Fairies, Werewolves and God: the banality of the human mind

 

When I first stumbled across the word “atheist,” I was thirteen years old. To say I was delighted at the discovery would be to miss the point: it felt like what believers would call a godsend. After years of being different in so many ways, as countless adolescents inevitably feel, I had finally found a group that made perfect sense to me. I hadn't had an occurrence of religious thought since I was six, and even then it was only terror, inspired by my priest's gruesome stories of Jesus's torture. There was no doubt in my mind; I was an atheist. Once I had let my exciting new definition sink in, I slowly started to seek out other atheists, and felt that rush of adrenaline we get when we find someone who agrees with us. Nietzsche might not have approved, but I was pretty pleased all the same. There was, of course, another joy, the tingling pleasure of outsmarting the masses; we might all inhabit the same world, but I understood it better than most.

   As will happen with bright-eyed young unbelievers, though, the giddy elation rather rapidly subsided into a sad mixture of isolation, frustration, and confusion. How could it be that so many people could live in a world of make-believe? Why was I so impervious to its charms? My first conclusion, which has always been a tempting one, was that people are simply very dumb: they lack the mental resources to think critically and analyze information. (When, in an argument, someone would lead with “Most people think...” I was always quick to retort, “Yeah, well 'most people' believe in God.”) As might be expected, this sort of conclusion quickly eroded any faint desire I might have had to fit in with or associate myself with believers. How could anyone want to surround himself with fools and charlatans who hold up a mendacious fairy-world as an example to others?
   This conveniently narrow worldview came under nearly instant attack, but not from the effete protestations of outsiders, from within. It did not take a sharp eye to notice that my atheist friends were not brilliant to a man. They often possessed a rather keen understanding of their surroundings (which may have been the reason for their atheism), but it was patent to me that their overall mental faculties were no better, or in certain cases many times worse, than those of my more spiritually inclined acquaintances. I immediately explained it away in the most convenient and less strenuous way possible: “Obviously, they're very smart in one sense, but just don't have a very powerful brain.” That is to say that to me, common sense and sheer mental computing power were not governed by the same cerebral force. This kind of conclusion seems to be commonsensical itself: everyone knows about those who were once aptly styled “idiot savants,” and it seems absurd to think that because someone lacks the charm to close a business deal, he will fail in calculus.
   But what never occurred to me was that then, and for some years afterwards, I was thinking like that class of person I so abhorred. I was drawing selective conclusions based on evidence much more generous and nuanced than my perception. With the religiously-fueled plane hijackings in the US in 2001, I, like many other Americans of all ages, was suddenly and violently exposed to the world of Islam, something that, to my ten-year-old mind, was entirely unfamiliar. I was too young to know what to make of the attacks; I was too focused on hoping bin-Laden would be caught and executed, too eager to make Iraq pay. But my mind was never idle. I remember when I was thirteen or fourteen, perambulating a bookstore, I found a book about the evils of Islam. I had been looking for an educational book, and nothing seemed more currently appropriate than studying Islam. After all, our country, for better or worse, was rather embroiled in Islamic affairs. After casually leafing through it for a bit (and assessing its thickness), I decided it looked legitimate enough to be a worthy buy. The contents of that book shocked me to my core. What shocked me the most were not the outlandish claims of Islamic oppression within the book, but my supplemental research validating every one of them. For every time I saw a prominent, respected Muslim supporting the death sentence for apostasy, blasphemy, or homosexuality, my outrage doubled. My focus changed thenceforth to combating the iniquities of religion, and I hardly gave another serious thought to the underlying framework of belief.
   To me, people would believe what they would, and I had learned through plentiful experience that exposure to reason and facts was no cure. Such an angle, in fact, galvanized the pious, who could boast having survived the most intense attack on their faith, and who were now doubly sure that they preferred eternal life to putrid decomposition. In conversations with believers, I would bring up facts, figures, and the innumerable horror stories of needless religious oppression, of course focusing on Islam. Christianity was equally hateful to me, but modern Islam represented old-style religion in the present world. The evils of Christianity in the 21st century do not jump out at the average person (the best even those who did hate Christianity could do was often simply to say “Crusades!” as if that were an all-encompassing argument).
