WHAT IS RELIGION?

The word “religion” is a semantic amoeba with dubious usefulness because it is so ambiguous and yet so few people dare to challenge it.  The ambiguity is part of the nature of the category, because it’s hoped to prevent conflict and because of ideas about tolerance, to be politically correct.  The power struggle over how to define religion for various conflicting purposes is as much part of the problem as whatever “religion” really “is” in all its manifestations.  Unspoken, the premise is that if I can convince others that certain idea-systems aren’t even religions, then I can rule out Islam or Taoism or Plains Indian systems because there’s no need to take them seriously or even try to understand what they’re talking about.  This is only another side of the evidently basic biological drive to define all rival peoples as NOT people, but only animals of some sort, not as elevated as we are. This justifies killing and enslavement, because that’s how we treat animals.

Part of the power of stigma and subversiveness is manipulating separation boundaries to give permission for what we want to do anyway -- which is to get rid of competitors on our turf.  An alternative, but related, strategy is the idea of Evil as inside-out Good.  Much of the interest in Satanic, Dionysian, or depraved cults of death, and other exciting systems, comes from the need for a defensive “religion” that uses the figures of the conventional in reversals.  Upside down crosses, etc.  The idea is to shock and repel attempts at control by mocking them with evil versions of what is conventionally accepted as good or at least powerless.  (The Stephen King strategy: the horrifying prom girl or the homicidal dog.)  One can’t be TOO unconventional, or no one will realize that they are being opposed, which is a different kind of subversive strategy, more dangerous.

People who obey social rules are considered “religious” without religion.  My extended family is a good example of the religious “nones”.  They are entirely respectable: no drinking, no smoking, no cursing, no drugging, no gambling, well-dressed, well-kept nice homes, newish cars always clean, good jobs, achieving kids -- but clearly not the result of attending church because they don’t.  Nor are they this way because of believing in God or any other impossible magic ideas -- though if you had a clipboard in your hand they would tell you they believe in God.  

They believe in not risking, in not inviting criticism, in having nice friends who share conventional mainstream indignations and affinities.  This adds up to something that is more like participating in the dominant culture than what books describe as religion.  If something embarrassing happens, it is soon explained and the subject changed.  If something truly tragic happens, then the talk is of “healing.”  This is the default.  It is no one’s “fault.”  It’s simply what is.  Their worst flaw is protective hypocrisy.  This is not ethics by rule, but “teleological” (controlled by the goal) so as to return to peace and respectability.

Watch out for the following, because it has a lot of unreliable sarcasm in it.  It’s a list of various and sometimes irreconcilable but meanings of the word “religion” accepted in various contexts.

1.  A system for organizing one’s life with the goals of safety and prosperity.  This is often culturally bound, esp. in the handling of topics forbidden to discuss, like abortion, sex outside marriage, same sex relationships, resistance to sexual dyads or variations.  It might be called morality.  The Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule.

2.  Belief in a god or gods, either as a reassurance or as an intimidation.  For some people, god or Jesus or Buddha as a role model.  (Why imitate when you could become?) Conventional mainstream people, like much of our pop media, can only imagine religion in terms of “God,” so the struggle over defining an imaginary being obscures everything else.

3.  Denial of a belief in any god or gods.  (A-theism and science count as religions.)  Or seeing god in everything, maybe including ourselves, or just ignoring the issue altogether.

4.  Complex theologies developed through reflection rather like mathematics, often called “systematics.”  These are very serious, the basis of schools for professional clergy and scholars, and sometimes as much dressing up culture with theory as insights into reality.  They often are related to politics in their role as justification.

5.  Mystic awareness of the sacred.  People do write about this and love to read about it, but it is the ultimate version of something that needs no words: just point.

6.  The sacred as a system of taboos meant to protect, respect, preserve -- like not walking on graves, wearing or not wearing a hat in a dedicated sacred building, and so on.  Not eating other people might be the most extreme example, but there are cultures where cannibalism shows respect and merging.

7.  A theology used by institutions to justify themselves and therefore merged with one particular system by use of terms like “god” in pledges and legal matters.  God as a wax seal of authenticity.

