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The book was published in paperback by Paragon on 17th
November 1999 and is NOW available from Amazon.co.uk and from
bookshops or from Paragon. Place your order with Amazon.co.uk
NOW. Or send your order, with a British or international cheque
for £8.99 made out to Paragon Publications to Paragon, Paragon
House, 213 Waterhouse Moor, Harlow, Essex, CM18 6BW. ISBN 0
9536795 0 0, 315 pages.
SYNOPSIS:
The book argues that Man has a genetic component to religion.
How this evolved and the physiological and psychological effects
it produces is explored. The book shows how religion was in
harmony with the pre-scientific world and represented an
adaptation to Man's mental environment. How the rise in science
has broken this adaptive benefit is explored and is then shown
to be contributing to a mental crisis for mankind. The demand
for new religions and cults is described. The effects the crisis
of faith is having on Man's mental outlook and social structure
is documented. Fascinating evidence for this theory is drawn
from the worlds of anthropology and psychology ranging from the
rituals of the Plains Indians and the alien abduction folklore,
to modern charismatic Christianity as expressed in the
‘Toronto Blessing’.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
RELIGION IS CULTURE
THE HARD-WIRING OF RELIGION INTO US
THE FALL AND RISE OF RELIGION IN WESTERN SOCIETY
THE NEW STRESS
GOING APE IN A MAD SOCIETY
THE NEW RELIGIONS
EXCERPT
My contention is simply that there is a genetic
component to the religious tendency of Homo sapiens, in
other words that it was selected for evolutionary benefit and is
represented in our genome. Mankind has always subliminally known
this fact about himself but in the pre-scientific world the only
word to describe it was by reference to Man's 'spirit'.
UPDATE
What gave an adaptive benefit was faith or belief, this came
first and drove the changes that created 'cognitive fluidity'
[Stephen Mithen: The Prehistory of the Mind 1996], the latter
merely allows for it. Faith is not the by-product of cognitive
fluidity but the other way round. The difference between madness
and faith is respectively that between perceiving the river, the
cow or the moon as a god and believing that the river, cow or
the moon is a god. Cognitive fluidity without faith would make
Man mad and would not have been selected. What was selected was
belief or faith. Belief or faith is voluntary, perception is
involuntary and that is the crucial distinction. Natural
selection favoured the ability to chose to believe something
about the river or the moon that was quite distinct to its
(rational and natural) perception.
Further Update:
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) as what I call "Vestigial
Grooming". Scientists have shown that acupuncture is twice
as effective as a placebo in certain situations but works to
roughly the same degree even when the needles are placed in the
'wrong' spots i.e. not on the meridian lines. This suggests that
the meridian lines are not the efficaceous reality but rather
the pricking and the touch are. Furthermore EFT which is very
loose in its adherence to specific spots to apply acupressure to
and uses the same spots in the same routine for all complaints
(unlike TFT or Thought Field Therapy from which it derived) can
not therefore be working via meridian lines. And yet it does
work as has been shown in medical trials in Latin America. So
what is going on here? Anthropologists and primatologists have
known for decades that if you deprive a monkey or an ape of only
one thing namely grooming it becomes rapidly neurotic. At some
point in out evolutionary history we lost first our fur and then
we derived complex customs that severely curtailed touching. The
latest evidence from studying the differences between the
genetics of human pubic and head lice suggests we lost our body
hair about 600,000 years ago. However the neuroligical and
psychological processes that made grooming effective for
'therapy' and mental and physical health were not yet 'switched
off' by evolution as this change was too recent when set against
the 30 odd million years of monkey/ape evolution. If you look at
an EFT touching session it is remarkably reminiscent of grooming
and this is why it works. For further details see my article
entitled "Vestigial Grooming as a Plausible Explanation
for Energy Meridians in EFT" published by Self
Growth magazine at www.selfgrowth.com.
Author's Post-Publication Essay: "The Spirit and the
Nature"
This book necessarily adopts an atheistic approach. It is a
scientific book and any scientific enquiry is inimical to faith
as science is about replacing faith with objective proof. Trying
to mix a faith-based methodology or mind-set with a scientific
one can only lead to confusion and is deliberately avoided in
this book.
There are two potential 'realities'. Spiritual 'reality' that
involves actual 'real' spirits and what I call 'religion' which
is not spiritually real but is physically real and stems from
the natural history of our species. It is expressed today by
genetic, psychological, hormonal and social forces.
