Can We Be Good Without God Biology, Behavior, and The Need To Believe - Robert Buckman

“Buckman’s got it right—
a realistic and positive moral blueprint for being good,

—Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Robert Buckman
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PENGUIN CANADA
CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?
ROBERT BUCKMAN, M.D., is a cancer specialist and

a professor in the Department of Medicine at the
University of Toronto. He is the current president
of the Humanist Association of Canada, and a
bestselling author and TV broadcaster.
Can We
Be Good
Without
God?
■
Biology, Behavior,
and the Need to Believe
Robert Buckman
PENGUIN
CANADA
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Buckman, Rob
Can we be good without God?: biology, behavior, and
the need to believe / Robert Buckman. — Rev. and updated ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-14-305127-X
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To the memory of
Joseph Campbell
with genuine respect and admiration.
And also to
,
PatriciaJames and Matthew
generators of wonderful happiness.
V
Contents
Preface: The Events of September 11, 2001 9
Acknowledgments 11
PART ONE: TO BELIEVE IS HUMAN 15
1. Introduction: In the Beginning ... 17
2. The Evolution of Belief 25
3. Worship and Heroes: The Machinery of Belief 64
4. The Neurology of Belief 78
PART TWO: BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR 111
5. The Behavior of Groups 113
7
8 CONTENTS
6. Constructive Effects of Communal Beliefs 173
7. Destructive Effects of Communal Beliefs:

The Dogma in the Manger 214
PART THREE: CAN WE DO BETTER? 229
8. Alternative Gold Standards 231
CONCLUSION: WE ARE ONLY HUMAN 249
9. The View from Here 251
10. Toward “Better” 260
Index 271
Preface
The Events of September 11, 2001
T JL. his book is about the effects of belief on behavior, and

we need to examine that interaction now more than at any
time in our history. The horror and the tragedy of the events
of September 11, 2001, brought home with shocking,
numbing, brutal, and sickening clarity the lengths to which
some people will go in the furtherance of their beliefs. Human
behavior has always included not only the potential for aston¬
ishing creativity, collaboration, and constructiveness, but also
the potential for great cruelty and barbaric destruction. This
book goes part of the way to explaining why that is.
As you will see here, since its very origins our species has
always employed the activity that we call “believing” in order
to conceptualize, understand, and cope with the world about
us. In every community over the centuries and millennia
beliefs have been codified into images of God or of another
supreme being (or beings). In chapter 4 you will read of recent
research from the field of neuroscience which shows clearly
that this concept of an external spirit or intelligence is a fea-
9
10 PREFACE
ture of the design and function of a particular part of the human

brain. Furthermore, as you will see, there is also an inbuilt
propensity, which can be demonstrated in a minority of average
people, to kill another human being if they feel certain that they
have been instructed to do so by God. Following that in chapter 5,
there is an analysis of the way in which many of these tendencies
are amplified and reinforced when we are in a crowd or large
group, and a review of the ways in which mass movements achieve
things that individuals could not and sometimes would not: acts
of great creativity as well as acts of terror and destruction.
Understanding these things is the first step toward moder¬
ating them. Our brains comprise not only the centers associated
with aggression and (probably) anger—part of the limbic system
called the amygdala—but also the “thinking brain,” the wonderful
and adaptive neocortex which is quite capable of giving each of us
awareness and warnings of the stirrings of our own urges or
instincts when they seem to propel us toward destruction. The
more we understand of the origins of our own drives and
instincts, the greater the chance we have of restraining the drive
toward destruction—in ourselves and perhaps in others—and of
reinforcing the urge toward creativity.
The behavior of every one of us is profoundly influenced by the
beliefs we hold. Over the course of our history, we have seen won¬
derful and extraordinarily creative achievements—great cathedrals
and buildings, brilliant paintings, and literally millions of other cre¬
ations. Over the same course of time we have also seen countless
acts of destruction. The more we understand about the way our
brains function and the various tendencies that are built into them,
the more we become able to develop the former and restrain the
latter. It is a great and profound hope that we can do this—and
understanding the factors that are involved is the first step.
Robert Buckman
Toronto, May 2002
Acknowledgments
T JL his book really started when, together with Michael

