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Monday, May 12, 2008
Edward Luttwak has a column (via The Corner) up pointing out that by Muslim measures Barack Obama is an apostate; so it is permissible that he should be killed. This is true, and I think if you asked most Muslims they would accede to the principle here. But as a matter of practicality these sorts of laws aren't enacted or enforced in all circumstances without sensitivity to other parameters; unlike Barack Obama the former president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, converted to Roman Catholicism from Islam as an adult (there have also been African leaders who converted from Islam to Christianity, but I don't believe they visited the Arab world), and he remained on good terms with the Arab nations. If you look at the cases where apostasy is an issue, they seem to fall into two broad categories. The first is one of crass material interest on the part of Muslims and marginality in the case of non-Muslims; in other words, there is a rational reason for a Muslim to use the letter of the law against the apostate or non-Muslim, and that individual who is being persecuted has very little recourse because of their lack of power. Second, there is the perception that the individual is being too vocal and so disrupting social norms and public disorder. It seems from all that I have heard atheism is known and tolerated in the Muslim world so long as atheists remain silent; the problem is public profession of views which go against majority norms. I strongly suspect in the case of the president of the United States most Islamic powers that be would simply ignore the letter of the law (that is, the consensus of Muslim scholars over the ages).
This does not imply that I think the attitudes of Muslims are appropriate to the modern world. Nor do I think it implies that the probability of Obama being assassinated due to his religious history is the same, all things controlled, as someone who had a less complicated past. I'm arguing simply that his "apostasy" really shouldn't be the primary predictor when we consider this issue; powerful men are simply held to different standards in our species, that's culturally invariant and the biggest issue of context in this case. Addendum: I'm going to take a moment here to make a political comment which I hope won't spawn a thread-closing tirade from readers; but conservatives often complain that liberals don't take cultural complexity into account when they're making models of societies. Additionally, they often accuse liberals of adhering to an idealized noble savage conception of non-Western peoples (e.g., I have heard some liberals argue that Obama's Muslim background will even encourage good feelings from the Islamic world!). Unfortunately, many conservatives are guilty of the same; simple models make good rhetoric and ignorance breeds supreme confidence (I've been guilty of this, you've been guilty of this). But if any individual looks to their own life, their social circle and their culture, they will see a great deal of texture, subtly and nuance which can't be shoehorned into the avowed heuristics. Labels: Religion
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Pajamas Media has a post up, Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves, which seems to be getting a bit of linkage. There's a lot of weird stuff in this post, so I figured I'd offer a little quick commentary on the assertions and data. I'm not going to do detailed citations at this point of why I believe what I believe in the interests of time, but if you dig deeper into the ethnography I think you'll see that I'm not making things up.
First, there's the assertion of mass conversions from Islam to Christianity in Africa. The link provided with an Al-Jazeerah transcript (translated) suggests that either Ahmad al-Qataani, leader of the Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, is stupid or mendacious. There's a lot of wacko contentions, but the big picture is this: in 1900 Africa was a predominantly pagan continent. Even regions which had long been historically dominated by Muslim elites, such as Senegal, was only lightly Islamicized at the level of the populace. In other words, institutional Islam has very shallow roots in much of Sub-Saharan Africa where it has historically been the only high religion. One can infer this from the fact that in East Africa the coastal margins were dominated by Muslim entrepots, and yet the majority of the population today is Christian in states such as Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania. Why? Because for whatever reason Muslims did not convert the interior tribes (I suspect that the fact that these peoples were a source of slaves as pagans, but would be forbidden if Muslims, might have played some role). An analogy might be Scandinavia in the late 10th century, when some warlords had converted to Christianity (e.g., Harald Bluetooth) and Christians were a presence as a minority across many regions, but paganism was still the dominant religion.  Since 1900 the proportion of Muslims has increased, but the proportion of Christians has increased far faster. Whereas the ratio of Muslims to Christians was lopsided in favor of Muslims in 1900 (with most Christians resident in Ethiopia), today there are more Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Southern and interior Central and East Africa the dominance of Christianity should be no surprise; Islam never penetrated these regions except in the form of the occasional trader, slave or otherwise. In contrast, in West Africa and in the Horn of Africa Islam arrived as an elite religion of the courts, a vector for high civilization (converting Nubia, almost conquering Ethiopia). But one needs to remember that the presence of Islam in Nigeria or the Guinea coast was never equivalent to that in Algeria or Egypt; Kambiz tells me that Muslim women in Ethiopia go topless on occasion. I think that tells you all you need to know about the penetration of Islamic values into many of these societies. The arrival of European colonialism resulted in a new avenue toward assimilation into a high culture which had nothing to do with Islam, and since 1950 the "forest zone" in much of West Africa has been Christianized. The fact that a long serving president of Benin converted from Christianity to Islam to Christianity again should illustrate the fluidity of religion in Sub-Saharan Africa (I suspect American readers might appreciate the protean & personal nature of religious affiliation in much of Sub-Saharan African better than Europeans or Asians).The article also has out-of-control fantasies by Christian evangelists: Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000. One Iranian religious scholar believes youth are abandoning Islam because it is identified with the corrupt Iranian government. Now the Iranian Majlis (parliament) is debating the death penalty for conversion. It's not impossible that there might be 1 million crypto-Christians in Iran, but do note this is a nation of 71 million. I'm sure I have enough Iranian readers to get a sense of these sorts of claims because if there really are 1 million crypto-Christians most Iranian Americans should know of them through their extended families, right? The exuberance of Christian