Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I Heard It On NPR


My goodness but it's been the strangest weather here. Yesterday was downright chilly. For us, anyway, who had already succumbed to turning on the air conditioner at night to sleep. We don't expect temperatures in the fifties at the latter part of May but here we are, reaching for the down comforters we'd already packed away, the jackets we'd thought we were done with for the year.
And the wind, it just keeps on picking up, like the bands that come before a hurricane, calm, still and then suddenly, it's as if a dervish had flown in to spin and toss and twirl the leaves and bend the branches, down and then up, over and around.
I am watching them right now and they are nothing if not dancing. A big clot of old branch just freed itself from the pecan and hit the roof, then tumbled to the ground.
Strange weather and so easy to divine portents and omens from such winds and chilliness, gray sky, calm then power, back to calm.
I listened yesterday while I walked to an interview with a woman who has written a book about the neuroscience of religion. Barbara Bradley Hagerty and her book is Fingerprints of God. She discussed how scientists have pinpointed the part of the brain where intense spiritual experience seems to come from. Not the part of the brain that makes you go to church on Sunday and sing hymns, but the part that the mystical, feeling-another-presence sensation comes from. The part that is activated quite strongly when Buddhist Monks meditate and nuns pray. The part that is activated during temporal lobe epileptic events, which is why 2,500 years ago Hippocrates wrote of epilepsy as The Sacred Disease. It caused visions and voices in the sufferers of the disorder, visions and voices which many thought came from god. The ones who experienced it often did.
The burning bush of Moses.
The voice of god telling Abraham to sacrifice his son.
John The Baptist, preaching in the desert.
Were these men epileptics?
Who knows?
But what amazed me about the interview with Ms. Hagerty was not what she had to say about scientists being able with electrodes to stimulate these same sort of visions and sense-of-presence that people have sought for eons with meditation, chanting, prayer, dancing, fasting, self-mutilation and who-knows-what-all. No, it was the way you could tell that she was using this scientific evidence to support her belief in god.
Her reasoning was that we humans are hard-wired this way by our creator to experience the presence of him. She referred to god as "him."
I found this very interesting indeed. She could be right. I'm not saying she isn't, but I am saying that this just goes to show that if you believe in god, you believe no matter what. I suppose this is what we call "faith" and if you don't, well...you don't.
To me the whole brain-thing proves that visions and voices come from right inside of our own brains and interpretation is all.
When I was seriously ill once, I had that very same feeling-of-presence. Raised in a Christian culture, I interpreted it as Jesus. It calmed me.
Was Jesus really sitting there in a rocking chair beside my bed in a hospital in Winter Haven, Florida?
I don't think so.
I think our brains are wonderful and amazing and when we are physically or mentally most challenged, they kick in with all sorts of good drugs and yes, even visions and voices that calm and reassure us. I mean, a scientist with an electrode-wired football helmet can recreate these things. This, to me, is not proof of god, but proof that we have evolved in strange and wonderful ways. I don't see the fingerprint of god, I see the firing of neurons of a stressed (or trained, in the matter of the meditators, the prayers, the chanters) brain to help us get through a dire situation, just as our bodies release adrenalin when we need to lift a car off a child.
But then, I don't have the god gene.
Which doesn't mean I don't find comfort and joy in the way things work. It doesn't mean that I don't feel the wind and see the rain and see the grandeur in them. It doesn't mean that I don't see the miracle in the seed, the beauty in the brain.
But here's the problem for me- if my brain doesn't work correctly and the wrong parts get over-stimulated or under-stimulated and instead of feeling the presence of god, I feel terror and anxiety when there is no reason to, would I then have to believe in the fingerprint of satan? Would I have to believe that I am possessed by an evil spirit?
Because if I am to believe that when the brain gives me this feeling of other-presence, this all-is-one, all-is-well message that this is god's fingerprint, when the opposite happens, how can that be just a brain dysfunction?
Have you ever injured yourself severely? Severely enough to feel that rush of morphine-like chemicals the brain floods the body with when it's hurt? If you have, you know that feeling of calmness which can overtake the anxiety and pain of the injury. I think this is a beautiful thing and a way the body takes care of itself but hardly proof of god.
Ah well. We all see the fingerprint of whatever we want to see. And I'm of the opinion that we really know so very little about how our brains work, how things relate and communicate from one quark to another, from one mind to another, from one plant to another. But I think we should be wary of interpreting what we do know to mean that god is involved.
Because for every person whose temporal lobe is activated who sees a loving god, who receives a message of peace and love, there is someone whose temporal lobe is activated who receives a message insisting that god wants him to spread the word that the infidels must die. Or that adulterers must be stoned to death. Or that women who were raped must be stoned to death.
Or that the world's end is at hand and we must all drink the Kool Aid.
We have to be careful with this stuff, this god-stuff. Your god might be loving and tell you to spread the word of peace, my god might be terrifying and spread the word of death.
And the wind could portend a coming storm or it could simply be the result of a weather disturbance down in the Keys which will blow itself out in a few days due to wind shears and water temperatures and other things I don't pretend to understand but trust that someone else does.
Which doesn't take away the ominous feeling the wind gives me.
I guess what I'm saying here is that the more information we have to help explain the things we feel as well as the things we see, the better off we are and that it's sort of ridiculous to me to try and use that information in rather twisted logic to explain that yes, there is a god, and in fact he left this place in our brain which can be activated to prove that.
Gotta be careful with this stuff. We still have all the lizard parts of our brains and we have all this more highly-evolved stuff too. It's all in there because we use it all and sometimes it tells us that god is with us and sometimes it tells us that the sky is falling.
And it can allow us to decide whether or not either of those things are true.
Amazing.
But not proof of god, at least for me.
You can read about the book and the author here.
Interesting stuff for our amazing brains to toss around and contemplate like the wind tosses the trees, like the sky contemplates the earth, like a soul contemplates the meaning of it all.

