerated, but I can't help it. Also, why do we have the sorts of leaders we have? How did George Bush beat Al Gore? Or, for those of you who say "he didn't," how did he run neck and neck with a person who was by all counts intellectually superior? Why do we like that nitwit Gilligan more than we like the Professor? And of course, why do we believe in invisible, powerful agents and the protective force of rituals.

In sum, why do we say, do, feel and believe so many strange things while our rational minds look on helplessly?

If we're going to explain religion, we have to consider all religion—not just the Western variety. Let me start by reading a few examples of religious beliefs cited by Boyer:

You should protect yourself against witches, or they could hit you with invisible darts that will get inside your veins and poison your blood.

You should go to a church or some other quiet place and talk to an invisible person who is everywhere in the world. That invisible listener already knows what you will say, because He knows everything.

To please powerful dead people, you should pour the blood of a live white goat on the right hand side of a particular rock. But if you use a goat of a different color or another rock, it won't work.

The end is nigh. Judgement Day is October 2. When that day passes and nothing happens, the end is still nigh. But the date has been changed.

Some people have an extra internal organ called the evur. That explains why they have unusual talents. Sometimes, some people's evurs fly away from them at night and cause mischief and misfortune.

These are all religious beliefs. We may ridicule them, but we would be ridiculing a large percentage of people on the planet. Most people subscribe to these beliefs, or others just as surprising. Why do people hold these beliefs? Where do they come from? Why are people so strongly committed to them? Indeed why, in some cases, will people kill others because they don't share them?

Most people would answer one of four ways:

Answer one: Religion provides explanations. For our ancestors, it explained puzzling natural phenomena, like thunderstorms; or experiences like dreams. It explains the origins of things, and why there is evil and suffering. This is what Immanuel Kant had in mind when he said that human reason is forever troubled by questions it can neither solve nor disregard.

But are we? All of us are faced since birth with unfathomable mysteries that don't trouble us in the least. For example, how can thoughts, things that apparently have no weight or size, move a physical object, like, say, my hand? Observe (I move my hand, to great fanfare) How did I do that? Does this mystery trouble you? It doesn't trouble most people. People the world over are perfectly satisfied that thoughts and desires have effects on their bodies and that's that. Only a small number of people, like Immanual Kant, have a general desire to explain mysterious things.

Also, the explanations given in religion are not very convincing. In fact, they're not really explanations at all. A scientific answer to the question "What is thunder?' is that a powerful electrical discharge moving through the air creates a vacuum, and when the surrounding air rushes to fill it, it creates a concussive force that makes a loud sound. Now, this explanation may be wrong, but it sounds reasonable and we expect that there are ways to test it and confirm it. An explanation from a religion is that thunder is the booming voice of ancestors, angry at some human misdemeanor. So, to explain this sound, we have to assume a whole world of imaginary beings—Where are they? Where did they come from?—that can't be seen—why not?—in a distant place that can't be reached. (But then how can the sound of their voices reach us?) And their voices produce thunder-- but how? Do they speak in booms? Do they have a special sort of mouth? Clearly, this is not a normal sort of explanation.

And before you dismiss this as the work of some primitive, ignorant culture, consider the not uncommon Western idea that people can get sick because a powerful God is punishing them for their sins. This is no different than thunder caused by ancestors with booming voices. Where is this God? Is there a reason he made a virus that inflicts damage, rather than just punish people directly? Has god been planning this attack for decades, since it's clear that the virus took that long to mutate? Religious explanations are not the sorts of explanations that we have in any other part of our life.

Explanations do play a major role in religion, but they're not the reason religion came to be.

Another explanation for religion is emotive: religion provides comfort. It makes death less unbearable. It allays anxiety in an unpredictable world.

Well, it is true that religion can be comforting, just as it can provide some explanations. On the other hand, many religions create as much anxiety as they allay. In Melanesia, people believe they are under constant threat of witchcraft; to thwart it, they have to perform an extraordinary number of ritual. You could say the rituals provide comfort to people, but this religion creates the very anxiety that it tries to allay.

Western religions don't do much better. They often create a terrifying world in which an eternity of unbearable torment may befall you. Many religions are filled with evil spirits, zombies, and the evil eye.

