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peristaltorLast month, I rambled a bit on Part I of the Deist Miasma to introduce the deliberately manipulative obfuscation those of a certain religious bent spin on scientific discoveries they feel threaten the basic tenets of the faiths they espouse . . . and that keeps them in positions of relative power. I did this, however, without even mentioning why I called it "The Deist Miasma." It's time to mention and expound on miasmas.
Today, "miasma" has simple poetic/literary or figurative meaning, referring to a stinky mist or a general pall of unease. That was not always the case, as Steven Johnson points out most eloquently in his book The Ghost Map, noting that the word derives from the Greek word for "defilement" and "pollution." Far more than a simple poetic term for "stinky," the miasmists literally believed that the bad smells one finds near rotting meats, sewage and the like make people sick.
Throughout history people have noticed that people tend to sicken and die where it stinks. People suffering disease singly or en masse exude odors if not properly tended, a task made ever more difficult by diseases that rot the flesh or cause, like cholera, constant incontinence. Mass graves outgas stink and often leach disease bacteria through groundwater or scavengers. Disease-carrying pests thrive on piles of stinky poop and rotting carcasses. making it far more likely that they will alight on food or folks near the stink. Without microscopes and other tools of bacterial investigation, therefore, people did what people tend to do, to associate and further conflate the symptoms commonly surrounding death and disease -- stinky smells -- with the cause.
Furthermore, their belief proved quite popular:
The Ghost Map outlines the 1848-49 outbreak and follows the researches of two principals, physician John Snow and clergyman Henry Whitehead, who together shared notes and determined the actual cause of just about every one of the illnesses, a popular neighborhood water pump contaminated with cholera spawn from an adjacent broken cesspool. One point Johnson notes again and again in his book, however, brings us back to the anti-evolutionist crowd: John Snow's groundbreaking work, supported as it was by a mass of solid evidence, failed to instantly sway the set opinions of miasmists. He notes the brilliant minds spreading the gospel of better health through stink avoidance; Charles Dickens, Friedrick Engels, even Florence Nightengale who wrote, "The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse's attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM" (Johnson, ibid, p. 123, EMPHASIS, apparently, Florence's). She wrote these words in 1857. . . nearly a decade after Snow's writings were published.
"Something interesting is at work." I couldn't agree more. Of the causes Johnson mentions, the one I find the most fascinating and worthy of study links miasma theorists, the theistic and those that tend toward theism -- how our brains are wired.
Johnson only spends a few pages summarizing the sense of smell's connection to the brain. "Again and again in the literature of miasma," he notes, "the argument is inextricably linked to the author's visceral disgust at the smells of the city." (Johnson, ibid, p. 128) He follows modern brain research which pegs the sense of smell very near in the brain to sections which control alarm and emotion:
Okay, so we have sensitive noses that can detect olfactory clues regarding the presence of microbes that can hurt us. That makes sense. Linking back to concepts like theism, however, more and more research has been emerging into the personalities of various "types" of people that point to a similar evolution of society and how we as humans find causal links and make decisions. I first found out about some of this research in John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience. In it he discusses at length the work of Bob Altermeyer, a University of Manitoba psychology professor who, with many years of clinical studies, has refined and developed a theory of how individuals relate to each other socially. Altermeyer's research distilled personalities into three basic conservative traits:
Just to be perfectly clear: I find myself so poorly matched to Altermeyer's categories that reading CWC was like exploring the social norms of a previously undiscovered tribe. Looking back, I think that is why I took so many intro and higher-level classes in college dealing with religion. I felt like I was missing something shared by billions, and felt compelled to research until I either found that magical thing or gave up. I gave up. Furthermore, unlike some who need to experience life in black and white, on or off, good or bad, I recognize that most of our behavior falls somewhere on a continuum, with some absolutely batshit insane on one end of the spectrum, others absolutely batshit insane on the other end, and most of us in the middle. Sanity is not a norm, it's a chemical and genetic balancing act, just like sexual orientation and deviation (more on that later, I promise).
Let's look at the first trait of a conservative that I so desperately lack, the willingness to submit to and participate in an authoritative hierarchy. I got a really good taste of what it's like when cultures clash reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks's entry about an argument at a family gathering:
It turns out thatbradhicks falls on that Altermeyer scale at the exact opposite end from his relative (kinda like me), and thus could not understand why someone "with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family" regards his submission to authority as necessary to maintaining that reputation. Two people from the same extended family therefore cannot discuss issues of what it means to be "moral" since they have such completely polar views and internal definitions on the subject.
