Tacoma Atheists

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

Did you know that Temple Baptist Church was built on land that sold for 57 cents, the amount saved by a little girl that had been turned away from their Sunday school?  Did you hear about the guy who died in his sleep, killed by his own farts? Can you believe it?! Elvis Presley said: “The only thing a n—– can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” Guess what — Scholars at the Smithsonian have uncovered writings of Nostradamus that relate to Barack Obama!

The above statements are false. But that hasn’t kept them from circulating the internet for years. Each of them is heart of a viral email, which means each has some quality that makes people forward it, over and over and over. The first is a kind of message commonly known as “glurge,” too-sweet-to-be-true stories that nevertheless give many of us a warm feeling or even chills. The second makes us laugh and piques our sense of curiosity. The third plays with our contradictory fascination with celebrities, which includes a desire to tear them down. The fourth appeals to our yearning for magic. These stories all are drawn from the urban legends fact-finding site, Snopes.com. What is the common theme?  Emotional arousal.

Comparing religion to chain mail seems crass, but the kinship is real. And as Francis Bacon said, “The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.”

Viral email has a variety of reproductive strategies. Like computer viruses, many chain mail messages contain explicit “copy-me commands.” Some promise us good luck if we forward the message to ten people before the day is up — or a week of happiness, or even prosperity. Some threatens us with bad luck if we don’t.  Some tries to shame us: “If you care about your friends, you’ll send this information about cervical cancer/visa fraud/brown recluse spiders…”   But most viral mails simply contain something that makes us want to pass them on. They may make us laugh or feel validated and righteous. Many delight us. A few tap our sense of magic or mystery or transcendence.

The term “viral marketing” has itself gone viral recently, popularized by books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, or Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Corporations have discovered that their best sales staff are satisfied customers, and they’ve been experimenting: Can we figure out the formula for starting a fad?  Can we seed the virus with a few hired hands who create buzz? The Heath brothers offer communications professionals a simple formula that they call the “Six Principles for SUCCESs”: SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES.[i] Look at the formula. Now think back about what I said regarding the boundaries of supernaturalism and the born again experience. The fit is remarkably tight.

In the field of medicine, epidemiologists study patterns of contagion. They might track, for example, how an influenza virus spread across one region and how it jumped from country to country in the bodies of specific carriers. Based on the way infections fan out, they may even be able to identify the “epicenter” of a disease.  Some of the tools of epidemiology are now being applied to study the spread of viral ideas.

Scholars debate whether viral ideas can be thought of as discrete self-replicating information modules known as “memes” (like genes) with humans as passive hosts, or whether our brains take a more active role in reconstructing contagious ideas from hazy blueprints. Either way, the ideas get transmitted through established social networks. But whereas diseases spread passively, meaning people rarely try to infect each other, viral ideas spread by harnessing the human desire to share what we know and to learn from each other. They spread horizontally within a generation, and vertically from generation to generation. That is why specific religions are concentrated in one part of the world or another and children tend to have the same religion as their parents.

For developmental reasons, children are particularly susceptible to simply accepting the ideas of their parents and community. If a parent says stoves burn you, cars can squish you, and bathing keeps you from getting itchy, kids tend to do best if they simply trust what their parents say. Nature has designed children to be “credulous.” This allows them to learn from the mistakes of their elders. It makes them more efficient in acquiring valuable information and adapting to cultural norms. It is also why evangelical parents are encouraged to convert their children. Research on identity development shows that if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave. Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)

A successful religion needs to have the qualities of a successful virus. In a changing environment, this means it must have the ability to mutate and adapt. In the past, religions spread largely by edict and conquest. This is how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and into the Americas. Today, though, religion is perceived as an individual choice and religions must gain share by attracting adherents.  This is why, today, the religions that are gaining mindshare are those that have good marketing, high birthrates, and what economists call “appealing club goods”. In the current environment, Christianity has been able to produce offshoots that need no edict or conquest.

