The Demythologists Inquiry - Mental Illness and Religious Fanaticism

 

I want to explore the brilliant idea that will move us towards tolerance, understanding, and world peace: the threat of burning of the Quran that was scheduled for Saturday, Sept 11th, 2010.

For those of you who wonder if our mighty Bible, God’s holy and infallible Word is “real”, pay close attention: the book is a real object, but the meaning of the Bible is purely symbolic. It has no more intrinsic value or meaning than any other book. Spiderman comics, Snoopy and Charlie Brown, and the Bible – they are all equivalent. They are books with stories and messages written by people with a message – not the invisible man.

The additional meaning that a specific book has is based on our symbolic-emotional connection – how we feel about the book in question. Emotions are what super-glue meaning to any book – especially a religion’s bible.

The difference is that most of us realize that Spiderman is a story. But because our brains are susceptible to religious fanaticism, we tend to take the Bible as news, fact, reality – the Law - God’s holy and infallible Word.

Both the Bible and the Quran are birthed from the same form of mental illness – religious fanaticism – paranoid delusions of an all seeing, all knowing invisible man with a very bad temper. If he catches you picking up sticks on Saturday – KABAM – you’re out.

This powerful mental symbol that the bible is based on is what we as a global society call God – the brain delusion that there is an invisible man who is making a list and checking it twice – deciding whether or not to send people to heaven or hell – the ill tempered Santa Clause God. A condoned form of mental illness.

The problem is that this supposed all powerful, all knowing God can’t even predict the simplest events that will effect millions of people, like the flooding in Pakistan, or the car bomb that blew up today in Russia.

Furthermore, this supposedly compassionate God seems to be bent our human destruction, punishment, pain, suffering. For me, God represents the ultimate abusive parent, supposedly able to help, but not helping; choosing instead to exact endless punishments for ambiguous, imaginary transgressions.

All religions have stories of doomsday – predictions of the end of the physical world. It is hypothesized that these stories were actually born out of our ancestors experiencing catastrophic natural disasters such as volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes and the like, and attributing those events to God’s dissatisfaction with their (often sexual) behaviors.  

For example, it’s been postulated that the eruption of Mount Krakatoa helped to trigger a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims who believed the eruption was God’s answer to Muslims who allowed themselves to be led astray by Western culture and modern Civilization.  

What does this tell us? That our brains are self centered and self important – and always have been. Billions of people around the world believe that they are so important, that the end of the world will happen in their lifetime – currently predicted to be 2012. Yes, we are so important that, arguably the biggest even in the history of the planet – the end of the planet – will happen before our eyes. We’re so important, that we will have a front row seat, to see people who don’t believe what we believe get swept away by the impetuous wrath of our Santa Clause God.

Not to mention the fact that true believing Christians have been predicting the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus in their lifetime for the past 2000 years.

But how did sex become the bad-guy for all of societies ills? Well, people are always having sex, so anytime the elders looked for the “cause” of the disaster, somebody was having illicit sex with somebody they weren’t supposed to. That’s what we mammals do.

For some reason, this angers God. My guess is he’s not getting laid. If he was getting laid, research from the Bonobo monkeys (who have tons of sex everyday) shows that lots of sex equals little to no violence within the species, and no murder. Where there is ample access to sex, there is ample peace.

Unfortunately, genetically, we all come from the same sexually active ancestors who were living in  the Rift Valley of Africa, some 175000 years ago. They were sexually active and adventurous, soft wired with the desire for companionship, and had a strong need to belong to a group. Their brains like our brains, are highly symbolic. Before there was language, there were symbols, shapes, and images that triggered strong emotional responses. Those responses go from tribe, to bloodline, to religious line, to national line, to ideological line, and so on.

Religion and the religious experience has co-opted brain function. God it is not a reality – its a symbol. That’s why, if you ask 100 people what God is, they will give you one hundred different answers. Clearly, God is symbolic.  We have religious experiences because our brains are susceptible to them, not because religion comes from God. Religion and religious experiences have come from our superstitious ancestors who lacked explanations for catastrophic events – other than to use the science of the day – “God”.

We continue to suffer the radical limitations of our ancestor’s brains. Even though culture, the planet, technology, science and the world, has entirely changed, our brains are slow to catch up.

Our brains are best suited for Africa, 400,000 years ago. But we live in 2010.