evangelists is understandable, but the media tends to be way too credulous. Remember that some evangelical Christians claim there are over 100 million Christians in China, though surveys suggest considerably less (though more than the Chinese government admits). There are also anecdotal accounts of how hostile to Islam some Iraqis are now that Shia clericalism has somewhat of an influence. There's a problem with this though: a disproportionate number of emigrants from Iraq today are from its ancient Christian communities. It seems rather tasteless to fan flames over likely non-existent potentials to convert Iraqi Muslims to Christianity when the indigenous Christians are being driven out, and it seems that we are seeing the last generation of Christianity in Iraq (I am very skeptical that the Chaldaean Diaspora in Sweden will flock back to Iraq once it is more stable, just as the Church of the East Diaspora in the United States did not return after the expulsions of the early 20th century). The rest of the article alludes to apostasy and conversion to Christianity in Russia, Europe and other parts of the world. I suspect the numbers for Malaysia are a bit exaggerated, especially since the source is a mufti who likely wants to justify a more aggressive role for his office, but secularization has been attested for French citizens whose families are traditionally Muslim, and Russia has a long history of converting and assimilating "Tatars" into its population. A portion of the noble Russian boyar class were derived from the elites of Turkic peoples who were brought into the fold of the expanding Empire. In places like Albania the population is predominantly secular and Christians, Hare Krishnas and Muslims are all attempting to find converts in the population. In any case, I suspect the article was meant as a propaganda piece. I suppose it is important to rally the troops...but I'm generally not too fond of making stuff up, since that sort of behavior tends to come back and bite you. I also think some people will take it a bit too literally so I wanted to clarify a few issues.... Note: If you are interested a scholarly exposition of data, Philip Jenkins' books are pretty good. He's pro-Christian, but he is pretty good about not making stuff up or deceiving readers. Labels: Religion
Sunday, March 30, 2008
On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran's In God's We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First, human cognitive states are strongly biased by innate tendencies which have a biological origin. Perception and language acquisition are easily explained by nativist treatments, but Atran and others have argued that more obscure biases such as folk biology also exist, while other domains such as theory of mind are broadly accepted within the scholarly community.
One can conceive of a model where on a lower structural level a set of biological parameters interact with exogenous inputs to generate a set of psychological biases. But the subsequent mental skills are not independent, and I suspect broadly distributed ones contingent upon environmental inputs such as language are among the least encapsulated from other cognitive domains. It seems rather clear that language aptitude is one of the components which can be used to explain the facility for mathematical abstraction, but it can not explain the totality of this skill. Cognitive anthropologists have also noted that preliterate peoples have extreme difficulties with comprehending the logic or rationale behind syllogistic reasoning (see Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind), suggesting that there are strong cultural preconditions to particular styles of thinking which may seem natural to us. Even though language, reading and writing all are learned, they are also facilities which we as humans have an innate aptitude for because of our neurobiology (language is obviously "more innate" insofar as it seems that our priming is so strong that it might emerge out of any conventional socialization processes, which literacy is historically and culturally contingent). Another working assumption of Bloom, Atran & co. is that a great deal of our cognition is implicit. Again, this is well accepted among the community of scholars. It stands to reason that our conscious mind lives under the illusion that it is all that there is, but a substantial body of work tells us that most of our conscious decisions are strongly influenced and primed by subconscious background parameters. Not only does this include priming an individual immediately prior to a psychological task, but it also includes the enormous swath of territory which falls under the category of intuitive thinking. A dense network of background connections and implicit inferences is often an outsized shadow of the visible chains of reflective rationality. Even in structurally transparent and deductive disciplines such as mathematics the dark-net of subconscious facts and assumptions loom large in the process of creativity. The fact that psychological biases have many different upstream neurobiological and environmental parameters, as well as the syngergistic nature of cognition which produces subsequent cognitive abilities (e.g., mathematics or painting which includes perspective), means that a hypothesis that posits a God Module is obviously going to be false. There are god modules such as the medulla oblongata, but only insofar as they are necessary for the proper functioning of a human in general. But it seems highly unlikely that there is one localized region of the brain which is specifically the causal element for belief in God (i.e., if said region is damaged atheism ensues, but most other cognitive function is left unscathed). This assumption doesn't derive simply from an a priori understanding of how the mind works; we can see it in how the phenotype of theism plays out. The pathological character of many aphasia sufferers is pretty obvious; in contrast the avowed attitude toward the God hypothesis is characterized by a rich range of opinion in terms of both plausibility and character. In other words, religion is more properly characterized as a quantitative trait which exhibits a wide range of continuous variation, subject to a norm of reaction. Do note that I said avowed attitude; when it comes to theism there are many ways to evaluate belief or lack thereof. Despite wide variations in verbal descriptions of the particular flavor of deity believers assent to, psychologists know that the implicit model of most humans in regards to supernatural agents is strongly constrained. This is one of the main reasons that many cognitive scientists believe that our mental architecture is rigged toward a belief in god; not only do the gods which individuals from widely disparate societies model in their mind's eye differ from the entities which they avow a conscious belief in, but those psychological constructs exhibit a very strong universal central tendency. In other words, the human model of a god, or supernatural agent if you will, seems to be predicated on the various elements of universal neurobiology. Unless strongly constrained by experimental or observational methodologies as in natural science, or a rigorous formalism as in mathematics, our species tends to reason extremely sloppily so that