8.  Ultimate authority, sometimes used to justify nations and the claims of their leaders.  A “tie-breaker” or mediator that can avoid violence, like the Pope in medieval Europe.

9.  Magic.  Casting spells and controlling events or people.

10.  Ghosts and dragons.  Escaping to impossible events, a craving for miracles.

11.  Valorization of the naturally sacred: mountains, oceans, trees.

12.  Social efforts to control whatever seems harmful, whether suicide, oppression, killing of children, and other taboos about sex, food, money, clothing, and so on.  This is where morality meets magic.  (Stopping tragedy seems impossible except with miracles.)

13.  The effect of writing on religion is profound.  But the Sacred “Book” is valorized how?  The Bible is “curated,” meaning censored by a committee of old men at the Council of Nicaea.  The Apocrypha is part of the material left out from the same period and reputedly from the same prophets.

14.  Virtue can be an inadvertent plan for extinction.  One reason to protect the stigmatized is that they might be better suited for the bottleneck times than conventionally adjusted people.

My interest in this new field of “Deep Time” is of intense usefulness to me because I think one source of clarification might be going back to a period BEFORE there was any religion.  How did religion form?  How do human brains recognize what is sacred in the terms of Eliade, a felt difference that sets some situations apart?  What, even in our modern brains, still wants to pray?  How can interacting molecules floating in a red soup separated from the world outside our bodies by a thin easily-torn skin, make us feel so convinced that we have a unique identity and that we are making our own choices?

Some, who see religion as “organized” and therefore a matter of institutions with hierarchies and duties, claim religion did not exist before agriculture was invented, because there is no evidence of temples before that.  (Their “definition” of religion requires temples).   But if one goes to the kind of religion we call “spirituality,” which is just about as variously defined as “religion”, that certainly is not confined to agricultural communities.  Pre-industrial hunting is trying to become in harmony with the world and therefore sensitive to opportunities to get prey.  If the farmer’s religion is based on crops, the hunter’s religion is based on sign, and there you have it:  Jacob and Esau.  Still arguing about what to eat.

Luckily, partly because of the new research on how the brain and body neurons function to guide us, what genetic research reveals, and the greatly expanded understanding of the planet’s time-line, there is a body of people thinking about these issues.  There’s still the issue of virtue giving eternal life in some other place, the problem of how a decidedly finite and vulnerable body can live forever and whether anyone would really want to, and just what might a “soul” be like -- a part of one’s identity that is separable from one’s body but imperceptible and possibly not even conscious.  

Have the terms of survival really changed?  Is virtue a waste of energy?  

IF YOU GOT "HAPPY" WOULD YOU KNOW IT?

The Satisfaction with Life Index. 

Blue through red represent most to least happy respectively; grey areas have no reliable data available.

The second of these “domains” that the psych people are trying to think their way through organizing is “Positive Valence Systems.”  There are a number of problems, some of which are listed in the NIHS minutes of discussion and some of which are not really considered.  http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/development-and-definitions-of-the-rdoc-domains-and-constructs.shtml

Notoriously, it is far more difficult to define mental health positives than negatives, though people since Maslow have been working at it.  “Negative Valence Systems”, the first one tackled by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in terms of reconciling and consolidating it with the new neurology science was easier in part because of decades of research by Joe LeDoux and his colleagues, specifically about fear and anxiety pathways.  Anyway, people who are maladjusted, hurting, or a pain-in-the-butt to others tend to seek out researchers in hope of relief.  Happy people are fine until there is some sweeping change to the world (climate change, political grid lock, economic hardships) that interferes with them.  These forces have been at hand recently.

http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/

Here’s what NIMH has so far.  It’s packed with jargon which I’ll try to paraphrase, but remember that I’m not a psych professional and might get their Latinate multisyllabics all wrong.  The acronym they’re using for this project is “RDoC” in case you’re trying to use search engines.

Approach Motivation Systems: 

Rather than asking, as Maslow did, what are the characteristics of a happy and healthy person, this category is more about how people go towards behavior that works in favor of growth and health.  It's a subtle difference.  “This is a multi-faceted Construct involving mechanisms/processes that regulate the direction and maintenance of approach behavior influenced by pre-existing tendencies, learning, memory, stimulus characteristics, and deprivation states.”  So these are the conclusions one’s brain has come to and stored to guide the management of what one does. 