When our emotional brain is triggered, as in the case when there is a threat to burn a symbolically “holy” book, it will often overrule our rational mind.

Rationally, a Quran is an old school comic book – dolling out threats and moral rules and laws from an ill tempered Santa Clause – who tells people what to do and when to do it. It is just like our bible.

Quran burning is a symbolic issue, and unconsciously at least, Pastor Terry Jones understands this. Burning the Quran is not about burning a book – its a symbolic act regarding disrespecting another’s symbolic religious beliefs.

The real issue here is that a religiously mentally ill person like Pastor Terry Jones, who has suffered tremendous abuse as a child, is getting any airtime at all.

If we were to be harshly scientific, and hook Mr. Jones’ brain to a fMRI, we would see that he is suffering from some kind of brain dysfunction as, I would argue, most fanatics are.  He is not “himself.” He is being run by his emotional/religious brain centers, and they lack the ability to reason and to control emotions.

Furthermore, if he is praying to god, he is speaking to these unconscious, emotional parts of his own brain, that have been informed by his own experiences of neglect and childhood abuse. He may believe he’s talking to “God” but in reality, he’s talking to his own abused brain. Once again, this would be easy to confirm through a simple fMRI.  

Our African brains are susceptible to following crazy, charismatic leaders. For every cult-leader like Mr. Jones, there are followers who will stand behind them, to the ends of the earth. That all makes sense with an earth was believed to be flat, and a 250 miles circumference represented the edge of the planet.

Furthermore, just because our ancestored believed the earth was flat doesn’t mean the earth was actually flat.  Beliefs – what you and I believe about reality – are irrelevant to the way things actually are.

In fact, back in our African days, people just over the mountain were considered aliens, evil, bad, and wrong. It makes no rational sense now that technology and air travel has quite literally wired the planet together.

Unfortunately, cults such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism,  have hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, who listen intently to the words of their now dead, delusional, brain damaged ancestors as if it their words have special meaning. They do. The words mean that the people who wrote them were quite crazy.

Really, you sat in a cave without food or water, and somehow an angel spoke to you about God and told you to write it all down. Really?

To have that kind of experience, all you have to do is go to Burning Man.

However, within each major cult there exists radical factions with leaders and followers- which I would consider the good Pastor to be one of. A radical, delusional cult.

Contentiousness is part of the human brain that we also inherited from our African ancestors. We can be social, get along, but seldom will we agree about anything – much less unify around a set of religious ideals.

To me, the fact that we as a culture continue to believe / not believe in the invisible man is beyond my imagination.  Somehow, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, globally we continue to believe in Santa Clause, and continue to give credence and reverence to others who believe in Santa Clause.

In this sense, religion truly is a mental illness – a delusion affecting billions of people.

Back to the nutty pro-pastor – who says Islam is of the devil – and they are sending millions of people to hell. The Pastor’s ideas of heaven and hell fall into a category II mythology – which is the idea of the world being involved in a struggle of good over evil, light over darkness. A category II mythology is standard fiction in all world religions, and most cults. Even tantra believes that there is a struggle of good over evil.

On the planes of Africa, when there was no electricity, no permanent housing, no guaranteed food supply, and a wealth of predators, the biggest struggle everyday was surviving night.

Our ancestors didn’t know that the earth was simply blocking the light of the sun when it was night. They thought the sun disappeared and gave way to darkness. Everyday was seen as an epic struggle of light over dark, good over evil. And as the nights grew longer, so did the peril. This is why the changing of the seasons are so seeped in traditions – religion began as a basic teaching of the cycles of life, and why the circle is such a strong cross cultural image.

All of our category II myths come from this basic story. It’s a fiction that has been passed down for tens of thousands of years.  

Like most other Christians, the good pestor believes that the end of times is upon us, and he has to do his part to make sure Jesus comes back soon. Of course, George Bush tried to cause the end of times with one of the most powerful armies in the world by attacking Iraq. That didn’t work out so well.

The Pastors actions illustrate just how crazy and closed minded fanatical religious thinking is. Fortunately, at least for the time being, the voice of reason has taken hold of Pastor Terry Jones’ brain, and his pre-frontal cortex has come back on-line.

Whether the Quran is ultimately burned or not, we as a critically thinking society have to ask ourselves why we continue to give such power to religious fanaticism, a form of mental illness, and the angry yet impotent Santa Clause god that we all believe in.