2011

Making us atheist look like jerks

Atheist Billboards

It’s no wonder that so many people think we atheists hate God. Like they did last year, the American Atheists have launched a Christmas-season advertising campaign (see image). This ad makes fun of people for what they believe in, which makes us atheists sound as intolerant as religious conservatives. The ad even uses ALL CAPS to demonstrate how very indignant we atheists are about religion.

If I were calling the shots with the atheists’ PR campaign, I’d run positive, pro-Christmas ads. I like Christmas, and I’m an atheist. Let’s show that we atheists are a fun-loving, open-minded bunch. Unlike some religious people we could point at, we don’t think that everyone who believes differently from us is bad, stupid, or in Satan’s grasp. My ads would say something like,

“Have a very merry Christmas, whether you believe in God or not.” 

Or maybe they would say,

“We can each believe in any gods we like, or not.” 

And there would be NO all caps.


PS: Judging by a 2013 billboard from American Atheists, they may be softening.

Why Atheists Are Jerks: Personality and atheism.

2011

Romney and Karmic Liberty

Jesus, Mitt Romney, and secular humanists agree on one thing at least: you don’t owe a karmic debt to the universe for your past misdeeds.

In 1993, Mitt Romney gave some remarkable advice to a troubled young Mormon. According to the New York Times, Romney told the young man that “as human beings, our work isn’t measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out… The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.”

Romney’s advice reflects a core message of the historical Jesus: you don’t owe a karmic debt to God for your past misdeeds. Even an atheist can agree with that viewpoint; in fact, we practically have to agree with it. Romney’s statement is remarkable because it does not square well with Mormon teaching. According to Mormon doctrine, northern Europeans, southern Europeans, and Africans were awarded supremacy, mediocrity, and slavery (respectively) for their deeds as spirits in their heavenly pre-existence. If a whole race can be cursed for millennia for something they don’t even remember doing, that sure makes it look as though the sum of one’s past deeds matter to God. If Native Americans are supposed to be the cursed, dark-skinned descendants of evil Israelites, it sure looks as though God is in the habit of holding past sins against one, even when they are one’s ancestors’ transgressions. Romney’s good advice doesn’t jibe with Mormon doctrines about God’s justice.

But then religion is more about community than about doctrine. A clever human is too wily to let bizarre doctrines trump good sense and good advice. Behind the fraudulent sacred texts of Mormonism and underneath the half-spurious gospels is the original teaching of the historical Jesus. As the pre-eminent Jesus scholar E. P. Sanders argues, Jesus seems to have taught not the pedestrian theme of a sinner’s repentance but rather the radical promise of God’s forgiveness. You don’t owe a debt for your past misdeeds. Jesus’ message was particularly radical in his day, when poverty, sickness, and mental illness were understood as God’s curses on sinners. Somehow, centuries of legends about Jesus, even those of the Mormons, haven’t entirely blotted out all of his good ideas.

(It should go without saying that complimenting Romney’s good sense is not tantamount to endorsing his candidacy for president. He may be the best Republican contender, but that’s not saying much.)

2011

The Dalai Lama and Human Social Instincts

What the Dalai Lama says here about human nature is very close to what an atheistic evolutionary psychologist might say. He says:

“Human beings are not intrinsically selfish, which isolates us from others. We are essentially social animals who depend on others to meet our needs. We achieve happiness, prosperity and progress through social interaction. Therefore, having a kind and helpful attitude contributes to our own and others' happiness.”

It takes only a single word change to make that statement accord with the natural science of human psychology. The word to change is “intrinsically.” Instead, you could say that humans aren’t “categorically” selfish. Or you could say we’re not “exclusively,” “merely,” or “irredeemably” selfish. As for the rest, the Dalai Lama’s statement agrees with evolutionary psychology that human nature includes built-in predispositions for positive social interactions. With this statement, he contradicts the radical behaviorists like B. F. Skinner and the Marxists like Stephen J. Gould who claimed that society determines how humans interact socially.