“Approach behavior can be directed toward innate or acquired cues (i.e., unconditioned vs. learned stimuli), implicit or explicit goals; it can consist of goal-directed or Pavlovian conditioned responses.” Below are eight sub-categories, proposed so far.

"Eat your Wheaties, kid!"

Reward valuation. Processes by which the probability and benefits of a prospective outcome are computed and calibrated by reference to external information, social context (e.g., group input, counterfactual comparisons), and/or prior experience. This calibration is influenced by pre-existing biases, learning, memory, stimulus characteristics, and deprivation states. [Whatever makes you think this is a good thing to do.]

Effort valuation/Willingness to work. Processes by which the cost(s) of obtaining an outcome is computed; tendency to overcome response costs to obtain a reinforcer.  [Why get up in the morning? How much effort will you put in?  Will you accept the cost of an education?]

Expectancy/Reward prediction error. A state triggered by exposure to internal or external stimuli, experiences or contexts that predict the possibility of reward. Reward expectation can alter the experience of an outcome and can influence the use of resources (e.g., cognitive resources). [If things get tough, how much frustration can you tolerate?  What if the reward you expect just doesn’t materialize?]

Action selection/Preference-based decision making. Processes involving an evaluation of costs/benefits and occurring in the context of multiple potential choices being available for decision-making. [Making a career choice.  Choosing one of three doors.]

Initial responsiveness to reward attainment: Mechanisms/processes associated with hedonic responses—as reflected in subjective experiences, behavioral responses, and/or engagement of the neural systems to a positive reinforcer—and culmination of reward seeking.  [Why do they insist on using the word “hedonic”? What’s wrong with “pleasure?”  Having said that, we get pleasure from different things that may not be frivolous or obvious.] 

http://www.slideshare.net/bright9977/10-leadership-lessons-from-genghis-khan

Sustained/Longer-term responsiveness to reward attainment: Mechanisms/processes associated with the termination of reward seeking, e.g., satisfaction, satiation, regulation of consummatory behavior.  [ How much is enough? The opposite of addiction.]

Reward Learning: A process by which organisms acquire information about stimuli, actions, and contexts that predict positive outcomes, and by which behavior is modified when a novel reward occurs or outcomes are better than expected.   [When good things happen and rewards appear, do they register with you?  A lot of people can’t handle good times, praise, or security.  It feels stuck, boring.]

Habit: Sequential, repetitive, motor, or cognitive behaviors elicited by external or internal triggers that, once initiated, can go to completion without constant conscious oversight. Habits can be adaptive by virtue of freeing up cognitive resources.  Related behaviors could be pathological expression of a process that under normal circumstances subserves adaptive goals. [So -- you learned to do something so well that you barely know you are doing it, but now it doesn’t fit the situation.  It's a drag and a drain.  Can you get it up to consciousness and extinguish it?]

I’ll make my own list of comments:

1.  The main thing about positive rewards is distinguishing between those that address simple existence, like food or shelter, and those that are only rewards to some people.  Is opera a reward or a punishment?

"Then I thought: Why not me? I hemmed and hawed. 

I wanted to go, but debated. The cost of BART. Lunch out. 

But mostly it was the word: OPERA."

2.  This group of people doing the thinking has a particular set of experiences and therefore assumptions.  A high-end shrink with a proper couch and high fees is going to see a population that is VERY different from those of a prison chaplain or a Medecins sans Frontieres fighting ebola.  Beyond that, to achieve the level of education that qualifies people to be on these sorts of committees means that they have been socialized to accept a very specific set of beliefs about what to do and how to do it.  The existence of this boundary (frontieres?) means that they are excluding many -- maybe infinite -- points of view and sources of information.

3.  It is surprising that often the neurology structures that light up on fMRI's and so on for negatives are the same ones that light up for positives!  (S/M folks are not surprised.)  It's the SYSTEM.  This is the sort of thing that has to build up considerable credibility before it can have impact on what’s always been accepted as truth.  Organic neurology research has reached that point and the NIMH is forced to take it into account.

