Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

There are many other variants to be considered in due course—for instance, people who pray, and believe in the efficacy of prayer, but don’t believe that this efficacy is channeled through an agent God who literally hears the prayer. I want to postpone consideration of all these issues until we have a clearer sense of where these doctrines sprang from. The core phenomenon of religion, I am proposing, invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do. I use the evasive word “invokes” here because, as we shall see in a later chapter, the standard word “belief” tends to distort and camouflage some of the most interesting features of religion. To put it provocatively, religious belief isn’t always belief. And why is the approval of the supernatural agent or agents to be sought? That clause is included to distinguish religion from “black magic” of various sorts. There are people—very few, actually, although juicy urban legends about “satanic cults” would have us think otherwise—who take themselves to be able to command demons with whom they form some sort of unholy alliance. These (barely existent) social systems are on the boundary with religion, but I think it is appropriate to leave them out, since our intuitions recoil at the idea that people who engage in this kind of tripe deserve the special status of the devout. What apparently grounds the widespread respect in which religions of all kinds are held is the sense that those who are religious are well intentioned, trying to lead morally good lives, earnest in their desire not to do evil, and to make amends for their transgressions. Somebody who is both so selfish and so gullible as to try to make a pact with evil supernatural agents in order to get his way in the world lives in a comic-book world of superstition and deserves no such respect.⁵

3 To break or not to break

Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.

—Ned Flanders (fictional character on The Simpsons)

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You’re at a concert, awestruck and breathless, listening to your favorite musicians on their farewell tour, and the sweet music is lifting you, carrying you away to another place…and then somebody’s cell phone starts ringing! Breaking the spell. Hateful, vile, inexcusable. This inconsiderate jerk has ruined the concert for you, stolen a precious moment that can never be recovered. How evil it is to break somebody’s spell! I don’t want to be that person with the cell phone, and I am well aware that I will seem to many people to be courting just that fate by embarking on this book.

The problem is that there are good spells and then there are bad spells. If only some timely phone call could have interrupted the proceedings at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978, when the lunatic Jim Jones was ordering his hundreds of spellbound followers to commit suicide! If only we could have broken the spell that enticed the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo to release sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, killing a dozen people and injuring thousands more! If only we could figure out some way today to break the spell that lures thousands of poor young Muslim boys into fanatical madrassahs where they are prepared for a life of murderous martyrdom instead of being taught about the modern world, about democracy and history and science! If only we could break the spell that convinces some of our fellow citizens that they are commanded by God to bomb abortion clinics!

Religious cults and political fanatics are not the only casters of evil spells today. Think of the people who are addicted to drugs, or gambling, or alcohol, or child pornography. They need all the help they can get, and I doubt if anybody is inclined to throw a protective mantle around these entranced ones and admonish, “Shhh! Don’t break the spell!” And it may be that the best way to break these bad spells is to introduce the spellbound to a good spell, a god spell, a gospel. It may be, and it may not. We should try to find out. Perhaps, while we’re at it, we should inquire whether the world would be a better place if we could snap our fingers and cure the workaholics, too—but now I’m entering controversial waters. Many workaholics would claim that theirs is a benign addiction, useful to society and to their loved ones, and, besides, they would insist, it is their right, in a free society, to follow their hearts wherever they lead, so long as no harm comes to anyone else. The principle is unassailable: we others have no right to intrude on their private practices so long as we can be quite sure that they are not injuring others. But it is getting harder and harder to be sure about when this is the case.