Save the Waitresses

Bill Picton—pig farmer,
serial killer of sex workers

Imagine if every few years the authorities found the bodies of murdered waitresses in a ditch, along the banks of a river, or on a pig farm. There would be an outcry. Lawmakers would investigate and reform the restaurant industry. We wouldn’t allow psychopaths to prey on our vulnerable women. We would make the world safe for waitresses. But enough imagining. The fact is that the women who wind up in those ditches or ground into pig food are not waitresses but sex workers. There’s no outcry because the people don’t much care what happens to “dirty whores”. Maybe we should cry out.

Life, Death, and Religion

Remember, you will die.

It’s common to consider religion to be a matter of personal philosophy, and that's part of the story, but religion is also a matter of life and death. That might sound strange coming from an atheist, so let me elaborate.

Modern people tend to think of religion as “what you believe in.” That modern attitude has been a long time in coming. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther defined Christianity as a matter of belief rather than of communal identity. Salvation, he said, depends on your faith, not on the Church. Since then, religion in the West has become more and more a question of individual orientation. Today one might go so far as to characterize religious identity as a matter of opinion. You might ask a friend, "Who do you think should win American Idol?" or "Do you believe in God?" But there’s more to religion than belief. For our ancestors, religion meant membership in a spiritual community, and that’s what it means to me today. When my wife died a few years ago, all belief was dead to her, but her church was there to mark her passing. It’s the congregation that she belonged to as a living person that mattered, not any beliefs about another world. For many people, religion seems to be ultimately about the afterlife, but for me it’s about this life.

Years ago, after our daughter was born, my wife insisted that we join a Unitarian church in Seattle, where we atheists would be welcome. I thought she was crazy, but I made the best of it. Years into it, my daughter finally talked me into teaching Sunday school, and that's when I first started feeling like there was something interesting going on at church. And then when my wife passed away in her 40s, I got an even closer look at the benefits of being part of a community. The pastor who spoke at my wife’s memorial service was the same woman who had counseled my wife in the hospital as she faced her own death. Since my wife didn’t believe in the afterlife, she was grateful to have a spiritual counselor who didn’t try to distract her with promises of personal immortality. No personal philosophy could have provided my wife with a trusted counselor to help her face her own demise. That sort of help comes from a congregation.

My wife got support, and so did I. Mine was a volunteer from our church whose husband had died at the end of a long illness. Our connection was not a shared belief but shared community. Philosophically I'm a Taoist, and politically I'm a secular humanist, but it wasn't a Taoist or a secular humanist who talked personally with me about what it's like to have your spouse die. It was someone from my congregation.

At this time, our adolescent daughter was going through the coming-of-age program, which meant she was already paired up for the year with a woman in the congregation, a mentor with whom she had a confidential, one-on-one relationship. The mentor program is standard for all youth, but it takes on a special meaning for those whose parents are dying. This is the same program that provided our daughter with world-class sex education. Religion is about life as well as death.

More generally, people overestimate the role that belief plays in religion. Historically, belief has usually been secondary to practical concerns, such as rulership, ritual, holidays, group bonding, morality, law, education, charity, politics, authority, obedience, war, ethnicity, tradition, song, dance, art, language, time-keeping, record-keeping, etc. Even belief itself has often been used for the practical purpose of defining in-groups rather than for any personal, spiritual growth. It's easier to understand religion when you watch what religious people do rather than categorizing them by the creeds they profess.

PS: Here's a Sunday school experience I've had in the years since I first composed this post. A man from the congregation came to my Sunday school class of 6th and 7th grade Unitarians. He recounted how he had seen his wife die of cancer, and he told them that they and everyone they know would also die. Engaging stuff. It scared me a little, so I can only imagine how it touched these kids. Increasingly, I think we secular people could really own the topic of death.