4.  Keeping track of the interaction between culture and pleasure is much more difficult because culture is constantly affecting what is success, why it’s success, and the consequences of success, which might be rewarding and punishing at once.  (Consider a top ballerina who is admired but who suffers physically in order to achieve.)  This is complicated again by overlapping cultures which contradict each other, like a ghetto kid whose peers think success in school is a marker of weakness while the kid’s mother is determined that success is only possible through education.  And what if the kid is dyslexic?  

ballerina feet

“Success” beyond simple survival is a slippery concept.  We tend to measure it with money, security, status, authority over others, admiration from those we care about.  What about contributions to society, cultural insight, or simply being virtuous -- except "virtue" takes us back to the same slippery ground as success.  Both are defined by participating in a culture, but cultures are incredibly various and contradictory.  In fact, the “standing order” of mental health systems may try to destroy this RDoC enterprise .  My guess is that there’s enough of a sub-culture -- humanistic, progressive, clinical -- to keep the project alive.  But not easily.  We should support this enormous re-framing.

ALL THIS FITS TOGETHER SOMEHOW

One research revelation is coming after another -- or maybe they are realizations since the knowledge was always there and, once thought of, is perfectly clear and real.  It’s strange that we always think we’re coming to an ending of history, the line has been drawn, the sum has been added, and it’s all over.  Except it never is. You don’t even have to make an effort because it all shifts, except that it’s not the world shifts so much as we’re seeing it differently.

Being able to see into neuron cells and their hookup relationships has revealed:

1.  “Thinking” is something the whole body does all the time: it is taking in a representation of the world and reacting to it in every second.  More than that, the body and brain is changing and rearranging itself between representation and reaction in every second.  The brain connectome is like a piano concerto that chords out changing patterns as it plays.  It’s not a bump for this and a wire for that, it’s 100 synapses at once, all over the brain and back into the brain stem.

2.  The body’s 3-R process is a dance, a shifting process.  We are not aware of this most of the time.  We think we are “me,” a unified identity, with trustworthy memories of an actual past.  (Except where did I put the car keys?)

3.  Self-awareness, consciousness, is a small percentage of the body’s commotion.

4.  Words are only an even smaller percentage of consciousness/concepts and they are at the mercy of the culture that supplies the categories and some of the grammar.

5.  Writing is only a small percentage of what spoken words can express, passed through another set of filters that are about keyboards or gripping an instrument while staying in control of font size, sequences, clarity.

6.  Somehow our Western culture has come to believe that writing is a mark of superiority and that writing really well is not only the most distinctive of human characteristics but also true communication and an indication of genius.

This last assertion is hooey.  I’ll just leave it there.  For now.

Something similar is true of addiction.  The knowledge we have now is challenging our assumptions.  (I’m reading Gabor Maté’s book, In the Land of the Hungry Ghosts, about a program to help the most seriously suffering addicts in Vancouver, BC.)

1.  Not everyone gets addicted easily.  In ninety percent, or two-thirds, or some comparable majority fraction of people, depending on the drug and the circumstances, their molecular responses are not permanently changed.  For an addict, the cell membrane is changed in a way that prevents it operating as it should.  Instead of allowing the proper molecules access and producing the proper molecules in the first place, it closes the  cell entry points for the reciprocal endo-transactions that must take place.  Instead the cell membrane and cell synapses shape themselves around the exogenous, outsider, molecules.  Then they quite literally MUST have them to work.  This is not conscious.  It cannot be felt by introspection of the cells, just general malaise.  It can only be observed in behavior.  But the early results are highly rewarding: blissful.  Later this high can only be felt by increasing intake of the drug.
  

Maté on the left

2.  Addiction is sometimes seen as an emotional reaction to a miserable life or a need for emotional comforting, a compensation for deprivation.  That can be the original motivation for taking drugs, but soon -- in those susceptible -- the cells have changed enough that it is now a mechanical problem, just as much as if bones were broken.  The things that are supposed to make a teeny mobile ecology of membranes and molecules shift back and forth to produce thought and life are disrupted.  No amount of will power can restore them.  Proper protection of the person (shelter, food, sleep), compensating meds, support from people who understand, and the stamina to withstand withdrawal can sometimes allow people to find a new balance.  Incarceration will not work.  Methadone works if the person can stay on it.