Finally, if providing comfort to those in pain were the reason we have religion, then societies who suffer the most would have need of the most comforting religions. But the one religion that is unambiguously comforting is New Age Mysticism. It tells us that we all have enormous powers we can tap, that we are all interconnected by a benevolent universal force, that we have led interesting previous lives, and that people are basically good. Note that this religion arose in the richest, most comfortable population of humans in the history of the world.

The third explanation you may hear is social. Religion holds society together and supports morality. As Voltaire said, "If God did not exist, he would have to be invented."

As with the other two explanations, this idea certainly tells us something about religion-- it's true that most religions are interpersonal, involving people forming coalitions, and most are concerned with moral beliefs. But again, that doesn't explain why we have religion, and believe in the particular sorts of things I mentioned earlier. In fact, what psychologists call "groupishness," a tendency to form coalitions, and basic concepts of morality are universal, and part of the normal development of any human brain, with or without religion..

Finally, many people say that religion is an illusion. People believe it because they are naturally superstitious and will believe anything. Look at widespread beliefs in UFOs, and urban legends. Like them, religious ideas are difficult to refute, and kind of exciting.

Well, these points are true. People do believe all sorts of crazy things with little evidence. Religious beliefs are irrefutable—at least, they are now that churches learned their lesson and stopped making pronouncements about things like the age of the earth and the movements of planets.

But Boyer points out that people aren't quite as gullible as this makes it seem. We don't believe just anything-- there are only a few sorts of things that catch on as religious beliefs. If people are lazy and will believe anything, why are people so selective in their religious beliefs? In fact, every society has scores of fascinating fairy tales, from Santa Claus to the bogeyman. But only a few become religious beliefs. Only a handful become important to us.

To Boyer, all of those explanations suffer from one basic flaw: they assume that we have a part of our brain that weighs the pros and cons of various ideas, and decides to believe some of them for a particular reason.

In fact-- and this is a pretty important piece of this whole puzzle-- hardly anything we believe is the result of rational, logical thought. We believe in things naturally, as a result of a variety of explanatory engines in our brains. The instincts and intuitions that arise come out of brain systems that are part of genetic inheritance, and arose through evolution because they were valuable to us for one reason or another. They are perfectly natural, and arise in similar form in people the world over.

But this does not mean that we have a gene for religion. Or a dozen genes for religion. Like religion, people the world over get colds. There is not a gene for colds, and people who grow up in an environment free of cold germs will never get a cold. What is genetic is a particular environment inside our nasal passages and lungs that is hospitable to cold viruses

In a very similar way, we have religion because we have brain systems that are designed in such a way that religious ideas feel compelling, are easy to entertain, and easy to repeat to others who, having similar brains, may also find them strangely compelling.

This concept is called mimetics, and it helps understand not only religion, but all aspects of culture.

Now, we all know about genes and genetics: genes are biological traits that get passed on through our chromosomes; genes that do things that result in lots of healthy offspring tend to survive, because those offspring produce more offspring that will have that gene; while genes that result in fewer healthy offspring tend to get rarer and rarer. That's natural selection. The idea of memes is that culture evolves in a similar way, from countless bits of cultural memes.

What's a meme?

(I hum opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth) Very successful meme.
(I hum four random notes) Not such a successful meme.

Let's try this:

(Singing) "Way, down upon the—" (the congregation sings the next words, "Suwannee River")

(Singing) "Old Dog Tray, he's—" (the congregation is unable to complete the phrase "-- ever faithful")

Stephen Foster worked hard on these songs, and hundreds of others. He and others performed them all over. They are strikingly similar. But just a few were mimetically successful, and survived over the decades; others survive only as historical footnotes.

Here's another meme I bet you can complete:

"Stop shooting those paper clips before you—" (congregation says as one "put someone's eye out!")

That's a great one, because it's so evocative- someone getting a paper clip lodged in their eye just makes you wince. And that makes it memorable.

The Shell Oil logo is another meme. Fashion is mimetic. And, very importantly, beliefs are mimetic.