[revised November 2014]

2011

Rise of the Metahumans

[EDIT: The FOXP2 gene seems to be involved in exceptional mammal vocalizations, including Neanderthal vocalizing, not just Sapiens. Something happened in our Sapiens lineage 50,000–100,000 years ago, but was it our FOXP2? Probably not. 4 October 2020]

What if metahumans took over? What if brain mutations appeared in the human population, giving the lucky mutants better ways of communicating, planning, and thinking? What if these mutants created surprising new technologies and used them to overrun everyone else? It would suck, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the end for the rest of us. When regular humans that have children with metahumans, some of the offspring will be meta. Your family line might survive the rise of the metahumans, provided you leave behind metahuman children, grandchildren, or other descendants. It’s harsh for us regular humans who get squeezed out, but maybe the metahumans will develop knew kinds of art, knowledge, and community. They would have all our human intelligence and passion, plus new ways of thinking. They could take humanity in bold new directions. Could such a scenario really happen? For various reasons, the metahumans are unlikely to actually arise any time soon. Fifty to 100 thousand years ago, however, a wave of metahumans did take over. I’m a metahuman, so are you, and so is everyone on the planet. Our mutant ancestors took over when we evolved modern speech and became humans as we know ourselves today.

Before they evolved into metahumans, our ancestors were regular old humans, designated “anatomically modern.” That term distinguishes them from metahumans, who are termed “behaviorally modern.” As anatomically modern humans, our ancestors had stone tools and fire, but nothing more than what the other archaic humans had. Evidently we knew how to sing and dance in groups. Definitely we had all manner of subtle social instincts: for mating, kinship, friendship, rivalry, and more. If we metahumans saw our naked, speechless, anatomically modern ancestors hanging out in a group, we would be able to identify their feelings and motives. They wouldn’t be aliens.

Now that we’ve evolved speech, we have figured out how to sew clothes, weave baskets, carve flutes, trade goods, make rules, promise ourselves in marriage, and tell our survivors how to allot our possessions after death. We speaking humans have plans, intentions, and purposes that other animals couldn’t imagine—not even our anatomically modern ancestors. We have created new and exhilarating lives for ourselves.

Underneath every verbal human mind, however, is an emotional human heart. The word-built mind is deliberate and intentional. The gene-built heart is intuitive and instinctive. We have been living by our hunches and our urges for far longer than we’ve been living by our thoughts and our promises. That’s why our hunches and urges get us to do things that we have trouble justifying with words. More often than not, the ancient, canny emotions get the better of our newfangled thoughts. Our thoughts feel independent, but they mostly they are carrying water for our emotions and intuitions. We metahumans aren’t all that meta after all.

Note: About the time that we were acquiring speech, a mutant version of the Fox-P2 gene appeared and swept through the human population, where it is now universal. Since this mutant gene is involved in speech and grammar, it might well be connected to our acquisition of modern speech.

- - -

Related posts

The rise of the metahumans as the fall of man.

Evolution as our creator.

The sex scandals of metamen.

Creatures of Love

Love is what humans do best. Some people will tell you that if we’re made of matter, then you can’t explain love. But science explains love as something we mammals evolved long ago. Birds have also evolved love, and maybe some dinosaurs did, but we mammals are better at it than any other animals have ever been. First, mammal mothers evolved love for their children, and vice versa. Mammal mothers care for their young with a devotion and intimacy that you just don’t see everywhere. Eventually we evolved families, some small and some extended. Families are havens of mutual affection and care, in a word—love. You rarely see a loving family among non-mammals, certainly nothing like an elephant herd or an orca pod. As for us humans, we’re the mammals that crank love up to 11. Human fathers love their mates and their children, not always but a lot more often than mammals in general. Lately, we humans have repurposed familial love, and now we have lifelong friendships between unrelated individuals.

Love is Biological

For us humans, love goes back for tens of millions years at least, and it is in our biology. We respond to our lovers, our friends, and our kin not just on a verbal or social level but with our biological bodies. Women evolved subcutaneous fat and gave themselves the enticing curves so adored by men. Chimp females are nothing to look at, not even to a male chimp, but human women are sexy, sometimes even to other women. On the hormonal level, seeing a sexy woman increases a man’s testosterone, but a woman’s tears reduce it. Human semen includes oxytocin, the hormone that helps people fall in love. Tender touch, meanwhile, induces us to release our own oxytocin. If love is blind, maybe that’s because hormones are blind, too. Mothers and children love each other with instincts that go back at least to the first mammals, over 200 million years ago. Thanks to our social structure, human mothers and children can love each other their whole lives rather than parting ways when the child matures. We also love our tribes, especially when we're united by our instincts for song and dance. It might sound strange for love to be an evolved, natural thing, but it’s right there in our flesh and blood.

