Pray for Me, Doc!

Posted on January 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

I remember reading over the years about experiments funded by the mysterious Templeton Foundation that studied whether prayer could really heal. They’re odd experiments, in a way, since no scripture I know of claims anyone who prays can heal, much less at a distance, and no religion I know of has ever claimed prayer-healing proves the existence of God.

The New Testament certainly shows Jesus and (in the Book of Acts) his disciples walking around first-century Palestine healing sick people – usually by touching them, not praying for them, — but these signs are used to reveal the divine nature of Jesus and the Twelve, not everybody else. In fact, Simon Magus’ claim to be a healer in Acts is taken as evidence of evil.

So Christian scripture, at least, very much limits the ability to cure the sick to Jesus and his inner circle.

But there’s an understandable modern impulse to test the God hypothesis in a lab setting, and so we have a series of well-publicized prayer-healing experiments, described by Harvard neurohistorian (coolest job title ever) Anne Harrington in her recent article “The Placebo Effect: What’s Interesting for Scholars of Religion?” in Zygon.

In 1988, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital recruited a group of born-again Christians to pray for coronary patients. There was a control group of patients who were ignored. There was no overall prayer benefit detected in terms of mortality; however, the prayed-for group showed statistically significant improvements in 6 of 26 kinds of complications. Evangelicals site this study as a win for God, but the results were underwhelming.

Ten years later, a double-blind study of AIDS patients, also in San Francisco, was more encouraging. One group was prayed for based on a name and picture, while a control was not. Neither were told. In the end, the prayed-for group had slightly better outcomes than the control. God: a weak 2 points.

However, the best study yet, run by Dr. Herbert “Relaxation Response” Benson and published in 2006 in The American Heart, involving 2,000 patients at six sites, had a surprising outcome.

First, patients who were prayed for did not fare any better than those who were not. Second, a group of patients who were prayed for and told actually did worse than a group who’d been prayed for but kept in the dark.

Benson hypothesized that those who were told their doctors were seeking divine intervention for their coronary condition might have been freaked out.

What have we learned today, girls? Once again, God has evaded detection in the lab. And if you are a doctor and decide to assign a prayer group to cure a seriously ill patient — for God’s sake, don’t tell them!

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God on the Brain

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

We were looking at lab experiments demonstrating the healthful benefits of prayer and meditation. Other, less spiritually-minded researchers have approached religious phenomenon as a kind of pathology, much as Freud did.

In the 19th century, a link was noted between some kinds of epilepsy and religious fervor. This link was studied by Norman Geschwind at Boston’s V.A. Hospital in the 1970s, who claimed temporal lobe epilepsy could cause religious obsession.

A decade later, Canadian researcher Michael Persinger built a “God Helmet” that bombarded the temporal lobes of healthy people with an electrical storm and could fake – he claimed – a “spiritual” feeling. Persinger got a lot of attention for his helmet but an attempt in 2005 in Sweden to duplicate his findings failed. Atheist Richard Dawkins put the helmet on and didn’t feel anything but mild nausea.

Another team at the University of California at San Diego claimed to have identified the “God Spot,” a specific region of the frontal cortex that is overstimulated during religious ecstasy.

Meanwhile, psychiatrist Richard Strassman gained global attention for his claim that many so-called religious phenomenon were caused by dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a hallucinogenic compound occurring naturally in trace amounts in the brain.

And Dan Hamer at the National Cancer Institute inspired cover stories in both Time and Newsweek after isolating a specific gene called VMAT2 that he claimed correlated with “spirituality.” It mediated the production of neurotransmitters related to our moods, although only an atheist would think religion always makes people feel good.

Now we had a “God Gene” to go with the “God Spot.”

Then there was backlash as even committed materialists like Persinger and Hamer realized media were overstating the case. In a New Yorker article, Dr. Jerome Groopman concluded: “To believe that science is a way to decipher the divine, that technology can capture ‘God’s photograph,’ is to deify man’s handiwork.”

One methodological problem, of course, is that most religious people aren’t mystics, and it’s a long pilgrim’s progress from a nun in a tube to explaining a global social movement.