inferences unmoored from experience or unchanneled by formalism invariably explore an enormous sample space of possibilities starting from the same axioms. That humans tend to conceive of the same god-construct despite lack of communication or outside input suggests that the channeling is occurring on an innate level. Additionally, not only do theists no matter their affiliation agree upon an intuitive model of God, but so do atheists. Paul Bloom has noted that the offspring of secular parents are usually innate Creationists. Many of the ideas bracketed within "religion" are very natural and intuitive. In our gut we know them to be "true" without deep reflection or analysis. Atheism can not exist without theism because it is simply a negation of the latter. It is a conceit of many atheists that children are naturally unbelievers and that they are indoctrinated into a religious system of belief. This is correct; children are indoctrinated into a system of belief, but more specifically they are indoctrinated into a system, not a belief. That in almost all human societies a supernatural model of the world is numerically dominant strongly suggests that these sorts of belief do not necessarily need the institutional scaffolding of established churches or professional priesthoods. Rather, it seems that these features of religion are secondary and subsequent, and that they operate upon the preexistent assumptions of the population. Some atheists live under the delusion that the withering of organized religion will result in the collapse of belief in God or the supernatural; this is not so. Though the extremely high rates of theism in some societies may be an upper bound contingent upon social and historical conditions, in no society does it seem there exists an inverse dynamic where theism is extant at trivial levels. Note that even after 70 years of state sanctioned atheism Russians have now swung back to a default affiliation with their historical religious identity as Orthodox Christians. This is not to say that Russians are a religiously fervent people; rather, the high levels of atheism espoused during the Soviet era was a function of a skewing of the environmental inputs which shifted the median value of the trait distribution. With the norm relaxed the distribution has shifted back. The plausibility of theism doesn't need to be something we note only in terms of macrosocial metrics in regards to religious affiliation cross-culturally. As I imply above, theism is at root a psychological phenomena, and the bundle of biases and presuppositions which our biology confers upon us stack the deck in terms of weighting the plausibility of god concepts. This applies to atheists as well. We might not believe in god on the conscious level, but that does not mean that we are immune to the priming affect of agents, and likely supernatural agents as well. The folk wisdom about there being no atheists in foxholes is a reflection of this assumption. Now I'm not going to tell anyone who says they don't believe in god that deep down they really do believe in god; rather, I simply believe that many of the psychological characteristics which prime one for finding god plausible are present in those who consciously assert that they don't believe in gods. For example many atheists may feel unnerved in cemeteries despite a materialist world-view; the psychological response may be a result of social conditioning, but it is also possibly a cognitive reflex at an intersection of environmental inputs (think snake aversion as something similar). So far I have alluded to biology & psychology, but what about the higher-level social sciences? Paul Bloom and most cognitive scientists are focused on the first two disciplines, so they tend to strongly adhere to a model that religion is a byproduct of our cognitive architecture. An analogy might be the heat given off by the functioning of a car's engine; the heat is not a designed product of the various components of the engine, but it is an inevitable byproduct of the physical processes entailed by combustion. Similarly, theism may not be an adaptation to any exogenous selection pressure, but the intersection of various adaptive psychological characters such as agency detection, theory of mind and folk biology necessarily lead to the plausibility of supernatural agents within the minds of most humans. Because of Bloom's disciplinary focus he tends to not be very open toward a functionalist explanation for theism; that theism (or religion) is an adaptive trait which increases individual fitness. Insofar as explanations at a lower level of organization are preferable to those at a higher level, I think that Bloom's skepticism is warranted. But even cognitive anthropologists who tend to focus on the psychological dimensions of theism can't dismiss the social aspects of religion, and a substantial body of social science research implies that variation in religious belief might track other social variables. Instead of repeating the functionalist explanations elucidated by scientists such as David Sloan Wilson (see Darwin's Cathedral), I think it is easy to illustrate the relation of these various theories by using an analogy with narrative. Despite the attempts of authors who dabble in "experimental fiction" it seems pretty obvious that a great story has a dimension of temporal permanence derived from the timelessness of the primary themes and styles. The Epic of Gilgamesh speaks to us even after 4,000 years, and many of its motifs are still extant in the heroic fantasy genre. Despite the lack of qualitative originality in plot and the constraints upon the plausible range of the psychology of characters we continue to consume fiction because our brains are attracted to particular themes arranged in a familiar structure. One could contend that fiction is a waste of time, but it seems likely that the same mental ticks which draw us to compelling stories are useful in other areas of life. But narrative is not only a byproduct of our promiscuous mental functioning, it is an essential part of myth-making and religion. The cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer has reported on research which suggests that minimally counterintuitive stories are the ones which are most memorable and "sticky" over the long-term. In other words, experimental fiction is just too weird to really make a deep impact, you don't have any common basis for associative memory to operate. In contrast, exceedingly conventional and banal narratives just don't add anything new to the base of data. A boring story is a boring story. But a familiar scenario with just the right amount of spice adds enough twists and turns within the comprehensible base to make it memorable enough to catalog and retrieve later. This explains why most science fiction and fantasy tends to constrain the deviation from normality; you can't relate to a story where most of it is unfamiliar or disorienting. Of course narrative is an essential part of religion. Even "primitive" religions have a robust narrative base; tales of gods & heroes unfettered by abstruse theologies. The story of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels has a power to draw people in and inspire them toward belief & action. In contrast, despite the fact that Christians accept the divine