Love is Cultural

For its part, cultural evolution has been good to love. When we evolved speech (50 to 100 thousand years ago), we created along with it something unprecedented: deliberate culture. You might call that the fall of man, but that’s another story. In some ways we humans have used deliberate culture to weaken family bonds. Ancient Hebrews, for example, were commanded to kill their own sons if those sons worshiped foreign gods. More often, however, we’ve used culture to exalt love and to spread it wider. When we became behaviorally modern in Africa 50 thousand years ago, our love extended only to our own respective tribes. Killing an outsider man was not murder, and abducting an outsider woman was not rape. We have done a lot to promote love since then. First-century Greek Christians went so far as to identify love with the highest good, saying “God is love.” We humans are no fools, and we can all see that reciprocal kindness is going to get us further overall than fighting over everything. That’s what gives Marxism its appeal. Civilizations have succeeded to the extent that they could get tremendous numbers of people cooperating and trading instead of competing and warring. Modern society, by and large, has used its wealth and power to extend dignity, autonomy, and security to more and more people. If biological evolution gave us an exceptionally love-oriented genome, cultural evolution confirms and exaggerates love’s power.

Love is Magical

It’s true that love feels uplifting, transforming, eternal, and spiritual. There’s no denying that. I’m only denying that it’s supernatural. Terence McKenna, who advocated a psychedelic worldview, said that love is one area of life where everyday people are most likely to experience magic. That has been true for me. But experiencing magic doesn’t mean believing it. I experience the earth as still, but I know it’s moving. I experience English as the natural way to phrase one’s thoughts, but I know it isn’t. Love is magical not because it’s supernatural but because we evolved to feel it as magical. After all, love has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Love gets humans with hundreds of millions of years of selfish instincts to pitch in together for the long haul.

Remember

Plato wants you to think that true love is immaterial and that nothing material can be true. Don’t believe him.

2011

Was C. S. Lewis Right?

C. S. Lewis said morality is real.

C. S. Lewis was right. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, you can imagine how it galls me to admit that Lewis was right about anything. After all, it’s Lewis who tried to trick kids into believing in Christ the magic lion. He also waged a losing battle against the historical understanding of Jesus, a topic dear to my heart. He even popularized the falsehood that Jesus couldn’t have been a wise mortal teacher because he claimed to be God. His Narnia books creeped me out a little, but his masterwork, Abolition of Man (1943), made my teenage soul burn with indignation. So how could I ever concede that Lewis was right about anything? Strangely enough, my reading in evolutionary psychology has given me a new appreciation of the argument in Abolition of Man. When Lewis defended morality as based on something real rather than arbitrary, he was onto something, even if he ended up only half right overall.

Lewis championed old-fashioned values, and he opposed the trendy idea that morality, like all culture, is arbitrary. To support his thesis that values were objective, he amassed evidence from around the world that different cultures have similar moral codes. He refers to these universal moral concepts as the “Tao” (meaning “Way”). In arguing that morality is real, Lewis is right. Morality isn’t just something we humans made up, like alphabets or the rules of chess.

But Lewis is only half right. Like the cultural relativists of his time, he attributed morality rather strictly to learning. In Abolition, he wrote that modern education was creating “men without chests.” These disastrously modern people reportedly had an intellect (the head) that was divorced from their animal nature (the guts), with no trunk to unite these two parts of the human being. He wrote that the wrong sort of education was creating people incapable of virtue. Like George Orwell after him, he prophesied a future in which a cadre of clinical experts could control the masses by controlling their education. The rank and file, in this view, could be reduced to living robots. On this point, Lewis is wrong.