Even as the Dalai Lama himself addressed 14,000 neuroscientists at a conference on the topic of the “Neuroscience of Meditation” in 2006, a different Canadian team found not one but six regions activated by prayer, including the caudate nucleus (memory and love) and the insula (sensations), and concluded: “There is no single God spot, localized uniquely in the temporal lobe of the human brain.”

And one of the team members even compared such experiments to the Victorian pseudo-science of phrenology, which sought to explain behavior using skull shape.

Interestingly, while the researchers may have believed they were explaining God away, some of the nuns involved in the original SPECT scan studies themselves felt the opposite: excited God himself could be seen, at least indirectly.

Who’s right?

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This Is Your Brain on God

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 2 Comments

Happy New Year, Seekers! Welcome to another year of Searching for an Answer to the Ultimate Question.

The Big Banana has proved particularly slippery to locate in a lab, which doesn’t stop people from trying.

So far, lab tests for God have attacked religious phenomena from two flanks – as what William James in his classic Varieties Of Religious Experience called “healthy-minded” and “sick-minded.”

On the former track, studies in the 1960s showed church attendance correlated with better health. That this effect wasn’t due solely to social support was later verified in comparisons of secular vs. religious kibbutzim in Israel.

Also in the 1960s, Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard began to study the “relaxation response,” the physiological benefits of mental states such as prayer and meditation. And a generation later, as brain imaging equipment grew smaller and cheaper and the West rediscovered Tibet, meditating brains (including the Dalai Lama’s) were subject to even greater scrutiny. They were found to have higher baseline levels of activity in the left prefrontal lobe, the brain’s center of attention and well-being.

In addition, practiced meditators were calmer, less easily startled because their “amygdalas are less trigger-happy,” in the words of Harvard neurohistorian Anne Harrington.

Starting at the turn of the millennium, researchers shifted from observing states of relaxation to “explaining” religious phenomenon.

In a well-known experiment conducted in 2001 by a team at the University of Pennsylvania, meditators and nuns were strapped into a jet engine-like machine called a SPECT scanner and injected with radioactive dye at peak moments.

The scans also showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. More interestingly, there was decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, the region in the top rear of the brain responsible for orienting us in space.

Conclusion: the feelings of “unity” and “oneness” reported by mystics in many religions may be caused by prayer-induced spatial disorientation.

Speculation abounded, with one team of neuroscientists even suggesting that the Christian trinity and the historical evolution of religions mirrored the three parts of the human brain – the brain stem (survival), limbic/hippocampal (emotion), and neocortex. (In the 4th century, Augustine already made a connection between the trinity and a three-part human brain, although he claimed the cause-and-effect flowed the other way: that we mirrored God.)

One of the original SPECT researchers, Andrew Newberg, cautioned in a 2010 interview: “One could try to conclude one way or the other that maybe it’s the biology or maybe God’s really in the room, but the scan itself doesn’t really show that.”

Next Time: Is God just an epileptic brain lesion?!

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More Stark Truth — or Why Early Christian Women Preferred Not to Marry Greco-Roman Dorks

Posted on December 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

Before we were interrupted by the Little Baby Jesus, we were closing out a monologue on the socio-religious tour-de-force that is Rodney Stark’s 1996 study, “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries.”

So, how did it? To recap, Stark examines religion as a social phenomenon — because he’s a sociologist, yes, but also because he believes conversion itself is a social act. People don’t join new cults because they admire a dogma but rather “to align their religious status with that of their friends and relatives who already belong.” Early Christianity was more like Facebook than an Evangelical Lutheran Church of Minnesota sermon.

In economic terms, religion is a “collectively produced commodity” that gains in value as members give more. High barriers to entry help eliminate “free riders” and encourage members to contribute. “Sacrifice and stigma mitigate the free-rider problems faced by religious groups,” he says. “Commitment is energy.”

Early martyrs — who could become quite famous as a result of their witness — blasted a furious message in the desert sands that Christianity had the very highest value, at least to a few. What more can we give than our lives?

In its first few centuries, the Jesus movement also benefitted from weak and pluralistic pagan religion, which allowed gods to accumulate without demanding real loyalty (except as a political matter). And its primary appeal, Stark argues, would have been to Hellenized Jews stuck between their own tentative Judaism and a spiritually disappointing Greco-Roman culture.