It's important to note that memes are not just a metaphor on genes. Memes and genes work together-- for instance, the fact that we have eyes is genetic. It's a fact that losing our vision is very maladaptive. Another genetic ability we have is the ability to perform decoupled cognition-- we can imagine things happening, and then have feelings based on those imaginary things. Research has shown that the feelings we imagine are roughly the same as if we actually experienced the imagined thing. So we can experience the feeling of being hit in the eye with a paperclip, or seeing someone else hit in the eye by a paperclip, and feel strong negative emotions. That makes the sentence "stop shooting those paper clips before you put someone's eye out" very memorable and mimetic. More so than "stop eating those sweets or you could get diabetes" for which we have no strong image. The process of getting diabetes doesn't run in decoupled mode very well-- it's too slow. So the paper clip meme is a fuction of our genetically-determined brain systems.

Similarly, the memes of religion survive because of the sort of brain we have.

We already saw earlier that explanations like "we have religion because it helps us (blank)… or we have religion because we need (blank)… are not very compelling. Suwannee River isn't successful because we all need a song about how much we miss home, so we went and came up with one. We just hear it and find it compelling. We don't do that on purpose-- in fact, we can't help it. That's why we call songs catchy; they get in our brains and we can't get them out even if we want to.

Certain ideas are catchy in the same way. Understanding which ideas and why requires understanding how the brain operates, and getting rid of some misconceptions. Boyer uses a metaphor for the brain: the Pemberly Estate in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Pemberly is the estate that belongs to the suitor of the book's heroine Elizabeth. As she tours the house and grounds, she imagines how grand it would be to live there. Of course, she means upstairs, where she would be treated royally. She doesn't give a thought to downstairs, where dozens of skilled, highly specialized servants run every aspect of the house and grounds, including the kitchens, the master's rooms, the guest rooms, the many servants rooms, the gardens, stables and out buildings. Keeping the estate running efficiently requires a house steward, a housekeeper, groom of the chambers, butler, valet, lady's maid, chef, footman, underbutler stillroom maid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundry maid, coachman, groom, candleman, stable boy, and on and on. Each servant has a very specific job to do, in a very specific manner. There were hierarchies even of servants, castes like the Upper Ten and the Lower Five, who dined separately. There was a complex division of labor, such that the chef cooked, but had no control over the wine. The butler decanted the wine, but the stillroom maid handled the china. And with this complex division of labor came a complex chain of command. The steward, but not the butler, could give orders to the chef; the chef controlled the preparation of food, but had no control over its serving, which was the butler's domain.

As Boyer points out, the amazing thing about this incredibly complex system is how utterly invisible it was to the people who lived upstairs. Food and drink would appear magically, shined boots would be delivered to the bedrooms in the morning, etc. Even the owners only had a vague notion of all the complexities needed to run their own household. A guest at an estate like Pemberly would perceive none of the machinations, but only marvel at how well everything seemed to work. But they might also notice something else—a certain rigidity. For while your boots appeared for you like clockwork in the morning, you could not easily get them shined in the afternoon. Because the stable boy who's job it was, was then taking care of the saddles in the stables. Of course, you could order him to shine your shoes, but then the stable master would have to step in to do the boy's work, the stable master's work would be left undone, and the morning hunt would have to be postponed, etc…

The brain, Boyer explains, is much like such an estate. Our conscious self thinks it is controlling things, but really most of the decisions go on deep in the brain, not only out of conscious control, but not even available for conscious inspection.

So now, you may be thinking, sounds kind of interesting, but I'm not convinced. This is where a sermon is inadequate. Because what makes Boyer's book convincing at this point is the way he looks at different systems within the human brain, how they probably arose, and how they contribute one piece to the total picture of religious beliefs. As he describes each system, he discusses various studies that explain how we know the system exists, and cites anthropological evidence for how that system operates in various religions. In our time today, I can only touch on a couple of them.

One system is hyperactive agency detection: humans are predisposed to see intelligent agents at work behind the scenes, causing everything from suspicious shadow to a bump in the night.

Having an overactive agency detector may make you a scaredy cat 99 times out of a 100, but the 100th time it may keep you from getting eaten by a leopard. So you live and pass on the overactive agency detector genetics, and your offspring, like you, think every bump in the night could be some invisible agent. The rational thinker in your group, who stops to think about the likelihood of that shadow being a leopard, does not pass on his genes. He becomes leopard food.