Significantly, the religions that are growing right now are ones with strong copy-me commands. Evangelical Christianity is centered on what Christians call the Great Commission: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost.”  In addition, just as the Roman church latched onto the strategy of competitive breeding (keep women home, sanctify a high birth rate), so Evangelicals have begun to explicitly add this form of copy-me command to the mix. By contrast, modernist Christianity is more often centered on what Christians call the Great Commandment: “Love the Lord your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and… love your neighbor as yourself.” In a straight up competition, the copy-me command wins out, and in fact, evangelicals are gaining mindshare, while modernists are losing it.

One of the fastest changing aspects of our world is the growth of information. As knowledge grows, some varieties Christianity accept new scientific or historical findings and reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions in light of our best understanding of the world around us. Tangentially, this is the approach taken by Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th Dalai Lama has said:

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”

This kind of adaptation is common for forms of Christianity that, like Buddhism, are more centered in praxis (practice) than belief. For those that are centered in belief, adapting to new knowledge is more difficult, and the survival strategy more often is a sort of fundamentalist retrenchment. Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God, describes this retrenchment in the Abrahamic religions.

The need to adapt may seem at odds with the recent success of fundamentalism, but in actual fact, fundamentalism is an adaptation to a changing world. Rather than revising dogmas, fundamentalists develop stronger defenses against external threats to a traditional homeostasis. An extreme example of this can be seen in the case of the Amish or Hassidic Jews: the belief system sustains itself relatively unchanged by engaging people to re-create an ancestral environment in which the belief system emerged.

But most theological fundamentalists have a more hybrid approach. They protect their children from external influence by home schooling or parochial schools, but don’t mind accessing creationist materials from interactive websites. They provide in-house social services that include pop psychology. They promote hierarchy and sexism but are willing to have women and children as spokespersons for these views. They play up the risks of inquiry and doubt and yet use scientific findings to make their arguments convincing. Fundamentalist populations resist ideological change, but they have learned to exploit popular culture, best business practices, new technologies, and even scholarship itself to maintain the survival of their beliefs.

Since a virus and host fit together like a lock and key, understanding viral ideas helps us to understand the human mind, and vice versa. Retro-viruses and influenza mutate rapidly, which makes it hard to develop immunizations against them. On the spectrum of religions, Christianity shows a similar flexibility, regularly spinning off new sects, denominations, and even non-denominational renegades. Christianity has adapted to a broad range of human minds and cultures, a strategy that has resulted in success beyond the wildest visions of the patriarchs.

Learn More:
“Memetic Lexicon”
“Virus of the Mind,” Richard Brodie
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 253-257.

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

“… I prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum.  When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself. I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy.” — Cathy

“Something began to flow in me — a kind of energy… Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went.” — Colson

“It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving… I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body.” — Jean

“I felt something real warm overwhelming me. It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity… a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped… and ran.” — Helen

(from Conway & Siegelman, Snapping, pp. 24, 32, 12, 31)

For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known. A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy — this is the stuff of spiritual transformation. Once experienced, it is unforgettable. Many people can recall small details years later.  In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities. A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children. A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.

This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation. A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen. Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying “the sinner’s prayer” may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship. Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues. Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy.

What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity.  In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant. Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs.  It requires a specific social or emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary.

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have written an excellent overview of what they call sudden personality change, or “snapping.”  The first edition of their book, Snapping focused on small counter-cultural cults and self-help groups that sprang up in the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, EST, Mind Dynamics, Unification Church, Scientology, and others. When asked about whether Evangelical Christianity might fit the pattern, Conway and Siegelman were reluctant to say yes.

Today they admit, “In America today, increasingly, that line [between a cult and a legitimate religion] cannot be categorically drawn… Our research raised serious questions concerning the techniques used to bring about conversion in many evangelical groups.”

Conversion is a process that begins with social influence. As sociologists like to say, our sense of reality is socially constructed. We will come back to this later. Suffice for now to say that missionary work typically begins with simple offers of friendship or conversations about shared interests. As a prospective converts are drawn in, a group may envelope them in warmth, good will, thoughtful conversations and playful activities, always with gentle pressure toward the group reality.