After these dire warnings, the rest of the 20th century showed that humans are built of sterner stuff than Lewis imagined. Every new campaign to revolutionize human society fell in the face of primeval human nature. Reformers have improved society dramatically, but the revolutionaries all failed to reprogram human psychology. Even B. F. Skinner’s learned, modern utopian dream proved to be just that—a dream. The mind control experiments of the Cold War failed. Communism failed to create the new man, and now man is creating the new Communism. We humans didn’t get where we are by being easy to control. Sure, we adapt to the lives we’re born to, but we adapt to pursue our own instinctive goals. That’s why totalitarian regimes have always failed to get people to care more about the State than about their friends and their family. We evolved to have friends and family but not to have a State. Cultural relativists say that the social environment defines human personality. Certainly we individual humans do turn out differently in part based on our different social environments. But society shapes the individual along lines that evolution laid out for us long ago. Like Orwell, B. F. Skinner, and Mao, Lewis underestimated the resilience of human nature.

Morality isn't merely inculcated fresh into each new juvenile brain. Evolutionary psychologists have revealed morality to consist of evolved adaptations. Traits such as sympathy, the conscience, concern for the young, a sense of justice, and the urge to punish cheaters turn out to be social instincts built into us by thousands of generations of natural selection. The Tao that Lewis identified is real even if no one teaches it to you. Lewis thought that morality was separate from one’s natural, animal self because his morality was supernatural. Now we can see that morality evolved naturally. The human ape is incredibly social and incredibly intelligent, so moral behavior has long helped our ancestors get their genes into succeeding generations. Since morality is natural instead of magical, maybe Lewis was not even half right, but only a third. That much I can admit with minimum heartburn.

Related post: Reading About Religion, with a good dose of social instincts.

2011

Meet Your Maker: Evolution 

Humans are created beings, literally “creatures.” That means we didn’t just happen. Something must have created us. Planets, crystals, and meteorites are cool, but they aren’t creatures; living things are. As Richard Dawkins explains, all organisms are creatures, engineered by the blind process of evolution. When you understand evolution to be your creator, it naturally helps you to understand yourself. Evolution illuminates your connection to the living world, your separation from it, your discontent in modern society, and your unique position in the world of living things.

Understanding evolution to be your creator means affirming your continuity with the living world. First Plato and then the medieval Church tried to put humans on the other side of a divide, with flesh on the animal side and our true, immaterial selves on the spiritual side. But modern science affirms that our nerves, sensations, feelings, and even thoughts are of the flesh. The love that a momma bear feels for her cubs is something like the love a human mother feels for her children—Plato be damned. We are animals not according to some dry categorization but by the raw fact of flesh-and-blood descent.

Paradoxically, evolution tells us not only that we’re connected to the rest of the living world but also that we are something new under the sun. We humans use symbols, speech, language, thought, deliberation, and logic. We even use our abstract, thinking brains to understand evolution, our very creator. In this way, we are different from anything else that terrestrial evolution has ever created. In particular, we have internal autobiographies, what Daniel Dennett calls narrative centers of gravity. That makes us special, literally different as a “species.”

If evolution is our creator, then it is also the source of our discontent. Spiritual, political, and reforming idealists have generally understood society to be in some sense evil or unnatural. Marxists and Christians disagree on human nature but agree that everyday society doesn’t represent the right way for people to live. Evolution tells us that we are primarily evolved for life in a tribal society, and when there’s a mismatch between our primeval instincts and our modern lifestyles, that spells trouble.

Finally, if evolution is our creator, then our creator evidently respects our freedom. Like Thomas Jefferson’s impersonal God, evolution establishes us with certain qualities, capacities, and predispositions, but it does not control us on a day-to-day basis or even look over our shoulders as we make moral decisions. Evolution doesn’t hang around waiting for you to pray for miracles so it can break the laws of physics on your behalf. Instead, evolution has set things up a certain way, and, to a large extent, we thinking humans have taken it from there. Termites evolved their way to building arches, but we humans figured out arches in a fraction of the time by thinking and planning. We’re different. Evolution may have built our plan-making brains, but humans with plans move too quickly for evolution to control us.