Another system is contagion avoidance. The broad outlines of this system are innate: when faced with a contaminant, we know the danger is probably invisible; even a limited contact can transmit the whole of the danger—there is no "dose effect," so the danger doesn't go away even if the substance is diluted; and any contact is enough to transmit the whole polluting effect. That system is innate, but the triggers for it are learned.

To Westerners, a single cockroach walking on the edge of a cup can ruin the cup for people; even if it's washed, they can't drink out of it. In other parts of the world, it might be considered a tasty accompaniment. They'd think we were crazy. It's just a cockroach!

On the other hand, in some societies, if a blacksmith enters your house during dinner, the meal is considered contaminated. All the food must be thrown away. "Ah, just our luck! A blacksmith! Now we have to throw everything out. And we were having cockroaches, too!" So here is a system that is genetically based, operates in a similar way the world over, but has different triggers, which are taught.

A brain system like that has obvious survival advantages. The ability to manifest a strong, uncontrollable aversion, triggered by whatever people in your group all seem themselves disgusted by, can help you avoid getting poisoned, or picking up a disease.

And we all know that believing in mysterious agents and forces, looking for causes in random events, having strong feelings about the consumption of "unclean" or forbidden foods and food combinations, and obsessive cleansing rituals all can be seen in religions, and all have their origins as automatic behaviors that have survival advantages.

But what about the rest of the religion? The guilt, the morals, belief that not only are their powerful agents lurking out there, but they know important things about me, and may punish me if I do something to upset them, may hold me to account on a day of reckoning. And what about the strong, overpowering emotions that are a part of religions? The sorts of brain systems that put these things in play don't seem to have any survival advantages.

Well, this is the second really important idea that I got from Boyer's book. Just as fish need water and worms need earth, humans need information, primarily from other humans. Boyer refers to it as the cognitive niche. He says that the two things that humans need, more than does any other species, is information and cooperation. For us, these are a matter of daily survival, and over the millennia our brains have been shaped by the need to acquire these two commodities. Information and cooperation from other humans.

You might be thinking, well, it's something that we want, but is it really that big a deal? We starve if we don't have food, we die if we fail to detect a hungry leopard, but would we die without being able to get information and cooperation from other people?

The answer is yes. We literally cannot survive without these resources. Now, you might say "if I had to, I could live on my own. On an island, maybe. Just give me an axe, a ball of twine and some matches, and I could make it just fine." But, sorry, an axe, twine and matches are some of the most powerful tools ever devised by humans, evolved and improved over millennia. So if you're saying you can survive without the help of other people, you've got to go in naked. So then there might still be a few scouts out there who say "I could do it; I could survive by my wits." But hold on: the other thing you can't bring with you is any information you got from other people. Because that's a tool even more powerful than an axe. I said "information and cooperation from other humans." So you'd have to give up any knowledge of making shelters and snares and catching fish. All you could use is what you could figure out on your own. And you could not survive.

A dumb cat could. A mouse could. Even a cockroach could. But you couldn't. This total reliance on other people has had an incredibly powerful influence on the evolution of our brains. We spend a tremendous amount of our brain power just thinking about other people. We have entire systems of the brain dedicated to calculating who we like and don't like, who we trust or mistrust, to whom we owe debts, and who owes us. Survival of a human group requires not only cooperation, but doing different things in a coordinated manner. Hunting large and possibly dangerous prey requires skills, trust and a precise division of labor. One person who decides to bolt could endanger the whole group. Complex and often silent negotiations are required for hunting and gathering and dividing up the spoils, in negotiating marriages and war raids. We not only consider what we think and want, but more than any other creature, we are able to consider what other people think and want.

In preparing for this sermon, I've run every aspect of it by you many times. You weren't really there of course. But as I imagined you there, and read this sermon, and monitored your reaction, it was just as if you were there. Even this part, where I'm talking about imagining you, was something I ran by you. And so was that. And this, too. We don't know, of course, but we think that this is something that no other species does-- at least not to this extent.