Schulman and Dr. Henry Morgentaler, I was involved in
organizing a panel discussion on the topic “Can You Be
Good Without God?” for the Humanist Association of
Canada and the Humanist Association of Toronto. An
article on that discussion written by Susan Kastner for the
Toronto Star came to the attention of my longtime friend
Cynthia Good, head of Penguin Books Canada. She asked
me whether I would be prepared to write, as it were, “the
book of the show” and I felt that it was a matter of duty and
responsibility to do that. My partnership with Cynthia has
consistently shown the value of the dialectic—the improve¬
ment and honing of a discussion by consideration of the
polar opposites.
Michael Schulman was helpful at every stage with con¬
tributions both specific and general. Andrew Ferns, my
invaluable researcher and assistant, has been superb at
11
12 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
finding references to arcane and difficult areas, and in helping me

keep track of the stories and data.
Above all in the scientific area, I cannot thank Michael
Persinger enough. I first heard him interviewed on radio some
time in 1996 and was struck by his coherent views—and detailed
research—on the right temporal lobe. Through several days spent
together, and through dozens of scientific papers and references
that he has been kind enough to send me, I have had several sig¬
nificant epiphanies. Somehow the way Michael explains the
workings of the limbic system has helped me see some truths (or
so I believe them to be) about human nature.
As regards my finding the works of the brilliant Joseph
Campbell, I owe that first encounter to my friend and colleague
Dr. Balfour Mount. The founder of palliative care in Canada, Bal
sent me The Power of Myth (the dialogues between Joseph Camp¬
bell and Bill Moyers) when I was hospitalized in 1990. Campbell’s
brilliance led me to read more of his writings—and I was
prompted further by Eve Martin Evans.
I owe a large debt to the author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I still feel
that his novel Cat’s Cradle captured the very essence of religions
and religious leadership (as well as many other topics), and that
in Mother Night he analyzed the deepest aspects of morals and
ethics, and made many brave and moving observations about
how we assess the true worth of a life. In his memoir of the war
and the Dresden bombings, Slaughterhouse Five, he highlighted
the universality of atrocities. I think Hiram Johnson was wrong
when he said that the first casualty of war was truth—I personally
think the first casualty of war is a sense of perspective and pro¬
portion. That Kurt Vonnegut is currently President of the Amer¬
ican Humanist Association goes some way to restoring a sense of
proportion and decency to the world.
The illustrations were done by my longtime friend Martin
Nichols, who also illustrated my book on cancer, and who often
seems to understand what I mean when I am not sure I know myself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 13
I am also grateful to Don Hill for stories and views; to Wade

Davies for looking at the section on shamanism; to my friend
and partner in teaching communication skills, Dr. Walter Baile,
for steering me to Gustave LeBon; and to Michael Chazzan for
making sure I’d got the origins of the human species roughly right.
Lastly, like all writing projects, this one took away a lot of
family time—my wife, Pat, was exceptionally patient (for most
of the time, anyway) as were our sons James and Matthew (of
whom the latter wrote the epigram on page 249 directly on my
computer when I said I was stuck for a way to start chapter 9).
I am also grateful to the critics of the first Canadian edition of this
book who thought that my style was breathless and somewhat
flippant. I think they were right, which is why I rewrote every
word of it for this edition.
If you would like further information about the Humanist
Association of Canada, call the toll-free number 1-877-HUMANS 1
(1-877-486-2671), or visit the website at www.humanists.net.
vA.'
\
Part One
To Believe Is Human
A
JL jL note on the use of the capital initial letter for the
word “God”: Since the use of a capital letter for the word
“God” is a very sensitive issue, I shall conform to current
convention on this point and capitalize the word when
referring to the commonly held conception of a nonhuman
intelligence or force referred to by the majority of people as
“God ” I do not mean to imply by that usage that I person¬
ally believe in the generally accepted idea of God but simply
that I am referring to the wide range of concepts and images
centered on the idea of a single Supreme Being.
15
sjfc.'
V
Chapter 1
Introduction
In the Beginning. . . .
T his book is not a debate about the existence of God.