14 comments:

  1. Ms. Moon, I can't tell you how close to home this hits right now. Not me personally, but I think you know what I mean.

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  2. I work with people who are acutely psychotic, and many of them claim that God and/or Satan are talking to them. Makes you wonder about these religious fanatics. Maybe they're future clients.
    Cause that's what you are when God tells you to set your house on fire and you actually do it: a client of mine.

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  3. Oh Ms. Moon - I love the way your brain works ;0)

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  4. Ahhhhh, yes. The Kool aid.

    I miss my NPR. And I worked in a psych hospital once upon a time, too. What's that Dylan said? You gotta serve somebody? The patients who set things on fire per the word of God BELIEVE in it, just as the people who feed and clothe and love because their God said so in the Bible.

    I think it's important to do what's feels right for you. And you know, keep an eye out for the other guy because he's following his heart too. Whether we like it or not, life is just a huge game of dodgeball.

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  5. But do we yet have proof that the psychotics who are told to set your house on fire are being told from the same place as people who have managed to access what I see as their own divinty.

    I am not comfortable with the idea that psychotic is the same as what waht monks etc have learned to access.

    Hmm.

    To me, jsut because it's locatable doesn't mean it negates people's experience of the divine.

    And I also suspect that if you've been raised with a repressive Christian religion, your concept of the divine, and your feelings about it are going to be somewhat off base.

    Because people have used religion as an excuse for violence and power seeking doesn't mean that there is anything inherently wrong with the concept of divinity.

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  6. If there is a divinity, it's that little place in our brain not in that big place with stained glass. God has definitely left the building.

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  7. Great thoughts on a difficult subject.

    I like the part about epilepsy. I can imagine that shaking and talking in tongues some religious fanatics engage in could easily come from the same part of the brain that causes seizures. The two events do look sort of the same when they occur.

    And I must say, if you hear the voice of God (or Satan) in your head telling you to act - in any way - you are either insane or wildly over indulgent of your imagination.

    Just one man's opinion.

    I think that we have already discussed this, but you have read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, no?

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  8. PS - It erks the crap out of me when people refer to "God" as "Him". I don't know what bugs me more: the capitalization thing or the gender assumption thing.

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  9. Steph- I do.

    Rachel- I think many religious fanatics are probably quite insane. The trouble is, they can be so convincing.

    JustMe- I'm glad!

    AllThisTrouble- I agree. Dodgeball. Gotta stay quick on your feet.

    Ms. Jo- Well, depends on how you define "divinity." And I'm not sure how I do.

    Magnum- I tend to agree with you there.

    Lady Lemon- Yes. I've read that book. I recommend it. And as you well know, I can't go to a place where god is God or a man or even all-powerful, all-knowing, etc., etc.

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  10. I just think it is all a matter of perspective; either you believe or you don't so far as I am concerned. Those people who think they need to find all of these concrete REASONS to believe, or hunt down proof or whatever, well, I think they are missing the point. But that's just me.

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  11. Not to be offensive... though I often am. I really dug a bumper sticker I saw that read: "Exactly when did Jesus create fossils?"

    Remind me next time we speak to tell you about some scary and fascinating stuff I've been researching on mind control. It ties in with the God obsession thing.

    pf ps Don't forget the spider poop!

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  12. pps Thanks LL for reminding me about the epileptic part. I found that incredibly fascinating also. Bursting with all kinds of possibilities and strangeness!

    Great post.

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  13. Kori- Well, exactly. You got the god gene or you don't.

    Ms. Fleur- I will remind you.

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