The God Gene

    A year or so ago I published an article in Dome of Glass (Q: What’s the Difference Between Paranormal and Horseshit? A: None) that detailed my attitude toward Supernatural Phenomena. In it I noted that despite the literary establishment’s, media’s,  and entertainment industry’s fascination with UFOs, psychics, ghosts, visitors from outer space, children with ESP, ladies prone to spontaneous combustion, Sasquatches, the Loch Ness Monster, and Big Foot, all these entities suffer from the same fatal flaw ─ they don’t exist.
    I also pointed out that the sort of people most likely to believe in such dark, primitive hogwash are the same ones who regularly prostrate themselves before one god or another, patiently suffer through the tedious preachings of semi-literate sermonizers, dance and scream and wiggle their butts when the ecstasy of religion is upon them, and dutifully tithe their hard-earned dollars to the money -grubbing charlatans who infest late night television.
    To cut to the heart of the matter, the impulse that leads most of humanity to believe in exorcisms and aliens, in witchcraft, poltergeists, psychics and teleportation, is the same impulse that leads them to believe in devils, demons, angels, and prophets; in immortality and miracles; in virgin births and Sons of God and resurrections and anal-compulsive frauds who take a personal interest in male foreskins, bathroom rituals, and the consumption of pork and who claim to be on intimate speaking terms with a nebulous character called Allah.

                                            Why are people religious?

    Why do presumably rational adults reject the poor Easter Bunny but passionately believe such self-evident crap as the miracle healing powers of Lourdes and pay heed to the rantings of Imams and cult leaders who at best are delusional schizophrenics, at worst, manipulative liars?
    The late anthropologist Weston La Barre, in a brilliantly concise summary, stated

A monstrous unsurrendered infantile omnipotence is the ultimate
paradigm of God and the first of his many psychosexual metamorphoses