In revival meetings or retreats, semi-hypnotic processes draw a potential convert closer to the toggle point. These include including repetition of words, repetition of rhythms, evocative music, and Barnum statements (messages that seem personal but apply to almost everyone– like horoscopes). Because of the positive energy created by the group, potential converts become unwitting participants in the influence process, actively seeking to make the group’s ideas fit with their own life history and knowledge. Factors that can strengthen the effect include sleep deprivation or isolation from a person’s normal social environment. An example would be a late night campfire gathering with an inspirational story-teller and altar call at Child Evangelism’s “Camp Good News.”

These powerful social experiences culminate in conversion, a peak experience in which the new converts experience a flood of relief. Until that moment they have been consciously or unconsciously at odds with the group center of gravity. Now, they may feel that their darkest secrets are known and forgiven.   They may experience the kind of joy or transcendence normally reserved for mystics. And they are likely to be bathed in love and approval from the surrounding group, which mirrors their experience of God.

The otherworldly mental state that I refer to as the domain of mystics is known in clinical situations as a “transcendence hallucination,” but this term fails to reflect how normal and profound the experience can be as a part of human spirituality. The transcendence hallucination is an acute sense of connection with a reality that lies beyond and behind this natural plane. It typically lasts for just a few seconds or minutes but may leave profound impression that lasts a lifetime. For Christians it may be interpreted as an encounter with a supernatural person — Jesus, or an angel. (A seeker of the paranormal might be convinced of an encounter with aliens or spirits.) More often, a person gets a disembodied sense of connection accompanied by intense feelings of joy, wonder, peacefulness or alternately terror, depending on the context.

Transcendence hallucination can be triggered by neurological events like a seizure, stroke, or migraine aura; or by a drug such as psilocybin, but it also can be triggered by over or under-stimulation of the brain. Some mystics from the past have described or even drawn these events with such impressive detail that a diagnostic hypothesis is possible. Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, wrote of the intense pain accompanying her visions and created scores of drawings that show the visual field distorted in keeping with a migraine aura.

In modern times, author Karen Armstrong describes the seizures that she first thought to be triggered spiritually. In discussing an altered state known as Kundalini awakening, one migraine sufferer commented,

“I usually don’t follow any of the mystic/esoteric stuff, but I must say it is kind of strange to see all my symptoms lined up like that outside of a western/medical context.”

Let me emphasize, though, that these altered states don’t depend on some kind of neurological damage or pathology. They can be unforgettable, peak experiences for normal people, long sought and hard won by those who care about the spiritual dimension of life. Sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, rhythmic drumming, or crowd dynamics have all been used systematically to elicit altered states in normal people.

Since we humans are meaning-makers to the core, such a powerful experience demands an explanation. But for most of human history, naturalistic explanations simply were unavailable. “Lacking understanding and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these abrupt changes in awareness to a source outside the body. They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communications that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time and earthly matter.” Needless to say, some supernatural hypotheses are more compatible with what we know about ourselves and the world around us than others.

In an evangelical conversion context like a revival meeting or missionary work, religious interpretations of the snapping experience are provided both before and after it occurs. These explanations become the foundation stones on which whole castles of beliefs later will be constructed. The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly, which gives them the power to now transform the convert’s world view in accordance with their own theology. Conversion activities can be harmful because all too often authorities use this power to promote a kind of tribalism that is built around exclusive truth claims and Iron Age moral priorities. The unforgettable born again experience gets used to justify beliefs that may be factually or morally bankrupt.

The conversion process as I have described it sounds sinister, as if manipulative groups and hypnotic leaders deliberately ply their trade to suck in the unsuspecting and take over their minds. I don’t believe this is usually the case.

Rather, natural selection is at play. Over millennia of human history, religious leaders have hit on social/emotional techniques that work to win converts, just as individual believers have hit on spiritual practices they find satisfying and belief systems that fit how we process information. Techniques that don’t trigger powerful spiritual experiences simply die out. Those that do get used, refined, and handed down.

