Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by Thomson J. Anderson & Aukofer Clare

Author:Thomson, J. Anderson & Aukofer, Clare [Thomson, J. Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

8

Wherever Two or More of You Are Gathered

Harnessing Brain Chemistry through Ritual

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

—Charles Darwin

Like religious ideas and beliefs, religious rituals are by-products of mental mechanisms originally designed for other purposes.

Rituals maintain, transmit, and propagate belief across time and space. We have seen how vulnerable the individual mind is to generating, accepting, and believing religious ideas. If the process stopped there, religious beliefs might be loosely held. But, by mobilizing powerful brain chemicals that arouse intense emotional experiences and give rise to feelings as diverse as self-esteem, pleasure, fear, motivation, pain relief, and attachment, ritual creates a whole far stronger than the sum of its parts. The group nature of ritual takes individual minds already primed for belief and throws them into a continuous loop of mutual reinforcement, creating a volatile congregation of conscious and unconscious forces.

In a sense there is only one real religion, created by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the original Homo sapiens in Africa, some 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. Our window into deep time, when these rituals were created, comes from three surviving populations of hunter-gatherers.

First are the Kung San of Africa, who until recently lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Second is a tribe that lived isolated from the world until the twentieth century in the Bay of Bengal’s Andaman Islands; its members are thought to be descended from the original band of humans who left Africa, traveled south around the Arabian Peninsula, then around India, and ultimately to Indonesia and Australia. Third are the Australian aborigines, who, according to genetic evidence, came from Africa in one wave.

All three of these tribes have religions that are striking in their similarity. They are all based on song, dance, and trance. Why? It turns out those are activities that harness some of our most powerful brain chemicals, the ones that influence pleasure, fear, love, trust, self-esteem, and attachment. So powerful was the religion our ancestors discovered that if you look closely, you still see echoes of this first religion in all of the faiths on the planet today. Just as we are all the sons and daughters of that small band of hunter-gatherers that roamed Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago, so too are all our religions derivative of their discovery of the power of song, dance, and trance.

The Brain Chemistry of Ritual

Cells within the brain communicate through neurotransmitters, allowing signals to move from cell to cell.

Every animal with a central nervous system has serotonin, the oldest of a class of neurotransmitters called monoamines. Serotonin neurons reside in the brain stem and send projections throughout the brain for a variety of reasons, including gross and repetitive motor movement. But more important to this topic is that serotonin also chemically regulates our self-esteem in accord with social feedback.

If I am fired from all of my jobs, my serotonin levels and activity will decrease, and the loss in social standing likely will trigger depression, irritability, and impulsivity in me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.