16/11/2016 4 Comments The Itch of THE Right Temporal LobeThe aspect of human psychology which gives rise to religious beliefs has been a subject that has interested me for a long time. What sustains this interest is the fact that, as I have read about and acquired knowledge of religions and their evolution over the millennia, I have become less and less convinced about religion having anything to do with either the truth of creation or about the morality with which we conduct ourselves as a species. I cannot think of any other feature of human lives that claims so much for itself with so little evidence to support its claims, as religion does. While religion may have been man’s first attempt at trying to explain the unknown with whatever knowledge was available, the aspect of religion having morphed into a dictatorship with a vice-like grip on our beliefs and conduct is an extremely dangerous situation in which the world finds itself today. Can we really afford to base our life, lifestyle, beliefs, thoughts and mindsets on bronze-age ideology despite the light of today’s knowledge, is a question that every educated intelligent human being must ask himself (or herself). As human beings, we are affected by both truth as well as by falsehood. The mere fact that an individual or a community of people are affected deeply by an idea or philosophy does not, by default, assign the honour of truth to the said idea or philosophy. Truth always triumphs the test of being verifiable. And, if a theory is not falsifiable with currently available means, we should be able to concede that we do not know rather than turn the argument on its head and declare that since a theory cannot be disproved, therefore it must be true. The burden of proof always lies on the claimant of a theory or a postulate. Having said this, I have to mention that despite my complete lack of belief in the matters of religion, I am deeply moved by the soulful rendition of a bhajan, a Hindu devotional song, sung by my favourite singer, Mohd Rafi, arguably the finest singer that India has ever produced - “Man tarpat Hari darshan ko aaj...” (The mind thirsts for a glimpse of Krishna...) This bhajan is unique in the sense that the lyrics were written by Shakeel Badayuni, the music was composed by Naushad and the song was sung by Mohd Rafi, all three of whom belonged to the Islamic faith. Yet, when one hears Mohd Rafi sing this song, one is transported to an ethereal realm of bliss and ecstasy. I have had tears in my eyes many a time when I have heard, and been moved, by the sheer beauty of the music. Yet, it would be facile for anyone to suggest that since a song about Lord Krishna has such power to evoke intense emotions, therefore it should automatically be construed as sufficient proof for the existence of Lord Krishna. Clearly the argument is a non sequitur. But, amazingly, it is precisely this kind of arguments that religion seems to rely heavily on, and get away with. There is a story of Umar ibn al-Khattab - the Caliph - an expert in Arabian poetry and a contemporary of Prophet Muhammad, who was devoted to the old paganism and was passionately opposed to Muhammad’s message. Al-Khattab was determined to wipe out Muhammad’s new sect. In fact, he had schemed to murder Muhammad and put an end to his preaching. But when he first heard the words of the Quran, he was overcome by their extraordinary eloquence. He reported that the language broke through all his reservations. “When I heard the Quran, my heart was softened and I wept, and Islam entered into me.” The noted polemicist and atheist, Christopher Hitchens, writes the following in his book, God Is Not Great – “I have been to innumerable gatherings, from Friday prayers in Tehran to mosques in Damascus and Jerusalem and Doha and Istanbul and Washington, D.C., and I can attest that "the recitation" in Arabic does indeed have the apparent power to create bliss and also rage among those who hear it.” The famous religious historian Karen Armstrong, who was herself once a nun before leaving the order to turn into a scholar of comparative religious studies, says in her book, A History of God – “The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy.” Therefore, for religious apologists to conclude that the sometimes-salubrious-sometimes-agitating effect which the tonal quality of scriptural recitation, or the aesthetic beauty of the verses, brings upon on the mind of a human being is, by implication, proof of the apparent ineffable truth of the scriptures, is no different from stating that Mozart’s 40th Symphony is a composition by god because it inspires similar emotions. As we can see, such arguments are illogical and carry little merit. Yet these are precisely the arguments which millions, even billions, of human beings swear by. Herein enters the issue of beliefs via understanding vis-à-vis beliefs via indoctrination. Only a small percentage of Hindus know the language of the scriptures – Sanskrit. It will not be a wrong estimate to state that there will be hardly any scholar of Sanskrit left in this world by the turn of the next century. In terms of extinction of language, this would be a sad event. But, in terms of a language as a means of communication, Sanskrit has long outlived its utility. Yet, all Hindu weddings and religious offerings are administered in Sanskrit, with the faithful being made to repeat verses, the meanings of which are clearly lost on them. Millions of Muslims around the world recite Quranic verses in Arabic. The majority of them are utterly clueless about the language. Yet, these same