This is another example of decoupled cognition, but this time it's related to a social situation. I can talk to people who aren't there, and they can respond. Boyer goes on to discuss a variety of social brain systems that find their way into religious contexts. One of my favorite examples is invisible companions that little kids have—a phenomenon that, like the contagion system, is innate. In fact, I had an invisible companion when I was little that dared me to do various things, and made bets with me. Each bet he won led to a further double or nothing bet, until I won. My prize was always something intangible, like a wish. Note that the basis of this whole relationship was social exchange—a critical skill in social living. Now, my daughter Carolyn had an invisible companion that she talked with and, with no input from her, I began describing it to her. Does your invisible friend sit right about here? And look toward you from your right side? And does it make bets with you? She looked at me like I was reading her mind. I found that, essentially, she had inherited my invisible companion, in almost every detail.

Now these sort of brain systems translate quite easily into the religious realm, where we see invisible agents with whom we make bargains all the time. Boyer covers a lot of them, in very convincing detail. But now, with what remains of my time, and your patience, I'd like to talk about a very special kind of religion that has become quite popular. In fact, this may be what you think of when you think about religion. It's the religious guild.

Many religions features specialists, like shamans, who handle the religious functions of a group. These people may have special knowledge gained from other shamans, but they also have a special essence of some sort. Among the Fang people, a shaman or ngengang helps you fight against the evur organ of an enemy by sending out his own evur organ to challenge it. You can check out various ngengangs in a village to find one that will be a good match against the spirit attacking you. A person born without this special organ could not be a shaman, no matter how much he trained.

Compare this with what Boyer refers to as the Religious Guilds, like Christianity or Islam. Specialists in these faiths are not defined by having a special essence. They undergo special training. And while with ngengang, you pick your shaman and you take your chances, with priests, rabbis and imams, their competence is guaranteed by a large organization. Also, the services are uniform: what you get from one priest is pretty much the same set of services you get from another priest anywhere in the world. So, like purchasing a brand name item, like a Coke or Whopper, you may give up some level of personalization, but you gain the comfort of knowing exactly what you're going to get.

Large religious organizations came about with the appearance of large states with literacy. Literacy allowed the storage and retrieval of unlimited amounts of information. Wherever literacy took hold, so too did stable associations of religious specialists. There were written religious texts, written prescriptions for rituals, lists of moral do's and don'ts. All these helped in the formation and maintenance of stable religious guilds. A religious guild derives its livelihood , influence and power by providing particular services, just as guilds of laborers do. This sort of division of labor became common in large states, because there was commerce, and people didn't all have to tend herds and grow their own food. All sorts of guilds, including religious ones, tried to establish common practices and prices to make sure they got all the business. They also did whatever they could to discourage competition from non guild members and from other guilds.

Now the value of other guilds comes from the fact that the members either do things that no one else wants to do, like collect the garbage or butcher animals, or because they require a great deal of skill that comes from years of apprenticeship. But religious specialists perform things like rituals to deal with supernatural agents, that anyone could claim to perform. In fact, wherever there are religious guilds there are also numerous freelancers—witch doctors, spirit mediums, cult leaders—who all claim to do just that.

The toughest job for these guilds is to convince people that they are indispensable, that they offer a service that's more valuable than the services of non-members. If they can wield political power, gaining an alliance with political leader, that will greatly improve their chances of survival.

Another solution to competition is to create a powerful brand, by making your religion distinct from all other religions; uniform no matter what guild member provides the service; easily recognized by particular features; and exclusively provided by one organization.

This branding of religious guilds had a big effect on the concepts and practices offered by these religions. First off, these kinds of religions had to have a particular doctrine, not only to set them apart from other religions, but to organize themselves. Kentucky Fried Chicken isn't just really good chicken made every which way; it's the seven herbs and spices that make it unique and uniform. If you have religious franchises from here to Timbuktu, you need a doctrine for the same reason. And once there was writing, you could have one, written down and shared across the guild.

And speaking of writing, religious guilds, unlike other religions, promote texts as the source of guaranteed truths. They downplay intuition, orally transmitted lore and essential persons (unless of course they're dead) because all of these fall outside the guild's control. By the way, the threat that Jesus Christ posed to the pharisees was exactly this, which is why he was considered so dangerous. His ideas that you didn't need temples or priests, that the result of living a moral life would be heaven here on earth, and that written religious texts could safely be questioned were all anathema to the very idea of religious guilds. And, ironically, as soon as Christianity became a religious guild, all of these essential ideas of Jesus were marginalized or abandoned altogether.

