Is Religious Experience All in One's Head?

I will be blunt: I increasingly view far right conservative Christians - and fundamentalist Muslims too - as suffering from some form of mental illness typified by fear of uncertainty, fear of change, fear of anything that rocks their artificial reality world construct.   A new book, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery” may lend credence to my somewhat cynical view of the deeply religious.  A piece in Salon looks at this book and the history of neuroscience it covers.   One possible finding?  The possible connection between religious experience and brain disturbances, especially epileptic seizures.  Here are some article highlights:

The answer may be epilepsy. At its most basic level epilepsy involves neurons firing when they shouldn’t and stirring up storms of electrical activity inside the brain. Neurons can misfire for many reasons. Some misfit neurons were born with misshapen membrane channels and can’t regulate the flow of ions in and out. Other times, when axons suffer damage, neurons start discharging spontaneously, like frayed electrical wires. Sometimes these disturbances remain local, and just one location in the brain goes on the fritz, a so-called partial seizure. In other cases, the seizure short-circuits the entire brain and leads to either a grand mal or a petit mal seizure. Grand mals (now called tonic-clonic seizures) start with muscular rigidity and end with the stereotypical thrashing and foaming; they’re what most of us think of when we think of epilepsy. Petit mals avoid the thrashing but usually cause “absences,” in which the victim freezes up and her mind goes blank for a spell.

[F]or some reason—perhaps because the nearby limbic structures get revved up—auras that originate in the temporal lobes feel emotionally richer and often supernaturally charged. Some victims even feel their “souls” uniting with the godhead. (No wonder ancient doctors called epilepsy the sacred disease.) 

Temporal lobe epilepsy has transformed other people’s lives in a similar way. All human beings seem to have mental circuits that recognize certain things as sacred and predispose us to feeling a little spiritual. It’s just a feature of our brains (Richard Dawkins excepted, perhaps). But temporal lobe seizures seem to hypercharge these circuits, and they often leave victims intensely religious, as if God has personally tapped them as witnesses. Even if victims don’t become religious, their personalities often change in predictable ways. They become preoccupied with morality, often losing their sense of humor entirely.

Based on these symptoms, especially the rectitude and sudden spiritual awakening, modern doctors have retrodiagnosed certain religious icons as epileptics, including Saint Paul (the blinding light, the stupor near Damascus), Muhammad (the trips to heaven), and Joan of Arc (the visions, the sense of destiny).

[W]hile epilepsy might well have induced their visions — the idea makes sense — it’s important to remember that Joan of Arc, Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and others also transcended their epilepsy. Probably no one but Joan would have rallied France, no one but Swedenborg would have imagined angels eating butter. As with any neurological tic, temporal lobe epilepsy doesn’t wipe someone’s mental slate clean. It simply molds and reshapes what’s already there.

What do readers think?  It certainly would explain the cause of sudden religious conversions that the Christofascists like to describe triumphantly. :-)

Does Religious Belief Atrophy Your Brain?

LOL! This story from Scientific American which theorizes that deep religious belief results in atrophy in the hippocampus portion of believers' brains is too funny in some ways. It certainly dovetails with my view that far right Christian conservatives are mentally challenged and abhor thinking - indeed, they want a sheep like existence where they are told what to do and what to think with absolutely no thought process involved. It also may help to explain the growing idiocy in the Republican Party as well. According to Wikipedia, the hippocampus plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation. It is also one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms. The symptoms also would seem to describe the Tea Party crowd as well. Here are some story highlights:
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“Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion.
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In this study, Owen et al. used MRI to measure the volume of the hippocampus, a central structure of the limbic system that is involved in emotion as well as in memory formation. . . . The study by Owen et al. is unique in that it focuses specifically on religious individuals compared to non-religious individuals. This study also broke down these individuals into those who are born again or who have had life-changing religious experiences.
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The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again.
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The authors offer the hypothesis that the greater hippocampal atrophy in selected religious groups might be related to stress. They argue that some individuals in the religious minority, or those who struggle with their beliefs, experience higher levels of stress. This causes a release of stress hormones that are known to depress the volume of the hippocampus over time.
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[A] person might perceive God to be punishing them and therefore have significant stress in the face of their religious struggle. Others experience religious struggle because of conflicting ideas with their religious tradition or their family. Even very positive, life-changing experiences might be difficult to incorporate into the individual’s prevailing religious belief system and this can also lead to stress and anxiety. Perceived religious transgressions can cause emotional and psychological anguish. . . . And all of these phenomena can have potentially negative effects on the brain.
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To me, Christianists clearly demonstrate an atrophied mindset when it comes to thinking. And just as they unthinkingly claim to follow the Bible, they latch onto other precepts that they clearly do not understand. A case in point? Bob Felton at Civil Commotion notes the Tea Party's bizarre admiration of Ayn Rand. In contrast to the Tea Party/Christianist/GOP resistance to thinking, Ayn Rand believed that “To think or not to think” is a moral question, and that the moral answer is “to think.” Obviously, this crowd may need to engage in more thinking and less blind obedience to mindless dogma. We were endowed with intelligence and an ability to reason. One of the biggest sins is to refuse to use this innate gift.