The story also touches on the second Altermeyer trait, Authoritarian Aggression, where those with high tendencies (like his relative) regard the outward quirks of those, for example, encountered by those on the narcotics and vice squad as "twisted and psychopathic and immoral." This sense of disgust extends to others to those with funny haircuts or wacky clothes or partners with the same reproductive plumbing. This disgust dovetails nicely with the Johnson section on smell, especially when one considers another psychologist's take on the topic, one that came in on my email only this morning.
Jonathon Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia doing research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures, writes in the linked article how the disgust reflex distorts a person's rational thought processes:
How might these feelings of disgust manifest themselves? For example, let's apply my emboldened section to, say, the attitude most conservatives have against homosexuality, specifically male conservatives considering male homosexuals. Here's a little tidbit all women out there should keep in mind (even if they may not consider it relevant): Men tend to be more visual than women when it comes to sex. That's why men consume more pornography and tend to be more attracted to physical traits than, say, compatibility or personality in sexual partners. So, what happens when a man even thinks about any sexual encounter including homosexuality? (I don't have a quote or citation here, but am going off of my own experience and countless conversations with other penis bearers.) He places himself in the scene as one of the actors. Men who happen to accept, say, their Leviticus verses literally because they rate high in both Authoritarian Submission (accepting God and His Church as the ultimate authority) and Authoritarian Aggression (feeling disgust and anger at those who flaunt God's strictures) might have a bit of a problem if they happen to be homosexuals.
They might find themselves conflicted, on the one hand openly and privately trying to fit into normal culture with a heterosexual life (as would naturally befit a conservative person who tends high in Altermeyer's third trait, Conventionalism) and view homosexuals as deviants threatening the fabric of society (Trait 2 again).
For some, this fate proves worse than for others. Remember, one's attractiveness to one gender or the other can be measured not in binary terms, but along a scale. Most of us lie somewhere between one and five on the Kinsey scale, but a few of us fall starkly on the scale as either gay or straight.
I heard a great story concerning social mores and this irreducible continuum of sexual attraction and its opposite impulse, sexual repulsion and disgust. A friend of mine found herself nearly 30 and still a virgin. With no prospects on the horizon, she and a similarly-fated male friend decided it was time to make the plunge together. She disrobed and got into bed. He as well. Just after the first tenuous glances and touches, he bolted from the bed, flew to the bathroom and threw up. Just as suddenly and without explanation he dressed and left. Two weeks later he apologized to her and came out as gay. (On a fun fact note, this woman once quite accidentally and spectacularly had her nose broken by Liza Minelli, but that's another story.)
So, yes, some members of society, falling fairly high in conservative tendencies and therefore not supposed to be forgiving or tolerant of homosexual behavior, can marry and successfully have children, fooling themselves and those around them perhaps for years. Others cannot.
I realize there's more to religious life than can be summarized with conservatism, of course, just as there is more to the brain than right or left. For example, conservatives and those strong adherents to religious tradition tend to see the world around them with more stark contrast than liberals. Things are either black or white, good or bad, as I noted above. Things are less nuanced, simpler. Says Daniel Everett:
Why, though, would someone choose to ignore the wonderful complexity in the world around them? That has always baffled me. It turns out that the simple act of making decisions tires the brain:
Ah, but as with any other muscle, could it be that some are stronger than others? Could it be that people who consider themselves conservative have greater difficulty mentally accepting or appreciating new experiences? It seems so, this and other studies suggest. Folks with brains less able to "tolerate ambiguity and conflict" would naturally gravitate toward beliefs and systems that encourage a very structured view of reality, one where easy categorizations are encouraged.
Finally, what of that sense of the spiritual so emphasized by religious adherents? That sense of not being alone in the universe? Well, it could just be temporal lobe epilepsy:
From another site:
This makes perfect sense to me. Far from being selected out of people, a sense of the divine might well have enabled the religiously oriented to achieve some of the great works of the past for which faith has traditionally been credited, works which might very well be responsible for advancing their progeny and thus spreading both trait and tendency. Even evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins finds this plausible, saying that "there could be an evolutionary advantage, not to believing in god, but to having a brain with the capacity to believe in god." Also, when famed-atheist Dawkins wore the helmet himself, he reported feeling nothing but a headache.
Though I've rambled quite enough already, I find I'm hardly finished. It's one thing to wade through obscure psychological studies and point; it's quite another to relate these studies to the current Deist Miasma fouling the political airs today. I'll leave that for another post.