people wax eloquent about the apparent allure and beauty of the Quranic verses. It should not fail to register in even the slowest of minds that this praise for the greatness of the Quran is merely a statement that has been passed down from generation to generation more as an act of solidarity than of any real admiration, per se, of the verses. The reality is that, for most Muslims, the recitation of the Quran is an exercise in phonetics rather than of understanding. Exactly the same is the case with Hindus reciting scriptures in Sanskrit. And, I suspect it would also be the case with most religions of the world. I recall my visit to the Alchi Monastery in Ladakh last year where I witnessed young Lamas (Buddhist monks), all of them under twelve years of age I would estimate, swaying from side to side in the rhythm of the incantations by senior monks. Most of the kids were visibly disinterested. The stories of how the holy books came to be are expected, nay demanded, to be accepted without questioning. Chattelhood is what seems to constitute good religious behaviour. Do we really need to continue our unquestioned allegiance to the doctrines contained in medieval books in an era when science has better answered all the questions that the religious texts once laboured to explain, and more? What sort of wisdom (or absence of it!) could possibly lead an educated human being of the twenty first century, versed in the theories of Copernicus, to seek knowledge of the planets and stars in texts belonging to the Ptolemaic era? And, to term such books as the perfect word of god is essentially setting the standard of perfection too low for even a person of moderate intellect. Karen Armstrong candidly confesses in her book, “The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings were justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.” Dr V S Ramachandran, neurologist par excellence (whom Prof Richard Dawkins has admiringly named “The Marco Polo of Neuroscience”) and author of the very interesting books: “The Tell-Tale Brain” and “Phantoms in the Brain” writes in his book, “A man wearing an enormous bejewelled cross dangling on a gold chain sits in my office, telling me about his conversations with God, the "real meaning" of the cosmos and the deeper truth behind all surface appearances. “The universe is suffused with spiritual messages,” he says, “if you just allow yourself to tune in”. I glance at his medical chart, noting that he has suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy since early adolescence, and that is when "God began talking" to him. Do his religious experiences have anything to do with his temporal lobe seizures?” An examination of the histories of religions, more specifically the histories of prophets, will reveal a striking similarity in the manner in which god is purported to have revealed himself through his messengers. And, almost all of these hint at having been cases of epileptic afflictions. If not, then god surely comes across as a sadist who revels in torturing his messengers. In 752 BCE, at around the time of Isaiah’s prophetic vision, a shepherd named Amos who lived in Tekoa became suddenly overwhelmed by an urge that led him to descend upon the shrine of Beth-El in Israel and pronounce a spell of doom. Despite the priest Amaziah’s efforts to send Amos away, he drew himself to his full height and declared that he had been plucked out by Yahweh from herding sheep and commanded to prophesise to the people of Israel. As was very common in that age, god was at his pernicious worst, delivering oracles through Amos. This was apparently something that Amos had not chosen of his own volition, but was undergoing a forced behavioural alteration that left him with no control over his own consciousness. He was compelled to prophesise regardless of his own desire or feelings. The lion roars; who can help feeling afraid? The Lord Yahweh speaks: who can refuse to prophesy? In 604 BCE, Jeremiah revived Isaiah’s perspective (which essentially was a battle between Israel and Babylon). Again, like Amos, Jeremiah was an unwilling prophet and when the call came to him, he protested that he was an unlettered man. Yahweh touched his lips and put words in his mouth. Jeremiah experienced God as a pain that convulsed his limbs, broke his heart and made him stagger about like a drunk. From 610 to 632 CE, the Quran was “revealed” to Muhammad, verse by verse. The Hadiths state that never once did Muhammad receive a revelation “without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.” The process was so frightening that “his body convulsed; he would sweat profusely even on cool days; experience great heaviness; or hear strange sounds and voices” (Armstrong). Closer to home, I grew up on the stories of Swami Vivekananda and his spiritual master Ramakrishna. I still remember a coloured pictorial book on the life of Ramakrishna that was gifted to me by my uncle. A picture in the book was of a young Ramakrishna looking upwards at a wedge of swans in the sky. The next picture was of the same young lad, fallen to the ground, with worried friends rushing to revive him. The adjoining text waxed eloquent about how Ramakrishna had been overwhelmed by the sight of the white birds in a blue sky and had experienced a spiritual rapture. The same book also contained the anecdote of how Ramakrishna had touched his disciple, Swami Vivekananda (then Narendranath Dutta), with his feet and lo and behold, Vivekananda instantaneously received a glimpse of the divine! It seems to appear that we have historically been