   The more I immersed myself in my world of omnipresent, terrifying acts of evil and idiocy, the more religion became my nemesis. As soon as I knew somebody even had the slightest spiritual inclination, he was already a mortal foe, and would have to do much to prove himself otherwise. Every individual expression of religion, therefore, became absorbed into a framework of worldwide religious manifestation, so that a Christian woman believing in the resurrection of the Nazarene was a stone's throw away from a suicidal jihadist. Such a statement seems positively absurd to many, but oddly not so to those who view religion objectively. The ideological differences are hardly so great as peaceable folk would like. What baffled me was that the religious could not see this, that they somehow ignored the worldwide benightedness stemming largely from their own most dearly held tenets.
   Richard Dawkins, the execrated and celebrated (depending on your field) atheist, when discussing the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, reaffirmed that “science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.” This was a part of short talk in which Dawkins, himself an evolutionary biologist, rather brilliantly discussed the shortcomings of human perception. Our brains, he postulated, have evolved to perceive only realities vital to our continued existence as a species. Nevertheless, people are convinced by science's ability to accurately predict phenomena, or are otherwise won over by its repeatable experimental results. To put it differently, it need not make sense to me that our solar system is heliocentric, and that my planet is hurtling at unfathomable speeds through the cosmos; it is plainly observable with basic astronomical technology. I have always preferred to view human matters in a similar fashion. In an alternate world, if a politician were to warn me today of the risk of a fascist nation which would round up millions of a minority—most of whom live without its borders—and systematically murder them, I should dismiss it as fantasy. In this world, however, such a thing is much more than conceivable—it is reality.
   Keeping this in mind, it is slightly odd that so many of the irreligious, just like me, have tended to have no small difficulty in processing the step-by-step logic of the religious. It should seem obvious that human cognitive powers never apply uniformly to all aspects of thought—in fact, such a condition would be viewed as something rather extraordinary. To keep with the example of a certain fascist dictator, there seems little point in denying that Adolf Hitler was something of a genius. His consolidation of political power was a series of deftly brilliant moves, always playing on the weaknesses and desires in others which to him were as plain as his evil is to us. It is one of the most remarkable feats of modern history that he should have been able to come so close to his goal of eliminating world Jewry, a task which sounds nearly grammatically impossible. It boggles the mind that he lived for years after World War I as a feckless vagrant. But, just as his arrival on the world stage highlighted his brilliance, it also displayed his insanity. How a man could claim to be establishing a thousand-year empire, and then attempt to effect his goal by declaring war against the entire world, utterly defies logic. But can a man with almost normal interpersonal skills, high reasoning ability, and stable relationships really be called insane? Despite our colloquial tendencies, it is a question worth pondering.
   To us atheists, religion seems insane. Indeed, the wisest of theists simply decline to provide a logical explanation for their beliefs, trying to put them in terms they think atheists will grok: “it's the faith I choose.” The problem with this sort of response, at least for unbelievers, is its implicit assumption that there are things that lie outside the realm of reason and logic, that need not be subjected to the same rules. The truth of the matter is that for those who elect faith, it is outside the realm of logic. The logical part of their brain will dust up the notion however the circumstances should require, but will not penetrate it. It is positively offensive to us that an otherwise perfectly rational being can willfully and obstinately shun its most useful faculties, with no apology. It is this absence of logic in the core of faith that makes it all but impossible for atheists to persuade theists to give up their beliefs. In my experience, it is much more common for a person to be converted to a religion by another than the inverse. This is because theists will not treat their suppositions on equal grounds with atheistic ones, as these suppositions are grounded in what they view as discrete worlds. Thus, they do not compete on the platform on which atheists think. When an atheistic viewpoint is explained to a theist, his reaction is not, as the atheist expects, “does this make more sense to me?” but rather, “how does this better me?” For the atheist, the answer is rather obvious, and atheists tend to be the sort of person that believes in the benefits of knowledge in all cases. The typical atheist resort is, when not pointing out the evils of organized religion, emphasizing the intellectual freedom and self-determination which accompany a godless life. This simply carries no water for a theist. For him, he is not surrendering a flawed view of the universe for a less flawed one; he is surrendering a unifying philosophy for an emptiness. One must remember that the proposition of God is not something which he will attack logically. He will view the role of his faith as logically as he needs, but its actual properties are off-limits. It simply makes no sense to a theist to give up something that pleases him and gives his life direction, when the alternative can provide no such thing.
