Here, I bring you an excerpt from Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. As usual, after the excerpt, I include annotations and links to related materials. If you’re interested in similar readings of important texts, please subscribe and let me know which texts you find most timely for our moment in history.
What is going on?
And he spake many things on to them in parables, saying, Behold, A sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.
If “survival of the fittest” has any validity as a slogan, than the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest, the fittest of texts.
—Hugh Pyper, The Selfish Text: The Bible and Mimetics
You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into position to benefit its progeny, and not the ant’s. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly, manipulative parasites infect fish and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely, even suicidal ways. All for the benefit of the guest, not the host.
Does anything like this ever happened with human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings are setting aside their personal interests, their health, their chances to have children and devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains.
The Arabic word islam means “submission,” and every good Muslim bears witness, prays five times a day, gives alms, fasts during Ramadan, and tries to make the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca, all on behalf of the idea of Allah, and Muhammad, the messenger of Allah. Christians and Jews do likewise, of course, devoting their lives to spreading the Word, making huge sacrifices, suffering bravely, risking their lives for an idea. So do Sikhs and Hindus and Buddhists. And don’t forget the many thousands of secular humanists who have given their lives for Democracy, or Justice, or just plain Truth. There are many ideas to die for.
Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare—or our own biological imperative to have offspring—is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely defend a food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant attempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to protect food stores or their own children and homes. Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal, but we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does make us different, but it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science. How did just one species, Homo sapiens, come to have these extraordinary perspectives on their own lives?
Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than one’s rivals do, but this is the default summum bonum of every wild animal. They don’t know any better. They can't. They’re just animals. There is one interesting exception, it seems: the dog. Can’t “man’s best friend” exhibit devotion that rivals that of a human friend? Won’t a dog even die if need be to protect its master? Yes, and it is no coincidence that this admirable trait is found in a domesticated species. The dogs of today are the offspring of the dogs our ancestors most loved and admired in the past; without even trying to breed for loyalty, they managed to do so, bringing out the best (by their lights, by our lights) in our companion animals. Did we unconsciously model this devotion to a master on our own devotion to God? Were we shaping dogs in our own image? Perhaps, but then where did we get our devotion to God?
The comparison with which I began, between a parasitic worm invading an ant’s brain and an idea invading a human brain, probably seems both far-fetched and outrageous. Unlike worms, ideas aren’t alive, and don’t invade brains; they are created by minds. True on both counts, but these are not as telling objections as they first appear. Ideas aren’t alive; they can’t see where they’re going and have no limbs with which to steer a host brain even if they could see. True, but a lancet fluke isn’t exactly a rocket scientist either; it’s no more intelligent than a carrot, really; it doesn’t even have a brain. What it has is just the good fortune of being endowed with features that affect ant brains in this useful way whenever it comes in contact with them. (These features are like the eye spots on butterfly wings that sometimes fool predatory birds into thinking some big animal is looking at them. The birds are scared away and the butterflies are the beneficiaries, but are none the wiser for it.) An inert idea, if it were designed just right, might have a beneficial effect on a brain without having to know it was doing so! And if it did, it might prosper because it had that design.
The comparison of the Word of God to a lancet fluke is unsettling, but the idea of comparing an idea to a living thing is not new. I have a page of music, written on parchment in the mid-sixteenth century, which I found half a century ago in a Paris bookstall. The text (in Latin) recounts the moral of the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13): Semen est verbum Dei; sator autem Christus. The Word of God is a seed, and the sower of the seed is Christ. These seeds take root in individual human beings, it seems, and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide (and in return, the human hosts get eternal life—eum qui audit manebit in eternum).
How are ideas created by minds? It might be by miraculous inspiration, or it might be by more natural means, as ideas are spread from mind to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on songs and icons and statues and rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations in particular people’s heads, where they give rise to yet further new “creations,” bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them but adding new features, new powers as they go. And perhaps some of the “wild” ideas that first invaded our minds have yielded offspring that have been domesticated and tamed, as we have attempted to become their masters or at least their stewards, their shepherds. What are the ancestors of the domesticated ideas that spread today? Where did they originate and why? And once our ancestors took on the goal of spreading these ideas, not just harboring them but cherishing them, how did this belief'in belief transform the ideas being spread?
The great ideas of religion have been holding us human beings enthralled for thousands of years, longer than recorded history but still just a brief moment in biological time. If we want to understand the nature of religion today, as a natural phenomenon, we have to look not just at what it is today, but at what it used to be. An account of the origins of religion, in the next seven chapters, will provide us with a new perspective from which to look, in the last three chapters, at what religion is today, why it means so much to so many people, and what they might be right and wrong about in their self-understanding as religious people. Then we can see better where religion might be heading in the near future, our future on this planet. I can think of no more important topic to investigate.
Marginalia
Religion vs. Idolatry
All stories work as viruses (if they work). There are good stories that create and bad stories that destroy. The description of religions as viruses is not a judgment or an insult. It's an attempt to advance a theory that can account for religion as a natural phenomenon — as natural as a virus.
A point often made in response to depictions of religion as a virus is that there's good religion, which typically means ‘mine’, and bad religion, which typically means ‘yours’. I propose a definition of bad religion that doesn't lapse into such juvenile finger pointing and primitive shadow projection.
Rather than focus on the ways in which religion distorts reality as measured by science, I propose that the opposite of religion isn’t science but idolatry. From this point of view, we can evaluate the goodness of a religion on the basis of standards that the religion itself embraces. Across the traditions of Abrahamic monotheism, idolatry is bad.
I remember a time when serious students of religion and adherents of specific denominations would describe certain sects as idolatrous or heretical. Regardless of what percentage of the audience reacted with agreement or disagreement, few would argue, as I've been arguing since the turn of the century, that, these days, a better question is whether there are any non-idolatrous denominations.
Sure, I can point to numerous individual practitioners and leaders representing countless denominations who express the very best of their traditions, and I receive their practices and teachings as blessings. But at the institutional level, I apply a presumption of guilt to every denomination. As I see it, institutional religion is a choreographed betrayal of its own founding revelations.
Freedom From Religion: Special Offer
I don’t know how much agreement Daniel Dennett and MLK would find in a dialogue about God or spirituality, but to me, MLK serves as a beautiful example not only of non-idolatrous religion but also of an effective (albeit often humanly impossible) form of resistance to the ineffable variety of lethal mind viruses spreading through our world.
For people seeking redemption from idolatrous religion, here's a Special Offer that expires on 01/15/2024 (MLK Day): Join me for ‘A Year in Dialogue’ and receive 50% off your subscription to Dialogue as a Service (DaaS).
How to Become a Great Nation
Abraham smashed his father’s idols; he didn’t rearrange them or place them in a corner. Importantly, this act of unrestrained rebellion led not only to the creation of a great nation, but it also ensured the salvation of Abraham's father.
Perhaps, this viral story captures a living truth: we best honor our fathers by becoming ourselves. Any student of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell knows that this truth finds powerful expression across the great mythologies of the world. In all of them, the lesson is the same: in Campbell’s words: “The finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny.”
Part 2: The Orthodox Paradox - Revisited
Subscribe to BS"D where I will soon publish “The Orthodox Paradox” as Part 2 of this series of responses to religion (no paywall).