It is about something much more important than that,
namely, the effect on human behavior and history produced
by believing in a God (or gods). In other words, we shall not
focus on what God does or has done (or what the gods do
or have done) for humans, but on what humans do and have
done for the sake of their gods.
The activity that we term believing is one in which our
species has engaged since the first evolution of conscious¬
ness, and it is a fundamental characteristic of the way in
which humans cope with the world around them. It is so
central to our behavior that the act of believing can justifi¬
ably be considered as part of what “being human” means,
whether we are conscious of its influence or not. The central
task of this book is to examine and assess the effects of belief
on our behavior because, as we shall see, those influences are
so often profound and far-reaching.
17
18 CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?
The effects of belief on behavior may of course be admired as

good or decried as evil, or anything in between (and are often, in
retrospect, judged to have been a mixture of both). Many—per¬
haps the majority—of the most significant events in human history
to date have been shaped or initiated by strongly held beliefs, par¬
ticularly by religious beliefs, frequently intertwined with political
beliefs. While clearly beliefs have, on many occasions, inspired or
produced great improvements in people’s lives, societies, and civi¬
lization, on other occasions they have incited or accelerated major
acts of destruction, sometimes involving large numbers of people.
It is because of the latter—those occasional but devastating acts of
destruction which include religious wars, massacres, and genocides
based on (or ostensibly based on) religious differences—that it is so
important to examine the effects of belief on behavior. That, there¬
fore, is the central focus of this book: how do our beliefs affect our
behavior, and how are we able to change those influences if we
wish? The more insight we achieve, the greater chance we have of
directing our own behavior, and the greater chance we have of cor¬
recting for the effects that we do not want, and restraining some of
the tendencies that we regard as destructive and undesirable.
This book, therefore, is intended to cast light on some of the
forces of belief that affect our behavior, and so to encourage dis¬
cussion and debate about the way humans conduct their
behavior, and about assessing how much—if anything—we may
want to change and may be able to change.
THE WORD “BELIEF” AND

OTHER PRACTICAL DEFINITIONS
BELIEVING AND BELIEF
For present purposes we may define the act of believing in purely

practical terms, distinguishing it from other thought processes—
INTRODUCTION 19
that is, other functions of the human brain—including cognitive

or intellectual acts such as calculating or logic, and affective activ¬
ities such as liking, loving, or hating. In simple practical terms,
belief may be defined as: any set of perceptions which are sus¬
tained by a person as a consistent attitude or view and which
extend beyond any factual information available, or even contrary
to relevant factual information. Therefore, by that definition,
beliefs are systems of thought that cannot be proven or disproved.
They can be studied, analyzed, discussed, contravened, disre¬
garded, debated, or even fought over, but by none of these activi¬
ties can a belief be conclusively proven or disproved by objective
dispassionate data. Believing is a human activity, and it requires a
brain capable of encompassing some measure of abstraction.
Before our species had developed conscious abstract thought—
widely regarded as a hallmark of humans—there would have been
no beliefs.
RELIGION
Another definition is needed at this juncture. The word “religion”

denotes an idea that we all understand and acknowledge, even
though its precise definition is problematic. The exact frontiers
between what we term a “religion” and what we consider a “cult”
or a “movement” or a “fringe belief” or indeed a “philosophical
stance” are difficult to define in practice. The word religion is
derived from the Latin ligo meaning “I bind,” and religions are sys¬
tems of belief that unite and bind together their adherents.1 In
current usage, the word religion carries an additional implication:
that of a belief in a suprahuman intelligence—a God or gods. The
way we currently employ the word implies that all religions have a
central core of theism. Most people would not term any nontheist
or atheist communities as “religions.” In this book, therefore, I
shall abide by that usage, and employ the word religion when dis¬
cussing a theistic philosophy held by a particular community.
SOME MEANINGS OF THE WORD “GOD”
Perhaps of greater importance than any other definition, how¬

ever, is the thorny issue of the large number of meanings of the
word “God.”
One current theological dictionary defines God as “the
supreme being (a) who is to be worshiped and served (Deut.
6:4-5) and (b) who in the monotheistic tradition is acknowl¬
edged as the personal, eternal, immutable, all-knowing and all-
powerful creator.... [T]he unique and holy God of Israel tran¬
scends our material world and is not to be represented in images.
(Exod. 20:4, Lev. 19:4, Deut. 4:12,15-24).”2
That definition is certainly a close approximation to what
most people mean when they speak of God, but there are many
other meanings—and the way that different people use the same
word is very important, and may of itself cause disputes and mis¬
understandings. In fact, given the different meanings implied by
different people when they use the same word, I would like to
suggest that a single universally accepted definition is not only
impossible, it is not particularly important. Perhaps what matters
more is the meaning of the word “God” to that particular person
in that particular context. What precisely you mean by the word
when you use it may be far more important when you and I are
discussing concepts of “God” than any dictionary definition. Just
by way of illustration I shall indicate a few of the more common
usages of the word to give some idea of the range of ideas and
philosophies encompassed by the word.
At this period in time (the beginning of the twenty-first cen¬
tury) it is probably fair to say that the vast majority of humans
believe in a God (or gods), and that most of the believers visualize
or conceptualize their God as an intelligence that has created the
universe, that will still exist after all human life is extinct, that
controls the daily events of human life, and may intercede in
those events for certain purposes, under certain circumstances.
INTRODUCTION 21
We may refer to this vision of God as an intercessionary “archi-