provenance of Deuteronomy, very few believers have ever recounted to me how it inspires them or serves as the ground of their faith. Just as narrative emerges naturally as a byproduct of our overall psychological architecture, it also immediately slots into the overall cultural entity which we label "religion." I suspect the exact same model is applicable to gods; their plausibility precedes their integration into a religious framework and does not derive from direct adaptation. But the universal nature of religious frameworks as well as storytelling implies that these byproduct traits are almost always subject to co-option by cultural systems which are canalized toward a particular configuration. But what is driving that canalization? I suspect there is some functional selection going on. Like many social science generalizations I'm not sure I can be very general here. David Sloan Wilson has collected data which shows that religious fundamentalism is more noticeable in economically depressed regions. Which way does the causality run here? I suspect that it is generally in the direction of economic insecurity to religious fundamentalism. The sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has elucidated a rational choice inspired framework which posits that religious institutions are firms which offer products which satisfy a fragmented market of religious consumers. This model seems highly plausible for the United States, but there are doubts as to its validity in other cultures where religious switching is not as socially acceptable or viable. Similarly, many of Wilson's adaptive arguments for the functional significance of religion are quite likely more relevant in societies which lack the accoutrements of the welfare state so that religious institutions have few competitors or substitutes. In other words, generalizations about the functional significance of religious institutions may not hold across many environments. Nevertheless, though generalizations on higher levels of organization are less impressive when compared to the relatively simplicity and universality of a biopsychological paradigm, I think it is necessary that we analyze the expression of religion outside the bounds of the human mind. After all, though religious ideas are fundamentally mental, they are embedded within a social matrix and have a geopolitical relevance in terms of how they shape human relations and action. We can, for instance, see that over the past few thousand years local tribal religions have ceded ground to the dominance of institutional religions which often have multiple products under the same brand name. The number of supernatural agents seems to be decreasing through a process of competition concurrent with the decrease in polities, languages and ethnic groups. But though institutional religions have gone through a process of consolidation this dynamic has limits; the fragmentation of Christianity during the Reformation or the schisms within the first centuries of Islam attest to this. Though religious institutions far exceed the scale of Dunbar's Number, a One-World-Religion seems as plausible as a One-World-Government. Psychologists have also attempted to move into broader domains of social science. Scott Atran has been at the forefront of attempting to synthesize the cognitivist viewpoint with an analysis of the nature of religious terrorism. Atran emphasizes the power of religious narratives & rituals in cementing group cohesion. The functionalist interpretation on this is pretty obvious; this is a case where heat from one process is quickly being utilized to generate energy through another. To some extent analysis of religious is like the species problem; we should measure the definition against the utility it provides in a particular context. Species define the joints around which nature is carved, and religion is a label for a cluster of integrated characters which we humans imbue with ontological significance. Both species and religion are important to understand, and can serve as frameworks for robust research programs, but a final definition will never be attained so long as scholars in disparate fields have distinct ends. A diversity of ends does not imply that these ends are contradictory, rather, when you have a many dimensional character it is necessary to observe from a variety of angles to obtain the clearest picture. Addendum: I want to add something: theism & religion are very robust phenomena. This is why adaptationist explanations are so compelling. That's why an analogy to misunderstandings due to intuitive physics (e.g., flat earth, variance of acceleration in proportion to mass of an objection) is informative, but only to some extent. Overactive agency detection feeds into something which is far more than the sum of their parts, the falsifiable manifestations of religion such as Young Earth Creationism can resist disconfirmation because of their association with psychological tendencies such as group conformity enforced by common rituals & beliefs. To say religion is a spandrel or exaptation understates its interaction with other aspects of human culture so as to make it inevitable and resistant to suppression. Related: The nature of religion and Breaking the Spell, Modes of religion, Who Dan Dennett think he be foolin'?, An evolutionary anthropology of religion, , God lives, deal with it!, , Belief & belief in belief, Logical consistency is irreligious, God & moralityAre people naturally religious? Yes.... , The round-eyed Buddha, Nerds are nuts, Atheism, Heresy and Hesychasm, The God Delusion - Amongst the unbelievers , Innate atheism & variation across societies, "Hard-wired" for God, Buddhism, a religion or not?, Why do people believe in God?, Is religion an adaptation?, Theological incorrectness - when people behave how they shouldn't....sort of , The gods of the cognitive scientists Labels: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Religion
Monday, March 24, 2008
Via Over Coming Bias, The science of religion - Where angels no longer fear to tread:
It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease. This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are not. Any bets on what's causing this? I suspect low dopamine individuals are less likely to be socially conforming, so the effect on religiosity might be weaker in a society where religion is less important than the United States. But nice to see some neurochemical work on this. In the future perhaps neuroscientists will be able to advise parents on the optimal mixture of the "soup" in their offsprings' brains to increase the chances of religiosity, or decrease it? (Randall Parker has been talking about this for years) But probably the most interesting reported research in the piece has to do with group selection & functionalism: To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year. These sorts of data are relatively persuave to me about the functional power of religious institutions and social dynamics. Of course, apparent deviations from the trendline will be important to examine too. This is the closest thing to a website I could find for the Explaining Religion Project. Labels: Religion
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Audacious Epigone crunches the Pew Religion Survey and comes up with some more insights....