Stark’s silver bullet is his persuasive appeal to common sense. He’s a radical demystifier. Turns out people join groups, including religions, for pretty good reasons: they know people, they’re not otherwise engaged, there aren’t a lot of freeloaders hanging around drinking their coffee.

And — in a fascinating section — Stark shows how the Jesus movement actually had dramatic health benefits. Plagues were frequent in the absurdly crowded, walled cities of the time, as were natural disasters. Drawing on the work of historians William H. McNeill and Hans Zinsser, Stark shows how basic medical care (washing clothes, providing water, pep talks) alone can raise survival rates 30%. Better neighbors, Christians emerged from chaos stronger than pagans, who tended to be self-centered in dark times:

“When disasters struck, the Christians were better able to cope, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival.”

Since the 1950s, sociologists such as Anthony F. C. Wallace noted that new religions often emerge from crises, as people watch the vivid failure of what we corporate cogsters call Business As Usual (BAU). Christianity was fresh and had a set of tenets that “made life meaningful even amid sudden and surprising death.”

Then there were the women. Famously, Stark argues that pre-Constantinian Christianity was actually appealing to women. To understand this point, we must ramjet back to the first- and second-century Mediterranean world. Whoosh. With me?

Greco-Roman families didn’t want girls and treated their YY-chromosomed spares to infanticide (something condoned by both Plato and Aristotle). Men in that world “found it difficult to relate to women,” and didn’t want to marry. (Sound familiar?) Fertility declined, as did the percentage of women in the population. Women who did marry became baby mills, which often killed them. Abortion often killed both mother and child.

Now contrast our early Jesus freaks. Like most Jews, they disallowed infanticide and abortion. Girl babies lived, and fewer mothers (also female) died. Giving oneself to Christ as a virgin — that is, staying happily single — was an acceptable life choice. And women have always had more influence on their family’s social life: when a Christian woman married a pagan man, it wasn’t the woman who changed teams.

Over decades, the proportion of women in the Christian population grew. This had a virtuous effect, as Stark, citing the work of Guttentag and Secord (1983), argues that women have more freedom in cultures where they are not a “scarce commodity,” as they were in the Greco-Roman world.

A final note on Stark’s so-called “Rational Choice Theory” of religion, which is described more fully in other works and is baked into “Rise.”

The late Christopher Hitchens once told The Onion he didn’t think Catholics really believed Jesus’ mother was a virgin, and I think he’s right. I’ve a notion it’s a dirty, silent secret of most believers in God (including myself) that there are specific tenets of our particular creed we do not, in fact, believe. We never admit this; but we know it.

I’m sure many Catholics doubt the virgin birth, as I’m sure many Mormons may doubt that a figure named Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith and revealed the location of the gold tablets that have disappeared. Yet it’s still entirely rational for us to join the Catholic (or LDS) Church. Why?

As Stark might say, putting things in the balance, the good outweighs the bad. We sign up for a social network from which we get a lot, and give a lot, and that’s worth more than a whisper of hypocrisy. Right?

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Season’s Beatings!

Posted on December 26, 2011 | 2 Comments

Happy Boxing Day . . . the day in which we either box up our returns and hurl them back at Macy’s or take a poke at our aged relatives who really, really should not have said that thing that can never be unsaid. By popular demand, we are reprinting last year’s Boxing Day post — the one in which we examine what our sources really tell us about the Little Baby Jesus. You’re welcome.

Read along in your Bibles:

The oldest Gospel, Mark, says — well, nothing. It starts with Jesus baptized as an adult, age unknown. John starts much earlier — way, way back “in the beginning” (of time), when God/Jesus created the universe. Unfortunately, down here on Earth, John skips the LBJ part. Acts and the Letters say nothing.

That leaves us with 3,800 words in Matthew and Luke as our ONLY sources. So-called “Infancy Gospels,” like Thomas and James, popped up in the second century, but they were written more than 100 years after Jesus’ death and are obviously fictional.

Matthew traces a family tree from Abraham through David to Joseph, who is Jesus’ father — but wait a second. He’s not, is he? We find out in a moment thatGod is Jesus’ father. Joseph is not related to him at all. Why do we care if some random guy is descended from King David?

Luke also has a genealogy, which goes back in time from Joseph through David and Abraham to Adam, aka “the son of God.” (3:23-37) Most of the names in these two genealogies are different; in fact, almost all of them are.