The existence of a religious guild also requires belief in a generalized god, not a lot of local gods and spirits. If you read Exodus, you see a clear and often brutal clash between these notions, in which the Israelites, claiming that their one god is the only god, and is a jealous god, destroy the temples and idols of the pagan people they encounter. A key provision of Judeo-Christian theology is the warning not to worship false gods. Non-guild religions couldn't care less whether you worship false gods.

Which brings us to fundamentalism. To some people, fundamentalism is an attempt to return to the old fashioned core values of one religion or another—values that have been lost because of the media, fashion, liberal college professors, or other corrupting influences. But this doesn't really explain the special features of fundamentalist movements—how angry they are, how they may include public shows of outrage, and sometimes violence. Boyer points out that fundamentalism is a reaction to something new in the world: the ability to see, through the media or through visitors from other countries with other faiths, that key provisions of your faith can be ignored by people, with absolutely no consequence. The foundation of many coalitions—religious and otherwise—is that you cannot break their rules without paying a very heavy price. Take away that threat, and people can pick and choose, do whatever benefits them most, without regard to the rest of the group.

As an analogy, think of a military platoon. They undertake extremely dangerous operations that are possible only if the individual members put the needs of the group above their own. Members of platoons often display heartfelt solidarity, intense emotions, that show their willingness to do this. And of course there are rules about defecting-- court martials leading to prison or execution. People in such groups often persecute or brutalize people in advance if they show any signs of being less than fully committed. Soldiers will publicly ridicule and publicize the plight of a person who is deemed to be less than reliable in battle. Now, once you believe someone is unreliable, why not just get rid of him? Why make a big public spectacle of the whole thing? Boyer believes that it's because the ceremony is not aimed at the victim; it's aimed at other members of the group. It's a powerful and memorable signal that defection is very costly.

Boyer believes that the actions of Fundamentalists are the same. Note that fundamentalists are concerned mostly with public behavior. How people dress, whether they go to religions meetings, etc.—even if their doctrine is concerned primarily with personal beliefs. Even when their doctrine specifically prohibits judging others.

Secondly, the punishment of victims is generally very violent and spectacular. Like the stoning of adulterers. This makes sense if the action is directed not at the perpetrator, but primarily at other people, to warn them about the cost of defecting.

I suspect few people here would consider themselves fundamentalists. But most of us have at least hints of the same strong feelings and urges that one sees in fundamentalism. When someone cuts us off, our beeping horn and obscene gesture are automatic and flamboyant reactions to someone flouting their social obligations. Psychologists find that seeing someone cut in line causes a greater outpouring of negative emotions than almost any other rude behavior. If Enron CEO Kenneth Lay cut in line at the CVS, people would be more angry at him about that than about stealing billions of dollars from his workers and stockholders.

When it comes to religious thought, not as much separates us all as we often think. The parts of the brain that have run things since long before we were human continue to exert their influence. But now, we have a newly evolved rational, logical segment of the brain that can look on and say "whoa, that is really strange!" but be unable to do much about it. It's like our instincts are in the driver's seat, and our logic is over in the passenger seat, trying to slam on the imaginary brake and insist that we missed a turn a couple miles back. But our instincts say "Look, buddy, I've been driving this rig for a 150 million years, and you've been sitting there for less than one. I got us this far, so just sit back, shut up and enjoy the ride."

For the most part, that's just what we do. And if we were living in conditions similar to those in paleolithic times, when these instincts arose, perhaps that would be all for the best. But some of these beliefs are no longer adaptive. And that's where our newfangled logic-centers in our neo-cortex come in. Rational thought tells us that the food preferences and drives that helped us survive for millions of years can be bad for us now that there are McDonalds on every corner. Rational thought tells us that the drives to form and defend tight-knit coalitions can be maladaptive when the tools to defend them go from sticks and stones to thermonuclear bombs. And rational thought can help us examine the threads of our religious beliefs to see which are helpful in today's society, and which are detrimental. This is the road that William Ellery Channing put us on as a faith 150 years ago—a road on which we as Unitarian Universalists have served as guides to other faiths ever since, as they adopted our once-radical, liberal interpretations. It is up to us to continue that tradition. As Channing pointed out,

"God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it. We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril.