Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

If you have come this far in the book, you are willing to inquire into the sources and causes of other religions. Wouldn’t it be hypocritical to claim that your own religion was somehow out of bounds? Just to satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, you might wish to see how your own religion measures up to the sort of scrutiny we will be directing at others. But, you may well wonder, can science be truly nonpartisan? Isn’t science, in fact, “just another religion”? Or, to put it the other way around, aren’t religious perspectives just as valid as the scientific perspective? How can we find any common, objective ground from which to conduct our inquiries? These questions concern many readers, especially academics who have invested heavily in the answers to them, but others, I find, are impatient with them, and not all that concerned. The questions are important—indeed, crucial to my whole project—since they put into doubt the very possibility of conducting the inquiry I am embarking on, but they can be postponed until after the theory sketch is completed. If you disagree, then before continuing with chapter 4 you should turn directly to appendix B, “Some More Questions About Science,” which deals with these questions, spelling out in more detail, and defending, the path by which we can work together to find mutual agreement about how to proceed and what matters.

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Chapter 3 Everything we value—from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion—we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection.

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Chapter 4 Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they must operate. The social and linguistic environment that coevolved with human brains gives human beings powers that no other species enjoys, but also created problems that folk religions apparently evolved to handle. The apparent extravagance of religious practices can be accounted for in the austere terms of evolutionary biology.

PART IITHE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

CHAPTER FOURThe Roots of Religion

1 The births of religions

Everything is what it is because it got that way.

—D’Arcy Thompson

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Among Hindus, there is disagreement over whether Shiva or Vishnu is the higher Lord, and many have been killed for their belief in this matter. “The Lińgapurāna promises Śiva’s heaven to one who kills or tears out the tongue of someone who reviles ´ Siva” (Klostermaier, 1994).

Among the Zulus, when a pregnant woman is about to give birth, sometimes the “spirit-snake of an old woman” makes an angry appearance (according to the shamans), indicating that a goat or some other animal should be sacrificed to the tribe’s ancestors so that the child may be born healthy (Lawson and McCauley, 1990, p. 116).

The Jivaro of Ecuador believe that you have three souls, the true soul you have from birth (it returns to your birthplace when you die, then turns into a demon, which dies in turn, becoming a giant moth, which becomes mist when it dies); the arutam, a soul you obtain by fasting, bathing in a waterfall, and partaking of hallucinogenic juice (it makes you invincible but has the unfortunate habit 97 of leaving you when you’re in a jam); and the musiak, the avenging soul which tries to escape a victim’s head and kill the victim’s murderer. This is why you must shrink the head of your victim (Harris, 1993).

These curious beliefs and practices have not existed “forever”—no matter what their devotees may say. Marcel Gauchet begins his book on the political history of religion by noting, “As far as we know, religion has without exception existed at all times and in all places” (1997, p. 22), but this is a historian’s pinched perspective, and simply isn’t true. There was a time before religious beliefs and practices had occurred to anyone. There was a time, after all, before there were any believers on the planet, before there were any beliefs about anything. Some religious beliefs are truly ancient (by historical standards), and the advent of others can be read about in newspaper archives. How did they all arise?