But whatever. Matthew has the Holy Spirit get busy with Mary … Joseph marries her … she gives birth … she bonks Joseph. Look it up: Matthew says Joseph “did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son.” (1:25) See that screaming “UNTIL”? The world’s oldest recorded case of blue-balls.

The dreamy duo live in Bethlehem, hometown of David. King Herod has a dream and sends “the Maji” (unknown number) to follow a star and they come to “the house.” No manger. No swaddling clothes. Maji exit, running.

Joseph moves to Egypt, imitating Moses. He waits (duration unknown). Herod dies, family moves to what Rock Star Theologian Bart Ehrman calls “an insignificant little one-horse town” called Nazareth. The end.

Okay. A little skimpy, Matt, but at least we have these running Maji and some (implied) Joe-on-Mary action. But where’s the Little Baby Jesus? Doesn’t make a peep.

We turn to Luke. He’s the screenwriting disciple, the Mel Gibson of gospelers, the USC grad who crafts the Jesus we all think we know today. If you cut out Mark, Matthew and John, most of us wouldn’t miss a begat. But take Luke out, you got some serious ‘splaining to do.

After some stuff about a cousin of Mary’s, Luke finally gets to her and old blue-balls in verse 27. The angel Gabriel visits the couple in … Nazareth? But in Matthew, they’re living in Bethlehem.

Okay. Joe goes to Bethlehem because — well, we’re told the Roman Emperor decreed a “census.” Matthew has no census; no ancient source mentions a census. But Luke does give us a manger, some “cloths.” But no running Maji. And weirdly, no marriage: Mary was “pledged to be married” to Joseph, but that’s it. Jesus was a human bastard. (2:5-7)

Then Luke has a whole scene in Jerusalem for Jesus’ bris and some prophets and so on, not a whisper of which is in Matthew. No Egypt. No Herod. No star over Bethlehem. Hmmm.

Where are we? Jesus parents were Mary and Joseph. They were Jewish. They may have come from Nazareth. That’s it. Merry (day after) Christmas!

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Stark Truth Continues

Posted on December 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Rodney "Chuckles" Stark

Continuing our discussion of Rodney Stark’s super-mondo book from the 1990′s, “The Rise of Christianity” — the discussion in which I get to do all the discussing, as is my preferred interpersonal method, — I’ll remind both of you that it’s in some ways an “outsider” work: a sociologist bringing the perspective of modern sociology to the study of the first few centuries of the Jesus movement.

Stark observes that people convert to new cults when they have relatively fewer meaningful social ties outside the cult than within. And converts tend to be “overwhelmingly from irreligious backgrounds.” When Stark studied the Moonies in 1960′s San Francisco, he noticed they had little success converting people away from other religions. Skeptics join cults.

And where do we find the most skeptics, ripe to sign up to some new movement whose members now include some old college bros? Among the affluent. Stark’s method is to write his unfolding argument as a set of propositions, such as: “Religious skepticism is most prevalent among the more privileged.” It’s not skepticism, per se, that makes people ripe for conversion but rather another corollary of affluence and education: interest in new cultures and ideas. In a word, curiosity.

Sociology reminds us just how sheeplike we are. At the moment when I feel I’m making my most bold and original statements, some sociologist shows up to prove I’m doing just what’s expected. Here I am — curator of The God Project Dot Net — a religious skeptic from an affluent background endowed with a natural curiosity, with social ties to the Roman Catholic church, and what do I do? Become a Roman Catholic. Baa baa.

Back to Stark. Using an econo-sociological language that seems odd — and oddly beautiful — applied to spiritual themes, he talks about “religious compensators,” which are analogous to money, i.e., something people want they are willing to pay for. His principles are (paraphrasing): poor people accept religious compensators for things that are scarce (like, say, status and wealth), but anybody may accept them for things nobody gets (like eternal life or justice).

“Regardless of power, persons and groups will tend to accept religious compensators for rewards that do not exist in this world.”

Religions like Christianity reframe death as its opposite: eternal life. To the extent people fear their own non-existence, they may buy into religion regardless of personal wealth. Which fits nicely with my own pet idea that Darwin didn’t cause secularism — antibiotics did. People who don’t fear death aren’t buying what religion offers.