With few exceptions the evangelists, from mega-church ministers to “friendship missionaries,” are unaware of the powerful psychological tools they wield. They are persuasive in part because they genuinely believe they are doing good. After all, they have their own born again experiences to convince them that they are promoting the Real Thing. Consider, for example, the Apostle Paul, whose Damascus Road event (possibly a temporal lobe seizure) transformed his moral priorities and sustained a lifetime of missionary devotion. What decent person wouldn’t want to share the secret to healing and happiness? The challenge is trying to figure out exactly what that secret is. As I say to my daughters, it is not enough to be well intentioned — even joyfully, generously so. We also have to be right.

Essentials:
Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Personality Change

Iona Miller, “Fear and Loathing in the Temporal Lobes” http://neurotheology.50megs.com/whats_new_9.html (excellent bibliography).

Sharon Begley. “Your Brain on Religion” Newsweek May 7, 2001. http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm

The Gary C. Booker Mental Self Defense Foundation is putting this on (Aug. 7th - 9th, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia), but I can’t access the site from where I am now. Why? I don’t know. Here’s something from another site.

Even after many centuries of being disappointed and miserably failed by organized religion, Black Americans continue to be extremely devout and show blind faith in self-destructive ways.  Religious fundamentalism and bigotry continue to promote sectarianism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism in Black American communities. Mental Liberation is the final frontier of the civil rights movement.

Join us as we work toward a more secular and rational Black America.

Topics for the 2009 Conference:

1. Why a secular solution to teen pregnancy in black America is needed.
2. The role of the black church in homophobia
3. Where was God during slavery and segregation?
4. Misconceptions about Charles Darwin and race
5. How Black stereotypes have become a second religion
6. Why the Black church receives too much credit for the civil rights movement
7. Why the Black church has alienated the black male
8. The imbalanced relationship between the black female and the black church

E-mail blacknontheists2009@garybooker.org for more information.

Thanks, RR! From the TNT:

About 24,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses from throughout Western Washington will converge on the Tacoma Dome during the next two weekends for their annual district conventions.

The first convention will start Thursday and end Saturday – starting and ending a day earlier than usual – because of a scheduling conflict with another event at the Dome on Sunday. Convention spokesman Henry Schwerdtfeger said organizers for the Witnesses and Dome staff members came to a mutual agreement over the schedule.

The second convention will run on its customary Friday-through-Sunday schedule, July 3-5. Witnesses do not celebrate the July Fourth holiday.

Each three-day convention will draw about 12,000 people and spotlight the theme “Keep on the Watch!” Talks will focus on world developments in light of biblical prophecy. Witnesses believe these signs show “we are approaching the end of this system of things.”

Schwerdtfeger said the signs of the end include terrorism, economic collapse, divorce and abortion. He called the conventions a “three-day survival course to help families make wise decisions to survive the end of this system.”

As in 2007, Witnesses are going door-to-door during the three weeks before the meetings to attempt to invite every Western Washington household. There are about 34,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Washington, including an estimated 3,200 in Pierce County.

The meetings are free and open to the public; no offerings are collected. For more information, visit www.watchtower.org or call 206-295-2962.

“By the year 2000, we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God”
— Gloria Steinem

“Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.”

— Robert Green Ingersoll

“if you want to love, serve or help someone, you should never assume you know what they want, need or love.”

— KJ

Via the P-I.com:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MARYSVILLE, Wash.

New guidelines for volunteers in the Marysville School District stop them from promoting religious or political viewpoints.

Superintendent Larry Nyland issued the guidelines last week after a parent complained that a 19-year-old volunteer had offered her 11-year-old daughter a ride to church.

The Everett Herald reports the new guidelines allow volunteers to give brief answers if asked about their church. But volunteers cannot promote religion, ask students for contact information or invite them to events.

“I am so far beyond atheism, there isn’t a word in the English language dictionary to describe me.”

— Harlan Ellison

I have changed comment moderation. Here’s hoping spammers don’t get too carried away. But at least legit commenters won’t have to wait days for me to moderate them. Now you just have to enter a name and e-mail. Cheers, all.