What Alabamians and Iranians Have in Common

I lived in Alabama for four years right after graduating from law school - in the Mobile area to be precise. While the state was certainly conservative back in that time era, based on the state's recent voting record and my experiences traversing the state after Hurricane Katrina to bring back evacuees the state seems to be lurching much farther to the lunatic far right fringe. A new Gallup study shows that the driving force for this phenomenon may likely be the strength of religious belief in Alabama as opposed to say Massachusetts. In fact, religious fervor in Alabama is roughly the same as that in Iran. Yes, I said Iran. Obviously, that is a frightening realization and perhaps also a reflection as to why Alabama ranks so low in terms of per capita income. In fact, the Gallup study revealed that with few exceptions, the least religious nations in the world were also the ones with the highest standards of living. The results also clearly show that the states that voted for McCain/Palin are the ones that are most religious and the ones with the lowest standards of living.
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One unanswered question is: does religious belief drive down a nation's standard of living or does a low standard of living encourage a high level of religiousity? Here are some highlights from the Gallup study:
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In 2006, 2007, and 2008, Gallup asked representative samples in 143 countries and territories whether religion was an important part of their daily lives. The accompanying map shows religiosity by country, ranging from the least religious to the most religious on a relative basis.
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[A] population's religiosity level is strongly related to its average standard of living. Gallup's World Poll, for example, indicates that 8 of the 11 countries in which almost all residents (at least 98%) say religion is important in their daily lives are poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 10 least religious countries studied include several with the world's highest living standards, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, and Japan.
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Lining up these percentages with those on our worldwide list allows us to match residents of the most religious states to the global populations with which they are similar in terms of religiosity. The results produce some interesting comparisons -- Alabamians, for example, are about as likely as Iranians to say religion is an important part or their lives.

New Survey Shows Religion is NOT an Inmutable Charateristic

In opposing gay rights and non-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation in particular, the mouth pieces of the Christian Right steadfastly contend in legal briefs and elsewhere that one’s sexual orientation is not an immutable trait or characteristic but rather is a matter of choice. Therefore, they argue, sexual orientation should have no legal protection. For the sake of argument, I say fine. However, let’s apply the same standard to religion. I suspect the Christianists would quickly want to sing a different song. Reports on the results of a new survey show that religion is like wise not immutable if that is the standard for legal protections (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022501182.html?hpid=moreheadlines). The fact is that more than forty percent of the respondents have changed their religious affiliation. Hear that Peter LaBarbera and Robert Knight?? Your argument is falling apart!! Among other interesting findings is that the Roman Catholic Church has been especially hard hit by defections, with a nearly 1/3 rate of attrition. Perhaps Benedict XVI’s attempt to return to the 1400’s will accelerate the trend. Here are some story highlights:

America has always been a competitive religious marketplace, but a major survey released yesterday shows a country increasingly exploring different faith identities and ways of worship. More than 40 percent of respondents told pollsters that they had changed their religious affiliation since childhood.

Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the survey confirms on a grand scale trends that demographers have noted for years: the slipping percentage of Protestants, now down to 51, and the rise of people who call themselves unaffiliated, now at 16 percent, up from similar surveys. The survey also lays out, just weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States, the Catholic Church's challenge here: no American faith group has lost more adherents. Sixty-eight percent of people raised Catholic still identify with their childhood denomination, compared with 80 percent of Protestants and 76 percent of Jews.

More than anything else in the poll, Pew highlighted the fluidity of identity, noting that every group is constantly gaining and losing members. Twenty-eight percent of Americans have left the group they were raised in, switching, for example, from Protestantism to Judaism or from the Orthodox faith to Catholicism. When people who have switched from one Protestant denomination to another are included, the number jumps to 44 percent.

The group that has grown the most is made up of those who are unaffiliated, including people who call themselves atheist and agnostic. Also included in this group are those who said they are "nothing in particular" -- some of whom went on to say religion is "very important" to them. Seven percent of survey respondents said they were raised as unaffiliated, less than half the percentage who call themselves unaffiliated today.

No doubt hate merchants, Pat Robertson and James Dobson will somehow blame the decline in religious belief and affiliation on the “homosexual agenda.”