tect-and-controller” image. It is to this concept of a God that
most people pray when they pray for relief of suffering, for favor,
for the punishment of their enemies, and so on.
Other people have entirely different meanings in mind when
they use the word. For example many people use the word to
mean the ineffable essence of good—the pure and indefinable
element and source of the goodness that is in all things. In some
respects, then, for those people this entire book is about the
meaning of the word.
In some areas of the world, some people have a concept of
God that is quite different from any of these. Some people—
including some liberal churches in the North American conti¬
nent, for example—do not believe that there is a Divine Con¬
troller managing human affairs. They do accept the fact that
prayers for intercession may be comforting to the person who
prays, but do not regard them as a means of propitiating a God
who, for His own reasons, may or may not decide to intervene.
Some of these people believe in a somewhat different concept of
a God. To them, God is a supreme external intelligence, and is the
embodiment of the prime force of the universe, and will survive
the extinction of all human life (and, for that matter, all life)
should that occur, but is not the architect of the physical universe,
and the controller of physical events. In other words, they believe
in the idea of a supreme intelligence, but do not believe that this
force was the physical creator of the physical universe or the con¬
troller of day-to-day human affairs.
Still others do not believe in any specific external intelli¬
gence—in any sense of those words—but do believe that there is
“something out there.” When asked to define this image of a God
further, they are often not able to articulate the concept beyond it
being the embodiment of all mysteries and the things we do
not—and perhaps cannot—understand.
Then there are people who use the word God to mean a state
of mind and spirit that an individual may achieve at a certain

moment. By the word God these people usually mean a sense of
oneness with the universe and with all forces of creation. Many
people who use the word in this sense do not believe in the phys¬
ical existence of a God-the-architect-and-controller, and might
term themselves “agnostic” on that issue.v
To complicate matters further, some people have their own
personal mixture of several of these elements. For example, there
are many who would define God as a state of mind (as in the
paragraph above) but who nevertheless also hold a firm belief in
the existence of an external God who created the universe. In their
view, there is an indefinable connection between the essence
inside each human and the supervening intelligence outside. All
of these differing definitions and varying uses of the word “God”
make it even more important that, in any discussions on the sub¬
ject, everyone involved defines as clearly as possible what they
mean, and in what sense and context they are using the word.
A useful test of a person’s meaning when they use the word
“God” is this one: does the person’s concept of God exist totally
independently of all human existence? In other words, if they can
imagine a time when all human life is extinct, will God—in the
way in which they use that word—still exist? Do they pray to an
intercessionary force that is truly eternal in the sense of sur¬
viving—and of course preceding—all human life? As stated
above, this book will not address the existence or nonexistence of
God, but since the word is used to mean such a wide variety of
ideas, it is important to try and define some of them.
One final point about the usage of other words. I shall use the
word “theist” to refer to a person who believes in the existence of
an external suprahuman God, and I shall use “nontheist” and
“atheist”—which have the same meaning—to refer to a person
who does not believe in that generally accepted idea of an external
nonhuman God.
INTRODUCTION 23
THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
This book will start with an examination, in part one, of the evo¬
lution of belief, and of religions in particular. We shall then
examine the role of mythology and legend in humankind s his¬
tory and shall see that the process of evolving stories and myths
has always been a crucial part of the way in which humans under¬
stand the world and explain it to others. Then we shall move on
to discuss in detail some important recent findings from the field
of neuroscience which elucidate the way in which the structure of
the human brain facilitates spiritual and religious experiences.
In part two we shall review some of the major components of
human behavior—at the level of the species, the race, the tribe,
the crowd, the family, and the individual. We shall look briefly at
some of the components of crowd behavior and at some of the
mechanisms that may be involved. Then we shall see how belief
systems—including God-based religious beliefs—can amplify or
initiate various types of behavior (both constructive and destruc¬
tive) and how this has been crucial on so many occasions in the
course of our history.
We shall then move on, in part three, to examine the ‘good”
side of the question, and ask whether there are any viable alterna¬
tives to God-based morals and ethics: whether anyone can in fact
be good without a God.
The book concludes with a personal viewpoint, and then a
synthesis of the main points into a view of the main constituents
of human behavior.
When it comes to the question of behaving well—in the sense
of ethical and beneficial acts—and the need for a belief in God in
order to achieve that, everyone has opinions, as indeed they
should. It is to be hoped that the material presented here, partic¬
ularly the new data from the neuroscientists, will inform and
stimulate debate and discussion on that issue. Examining the
foundations of our own belief systems can be a healthy and invig-
orating process, whether the answer to the question in the title of