    By this La Barre meant that belief in a benevolent "All-father" ─ Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, Zeus, Odin, what have you ─ represents a displacement into adulthood of one’s experience as a infant when a cry of discomfort brought instant solace or a whine of hunger brought instant nourishment.
    Thus, according to La Barre, when a religious man yearns for something ─ love, success, safety, immortality, food, protection, victory ─ he prays to his god in a fashion analogous to an infant bawling to its parent. And if the god or parent fails to deliver the goods it simply indicates that the prayer didn’t have sufficient Faith to suit the deity’s taste...so he just starts praying and bawling all over again.
    Although I’ve always been found of La Barre’s insight, backed as it was by his encyclopedic erudition and profound knowledge of the thousands of bizarre religions that humanity has subscribed to over its long and checkered past, I feel that belief in god is not merely an unconscious clinging to the Golden Age of Babyhood ─ that infantile Garden of Eden where the trees blossom year round and every need is effortlessly satisfied by the simple wanting of it.
    To me there’s a more fundamental factor at work, namely, that: mankind’s propensity for religion, that is to say, the worship of nonexistent entities, is a species-specific Darwinian adaptation. It is my opinion that buried deep within the DNA of homo sapiens is a gene, call it the God Gene, that programs men to BELIEVE in an all-powerful deity no matter how transparently ridiculous that belief may be.
    There’s no question that humanity’s religious instinct is one of the most powerful unifying social forces in the human catalog.
    Look at the record.
    Religion trumps race and friendship and brotherly love. It trumps loyalty to one’s children, one’s parents, one’s family, and one’s country. It can even trump that most basic of animal instincts ─ the will to survive ─ as evidenced by Japan’s Kamikaze pilots and the Muslim suicide bombers that currently plague the world.
    City-States, Nations, and Civilizations have risen and fallen in lock step with the vagaries of their constituent populations’ commitment to a particular religion. At present we are witness to the ominous growth of Islamic fanaticism and the concurrent decline of the West as it abandons its Christian roots in favor of a hedonistic secularism.
    Two of history’s most spectacular religious phenomena took place in the 20th century with the meteoric rise and catastrophic collapse of the non-theological religions of Communism and Nazism. The psychopathic messiahs who created these religions ─ Hitler, Lenin, Stalin ─ imagined that they could function as living gods. But their religions were doomed to fail precisely because one cannot replace an immortal, all-knowing, ghostly, make-believe god like Jehovah or Allah with a mortal, flesh-and-blood man no matter how deep that man’s psychosis, no matter how many monuments he builds to himself, no matter into what mindless rages he inspires the mob with his oratory or terrifies the mob with his secret police.
    Of course, a mortal can satisfy the God Gene...provided he’s been dead for a sufficiently long time to be transported to heaven or, alternately, like a Pharaoh, to be mystically endowed, post-mortem, with eternal life by his shamans so that his "soul" (another imaginary construct) can be transplanted into a successor’s body.
    It took a few centuries, but Jesus and Mohammed, to take two prominent cases, were successfully fairy-taled into non-existent paradises, there to sit for all eternity at the right hand of their non-existent Daddies surrounded by troops of non-existent angels. But living, breathing men cannot fill the bill for long no matter how paranoid, sadistic, and narcissistic they are. One can deceive the people for a while, but Real Gods do not sit on toilets, piss in the bushes, get stinking drunk, trip over pebbles, put their trousers on one leg at a time, or suffer from syphilis or spotted leprosy.
    I’m well aware that most of the earth’s human population believes in some sort of supreme being or committee of supreme beings. After all, the six billion of us who are currently taking up space on the globe and the few hundreds of billions who preceded us and now belong to the Silent Majority have been kneeling to, praying to, offering sacrifices to, begging forgiveness of, listening to sermons about, and generally kissing the asses of current or deceased deities since our foremothers descended from the trees and began peeling carrots and cooking chicken soup.
    And I certainly don’t doubt the depth of passion and sincerity and certitude of those who worship imaginary beings.
    The evidence is everywhere.
    Why else would believers in one imaginary being spend so much time and effort murdering, imprisoning, torturing, proselytizing, conquering, and burning at the stake those who believe in a different imaginary being?
    Aren’t Passion and Faith and Certitude proof of the worthiness of every sect, cult, and world-religion that’s bubbled forth from the cesspool of some lunatic’s mind no matter how bloodthirsty its members or absurd its rituals or disastrous its teachings or insane its acolytes?
    Surely the Islamic world have collapsed long since if Mohammed hadn’t taught his followers the precise way to wash up after taking a crap.
    And wouldn’t we all be living like savages if Moses hadn’t brought down a pair of large stone tablets from Mt. Sinai after chatting with a burning bush?
    And could Europe possibly have achieved such glories as World War I and II and the Holocaust without men like Torquemada to set Christian civilization on the path to righteousness during the Spanish Inquisition with the aid of a few thousand auto-da-fés?
    And how could ancient Phoenicia possibly have prospered if its priests hadn’t had the foresight to mandate the sacrifice of children to the god Moloch?
    And wouldn’t the Aztec state have been destroyed long before the Spaniards showed up if Aztec priests hadn't secured its safety by ordaining the creation of mountains of sacrificial human skulls?
    In his book, The Ghost Dance, Weston La Barre poses this simple question: "Do earnestness or energy prove moral truth?"
    Most people I’ve met think they do.
    Most people Believe with a capital B; have Faith with a capital F.
    I’m sure it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy and loving inside (and ready to wring the neck of anyone who doesn’t agree with them).
    As for me, I confess to being some kind of mutant who happened to be born without a single God Gene to my name
    I apologize for my infirmity. But don’t try to reform me. It’s hopeless. I mean, I’d as soon argue politics with a Liberal as discuss religion with a Believer.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

 

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Comments

  • 6/13/2011 1:43 PM Loren wrote:
    I've always thought that people adopt religion for 2 reasons:
    1. Arrogance. The deep belief that they are so special that they couldn't possible just expire. That they have a divine "purpose" and "reason to be here" because the alternative is just something they cannot accept.
    2. Simple stinky fear of death/the unknown. Being the only creature with an innate sense of our own unavoidable demise is genuinely frightening, and it helps people to live in a constant state of denial/ignorant bliss when it comes to this uncomfortable truth to believe in a life continued after death.
    Reply to this
  • 6/15/2011 11:12 AM Norm wrote:
    Great article Pop.
    I believe that prayer actually works. Not because a God is pleased and answers it, but, because the "Self talk" helps one formulate what one wants to happen and keeps the goal fresh and in focus.
    Reply to this
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