inclined to associate seizures and abnormalities of the human brain with spirituality. To state that the aforementioned prophets displayed classic signs of epileptic afflictions would be heresy, but this is probably the closest assessment of what such behaviour would seem to suggest. The fact that each prophetic experience in the texts seems to have been plagiarised in such an unabashed manner from previous experiences (compare Muhammad with Jeremiah), should also arouse suspicion in every thinking mind. A trans-cranial magnetic stimulator is a device which, when applied to the scalp, shoots a rapidly fluctuating and extremely powerful magnetic field onto a small patch of brain tissue, thereby activating it and providing hints about its function. A Canadian psychologist Dr Michael Persinger applied such a device on himself and used it to stimulate parts of the temporal lobes in his brain. To his amazement, he reported that he experienced “God” for the first time in his life. It is a standard teaching in medical curricula that patients suffering from epileptic seizures originating from the temporal lobes can have intense spiritual experiences during episodes of seizure and become overly occupied with moral issues during healthy periods. Hippocrates wrote the earliest text on epilepsy 2500 years ago and named it “On The Sacred Disease”. Dr V S Ramachandran wonders in “The Phantoms in the Brain” – “Does this syndrome imply that our brains contain some sort of circuitry that is actually specialized for religious experience? Is there a "God module" in our heads? And if such a circuit exists, where did it come from? Could it be a product of natural selection, a human trait as natural in the biological sense as language or stereoscopic vision?” One cannot help but wonder if Ramakrishna had managed to excite Vivekananda’s temporal lobes by some method! It is amply clear that religious belief in the majority of human population is as a result of the accident of birth, upbringing and childhood indoctrination, and survives only in a domain that is bereft of inquiry, scrutiny and criticism. Even a cursory reading of the scriptures will reveal why inquiry is so strongly discouraged. It is because even a careless skim-and-scan of the scriptures leaves contradictions and discrepancies screaming at the reader. Scrutiny is the death knell of religion and is, therefore, threatened with an eternity in hellfire in order to deter the fainthearted majority from pursuing any line of doubt or inquiry. The Quran is declared to be the perfect word of Allah. Perfection is a certificate that the book is quite undeserving of. I am no scholar of the Quran, but I had to go no further than just the fourth out of the one hundred and fourteen chapters to detect the following elementary flaw that would not pass the test of scrutiny by even a primary school student with the barest knowledge of fractions. Surah 4:11 and 4:12 state that in the event of a man’s demise, who has left behind three daughters, two parents and a wife, the daughters’ share of the inheritance shall be 2/3, the parents’ shall be 1/3 (ie, 1/6 for each parent) and the wife’s shall be 1/8. Together they add up to more than the available estate! Similarly, when these two verses are read in conjunction with 4:176, which is also a verse for inheritance, in the case of a deceased man who leaves behind his mother, wife and two sisters, their respective shares shall be 1/3 for mother, 1/4 for wife and 2/3 for two sisters. Yet again, the sum of these shares exceeds the size of the property! Surely, these are not allegorical verses. These are very clear verses that indulge in simple numerical diktats, albeit arithmetically incorrect. Imperfection doesn’t get more obvious than this! I am sure that there is going to be no shortage of religious defenders who will invent contorted explanations to prove that there is no mathematical error in these verses. Surah 44:58 states clearly that the Allah has made the Quran very clear, simple, easy and written in Arabic. 3:7 states that some parts of the Quran are clear to understand and some parts are allegorical. The allegorical parts nobody should endeavour to understand as none save Allah is aware of their meaning. Clearly, there is nothing allegorical in 4:11, 4:12 and 4:176 and must therefore be taken at face value, in the manner stated, without attempting any circuitous interpretations. The verses in the book are scattered without any logical link among them. Therefore, detecting discrepancies is not an easy job. It would not have been possible for a layman reader like me to have detected the above contradiction had they not been placed in the same chapter (chapter 4). What I find even more amusing is that the same chapter number 4 contains the following verse (4:82) – “Do they not then consider the Quran carefully? Had it been from other than Allah, they would have surely found therein many a contradiction.” Well, I have detected and explained an obvious contradiction. What, then, does it say about the authorship of the book? The incoherent scattering of verses and the contradictions among them (the number of days that Allah took to create the earth and heavens are reported differently at different places of the book is one of many other such examples), seem to suggest that the book was scripted by a committee with little coordination among its members. The explanation regarding the origin and development of any religion becomes a very simple one to understand if we merely accept the fact that religion is man-made, and so is god, was born out of man’s