Labels: Religion
Monday, February 25, 2008
Pew is out with a new survey of religion in America. I've only skimmed it so far, but it has lots of interesting stuff. Note for example that this survey suggests that are marginally more self-identified Buddhists in America than Muslims (this is probably a function of the fact that Buddhism, and generally Buddhist ideas and concepts, have a much wider appeal to white Americans than Islam, whose "product" is less strong differentiated from forms of Christianity).
Check the methodology. Via Rod Dreher. Labels: Religion
Sunday, February 17, 2008
God (and Gadgets) of the Lonely?:
I've been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I've had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I've heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who've been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the psychological origins of religion. While the final answer to why people are religious is a long, long way off, I can say with some confidence that the first of the two answers above is almost certainly wrong. People's religious impulses stem from much more mundane sources than the mysteriousness of the world around us. That's not to say that religion can't serve to help explain the otherwise inexplicable, or that this isn't an important purpose of religion, but it doesn't seem to be one of the fundamental or original purposes of it. Instead, it seems that religion's social functions are actually more foundational. This leads to the second answer above -- the one that says religion is around to make us feel less lonely -- seeming plausible. Most of the research on the social aspects of religion to date, however, has been on its function in communities. A paper in this month's issue of Psychological Science, however, takes a more direct look at the role of loneliness in religion. Labels: Religion
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
A few weeks I read a The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800. A fair proportion of the book discussed the introduction of Roman Catholicism into China during the late Ming period (early 17th century) down to the denouement of the rites controversy. Because China and the West had developed on different intellectual tracks for 2,000 years before this meeting of the minds, so to speak, the Jesuits had to grapple with the fact that details of translation were of great import. For example, they introduced the neologism Lord of Heaven to distinguish their monotheistic god from the traditional Chinese concepts of Lord on High and Heaven (the personal and impersonal forms of the divine respectively). The missionaries were worried about conflations within the Chinese mind between the new religion and their preexistent supernatural beliefs; an issue emphasized by the repeated lack of distinction by locals between the exoteric aspects of Roman Catholicism and Pure Land Buddhism. Speaking of which, the Jesuits regularly utilized realistic European paintings of religious scenes, individuals and events, in their attempt to impress & imprint upon the natives the sensory pageantry of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. But they had to cease displays of the Madonna with the infant Jesus because Mary was often assumed to be a rendering of Guan Yin, a bodhisattva of compassion. Now reading T'ang China I stumble upon a passage where the author points to scholars who suggest that the evolution of the male bodhisattva Avalokitesvara into Guan Yin and the associated imagery was influenced by Nestorian Christianity's depiction of Mary! It is not surprising that crypto-Christians in Japan cloaked their Mary veneration within devotions to the Japanese variant of Guan Yin.
The possibility that Guan Yin might be phylogenetically related to Mary mother of Jesus is only that, a possibility. Alternatively, it seems plausible that both serve as a specific focus for relatively universal cognitive reflexes easily evoked in most contexts. Nevertheless, it would be richly ironic if the Jesuits turned away from excessive attention to Mary because of a confusion with Guan Yin because the latter had integrated aspects of Mary into her persona and presentation in the first place! From the outside as an irreligious person the often vacuous assertions of religious liberals that all faiths manifest the same truths actually makes some sense; but whereas the religious would interpret the truth as a transcendent supernatural one the materialist would simply give the nod to universal human psychological propensities intersecting with generic exogenous inputs (e.g., you look upon the star filled sky and feel a sense of awe). All that being said, to many religious people the specific name given to these cognitive constructs is very, very, important. In the days of yore when religion was simply an extension of tribal custom & tradition adherence to the name of a god was a cultural marker. All men are fundamentally human, variations upon the theme, but in a patrilineage which specific man you are descended from (at least notionally) determine all aspects of your social relations. Similarly, which god to which you bend the knee is critical in determining your circle of kin and fictive kin. The basic building blocks are psychologically universal, but the specific twists are socially functional, leveraging other cognitive tendencies in the process (conformity and xenophobia). Remember, the last of the pagan philosophers quipped that the Christians of the time were killing each other over one letter, i, whether one adhered to the doctrine of homoiousia or homoousia. Though to be fair, the difference was over the weighty matter of whether the three aspects of the Trinity were of similar or same substance...whatever that means. Labels: Religion
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Necessity & sufficiency & Islam; Barack Obama is an apostate!