Addiction is a physiological condition dependent on the cell's own actions that (like HIV) makes a person vulnerable to desire, meant to keep a person alive but driven to a kind of desire that will kill them, if not directly then by the neglect of other self-protections.  Maté believes that the fraction who have susceptibility were made that way just before or after birth.  Environment is crucial.

Somewhere I read a quote (I wish I’d written it down with the attribution) that suggested  the brain machinery for nurturing and the brain machinery for rage are like parenthesis, two “hands” that hold between them what we call love or attachment.  I read today that the hormone called “oxytocin” -- which we all learned from reading Herriott's “All Creatures Great and Small,” would make a resentful cow turn and care for her calf or a sow begin to make milk for her piglets -- is not ever present in reptiles.  Instead there is a precursor chemical that prompts crocodiles, for instance, to go to the birthing place, dig the hole, produce the eggs.  Then they leave.  It's humans who go "aaaww" over the babies and want to cuddle them.

http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/dr-love.html

"Oxytocin is a sort of moral governor, and that sense of morality comes from this ancient mechanism that modulated approach and withdrawal behavior. The precursor molecule for oxytocin, which was found in fish at least 400 million years ago, modulated approach and withdrawal behavior between males and females to facilitate sexual reproduction. So the value of sex is that you get greater genetic diversity faster. But the curse of sex, if you’re a fish, is that if this other fish gets close enough to you to fertilize you, you might instead become its lunch. What the precursor oxytocin did in the female was allow the approach of a male fish, but only when the female was ovulating.

"Oxytocin does the same thing in humans. It modulates approach and withdrawal behavior, and it does so by modulating fear responses."

One of the most moving stories in “Hungry Ghosts” is that of a pair of addicts who were educated, gifted people but hooked and therefore thrown on badd times.  He was more alcoholic.  She was into cocaine.  She became pregnant.  Somehow the baby was okay, but the mother rose and left as soon as the infant was born.  The father, who had been in and out of the relationship, then stepped in and for the first few weeks of the little girl’s life, as she was weaned carefully from her intrauterine addiction, he was the nurturer.  Something in the woman’s addiction evidently blocked the production of oxytocin, but alcoholism did not, even in this male.  At least for those several weeks -- then he went off on an alcohol binge and the baby was fostered.

So the function of oxytocin is to trigger nurturing or what I might even call cradling and in its most basic function -- before mammals -- was to allow two creatures who might otherwise compete, fight or eat each other to declare enough of a truce to unite semen with ovum.  Even in mammals there are no guarantees of protection.  In some animals, sex is agonistic enough to seem almost like fighting.  (Insert cat joke here.)  Tom cats will eat kittens.  Threatened mother mink will kill all the babies.

Sing it!

If everything in a body works as a reciprocity, then human love might be seen as occupying a place on a continuum between nurturing/cradling and raging/attacking.  So would the molecular trigger for violence be testosterone or adrenaline?  Or both?  Fear?  If in Ray Rappaport’s terms, all the reciprocities amount to the banks of the stream that is homeostasis (too much hot or cold and you die; too much food or not enough food and you die) so that likewise too much nurturing is suffocation and too much violence is traumatic wounds.  But the momentum goes forward towards survival, moving a little from one side or the other, so long as the bounds of endurance are not exceeded.  This metaphor is an account of the survival of individuals.  We tell many versions in what we call “novels,” and illuminate points on the continuum with “poems” or “songs.”

The survival of groups requires a different sort of homeostasis -- between war and peace.  Or more temperately, between economic competition and protection.  These are related to population density, slipping over to murder when there are too many people or suicide when life is too limited.

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park

Rats in a box get addicted to pushing a lever for drugs.  Rats in a rat-friendly environment, a Rat Park, big as a human house with lots of things to do and play with, simply don’t get addicted. All mammals are pretty much like that.  Like, boys need Skate Parks; dogs need Dog Parks.