*Funny thing to note: In the minutes I have been typing this post into my LJ up until you reach the asterisk, my iTunes player on Party Shuffle has played Soundgarten's "Face Pollution," Tool's "Aenema," and Spinal Tap's "Stinkin' Up The Great Outdoors." Though I wholeheartedly reject synchronicity as silly, sometimes one can easily see how the concept might originally started. Nice one, Carl Jung. Nice one.
Today, "miasma" has simple poetic/literary or figurative meaning, referring to a stinky mist or a general pall of unease. That was not always the case, as Steven Johnson points out most eloquently in his book The Ghost Map, noting that the word derives from the Greek word for "defilement" and "pollution." Far more than a simple poetic term for "stinky," the miasmists literally believed that the bad smells one finds near rotting meats, sewage and the like make people sick.
Throughout history people have noticed that people tend to sicken and die where it stinks. People suffering disease singly or en masse exude odors if not properly tended, a task made ever more difficult by diseases that rot the flesh or cause, like cholera, constant incontinence. Mass graves outgas stink and often leach disease bacteria through groundwater or scavengers. Disease-carrying pests thrive on piles of stinky poop and rotting carcasses. making it far more likely that they will alight on food or folks near the stink. Without microscopes and other tools of bacterial investigation, therefore, people did what people tend to do, to associate and further conflate the symptoms commonly surrounding death and disease -- stinky smells -- with the cause.
Furthermore, their belief proved quite popular:
There were practically as many theories about cholera as there were cases of the disease. But in 1848, the dispute was largely divided between two camps: the contagionists and the miasmists. Either cholera was some kind of agent that passed from person to person, like the flu, or it somehow lingered in the "miasma" of unsanitary spaces. The contagion theory had attracted some followers when the disease first reached British soil in the early 1830s. . . . But most physicians and scientists believed that cholera was disease spread via poisoned atmosphere, not personal contact. One survey of published statements from U.S. physicians during the period found that less than five percent believed the disease was primarily contagious.
(Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead, 2007, pp. 68-69, emphasis mine.)*
The Ghost Map outlines the 1848-49 outbreak and follows the researches of two principals, physician John Snow and clergyman Henry Whitehead, who together shared notes and determined the actual cause of just about every one of the illnesses, a popular neighborhood water pump contaminated with cholera spawn from an adjacent broken cesspool. One point Johnson notes again and again in his book, however, brings us back to the anti-evolutionist crowd: John Snow's groundbreaking work, supported as it was by a mass of solid evidence, failed to instantly sway the set opinions of miasmists. He notes the brilliant minds spreading the gospel of better health through stink avoidance; Charles Dickens, Friedrick Engels, even Florence Nightengale who wrote, "The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse's attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM" (Johnson, ibid, p. 123, EMPHASIS, apparently, Florence's). She wrote these words in 1857. . . nearly a decade after Snow's writings were published.
All of which begs the central question: Why was the miasma theory so persuasive? Why did so many brilliant minds cling to it, despite the mounting evidence that suggested it was false? This kind of question leads one to a kind of mirror-image version of intellectual history: not the history of breakthroughs and false leads, the history of being wrong. Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work. In the case of miasma, that something involves a convergence of multiple forces, all coming together to prop up a theory that should have died out decades before. Some of those forces were ideological in nature, matters of social prejudice and convention. Some revolved around conceptual limitations, failures of imagination and analysis. Some involve the basic wiring of the human brain itself.
(Johnson, ibid, p. 126)
"Something interesting is at work." I couldn't agree more. Of the causes Johnson mentions, the one I find the most fascinating and worthy of study links miasma theorists, the theistic and those that tend toward theism -- how our brains are wired.
Johnson only spends a few pages summarizing the sense of smell's connection to the brain. "Again and again in the literature of miasma," he notes, "the argument is inextricably linked to the author's visceral disgust at the smells of the city." (Johnson, ibid, p. 128) He follows modern brain research which pegs the sense of smell very near in the brain to sections which control alarm and emotion:
A 2003 study found that strong smells triggered activity in both the amygdala and the ventral insula. The amygdala in an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, much older than the mammalian higher functions of the neocortex; raw instinctual responses to threats and emotionally charged stimuli emanate from the amygdala. The ventral insula appears to play an important role in biological urges, like hunger, thirst, and nausea, as well as in certain phobias. . . .