posted by Razib @ 1/16/2008 03:19:00 PM 
 
Mark Kirkorian points out that Barack Obama is a Muslim apostate:
Several implications: first, Obama's has a unique opportunity - even a responsibility - to speak out on behalf of former Muslims under threat of death for converting to other faiths. Second, there are likely to be even more lunatics trying to kill him than there would be otherwise. And third, how would a President Obama be greeted by, say, the king of "Saudi" Arabia? Probably the same way a President Lieberman would be, and that could actually be a big selling point in his favor, but it's something we can't just pretend doesn't exist. By a broad interpretation Kirkorian is correct to assert that Obama would be considered an apostate by many Muslims if the facts of his biography were to be presented before them (I am an apostate as well by the definition that is being assumed here). Additionally, his conversion to another religion is also highly problematic, non-religious individuals who nevertheless do not opt-out of Islamic identity/culture and turn toward aggressive atheism or another religion are tolerated to some extent in many Muslim societies. Converts to other religion though are seen as a more obvious affront. But there's a big problem with Kirkorian's inferences: they exist in in a vacuum of the true distribution of empirical data and take Muslim axioms at face value. This is common among many conservative American intellectuals who wish to rebut the anodyne reassurance from the mainstream that Islam is "really a religion of peace." So fixated on countering the "Islam is peace" propaganda conservative intellectuals don't bother to learn much about how the religion is actually practiced to compare the facts to the various inferences they make about how it would be practiced. If you look at a list of former Muslims you note several politicians, most prominently Carlos Menem, the former president of Argentina. Menem of course had good relations with the Arab world. What gives here? We know that some apostates are threatened with death, or even killed. Context matters. Many of the attacks on apostates have other factors which serve to push Muslims to action upon their avowed axioms. The Afghan convert to Christian, Abdul Rahman, wasn't the most mentally stable individual. In the Muslim world apostasy and blasphemy laws are often enforced or implemented opportunistically; quite often there are other reasons that principals bringing the charges have for prosecution (e.g., confiscation of property). I do think it is important that the Mark Kirkorians of the world point out the illiberalism which is accepted within the Muslim world. But that being said, I do worry that they take their own rhetoric a bit too literally. After all, consumption of alcohol does exist within the Muslim world, to the point where a king of Saudi Arabia had to abdicate because he couldn't mask his addiction anymore. To some extent I wonder if a certain Anglo-American naivete about the relationship between word & deed is at work here; a tendency to take as concrete assertions which are embedded & expressed within the constraints of practical day to day realities. On the other hand, I also think part of the issue is that when you are outside of a culture you only see the explicit axioms which are averred and are unaware of the implicit pragmatism which defines day to day life. Finally, it is important to note that though I think that the Islamic attitude toward apostasy is not sufficient to explain the outbursts of violence and intimidation to those who leave the fold, it is necessary. Labels: Religion
Friday, November 23, 2007
Reading the Bhagavad Gita I am struck (as usual) by commonalities between mystical philosophies rooted in a method of psychological introspection and meditation. For example, the tendency toward monism is marked across many traditions which emerge out of specific religious or philosophical movements. This even includes the monotheistic religions of the West, whose creeds and beliefs tend to notionally reject monism and imply the separation of a personal God from his Creation. The Perennial Philosphy emergred from this empirical observation of the relatively uniform experience of mystics, and the field of Religious Studies has been influenced this idea, in particular through the work of Mircea Eliade. Eliade and his fellow travelers conceive of religious experience as a window into a sacred reality, distinct from the profane world. Obviously, I don't believe this. Rather, I am struck by the fact that very few mystics ever report that they have looked upon the 6
3 essences of the universe. Or any specific deviation from the One. Rather, mystical trance seems to blur distinctions across categories as all perception melts into a unitary underlying essence, whether you call it God or the One. In contrast to mysticism theology tends to explore a huge sample space of possibilities and configurations. Why is this? I suspect it is because theology tends to rely on explicit chains of inferences based on verbal logic, and quite often individuals may differ in their sense of what is implied by a particular proposition. In contrast, the heightened consciousness of mysticism and the sense of the One is probably reflecting underlying neurological realities. The One isn't the real nature of the universe, it is simply the common output the brain pops out when put under the ascetic stresses or mental techniques which mystics utilize to change their consciousness. I am generally skeptical of neurotheology when it claims to explain religion, but I do believe it is on its way to accurately sketching out the shape of mysticism (obviously it doesn't explain religion because I think that mysticism is simply a subset of religion, not the totality of it). Labels: Religion
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
For several years I've been suggesting that people should be relatively unconcerned by the rise of the evangelical Christian counter-culture, and in particular its more ambitious projects, such as Patrick Henry College. My rationale was primarily one based on American history and the experience of Christian anti-modernists with founding institutions to battle back against the de-sectarianization of earlier redoubts. For example, Harvard was founded to train Calvinist ministers. Princeton was founded to train Calvinist ministers after Harvard was suborned from within (it became a stronghold of Unitarianism before its sectarian aspect disappeared). Eventually Wheaton became the Harvard of American evangelicalism. The disquiet over the non-renewal of the contract of a faculty member who was converting to Roman Catholicism suggests to me that the cracks of ecumenicalism are looming on the horizon.