Religion traditionally concerns itself with humanity’s creator, and atheist religion is no different. We can learn more about ourselves and our mortal lives by learning more about that which created us: biological evolution.

Successful Kickstarter: Raising money to self-publish Grandmother Fish, the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. 

Grief and the Human Animal

My wife Tracy passed
away in 2008.

According to Ruth Davis Konigsberg's Valentine's Day article in the New York Times, people recover from grief faster than one would generally expect. I’m not surprised. Our expectations about grief are romantic stories that we tell ourselves, but those stories are no match for biological reality. After a personal tragedy, it seems like we should never be able to laugh again or love again. How could we? But our animal selves have no time for drama or romantic narratives. Our capacity to recover from grief is a primordial instinct grounded far more deeply in who we are than any narrative we can spin with our newfangled forebrains.

A few years ago, my wife died under exceptionally miserable circumstances. Friends would say that they couldn’t imagine what it must be like for me to suffer through my wife’s decline and doom, and I agreed with them. In fact, I would say, even I couldn’t really imagine what I was going through. I was living through it day by day, but the loss was so profound and the details so tragic that it was fairly well beyond comprehension. There was no sensible story I could tell myself about how I was going to recover or about how things were going to be OK. But somehow, as they say, life went on. Without really trying, I did the inconceivable, and I got better.

The process of recovery defies rational explanation. That’s because it’s not rational in the first place. The rational parts of ourselves like to think that our lives should be rational, but rationality is an extremely recent invention, as far as evolution is concerned. The instinct to persevere and to heal oneself goes back to our proto-mammal ancestors or before. Our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning, were all special in at least one way: every single one of them survived long enough and succeeded well enough to generate at least one offspring. Our ancestors were all survivors. Whether we understand our own power or not, we’re each born with the predisposition to recover from the most serious tragedies, if tragedy should ever strike. Our ability to rebuild our lives is fundamentally biological. Recovery from loss is not rational any more than digestion or color vision is rational.

We never evolved the capacity to fully comprehend the enormity of personal tragedy. Why would we have evolved any such capacity? What good would it have done our ancestors to have a clear understanding of monstrous, personal loss? When things get bad enough, comprehension falters. But it’s not our understanding that heals us anyway. It’s not our conscious awareness of loss that gets us past grief. Instead, what takes over is the perseverance that we evolved from an unbroken line of ancestral survivors. Without permission from our conscious selves, and without even full awareness, the more ancient parts of who we are set about the practical business of rebuilding broken lives.


Life, Death and Religion: my wife passing away helped me appreciate being part of a church community.

2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html

2011

Aristotle left a mark

Our Real Souls

If, on one hand, someone tries to tell you that your soul is a ghostly entity that lives on after your body dies, don’t buy it. And if, on the other hand, someone tries to tell you that you have no soul at all, don’t believe them, either. If, on the other other hand, someone tells you that our souls are the realest things about us, then read their blog post.

The old idea of the immaterial, eternal soul has lost ground with the advance of science and of modern culture. Scientists have mapped the universe from the quark to the galaxy, and mapped the human being from the allele to the brain wave, and the ghostly soul is nowhere to be found. Besides, the whole idea of the soul seems suspiciously useful as a tool for controlling the rabble. Promises of heavenly rewards and threats of hellish punishment keep the little people in line. Stories about the afterlife distract the poor, the oppressed, and would-be reformers from real-world injustices. Christian priests threatened peasants with hell, Hindu brahmins threatened the lower varnas with horrible reincarnations, and Mormons justified discrimination against Africans by referring to sins that they had committed as spirits before birth. An eternal, immaterial soul? Smells like a con job.

But who says the soul has to be eternal and immaterial to be real? Aristotle said that an ax’s soul would be chopping. Chopping is the ax’s purpose, definition, and use. Similarly, the Stoics said your soul was your “leading edge.” Defining the soul that way lets us atheists use the term honestly. I can say that a particular bar has “soul,” or warn a friend not to lose his “soul” at a job, or put my “soul” into my work. It’s a good word and a useful concept, and it fits everyday terms such as “soul mate.” Admittedly, it feels strange to define the soul as something other an eternal spirit, but that’s just because the medieval Church wants a monopoly on our minds. Aristotle predated the popes by a thousand years, and he said your soul was natural, not supernatural.