The Religious Ape in Crisis is not about the veracity of
religious phenomenon in the sense of what really is 'out there'
in the spirit world or in the 'outer space' of the physical
Universe or indeed 'in there' as with the 'ghost in the
machine'. Rather it is concerned with the natural history of
religion for Homo sapiens and with the 'inner space' of
the mind. What is experienced is real to those who experience
it: one man's vision is another man's hallucination or delusion.
This is true even within the same religion. Evangelical
Protestants would regard a Catholic girl in Spain, 'seeing' the
Virgin Mary and 'hearing' her command more use of the Rosary, as
deluded, but would have no problem with an evangelical minister
seeing Jesus stand before him. The point about religion is that
it evolved as a real component of what we are. There is a
religious mechanism built into us by our genes. The
hallucination is real as experienced by the hallucinator and has
a psychological, biochemical, neurological and endocrinal
component that is also 'real'. Religion is part of Man's natural
history. That is why to be religious is not to be mad any more
than the cheetah is deformed because it has long legs. The
evolution of our genes led to the evolution of our memes but
then the memes became part of Man's mental environment, which is
an integral part of the environment for a self-aware thinking
being. At that point Man's genetic evolution had to adapt to the
new reality. In a nutshell, over the evolutionary timescale the
genes led to memes which gave rise, via this mental and
environmental pressure working as natural selection, to new
genes.
An example helps to make the point about reality. Even
ufologists and alien abduction researchers who believe in the
objective 'out-there' reality of UFOs and alien abductions are
the first to acknowledge that many reports are mistakes,
hallucinations, misidentifications or plain frauds. Clearly
these 'unreal' phenomena are worthy of study to elucidate the
psychological forces involved. This would remain true even if
UFOs land on the White House lawn today and disgorge a number of
abducted humans in front of the astonished press corps. Likewise
the seminal studies of the Salem Witch trials of the Seventeenth
Century or the beliefs about witches held by those living in the
Middle Ages remain valid, irrespective of whether the witches
had any supernatural powers. These studies have shown how claims
of witchcraft were used to settle scores, rise up power
hierarchies and ostracise people that were feared. Processes of
mass hysteria were involved along with false confession syndrome
and, overall, this belief system had a cathartic effect. All
this remains valid whether or not chanting spells gives you any
supernatural power over people and even whether in fact anybody
actually did chant any spells.
Likewise, even Gerald Coates of Pioneer, has acknowledged
that not every episode of laughing, barking, falling down,
shrieking and trembling witnessed in a Toronto Blessing style
Pioneer Conference is necessarily the supernatural work of God.
Rather he admits that some of it is 'of the flesh' i.e. the
natural, psychological, human response of suggestion. What is of
Man is worth studying the better to understand Man. Anthropology
is the study of Man and The Religious Ape in Crisis is an
anthropological study of religion.
There is nothing in the above to indicate that there is or is
not any objective reality behind the beliefs. That is a separate
question and outside the remit of the book. Indeed it is
entirely consistent with the notion of a Creator God, that has
formed the physical Universe to give praise to Him, that there
should be physical, biological, genetic and biochemical
components to the 'spirit' within and to the awareness of the
'Spirit' without. Obviously there would necessarily be a
connection between, on the one hand, the pumping, physical heart
of Man and the coursing blood in his arteries and, on the other
hand, his 'spirit' which come together in the 'soul'. Man is
both flesh and spirit according to the religious
viewpoint - a spirit in a material body in the material world
surrounded by a spiritual world. Indeed the Bible makes this
very point as it stresses that the physical life precedes the
spiritual life and states that the conception of the human
spiritual life first requires the physical life (Gen 1 Cor 15:
46). There is an intimate connection between the two from the religious
perspective.
However, for the reason of clarity already given, The
Religious Ape in Crisis is not concerned with the objective
reality or unreality of any or all religious beliefs. What is
certain is that whilst all religious beliefs have a little in
common they disagree on so much else that they are, broadly,
mutually incompatible. This means that either all are delusional
in much of their detail or all but one are delusional in much of
their detail. It is logically possible that if there could be
held to be a common core to all religious belief then that could
either be true or false in terms of objective reality. However
any such core would be so nebulous, for example a statement that
there is a spiritual reality, as to be almost meaningless. Only
the details of the faith give form to the religion. What this
means in summary is that it is beyond question that, at the very
least, there is a vast amount of delusion in religion.