But that's just the American evidence. I think we can increase the sample space from the founding of Christianity, as well as look at other nations. Reading about the Reformation recently I noted again that to engage in full takeover of a society Protestants had to capture the elite, and especially the monarch or potentate. France and the Austrian lands of Germany were initially strongly influenced by the Protestant Reformation, and parity was achieved at least at the level of the nobility. But over time the Catholic monarch forced religious conformity. In places like Holland the small Protestant minority were highly motivated, and without a powerful monarch they were able to engage in full takeover of the society. In Scandinavia and England the change occurred by fiat from on high (Scotland might be an exception to the rule, but its monarchy was particularly weak during this period and the nobles dictated the religion of the young future king James). These "magisterial" Protestants were in many ways quite traditional, and as evidenced by Martin Luther's screed written against the peasants who rebelled against their lords in 1525. They were willing to aid and abet the powers that be and violate the spirit of their original dissent from the central authority of the papacy. On the other hand there were dissenters, radical Protestants, who wished to reorder society through their own interpretation of scripture. The Munster Rebellion is the most antimonian manifestation of this tendency. These attempts to purify the society failed and most radical Protestants accepted that they were the Elect and that the culture at large was going to be outside of salvation. Though mainstream Calvinism is popular among American evangelicals, it is from the radical Reformation that anti-modernist Protestanta derive their true energy and which they most resemble. Though some groups, such as the Jehovah's Witness, have stayed true to the separatist vision, of late some evangelical Protestants have attempted to refashion the broader culture in their own image. Obviously I think they are bound to fail. The attempt to fuse radical Protestantism with the City of Man always results in the latter consuming the former, just as Christian Rock or Rap seems second-hand and derivative. The utopian streak derived from primitive Christianity can have no truck with the amoral and pragmatic necessities of the world (the Pope who was no longer a Prince became a far more luminous spiritual figure). Many radical Protestants look back to the Christian Church before it was championed by the Roman Empire, and suggest that it was the Empire which converted the Church and not the reverse. But of course that early Church's purity was enabled by the fact that it was a minority sect which self-selected its members for their devotion to a separatist quasi-state within the Roman Empire. Any attempts to turn the Roman Empire into a Christian utopia would have foundered on the reality that the institutional structures and purity of belief suitable for a separatist subculture are impractical for a universal political dispensation. Labels: Religion
Thursday, November 08, 2007
I've been reading a bit of the literature of the cognitive science of religion, as well as a good deal of material on the Reformation (for the former, see In Gods We Trust and Religion Explained). Trying to make heads or tails of the dynamics which we see in the world around us isn't easy (at least for me). One of the major issues which crops up when psychologists explore how individuals model their gods is a dichotomy between a reflective conception and a reflexive intuition. People can give rough sketches of their theology of choice, but when prompted with little warning to narrate their god acting upon the world the implied characteristics tend to differ sharply from the formula which they earlier provided. The implication is that in parallel with a conscious god-model adhered to for the purposes of group identity most humans have an implicit subconscious model which they use in day to day cognitive processes. Some workers posit that this dual nature of god-concepts explains the tension between elite religion and folk religion, the high church and the low. The process of sect formation and religious revivalism may be the natural byproduct of this tension, as the masses attempt to draw away from elite attempts to shoe-horn theism into a hyper-rational and abstract system which doesn't satisfy their psychological needs and intuitions (in the American context this would be the switch from liberal Protestantism to evangelical Protestantism; though the latter is more orthodox in its theology, it is still considerably more penetrable than some of the abstruse material generated by modernist icons such as Paul Tillich).
With that, I was interested in some of the facts relayed in The Protestant Reformation: Beliefs and Practices: The Reformation may eventually have become a popular movement, but it had its origins in the intellectual developments associated with Humanism and the Renaissance. The early reformers were virtually all of them university-educated men. Most of them were trained theologians, but they had also had a solid grounding in classical scholarship and in the techniques of logic and rhetoric.... The "university-educated" portion really jumped out at me. Remember that this was a period when most of the populace was not functionally literate! The Reformation was a world-shaking event. Luther and Calvin and their fellow travelers ushered in a period of communal bloodshed which culminated in the international Thirty Years' War, which many take to be a turning in point Europe's love affair with state sponsored religion (the discontinuity is not so sharp, note the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which postdates the Peace of Westphalia by a generation). Obviously there were other contingent factors which played a role in the Reformation besides the intellectual firepower of men such as Martin Luther. Most people can probably agree that the printing press was a critical catalyst in the emergence of a robust republic of letters which served as the vehicle for a rapid sweep of new ideas across populations. But that catalyst needed a substrate to operate upon, so ideas in and of themselves did matter. I was interested to discover that John Calvin, the hero of the Reformed movement and the god-father of many Christian conservatives, was not a literalist. For example, believed that Genesis was a simplified narrative aimed toward a particular audience. In fact many of the reformers were taken aback by the simplistic reception of their message among the masses; some radicals took to sola scriptura and began to use the Bible as proof text for all elements of their lives. Many of these were the precursors of the Anabaptists, who were persecuted by Lutherans and Calvinists as well as Catholics. Additionally, the sophisticated arguments exposited by the intellectuals were not well understood by the typical enthusiastic convert. At one point one of Luther's followers, Andreas Karlstadt, preached against the Catholic interpretation of the eucharist to a sympathetic crowd, but was expelled a few days