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ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

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This begins as a sort of review of the filn Avatar but segues beautifully into discussing a new book on the 'faith instinct' - an argument by ane volutionary biologist that argues for a sense of the transcendent being hardwired into the human DNA, similar to discussions on a 'God gene' postulated by some neuroscientists in recent years.


'Avatar' and the faith instinct
by Jonah Goldberg

December 31, 2009


You probably don't need a long synopsis of James Cameron's half-billion-dollar epic "Avatar," in part because even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it. As many reviewers have noted, Cameron rips off Hollywood cliches to the point you could cut and paste dialogue from "Pocahontas" or "Dances With Wolves" into "Avatar" without appreciably changing the story.

In short, "Avatar" tells the tale of a disabled Marine, Jake Sully, who occupies the body of a 10-foot-tall alien so he can live among the mystical forest denizens of the moon world Pandora. Sully is sent in mufti, like a futuristic Lawrence of Arabia, to further the schemes of the evil corporate nature-rapists desperate to obtain the precious mineral "unobtainium" (no, really).

Jake inevitably goes native, embraces the eco-faith of Pandora's Na'Vi inhabitants and their tree goddess, the "all mother," and rallies the Pandoran aborigines (not to mention the Pandoran ecosystem itself) against the evil forces of a thinly veiled 22nd-century combine of Blackwater and Halliburton.

The film has been subjected to a sustained assault from many on the right, most notably by Ross Douthat in The New York Times, as an "apologia for pantheism."

Douthat's criticisms hit the mark, but the most relevant point was raised by John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard. Cameron wrote "Avatar," says Podhoretz, "not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people."

What would have been controversial is if -- somehow -- Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that's the point, isn't it? We live in an age in which it's the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na'Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I'm certainly one of those cranky right-wingers, though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

But what I find interesting about the film is how what is "pleasing to the most people" is so unapologetically religious.

Nicholas Wade's new book, The Faith Instinct, lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian, a notion of something unknowable from mere experience.

Either way, in the words of philosopher Will Herberg, "Man is homo religiosus, by 'nature' religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living."

Wade argues that the Darwinian evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection but also on the natural selection of groups. And groups that subscribe to a religious worldview are more apt to survive -- and hence pass on their genes.

Religious rules impose moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a "cause larger than yourself," as we say today. No wonder everything from altruism to martyrdom are part of nearly every faith.

The faith instinct may be baked into our genes, but it is also profoundly malleable. Robespierre, the French revolutionary who wanted to replace Christianity with a new "age of reason," emphatically sought to exploit what he called the "religious instinct which imprints upon our souls the idea of a sanction given to moral precepts by a power that is higher than man."

Many environmentalists are open about their desire to turn their cause into a religious imperative akin to the plight of the Na'Vi, hence Al Gore's uncontroversial insistence that global warming is a "spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The symbolism and rhetoric behind Barack Obama's campaign was overtly religious at times, as when he proclaimed that "we are the ones we've been waiting for" -- a line that could have come straight out of the mouths of Cameron's Na'Vi.

What I find fascinating, and infuriating, is how the culture-war debate is routinely described by antagonists on both sides as a conflict between the religious and the un-religious. The faith instinct manifests itself across the ideological spectrum, even if it masquerades as something else.

On the right, many conservatives have been trying to fashion what might be called theological diversity amid moral unity. Culturally conservative Catholics, Protestants and -- increasingly -- Jews find common cause.

The left is undergoing a similar process, but the terms of the debate are far more inchoate and fluid.

What is not happening is a similar effort between left and right, which is why the culture war, like the faith instinct, isn't going away any time soon.



The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures.
By Nicholas Wade. Penguin Press; 310 pages



Spirit level: Why the human race
has needed religion to survive




WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas Wade recalls the place where he first felt sanctity: Eton College chapel.

The “beauty of holiness” in a British private school is a far cry from the sort of religion that later came to interest him as a science journalist at Nature magazine and then the New York Times.