   This is, of course, thinking through only one of two very important steps. The theist can typically see no further than the negative consequences. If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that humans deeply fear change. The greater the change, the greater the fear. If someone is going to change his cultural identity, he needs a palpable reward. The theistic mindset is as follows: “I do not fear death. Atheists fear death. If I join them, I too shall fear death. This is a negative development.” The value of “truth” is not even assessed, as God is not a “truthful” proposition, but a “faith-based” one. As such, proponents of religion, much to scientific consternation, will often make claims about “individual truths.” What is true to one person's religion need not be true for any other's. In fact, any “truth” outside of mainstream science is a victory for the presence of God, such that nonsenses like “moral truths” are invoked as evidence of a creator, when the word “truth” conveys no such meaning.
   Such thought precludes exploring the benefits of atheism, such as increased understanding of one's surroundings and history, as well as a more real understanding of morality and purpose, not to mention harmony with others based on the plainly observable, which is much harder to deny than any religious tenet. That is not to say, however, that the human mind's remarkable capacity for delusion is by any means related to the intangible. I can think of many examples, as can anyone, of human ability to deny the obvious. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is well aware that the historical consensus is that millions of Jews were systematically executed by the German government. He is well aware of scientific principles, which encourage skepticism, questioning, and an open mind. He is perfectly capable of thinking along such principles, as he amply demonstrates with his carefully-worded “questioning” of the aforesaid consensus. It takes no great powers of insight, though, to see that his mind is not open. He has already arrived at a conclusion: the Holocaust is a hoax. To change this conclusion, as his mindset is constructed, would be to make a larger admission about the role of Jews in this world. In short, it would constitute an uncomfortably large change. So he keeps his scientific inquiry well away from that presupposition. This in no way prevents him from using scientific inquiry to shore up his presupposition, with suggestions that “more than one aspect” of the history be examined.
   There are innumerable parallels in the modern world, one of the most obvious of which is the Turkish state's paranoid aggression in denying the Armenian genocide. The best sequential parallel, though, is that with the intelligent design movement. Its very name is a metaphor for its logical inconsistency. It was, of course, originally creationism, until the word became too negatively associated with dogma. When a word representing a movement loses marketability, the obvious solution is to relabel. Besides the more immediate necessity of changing the label to circumvent First Amendment-based court rulings, the new name represents a more scientific outlook on the matter, deliberately eschewing reference to the Christian god, whose presence at the fundamental levels of the theory is clear as day. It is science in precisely the same way in which Mr. Ahmadinejad's historical inquisitiveness is scholarship. Like him, proponents start off with a basic, unquestionable conclusion, but instead of approaching the conclusion itself with scientific inquisitiveness, they seek to dismantle its opposition. If they could do so, the scientific community would be grateful to them. Science is not in the business of harboring falsified theories. (It is,  of course, unlike religion, interested in falsifiable theories.) Unfortunately, no flaws in the current scientific view are significant enough to dismiss absent a competing theory, and if one wants to dismiss the current thinking scientifically, he must remember to offer a similarly scientific solution. It is this second part which utterly baffles the religious. As with the Iranian president, their initial conclusion is simply not approachable. Its invalidation would be positively calamitous. Both Ahmadinejad and proponents of intelligent design are careful not to explicitly state their predeterminations, knowing full well that to do so would be scientific suicide.
   Much of this is seems painfully obvious to the reader. I mention this not to reveal their hypocrisy, but to dispel the illusion that believers in the supernatural are insane, generally unintelligent, or lying. I have heard atheists, when asked about why some religious people seem brilliant at times, but still believe such childish notions, dismiss the idea offhand and say, “then they're not really intelligent.” Why must intelligence be pigeonholed? The same goes for the popular conceptions of psychics: deluded, or fraudulent. I hardly think the delusion of an honest psychic is any greater than that of the millions of people who keep him in business. It is simply inconceivable that the world should have functioning societies if such a high proportion of its denizens were mentally ill. We have all heard the stories of Einstein's grades as a child, and although the story is often presented in an insultingly misleading manner, it has some truthful basis. Einstein's math and physics grades were always exceptional, but his skills in other subjects were well below par. How much of that was due to a rigid educational system is up for debate, but so are the reasons behind religious belief. Nobody considers Einstein dumb, because variation in intelligence is widely understood and accepted.
   The problem with applying this to religious belief is that religious belief has always been held inviolate. Criticizing religion, when not a capital offense, is perpetually out of vogue. Anyone doing so is attacked as just an attention-seeking contrarian who should be silenced for the good of the community. After all, with some notable exceptions, religion has an unshakeable foothold in nearly every nation. Because of this opprobrium awaiting any public critic of religion, the field of explaining the phenomenon of religious belief is astonishingly sparse. I say sparse even though there are mountains of such works out there, since these works are all too often written from a religious standpoint (How does God reveal Himself to us? What is it in humanity that makes us innately turn to God? Explaining the seed of belief, etc.), and as such, worthless.