this book is changed by that process or remains the same.
NOTES
1. Adherent is of course another word that illustrates the role of re¬

ligion in sticking together and holding its believers in a coherent group.
2. Gerald Collins and Edward Farrugia, A Concise Dictionary of
Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 84
Chapter 2
The Evolution of Belief
EARLY RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND TOTEMISM
A soon as humankind was able to perform the

cerebral function that we now call “thinking” it started
performing another psychological activity that we call
“believing” Of course, since all systems of thought—
including beliefs—evolved long before there was written
language or even paintings and other artifacts, we do not
have archeological evidence of exactly how events unfolded.
Hence, much of what follows is still partly speculative, but it
is based on a sufficiently firm foundation of evidence in
order to make a credible and coherent hypothesis.
Although there is still controversy about our direct pre¬
decessors, it is now generally thought that our species Homo
sapiens is not directly descended from Neanderthals (them¬
selves an intelligent species with erect posture). The Nean¬
derthals emerged approximately 300,000 years ago in Africa
and the Middle East, and it seems probable that anatomi¬
cally modern Homo sapiens emerged 120,000-100,000 b.c.e.
25
(before the common era). It is possible that there was a period of

overlap of at least 20,000-30,000 years, perhaps much longer,
when both species existed in Europe, although it is not known
whether there was contact between them. (I should make it clear
that there are still some controversies about these dates and about
the origins of the species.)
It is known, however—without controversy!—that the original
members of the Homo sapiens species existed as nomadic hominids
who roamed the savannas and veldts, and that they were hunter-
gatherers. In other words, their sources of food were the animals
they hunted and killed, and any foods that they found growing
wild. In this nomadic state they did not consider any particular
single location as “home,” although they did have a territory which
they regarded as theirs. As we shall see, this is a very important
factor in understanding early systems of rituals and beliefs.
At some later period around nine or ten thousand years
before the present (10,000-9,000 b.c.e.), humans started culti¬
vating and farming—growing and domesticating crops for food.
This dramatic change in the human way of life occurred at dif¬
ferent periods in different areas of the world, but wherever it
occurred, it seemed to be accompanied by fundamental cultural
changes. Humans, as a result of developing the cultivation of
plants for food, became “rooted to the spot.” They no longer
depended on the vagaries of their prey for food, the hunters were
no longer the sole foragers and providers for the community, and
the whole cultural attitude of “home” and “our land” began. As we
shall discuss later, their belief systems also changed. The same sort
of change in social structure following the development of
farming seems to have occurred in almost every human society—
and with it, as far as we can tell, changes in their culture including
religions. This is a complex area of archeological and anthropo¬
logical study in itself, so naturally any discussion is necessarily
very broad and somewhat simplistic.
In the hunter-gatherer phase of human development,
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 27
humans did not think of themselves as the dominant race—they

