Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

5. An initial opening into this politically delicate but biologically secure research can be found in Ewing et al., 1974; Shriver, 1997; Gill et al., 1999; Wall et al., 2003. See Duster, 2005, for a thoughtful evaluation of the pitfalls to be avoided in studying the genetic factors in human diseases.

6. See, for instance, the encyclopedic Hill and Hood, 1999, Measures of Religiosity, which reviews hundreds of different surveys and instruments.

7. These questions may seem too fanciful to take seriously, but they are not. Research has shown striking effects of apparently trivial differences. The news of the day does matter in some conditions (Iyengar, 1987). In a survey about personal happiness (or subjective well-being), if the telephone caller asks subjects, “How’s the weather where you are?,” then how the weather is doesn’t matter; if the telephone caller doesn’t ask this innocuous question and the weather is sunny, people say they are significantly happier! Drawing attention to the local weather makes answerers less likely to be covertly influenced by it in their responses to questions on other topics (Schwarz and Clore, 1983). For other examples, see Kahnemann et al., eds., 2000.8. Shermer designed the study in collaboration with Frank Sulloway, a former MIT statistician and Darwin scholar and author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996). After extensive pretesting and refining of their questionnaire, they first sent it out to the five thousand Skeptic Society members and got over seventeen hundred replies, and then they sent the same survey to a random sample of ten thousand people across the country and got over a thousand respondents. The statistics above are for the random sample, not the skeptics. See Shermer, 2003, for some of the details. Shermer and Sulloway, in press, is the formal presentation of the results.

9. My own foray into questionnaire design has been exploring other possible sources of distortion, such as looking at how the same questions in two different contexts (challenging and supportive) get answered differently. There are definitely significant differences, but they are not what we initially expected, and are ambiguous between several different interpretations, so we are designing follow-up studies and have not yet submitted any of our results to a peer-reviewed journal. By the way, we have attempted to answer the question raised in chapter 8 and reviewed above, regarding whether it makes a difference whether a question reads “God exists” or “I believe that God exists” (strongly agree, agree somewhat…). Our preliminary results suggest that this minor difference in wording does not make a difference when, for instance, the test items are “Jesus walked on water” versus “I believe Jesus walked on water.” But further studies may discover a context yielding a different result.

10. Quoted in Stern, 2003, p. xiii.

11. Quoted in Manji, 2003, p. 90.

12. This paragraph and its predecessor are drawn, with revisions, from Dennett, 1999b.

13. Scott Atran has begun studying future Hamas leaders in Palestine and Gaza. See his important editorial, “Hamas May Give Peace a Chance,” New York Times, December 18, 2004.

14. No Arabic-language publisher would dare publish a translation of Manji’s book, but an Arabic translation of it is available, free, on the Web. Young Muslims all over the Arab world can download it in discreet PDF files, to be read and shared and discussed, the beginnings of what Manji calls Operation Ijtihad. Ijtihad means “independent thinking,” and it flourished as a tradition during the greatest period of Islam, the five hundred years beginning about A.D. 750 (Manji, 2003, p. 51).

15. Irshad Manji reports seeing a sign in a new school for girls in Afghanistan: “Educate a boy and you educate only that boy, educate a girl and you educate her entire family” (speech at Tufts University, March 30, 2005).

16.A recent poll in Newsweek (May 24, 2004) claimed that 55 percent of Americans think that the faithful will be taken up to heaven in the Rapture and 17 percent believe the world will end in their lifetimes. If this is even close to being accurate, it suggests that End Timers in the first decade of the twenty-first century outnumber the Marxists of the 1930s through the 1950s by a wide margin. But what percentage of these adherents are prepared to take any steps, overt or covert, to hasten the imagined Armageddon is anybody’s guess, I fear to say.