To examine the roots of religion, he says, it is important to look at human beginnings. The customs of hunter-gatherer peoples who survived into modern times give an idea of religion’s first forms: the ecstasy of dusk-to-dawn tribal dances, for example.

Charles Darwin, whose idea of the sacred also came from an English private school, witnessed religion at its most primordial when he went to Australia in 1836. He found it horrifying: “nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of blazing fires, all moving in hideous harmony…”

Whatever Darwin’s personal sensibilities, Mr Wade is convinced that a Darwinian approach offers the key to understanding religion. In other words, he sides with those who think man’s propensity for religion has some adaptive function.

According to this view, faith would not have persisted over thousands of generations if it had not helped the human race to survive. Among evolutionary biologists, this idea is contested. Critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, suggest that faith is a useless (or worse) by-product of other human characteristics.

And that controversy leads to another one. Does Darwinian selection take place at the level only of individuals, or of groups as well? As Mr Wade makes clear, the notion of religion as an “adaptive” phenomenon makes better sense if one accepts the idea of group selection. Groups which practised religion effectively and enjoyed its benefits were likely to prevail over those which lacked these advantages.

Of course, the picture is muddied by the vast changes that religion went through in the journey from tribal dancing to Anglican hymns. The advent of settled, agricultural societies, at least 10,000 years ago, led to a new division of labour, in which priestly castes tried to monopolise access to the divine, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy.

Still, the modifications that religion has undergone should not, in Mr Wade’s view, distract from the study of faith’s basic functions.

In what way, then, does religion enhance a group’s survival? Above all, by promoting moral rules and cementing cohesion, in a way that makes people ready to sacrifice themselves for the group and to deal ruthlessly with outsiders.

These arguments are well made. Mr Wade has a clear mind and limpid prose style which guides the reader almost effortlessly through 200 years of intellectual history. Perhaps, though, he oversimplifies the link between morality, in the sense of obedience to rules, and group solidarity based on common participation in ecstatic rites.

All religion is concerned in varying degrees with metaphysical ideas, moral norms and mystical experience. But in the great religions, the moral and the mystical have often been in tension. The more a religion stresses ecstasy, the less it seems hidebound by rules especially rules of public behaviour, as opposed to purely religious norms. And religious movements (from the “Deuteronomists” of ancient Israel to the English Puritans) that emphasise moral norms tend to eschew the ecstatic.

Max Weber, one of the fathers of religious sociology, contrasted the transcendental feelings enjoyed by Catholic mass-goers with the Protestant obsession with behaviour.

In Imperial Russia, Peter the Great tried to pull the Russian Orthodox church from the former extreme to the latter: to curb its love of rite and mystery and make it more of a moral agency like the Lutheran churches of northern Europe. He failed. Russians liked things mystical, and they didn’t like being told what to do.

As well as giving an elegant summary of modern thinking about religion, Mr Wade also offers a brief, provocative history of monotheism.

He endorses the radical view that the story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is myth, rather than history. He sympathises with daring ideas about Islam’s beginnings: so daring that many of its proponents work under false names. In their view, Islam is more likely to have emerged from dissident Christian sects in the Levant than to have “burst out of Arabia”, as the Muslim version of sacred history teaches.

At times, the book stumbles. In describing the interplay between Hellenic and Hebrew culture at the dawning of Christianity, Mr Wade makes exaggerated claims. He says there is no basis for a mother-and-child cult in the religion of Israel. In fact there are many references in the Hebrew scriptures to the Messiah and his mother; the Dead Sea Scrolls have made this even clearer. And his micro-history of Christian theology is inaccurate in places.

These objections aside, this is a masterly book. It lays the basis for a rich dialogue between biology, social science and religious history. It also helps explain a quest for collective ecstasy that can take myriad forms.

Perhaps his brief autobiographical reference to Eton should have noted the bonding effect not only of chapel, but also of songs like “Jolly Boating Weather”.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/02/2010 00:18]
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