Before the fall of Rome, Christianity was tolerant. Theologians surmised that the Logos (Word) had gone to all the world, and that people in Asia, for example, could find salvation without ever hearing about Jesus. Then the barbarians sacked Rome, and Christianity developed a narrower outlook. Aristotle’s real-world view of the soul managed to hold on until after the Reformation. In response to Martin Luther, the Roman Pope and his loyal bishops responded half by reforming and half by retrenching. On the matter of the soul, they finally came down officially with Plato. For me, it's hard to believe that a thousand years ago in Europe there were intellectuals who held to Aristotle’s view of the soul, but it’s true. The Church wants you to believe that it’s the ghostly soul or nothing, and that's what I learned when I grew up.

Today, with the advance of science and philosophy, Plato’s version of the soul is in disrepute. You can’t literally believe in eternal spirits animating temporary bodies. Even so, you still have a soul. What could be more real to you than your own self? It’s your you-ness. You might call it your personal edge. But even if a person’s them-ness seems real, is it really real? Mystics and like-minded seekers might ask. If you’ve ever gotten to know a person, you have encountered the sort of soul I'm talking about. Hell, if you are acquainted with a dog or a cat, you have met a soul. A goldfish? Maybe not. We humans are the most soulful of all. We have evolved to discern other people’s what-nesses. Our senses and instincts are finely tuned to read each others’ souls, making human individuals compellingly real to each other. It is this act awareness of others that enables our unparalleled awareness of self.

Nietzsche said, “Be hard.” If your soul is your edge, as with Aristotle’s ax, I’d rather say “Be sharp.” Better yet, “Be keen.”

2021: In From Darwin to Derrida, David Haig frames concepts of meaning, purpose, and the soul in material terms. His treatment is a lot more thorough than mine. 

2011

Monkey Chant at Burning Man

Burning Man is a yearly festival of radical self-expression, interactive art, and intentional community. That’s fertile ground for an atheist Sunday school teacher. Last year at Burning Man, for instance, I attended my first monkey chant. When I say that religion is largely about community, my experience with the monkey chant is not far from my mind. As science writer Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, rituals of shared song and dance are society’s traditional community builders, all the way back to our hunter-gathered days, and all the way up to the boot camp drills and chants in the modern military. We seem to have evolved to form heartfelt communities through shared song and dance.

The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.

The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.

Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.

So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Fall of Adam and Eve

Labor is a curse, says Genesis.

What does evolutionary psychology have to do with the Bible’s story of the Fall?

Yesterday my neighbor told me that her husband was feeling his age. After a lifetime of physical labor, his knees, back, and shoulders were causing him pain. In evolutionary terms, walking upright is a recent innovation, so knees, backs, and shoulders are still weak spots in our anatomy. In addition, sustained physical labor is an even more recent innovation. Evolutionary psychologists look for mismatches between the tribal life we evolved to live and our current conditions. We evolved our bodies and minds to prosper in the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle of 100 thousand years ago. Sustained physical labor looks like a mismatch to me. A hundred thousand years ago, there were no miners, lumberjacks, farmers, baggage handlers, or construction workers. Today, if you spend your life using your body differently from how it’s designed to be used, you suffer. As the book of Genesis says, a consequence of knowledge is labor, the sweat of one’s brow. This confluence between evolutionary analysis and a three thousand year old creation story is a fine example of how the world’s religious traditions are often at least half right, if you take them figuratively.