later by the same people for not celebrating the eucharist in the "proper" (i.e., Catholic) manner. But to me iconoclasm is the most interesting phenomenon. The destruction of images, sculptures and art-work in general as "idolatry" is very familiar. In both Korea and Brazil radical Protestants have engaged in the destruction of religious imagery of their "idolatrous" opposition within the past few years, and we don't even need to talk about the Bamiyan Buddhas. The reformer Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich was disturbed by the more enthusiastic iconoclasts who were destroying works in his name, and tried to salvage some of the stained glass in his church in vain. His followers were no longer under his control when it came to some questions whose correctness they needed no scholarly guidance on. The most extreme case of iconoclasm in the modern or early modern era is clearly manifest in Islam; Wahhabi radicals have been engaging in the destruction of sacred architecture and sites for several centuries. Though Islam is ostensibly an unadorned monotheism, as a practical matter there is a fair amount of veneration of saints and holy men, particularly around their burial sites. John Calvin was buried in an unmarked grave because his followers were worried about the likelihood that such a site would become one of pilgrimage for those who venerated him. It seems clear that these recurrent manifestations of iconoclasm are natural implicit inversions of the tendency to imbue in objects and places a sacred importance. The rage of iconoclasm and the passion that it elicits issues from the fact that the destroyers understand very well the natural impulse to venerate particular persons and the objects and places which are imbued with their charisma. On the one hand folk religions, whether Catholic or Protestant, Muslim or Hindu, exhibit similar tendencies and manifest the same general motifs. But this ocean of intuitive religious sensibility is periodically roiled by "reformist" tendencies from waves from on high which are able to spread quickly because of their transmission via explicit verbal creeds and arguments. Folk religion is limited in its spatial expanse because of its relationship to objects in the landscape, relics of obscure saints and sacred places of parochial importance. Its roots are deep, but its canopy is narrow. In contrast elite reformist movements are portable bits of data, memes, which are constrained only by the information technology and the necessary lubricant of mobile and literate evangelists. Ergo, the printing press combined with a standing cadre of intellectuals (generalized subsided by the Catholic Church ironically!) enabled the Reformation to explode beyond the control of monarchs bent on strangling it (remember that Henry the VIII was against it before he was for it!). Events such as St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre show the power of these emerging memeplexes to crystallize divisions and coalesce ingroup-outgroup sentiments. But as these movements spread and diffused down the social ladder the tightness and integrity of the myriad memes becomes garbled; nuanced theological arguments reduce down to intuitively tractable maxims such as the destruction of idols. The various currents and tensions working at cross-purposes likely cycle over time and produce a metastable equilibrium. Addendum: Not only did Protestantism emerge as an idea promoted by a small group of intellectuals, its initial successes were among urban or elite segments of the populace. The French Protestants, the Huguenots, were able to hold their own in the face of Catholic persecution for several centuries because of their concentration among the higher orders of society and the critical mass in the cities of particular regions. In Poland, Austria and Hungary at one point the higher nobility seems to have turned predominantly Protestant. In Poland persistent (though weak) pressure from the monarchy combined with the historical circumstance that Protestantism became associated with traditional enemies (Prussia and Sweden) resulted in the re-Catholicization of of the nobility by the 18th century. In Austria the Hapsburgs forced a re-Catholicization through incentive and coercion. In Hungary a Protestant minority remained despite widespread defection, but this was due to the historical coincidence, as the south and east of the country was under Ottoman domination and so beyond the reach of the Counter-Reformation. I bring up these minutiae to show that even though Protestantism as an idea swept many elites, it was generally successful in sinking deep roots only where the apex of the political order favored it for a substantial period of time (England, Scandinavia, the principalities of northern Germany, Geneva, and the Netherlands). Conversely, even if the Reformation did not succeed it often left a lasting impact. The French Protestants who fled in the late 17th century from persecution and forced conversion to Catholicism left a lasting mark across the globe, from South Africa to Berlin to England. Even though the Reformation was never a mass movement in Italy, some of the most radical thinkers were Italian, and shaped the course of movements such Unitarianism in Transylvania. And remember that the most prominent Unitarian of the age, Michael Servetus, was Spanish! Finally, I don't want to emphasize historical contingency too much. During the first decade or so of the Reformation the Hapsburg monarchy was dealing with a Turkish march deep into central Europe. The Ottomans were beaten back from Vienna only in 1529, and for a century and a half afterward they were a persistent drain on the Hapsburg treasury. Some have argued that the Ottoman offensive of the early 16th century was a necessary precondition in giving Martin Luther and other radicals respite from attempts by the center to bring them into line. This is possibly correct, but that does not mean that the Reformation of the early 16th century was a once-in-a-universe phenomenon. With the printing press, the emergence of a larger middle class and the coalescence of proto-nations during the Renaissance it seems that the likelihood for religious discord was high. The Hussite rebellion shows that many of the preconditions were already extant during the late medieval period. A convergence between the explosion of Martin Luther and the Turkish worries of the Holy Roman Emperor might have been fortuitous for the Reformation, but it seems likely that if Suleiman the Magnificent had turned all his attention to Persia in the east any success of stamping out of the heretics would only have delayed the inevitable reckoning with the pent up social pressures and the technology to unleash them. Labels: Religion
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science has an interesting post where they present two charts; one displays average religious attendance vs. average income and another within-state correlation of religious attendance vs, average income. The red data points show states where George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004 and blue John Kerry. Two conclusions:
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