In lay terms, the human brain appears to have evolved an alert system whereby a certain class of extreme smells triggers an involuntary disgust response that effectively short-circuits one's ability to think clearly -- and produces a powerful desire to avoid objects associated with the smell. It's easy to imagine the evolutionary pressures that would bring this trait into being.
(Johnson, ibid, pp. 128-9.)
Okay, so we have sensitive noses that can detect olfactory clues regarding the presence of microbes that can hurt us. That makes sense. Linking back to concepts like theism, however, more and more research has been emerging into the personalities of various "types" of people that point to a similar evolution of society and how we as humans find causal links and make decisions. I first found out about some of this research in John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience. In it he discusses at length the work of Bob Altermeyer, a University of Manitoba psychology professor who, with many years of clinical studies, has refined and developed a theory of how individuals relate to each other socially. Altermeyer's research distilled personalities into three basic conservative traits:
1. Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
3. Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
(From the Wiki page, but matching my reading in Dean's book.)
Just to be perfectly clear: I find myself so poorly matched to Altermeyer's categories that reading CWC was like exploring the social norms of a previously undiscovered tribe. Looking back, I think that is why I took so many intro and higher-level classes in college dealing with religion. I felt like I was missing something shared by billions, and felt compelled to research until I either found that magical thing or gave up. I gave up. Furthermore, unlike some who need to experience life in black and white, on or off, good or bad, I recognize that most of our behavior falls somewhere on a continuum, with some absolutely batshit insane on one end of the spectrum, others absolutely batshit insane on the other end, and most of us in the middle. Sanity is not a norm, it's a chemical and genetic balancing act, just like sexual orientation and deviation (more on that later, I promise).
Let's look at the first trait of a conservative that I so desperately lack, the willingness to submit to and participate in an authoritative hierarchy. I got a really good taste of what it's like when cultures clash reading
bradhicks's entry about an argument at a family gathering:I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he'd been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county's vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he'd asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn't square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn't see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn't at the time. He couldn't understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I'd seen in the past year's worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?
I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. . . .
My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it's never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it's a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. (Emphasis mine.)
It turns out that
bradhicks falls on that Altermeyer scale at the exact opposite end from his relative (kinda like me), and thus could not understand why someone "with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family" regards his submission to authority as necessary to maintaining that reputation. Two people from the same extended family therefore cannot discuss issues of what it means to be "moral" since they have such completely polar views and internal definitions on the subject.The story also touches on the second Altermeyer trait, Authoritarian Aggression, where those with high tendencies (like his relative) regard the outward quirks of those, for example, encountered by those on the narcotics and vice squad as "twisted and psychopathic and immoral." This sense of disgust extends to others to those with funny haircuts or wacky clothes or partners with the same reproductive plumbing. This disgust dovetails nicely with the Johnson section on smell, especially when one considers another psychologist's take on the topic, one that came in on my email only this morning.
Jonathon Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia doing research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures, writes in the linked article how the disgust reflex distorts a person's rational thought processes:
For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed.
. . . This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." . . . This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. (Bold emphasis mine, Italics Haidt's)
How might these feelings of disgust manifest themselves? For example, let's apply my emboldened section to, say, the attitude most conservatives have against homosexuality, specifically male conservatives considering male homosexuals. Here's a little tidbit all women out there should keep in mind (even if they may not consider it relevant): Men tend to be more visual than women when it comes to sex. That's why men consume more pornography and tend to be more attracted to physical traits than, say, compatibility or personality in sexual partners. So, what happens when a man even thinks about any sexual encounter including homosexuality? (I don't have a quote or citation here, but am going off of my own experience and countless conversations with other penis bearers.) He places himself in the scene as one of the actors. Men who happen to accept, say, their Leviticus verses literally because they rate high in both Authoritarian Submission (accepting God and His Church as the ultimate authority) and Authoritarian Aggression (feeling disgust and anger at those who flaunt God's strictures) might have a bit of a problem if they happen to be homosexuals.They might find themselves conflicted, on the one hand openly and privately trying to fit into normal culture with a heterosexual life (as would naturally befit a conservative person who tends high in Altermeyer's third trait, Conventionalism) and view homosexuals as deviants threatening the fabric of society (Trait 2 again).
For some, this fate proves worse than for others. Remember, one's attractiveness to one gender or the other can be measured not in binary terms, but along a scale. Most of us lie somewhere between one and five on the Kinsey scale, but a few of us fall starkly on the scale as either gay or straight.