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat a magic fruit that makes them self-aware. As a result, they are denied the other magic fruit that would have made them immortal, and Yahweh curses them. Women are cursed with a painful childbirth and domineering husbands. Men are cursed with labor. This all makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. When humans evolved self-awareness and speech, we became aware of our mortality. “On the day you eat of it, you will die,” said Yahweh, and figuratively speaking, that’s true. When we learned to understand our own biographies, we saw ourselves die in our own mind’s eyes. As Mary Oliver conveys in her poem “The Black Snake,” animals that lack foreknowledge live as if they’re immortal. We’re not so lucky. As for the curse of painful childbirth, it’s the result of the oversize brain we recently evolved. In other words, when we evolved sentience, doing so cursed women with the pains of labor. Women also got the short end of the stick in the power struggle between the sexes. Men used their verbal ability to promise, threaten, and punish, allowing them to wield power over women, especially in settled societies. Men’s attitudes toward women have traditionally been proprietary. Finally, men are cursed with physical labor. The capacity to think ahead leads to hard work. For one thing, you see how your own labor can build up wealth for yourself in the future. You work harder than you otherwise would because you can foresee the benefits. For another thing, people with power over you can see how your labor could benefit them, and down through history powerful people have contrived countless ways to force the less powerful to do the heavy lifting. Today, our system is economic, and the wealthy can pay someone like my neighbor to spend his career doing physical labor. Without self-knowledge, our ancestors never worked themselves like we work ourselves or work each other.

In China, the Taoist Zhuangzi said much the same thing in his story of the horses’ hooves. In his story, wild horses are healthy and happy, while domesticated horses are neurotic and sickly. He makes the point that the same is true of people. Before the coming of the sages, we lived simply and happily, but now the sages have brought stress and confusion. Who are these sages? Not coincidentally, “Homo sapiens” means “sage,” literally “wise man.” The wise ones who changed everyone’s lives with their cleverness were humans, specifically those who evolved language. We’ve spread across the globe and invented an endless array of unnatural lifestyles for ourselves.

The cosmological beliefs found in ancient religious texts may be untenable today, but their poetic insights sometimes still ring true.

2011

young woman and powerful man

High Status Sex Scandals

From the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Anthony Weiner sexting incident, high-status men keep getting caught with their pants down. You might wonder why a congressman would send a photo of his crotch to a young woman, or why the leader of the free world would get tangled up with an intern. While evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain why any particular human engages in any particular behavior, it does explain our general tendencies. In this case, the indiscretions of high-status men make more sense when you understand that our ancestors evolved status in order to give stronger males more than their share of access to females. Evolutionarily, high status is largely about having sex with more women.

Millions of years ago, after we chimps* split with the gorillas and before we Hominina split with the other chimps, we evolved a system of male status.** Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas do not have high- and low-status males living together, but we chimps do. This social system allowed stronger and weaker males to cooperate in a group, something you don’t see among other great apes. High status allowed the stronger males to get more than their share of the resources without having to drive the weaker males away or kill them. The most important scarce resource in the lives of our male chimp ancestors was females. That’s true of mammals in general, and we chimps are no exception.

A drive for status, especially among men, is a human universal, as noted by the world’s first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin. We don’t consciously know that our quest for status is the latest chapter in the mammalian male’s quest for more mates. Once men get power, however, it’s easy to see what comes next.

For their part, women have their own evolutionary baggage. Our female ancestors have long preferred high-status males. The ones who didn’t prefer powerful males wound up bearing sons who were more likely to have low status like their fathers. Since high-status males reproduce at favorable rates, evolution leads females to favor them as mates because that strategy leads to their sons reproducing at favorable rates. If the leader of the free world gets messed up with a flirty aide, it’s partly because there's something about being the leader of the free world that gets a woman’s attention.

None of this is to say that any particular human is hard-wired to have unwise liaisons with any other particular human. Evolutionary psychology is about ultimate causes and population-wide patterns, not individual decisions. The pattern is easy to see, and it’s only a matter of time before another high-status male makes the day’s headlines by acting out yesterday's evolutionary imperative.

* Technically Hominini. (2020)

** Or maybe living in multi-male, multi-female bands goes back tens of millions of years to the early “monkeys” (technically simians). (2020)

PS: It turns out that extroverts in our culture are more promiscuous than average, and lots of powerful men are extroverts. (2019) 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Related old-website post: Thomas Jefferson the slave-raping hero, 2006