Sometimes this point is obscured by reference to a 'real'
supernatural force that has a false nature and a deceiving
intent. So, for example, rather than saying that the Catholic
girl was hallucinating the evangelical might say that she was
possessed by a, real, evil spirit that showed her the vision of
the Virgin Mary, in 'reality', in order to trick her into
worshipping Mary and not Jesus. Or, they might claim that
statues of holy cows weeping 'tears' of blood in Hindu areas are
genuinely weeping blood that is produced by devil spirits and
can actually be objectively seen. On this basis all religion
considered 'false' by a religious person could be considered by
him/her as Satanic but even the most ardent anti-Catholic
Protestant evangelical, believing the Pope to representing the
spirit of anti-Christ as some do, would not deny that there is
an element of natural, human hallucination, suggestion and
delusion in Catholic Christianity.
That agreed, the Religious Ape in Crisis is concerned
with how the delusional paradigm of religion in general evolved
from the time of Homo erectus and became the defining
attribute of Homo sapiens. The book shows that this
delusional component is not mental illness and can not be
diagnosed as such, which is why psychologists are baffled by how
very religious people are so normal and balanced in their
everyday lives. Religion is a natural part of what Man is, in
the same way, though not the same extent, that being built for
speed is part of what makes a cheetah a cheetah. Thereafter the
book examines the genetic base to this expression and its basic
roots in neurology, biochemistry, physiology, psychology, social
psychology and sociology. The fundamental analytic methodology
has however been anthropological, both physical and social.
Anthropologists are usually atheists and rarely share the
beliefs that they 'study'. This seems to me, in one sense, a
contradiction in terms. You can not begin to understand faith
unless you have faith. Whilst you can study faith from a
rational point of view, such a study will be limited in its
understanding of faith. Love is an emotion and so is faith. To
study romantic love is one thing but evolutionary psychology,
neurology and physiology can never understand romantic love. To
do that you have first to fall in love. One can imagine a couple
in love being wired up to all kinds of machines that can and do
now record the scientific reality of romantic love, such as
changes in brain wave patterns, hormonal secretions (e.g.
oxytocin) both short term and longer term, biochemical changes,
heart beat and pupil dilation. The scientist would still not
understand romantic love as an emotional experience, for that
love must be experienced. Academic study can shed much light on
the subject but can never communicate an understanding of what
it is to be in love. That has to be experienced. Everybody would
agree with that. As faith is like love the atheist
anthropologist is in a dilemma, for he has excluded himself from
an empathetic understanding of the people he is studying.
The best approach is to be completely open to both
perspectives: to still retain the objective, outside
perspective, but yet believe in the belief system being studied.
The trick is to keep simultaneous hold of both the objective,
scientific, out there, perspective and the subjective experience
of faith. It is not easy, but it can be done.
In the book religion is treated as an illusion by, for
example, suggesting that in specific instances it is so: e.g.
predicting the migration of buffalo by ritual trance or
believing that a Flood covered Mt. Everest in physical water. I
also say that religion is based on imagination but that is in
the context of the scientific book and of my usage of the word
'religion' in the book, as described above. This focuses only on
the natural history of religion and avoids becoming embroiled
with the actual reality or unreality of spirits as well as that
would make the book impossible to follow.
Furthermore I stress how Man makes religion real through his
belief. A delusional succour can therefore provide a succour
that is not delusional. This I prove by endless statistics of
the benefits of religious belief in terms of overcoming stress,
better health and so on. The irony is that Man evolved to be a
creature of faith but then developed science. The tension this
causes, I do not attempt in the book to resolve as to attempt
this would involve another book.
I do not take it upon myself in the book to advocate a
'necessary lie' or an 'as if we believe it' religion rather like
the arrogance of intellectual Monarchists who dismiss the
concept of royalty for themselves but recommend it for the
masses. This is because as I stress in my book religion without
a real faith is not religion and won't work as religion does. No
adult prays to Father Christmas or would seek succour from him
in a crisis. I do not recommend belief in an illusion in the
book, all I do is point out how the 'illusion' is part of what
we are genetically and the perils of its being ignored.
The book is about the natural history of religion not the
veracity of individual religious beliefs, rather the book is
about a developing crisis that September 11th 2001 illustrated
only too well. @copyright: Edmund Law 1999
The Religious Ape In Crisis by Edmund Law
Published by Paragon - 315 pages - Paperback
ISBN 0 9536795 0 0
Orders may be placed via Amazon.co.uk
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