   The reality is that superstition has a long and decorated history of making people seem insane. Witches have been burned alive, werewolves have been broken on the wheel, fairies and vampires have been blamed for rapes, thefts, murders, eclipses, and any number of unsettling or unexplained happenings. Werewolves and fairies seem just as crazy to the modern Christian as do Zeus and Odin. This is because werewolves and fairies are no longer relevant to our culture. If we were all 15th-century German peasants, illiterate and ignorant, our views would be radically different. What was the point of questioning the existence of werewolves? Since childhood, German peasants had been told gruesome, purportedly true stories of diabolical deeds perpetrated by shadowy figures. Did the explanations make great empirical sense? Not really, just as divine explanations have rarely stood up to empirical doubt, irrespective of the historical age. There were plenty of realistic unbelievers then, as there have been forever. But to the majority, questioning such assumptions simply conferred no immediately visible benefits.
   When one stops to think about it, it is hard to find concrete negative aspects of many such superstitions, when carried out in moderation. How does one avoid a werewolf? He shuns men who act oddly. He bewares the insane. He does not travel unprotected in the woods. These are all sound principles, as are many moderate religious ones: respecting one's fellow humans, living modestly, caring for those who suffer, honoring tested traditions, etc. Within such a framework of thought, the immoderations--the executions of innocent farmers for werewolfery and the persecution of homosexuals or members of minority religions--are hard to eradicate without questioning the very cultural foundation by which one defines himself.
   There have always been liars and predators who propagate myths for personal gain, and this will never change. There were men in the past who used accusations of werewolfery to eliminate political foes; there have been adulterers who blame incubi or succubi for their transgressions. In spite of the well-worn human track record of willful deceit, it is myopic and misleading to think that intelligent, superstitious people are charlatans. What puzzles many people is the intricacy of the mind's landscape. To go back to my earlier example of psychics, a psychic need not believe everything he says, but that is not to say that he does not believe some, or even most of it. The mental bans on what may be explored critically and what may not are largely predicated on cultural and personal beliefs, influenced by personal experience. It is impossible to predict with certainty what any one man may believe—and contradictory beliefs are certainly not out of the question, if both are ontologically important to him.
   Atheists frequently cite the dearth of religion in the scientific community as proof of their intellectual preeminence. After all, if the smartest people on our planet overwhelmingly reject religion, who are the laypeople to gainsay them? I would never suggest that the lack of religion among scientists, especially biological ones, is a coincidence. I do, however, reject the conclusion that scientists deny religion because they are the smartest people on the planet. I reject this because scientists are not the smartest people on the planet. They are accorded this reputation unfairly. It bears remembering that science routinely astonishes common sense. Disciples of science are, as a result, privy to many properties of nature which elude the untrained mind, giving them the illusion of superior mental power. Science is the refined art of obtaining and gathering information about the universe. The most important quality in a scientist is skepticism. It is a scientist's job to doubt all he hears and sees, until it is proven over and over again. It is, therefore, absolutely no coincidence that a body of professionals dedicated to discovering truths about the universe rarely has recourse to untestable hypotheses. The very mentality that leads to faith is inimical to scientific principles. I find this viewpoint, while less damning to the intelligence of the faithful, even more damning to the soundness of religion. Of course, there is a significant minority of scientists that believes in a personal God. The reasoning behind this is identical to that behind all faith, but the occurrence is less common for the reasons given above.
   I can personally attest that I have felt very uncomfortable in a religious world, and that I have shared the opinion of many atheists who felt utterly alone. Unbelief is often such a fundamental inner difference that the issue in assimilation is not whether the religious will accept the irreligious, but whether the irreligious feel united enough with the religious to seek acceptance. I am of the opinion that viewing religion as I have come to, as I have outlined above, is socially beneficial. No two people have all intelligences aligned; one does not reject his friend because one can draw more accurately. We atheists have much more in common with the minds of theists than we may care to admit. If an atheist is debating whether to keep a religious friend who seeks to confrontationally push his religion on him, that is a different story. It is understandable that the religious want to share their revelations; they often mean well. But there is a limit to accepting variations in view and intelligence, and I draw it at impingement upon individual peace of mind. Just one heathen's thoughts.