actually thought of themselves as quite inferior to most of the
larger animals. They admired and revered various types of suc¬
cessful animals, and regarded them as imbued with important
and superior spirits. We can infer as much from observations
made about similar contemporary religions and belief systems in
various parts of the world, and in general terms this type of belief
is described as “totemism.” The meaning of totemism is not
simply the representation of the chosen animal in a group’s cul¬
ture. Totemism implies—as the American scholar and mytholo-
gist Joseph Campbell expresses it—the larger principle which is
represented equally well in the “animal master” and in the
“animal guardian” or personal patron.1 The selected animal was
not merely the mascot, but was the symbol and the essence of the
community—the spirit of the clan.
Communities commonly used many different parts of the
selected animal for their own purposes, hoping by that means to
take on at the same time many characteristics of that animal.
Thus, a community might focus on, for example, the bear. They
would eat bear meat, use the skin for clothing, the teeth for deco¬
ration, the bones as implements, and the sinews for sewing, and
would hope that in addition to supplying the community’s phys¬
ical needs, the bear would also imbue them with its own qualities
of resilience, bodily strength, courage, and so on.
These conclusions are supported by what we can infer from
the earliest artifacts known to us. The earliest cave paintings have
been dated to approximately 35,000 bce, and those paintings (in
Southern Europe) have been found in quite inaccessible areas of
the caves, not near the entrance. In the caves of Lascaux, for
example, some of the paintings were over half a mile away from
the entrance, and difficult to locate because of deceptive blind pas¬
sages and dangerous sudden drops. Yet even in those inaccessible
and secret locations, the paintings were created and then painted
over, meticulously and repeatedly many times over the course of
several centuries. This suggests that the painters and the tribe were
prepared to go far into the cave to create and then recreate—and
to look at—the paintings, and it is therefore likely that the act of
making the paintings was in some ways a special activity.
The content of the earliest cave paintings is also significant:
the subjects are almost always large animals. In other words, the
painters were selective about their subjects. Of course we do not
know why—but it quite likely that there was some particular
feeling or even reverence about large animals. (It is of course still
possible that the cave painters were simply planning their next big
hunt—but, if that were the case, it is not likely that they would
hold that planning meeting deep inside the cave. The site of the
paintings does suggest something very special and particular
about them.)
Furthermore, among some of the early cave paintings are sil¬
houettes of human hands, created by the painter or someone else
holding his hand against the wall while pigment was blown or
spattered on to the wall. Some of these silhouettes lack the whole
end portion of one or more fingers: a finger had been amputated
at the knuckle. It is very likely—though, again, not certain—that
these amputations were deliberate acts of sacrifice. In other
words, the owner of that hand had deliberately cut off a joint of
his finger for some reason. We think that this is likely because
similar rituals of finger-joint offering have been reported in more
recent cultures, among the Crow Indians for example, and they
are known to have been rituals acts carried out for the sake of
good hunting.2 Hence it is possible that these silhouettes are early
evidence of humans trying to please or propitiate the gods or
spirits of the hunt by amputating a portion of a finger as an
offering. Some of the hands lack several joints, suggesting that
these rituals were sometimes repeated.
However, one small sculpture—a figurine, really—is even
more revealing. The artifact is clearly half-human and half¬
animal. Experts agree that this figure, of a person either fusing
with or transforming into an animal, is clear evidence of some

form of belief in the spirit essence of animals. It is, arguably, the
first solid evidence—in every sense—of spirituality.
Now, it should be pointed out that even at this early stage, the
activities of spiritual devotion might have also served as an art
form—in fact, they probably did. The sculptures, and cave paint¬
ings, and petroglyphs (stone works) might well have acted as a
medium of artistic creativity as well as of devotional observance.
By the time pottery and more sophisticated paintings had been
developed, the creativity was well established. But even at this
early stage, there may well have been expression of individual cre¬
ativity and emotion in the works, and not solely the beliefs of the
community. It is not difficult to imagine a small community of
cave dwellers, for example, acknowledging that one particular
individual created better paintings on the wall than other mem¬
bers. An artists ability might easily be perceived and admired in
connection with the spiritual content of the painting itself, as it is
today. Devotional art is an expression of both those things—
devotion and art—and it is not difficult to see that the works cre¬
ated for spiritual reasons could have been made to convey only
spiritual values, but emotional ones as well. The fonts of spiritu¬
ality and creativity were always close neighbors.
ANIMISM: SPIRITS AND GODS AS

INCARNATIONS OF CAUSALITY
At some point humans became conscious of their own potential

and abilities. At that time, long before the change from hunting to
agriculture, humans came to see their species as potentially pow¬
erful and dominant. As that process continued, animal-centered
totemistic beliefs became replaced gradually with different sys¬
tems of belief. The systems that developed were those that
accounted for every phenomenon of the world by the actions of
spirits or gods that inhabited every object in the natural world.