Stark paints a picture of the first-century Roman world as religiously anemic, secular and accommodating. Roman religion was something like mainline Christianity in America today: very undemanding. From whom little is demanded, little is surrendered. People get what they give and religious groups full of twice-yearly non-participants aren’t giving much.

Which leads, of course, to another proposition:

“New religious movements mainly draw their converts from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented, and those affiliated with the most accommodated (worldly) religious communities.”

Jews in the diaspora, Hellenized by Alexander’s empire, living in a secular culture untaxed by the pagan gods, were ripe for a new movement that demanded active, full-bodied participation. We might say the same of secular people in the U.S. today being rich targets for conversion to evangelical churches which (believe me) are a lot more demanding/giving than those empty-pewed mainstream parishes.

The sociological proposition is that groups rely on the freely donated efforts of their members to thrive. They also are hurt by “free riders” — that is, people who like the benefits but won’t contribute. Stark’s insight is that it’s actually the most demanding groups that do best by raising the bar for membership so high free riders go away. Think about modern evangelical churches: they demand Sundays, of course, but also want you to do Bible study, prayer groups, personal ministries, job fairs, basketball coaching, member outreach, phone answering, brownie baking, party going with your kids and their friends, set-up and clean-up, donations … it never ends. People who stay in such groups tend to give a lot, which means they also get a lot from the others. So it was, Stark believes, among the early Christians.

And then, of course, we get to the women … next time. Happy holidays.

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The Stark Truth

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 3 Comments

Finally got around to reading celebrated academic Rodney Stark‘s “The Rise of Christianity,” and I’m sorry I waited so long. Give yourself the gift of Stark this Christmas: published in 1996, “Rise” is one of the most influential and exciting studies of early Christianity ever written. It doesn’t address the question of God’s existence, per se, but it does make belief seem entirely rational.

Stark’s goal was to use the tools of modern social science to explain how a movement that at Jesus’ death had a few hundred members could become, within three centuries, the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Good question, right?

First, using available sources and common sense, he quantifies the problem. At the cross, Jesus is deserted. The Book of Acts is unclear on the point, but a generous assumption is there were 1,000 Christians in the years immediately after the crucifixion. By 350, after Constantine’s conversion, there may have been 34 million Christians. Simple math (which had apparently never been done before) shows a required growth rate of 40% per decade from 40 to 350 C.E. Impossible? Stark points out this is the same growth rate enjoyed by the Mormons in the 20th century.

Second, he slips in a surprising quiver of iconoclastic arrows under the guise of showing how the movement grew so fast. To sum up his dazzling counterpunches, each the subject of an essay in the book, Stark’s early Christianity:

  • Appealed mainly to the relatively affluent, rather than the poor
  • Had a strong appeal to women and proto-feminists
  • Drew converts more successfully from Hellenized Jews, rather than gentiles
  • Thrived among the urban, transient populations of big cities, rather than in rural areas
  • Benefitted from the chaos of the time
  • Helped cult members live through epidemics
  • Got great PR from the hideous deaths of the early martyrs
  • Finally, was turbocharged by the weak, undemanding, pluralistic and optional nature of the reigning pagan cults

Stark’s project is to build a bridge between social science and Christian history, which had been at odds, mainly because religious historians had a triumphalist view of their faith, while social scientists were put off by the apparent “irrationality” of religious types (cf. Freud).

But no more: Stark made his name in the 1980′s showing that religious and cult affiliations can be explained as the reasonable choices of rational economic actors making the best selection they can from available options. As the champion of so-called “Rational Choice Theory,” described in books such as “A Theory of Religion,” written with William Sims Bainbridge, Stark has done much to dispel the myth of the crazy convert.

Setting the stage, Stark describes a field experiment he and a colleague, John Lofland, conducted in the 1960′s among the Moonies of northern California. They observed that converts were almost never total outsiders: most had some social or blood tie to a cult member. And new converts embraced the doctrines of the church only after they joined.

To extend the analogy to early Christianity: People didn’t sign up because they were impressed by the Trinity or the Incarnation, but because their sister-in-law was. Ties to the cult outweighed ties elsewhere. Conversion was social, then theological.

Stark says:

“Conversion is not about seeking or embracing an ideology; it is about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and family members.”

More on this next time …

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