primordial urge to understand the unknown and has gradually evolved into the form it is today. A simple narration of the story of the prophet Elijah puts things in perspective. The ancient Jews were pagans and polytheists. There were various Gods like Baal and Marduk who were worshipped, besides Yahweh. In the 9th Century BCE, during the reign of King Ahab (a believer in Yahweh), his wife Jezebel, a keen pagan, began proselytising to convert the masses into following Baal and Asherah. During this period, the land was struck by drought and a prophet named Elijah walked into the kingdom. At Mount Carmel, Elijah challenged the subjects of Ahab to a contest between his god Yahweh and their god Baal. He arranged for two bulls to be placed on altars and set the condition that whichever god was able to send down fire from heaven would prevail. The followers of Baal invoked their god all day, to no avail. At dusk, Elijah took centre-stage, dug a trench around the bull and filled it with water, for effect. Then he called out to Yahweh and immediately Yahweh sent fire from the sky that at once consumed the bull and all the water in the trench. Having proven the superiority of his god, Yahweh, Elijah hounded the followers of Baal to a valley and slaughtered them all. The road to heaven has historically been paved with the corpses of men! In ancient times, it was victory of one tribe in battle over another which determined whose god was more powerful. Defeat in a temporal battle often meant having to accept the superiority of the god of the valiant army, and converting to the other party’s beliefs. The frequent battles that followed Muhammad’s establishment of the Islamic dispensation, and the victory of the Muslims over neighbouring tribes, were essentially what ensured the furthering of the Islamic faith. Muhammad’s battles with neighbouring tribes over land and food must be viewed in context of the 7th Century. They were typical of the era and the society that he lived in, wherein pillaging and murder were the norm. And, as in the illustration of the story of Elijah, these conquests meant that the vanquished were brought into the fold of the newly established religious system. In this world that we live in, where religion has set its rotten roots in every affair of our daily lives, we would do our mammalian species a great service if we were to teach ourselves about the history of religion and its dubious origins, thereby setting the stage for curing ourselves of this god delusion that we suffer so seriously from. Enlightenment involves looking forward towards a realm of knowledge and development, not backwards at primitive cult rituals and delusional beliefs. Enlightenment can come only from quest and inquiry, not from forcing men to undergo orchestrated religious rigmaroles, while looking heavenwards to chant in unison like tamed parrots, “Ameen!”
4 Comments
raja
25/11/2016 04:06:04 am
Interesting read. I agree with what you say. Perhaps also highlight some aspects of the Hindu religion too which clearly do not stand scrutiny. Am sure there are plenty. :-)
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Joy
25/11/2016 06:29:53 am
Hinduism is an ideological fruit salad. It is a potpourri of this and that and everything. From staunch orthodoxy to atheistic mimamsa, there seems to be a whole lot of everything that has been plonked together and imperfectly shaken. I tried my best with this religion and soon realised that it was just another of those poor medieval human inventions, quite like all other religions. No religion in this world stands up to scrutiny. Not one. Defence in favour of religion always demands an awful lot of logical contrivance, verbal jugglery and intellectual disingenuous position-taking. Today we live in an age of competitive religions. It has become a stage for one bad religion versus another dangerous religion. The point of debate is no longer which religion is true, or which religion is useful. None of them is either true or useful. All religions are false, often dangerous and indeed, eminently man made. However, what is encouraging is that the third largest denomination in the world after Christians (2.6 bn) and Muslims (1.6 bn) is the group of non-believers (1 bn). As science discovers more and more, and dispels our ignorance, gods and religions will recede to the farthest corner of insignificance. I don't see religions lasting in their current forms by the turn of the next century. They might, at best, become a part of the mythological folklore and today's popular gods will soon join the bandwagon of Baal, Marduk, Zeus and Apollo.
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Liz Hughes
24/12/2016 08:09:01 am
Thanks for these well thought out views. It's taken me a long time to have similar ideas and question the way I have just stumbled on without looking for clear evidence for religious beliefs. Without wanting to get too involved in Buddhist philosophy I do like the idea that I am my own master and I am responsible for my actions. Thank you
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Joy
29/12/2016 01:37:28 am
Hi Ms Hughes, thank you for reading and posting your comment. Indeed one should be responsible for one's actions without hoping for a vicarious redemption through a ghastly medieval human sacrifice. It is not necessary to posit a god, prophet or religion in order to live well, or to be appreciative of Nature. As one of my favourite authors Douglas Adams quipped, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
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