I heard a great story concerning social mores and this irreducible continuum of sexual attraction and its opposite impulse, sexual repulsion and disgust. A friend of mine found herself nearly 30 and still a virgin. With no prospects on the horizon, she and a similarly-fated male friend decided it was time to make the plunge together. She disrobed and got into bed. He as well. Just after the first tenuous glances and touches, he bolted from the bed, flew to the bathroom and threw up. Just as suddenly and without explanation he dressed and left. Two weeks later he apologized to her and came out as gay. (On a fun fact note, this woman once quite accidentally and spectacularly had her nose broken by Liza Minelli, but that's another story.)
So, yes, some members of society, falling fairly high in conservative tendencies and therefore not supposed to be forgiving or tolerant of homosexual behavior, can marry and successfully have children, fooling themselves and those around them perhaps for years. Others cannot.
I realize there's more to religious life than can be summarized with conservatism, of course, just as there is more to the brain than right or left. For example, conservatives and those strong adherents to religious tradition tend to see the world around them with more stark contrast than liberals. Things are either black or white, good or bad, as I noted above. Things are less nuanced, simpler. Says Daniel Everett:
I once heard John Wayne say in an interview, "They tell me that things aren't always black and white. I say, 'Why the hell not?'" This is a common sense view of morality and I think that it is fairly widespread. Having spent (in another life it seems) more than twenty-five years as an ordained minister and missionary, I know first-hand that one of the most important messages of many organized religions is that morality is absolute and that there is always a black and white to an issue if you think about it hard enough—grayness is for fuzzy-brained liberals.
Why, though, would someone choose to ignore the wonderful complexity in the world around them? That has always baffled me. It turns out that the simple act of making decisions tires the brain:
The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort -- you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function —- a talent we all rely on throughout the day —- draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain.
Ah, but as with any other muscle, could it be that some are stronger than others? Could it be that people who consider themselves conservative have greater difficulty mentally accepting or appreciating new experiences? It seems so, this and other studies suggest. Folks with brains less able to "tolerate ambiguity and conflict" would naturally gravitate toward beliefs and systems that encourage a very structured view of reality, one where easy categorizations are encouraged.
Finally, what of that sense of the spiritual so emphasized by religious adherents? That sense of not being alone in the universe? Well, it could just be temporal lobe epilepsy:
The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious feeling has led one Canadian scientist to try stimulating them. (They are near your ears.) 80% of Dr Michael Persinger's experimental subjects report that an artificial magnetic field focused on those brain areas gives them a feeling of 'not being alone'. Some of them describe it as a religious sensation.
His work raises the prospect that we are programmed to believe in god, that faith is a mental ability humans have developed or been given. And temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) could help unlock the mystery.
From another site:
Persinger invented a helmet (in the above picture) that will generate electromagnetic (EM) fields that can induce electric current targeted at specific neural regions. When Persinger's Helmet is targeted at the right temporal lobe, it produces the sensation of a negative "presence", sometimes interpreted as demonic by those with religious predispositions. (The right hemisphere is very prone to negative emotional states, and the left hemisphere to positive states).
However, when targeted at the left temporal lobe, it produces the sensation of a benevolent "presence", sometimes interpreted as god by the religious. Persinger noted that religious sensations were correlated with asymmetric theta wave activity in the left and right temporal cortices. That is, religiosity seemed to be promoted by activated left temporal theta activity that is out of sync with right temporal theta activity. (Emphasis mine)
This makes perfect sense to me. Far from being selected out of people, a sense of the divine might well have enabled the religiously oriented to achieve some of the great works of the past for which faith has traditionally been credited, works which might very well be responsible for advancing their progeny and thus spreading both trait and tendency. Even evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins finds this plausible, saying that "there could be an evolutionary advantage, not to believing in god, but to having a brain with the capacity to believe in god." Also, when famed-atheist Dawkins wore the helmet himself, he reported feeling nothing but a headache.
Though I've rambled quite enough already, I find I'm hardly finished. It's one thing to wade through obscure psychological studies and point; it's quite another to relate these studies to the current Deist Miasma fouling the political airs today. I'll leave that for another post.
*Funny thing to note: In the minutes I have been typing this post into my LJ up until you reach the asterisk, my iTunes player on Party Shuffle has played Soundgarten's "Face Pollution," Tool's "Aenema," and Spinal Tap's "Stinkin' Up The Great Outdoors." Though I wholeheartedly reject synchronicity as silly, sometimes one can easily see how the concept might originally started. Nice one, Carl Jung. Nice one.