This is what we now call animism.
The central focus to animistic beliefs can best be epitomized
as a search for causality. The natural world would have appeared
extremely perplexing to early communities—in fact it is still fairly
perplexing to all of us today—and a belief in a system of forces,
gods, and spirits would have given some'comfort and rationale
behind what was happening. There were, after all, a very large
number of apparently inexplicable events. It is not difficult to
imagine early humans, as they developed consciousness and
rational thought, building up a long list of questions. What
caused illness and death, and how could they be avoided? What
caused fertility? That is, what caused women to conceive and food
crops to grow, and how could fertility be ensured? What caused
the daily alternation of day and night, and how could the sun be
encouraged to return each dawn? What caused the moon to dis¬
appear and reappear after three nights of absence? What caused
the yearly succession of seasons, and how could it be guaranteed
that if winter comes, spring will not be far behind? What caused
the annual migrations of fish, birds, and mammals, and how
could it be made certain that they would come back each year?
The focus of all of these questions was the central enigma of
causality. What made things happen: what was the form or order
and organization with which these events blended? What was, in
other words, the overriding music to which all these things per¬
formed their dance? An early answer—animistic belief—was
simply that everything had its own motive force, and took its
place voluntarily and consciously in the natural order of things.
Sapient people in these early societies did not perceive them¬
selves as the only truly conscious creatures in the world. For them,
consciousness was everywhere: they believed that everything
around them had its own consciousness and its own spirit. Ani¬
mistic belief systems provide a raison d’etre for the vast number
of apparently inexplicable natural events. The river flooded
because that is the way the spirit of the river wished to meet the
spirit of the lands. The sea was turbulent because the spirit of the
sea was angry. There were no fish because the gods of the fish
were offended. The hunting was good because the hunted animals
consciously and voluntarily wished to give up their lives to pro¬
vide the community with food. (This is the basis of many cere¬
monies in hunting communities, even now.) All events—from
fertility to natural catastrophes such as storms or floods—were
explicable in terms of the spirits controlling them. Animism gave
comfort because it provided an intelligible rationale for a com¬
plex and confusing universe.
In some respects, then, we can think of the animistic gods and
spirits as embodiments of causality. They represented an image
and a concept of because in answer to humankind s long list of
why questions. It is highly likely that beliefs were first and most
urgently pressed into service to answer these anxieties raised by
the fears of natural events. William James, the American psychol¬
ogist of the late nineteenth century who analyzed the role of reli¬
gion in the human psyche, put it neatly in referring to the old
saying, aThe first maker of the Gods was fear.”3 Fears and anxi¬
eties could be somewhat allayed by the idea that the gods knew
what was happening even if the mortals did not. The gods under¬
stood, created, and took their part in the natural order of the
cosmos. They knew, and they did as they wanted to.
From those beginnings, it is easy to imagine how early soci¬
eties would wish to influence and encourage the natural order to
bring them benefit. As Joseph Campbell explains clearly, a great
number of early rituals and ceremonies evolved as imitations of
what communities imagined as being the natural and divine
order of things.4 It was a central theme of most early religions and
belief systems that ceremonies on earth should imitate the sup¬
posed divine order in order to produce the natural and good
order of things in the human sphere. Their rituals and obser¬
vances were basically designed to reproduce what they perceived
as a natural order of things. By thus carrying out ritualized sym¬

bols or imitations of what they imagined the gods were doing,
people hoped to establish the God-derived order in the world
about them (as Campbell put it, a constant theme has been to
establish order on earth as it is in heaven).5 Hence most early rit¬
uals and ceremonies have, at their center, a strong image of the
way the world should be, and the way^ the religious adherents
would like their gods to arrange it. Many motives and forces are
implicated here but I shall illustrate a few of the major ones, by
discussing first the fear of the dead, and second some fertility rit¬
uals centered around the themes of death and rebirth.
FEAR OF THE DEAD
In addition to the concept of causality, perhaps the next major

ingredient in the overarching concept of heaven and earth was
what happens after death. One can easily imagine that spiritual
and religious thoughts would need—early in their develop¬
ment—recognition of the difference between living members of
the species and dead ones. When an individual recognizes a
corpse as a former living member of his or her own group, then
speculation about the meaning of life-force—and indeed the
meaning of life—may begin.
Formerly, we used to believe that humans were the only species
that could perform this important mental task, but we have steadily
come to realize that other animals may be able to do something
similar. Of course, in its most basic form, recognition of the dead
might be no more than a simple behavioral instinct or urge which
confers survival value on social animals. It may be of considerable
advantage for, let us say, an antelope to recognize the dead body of
a herd member and thus to avoid an area where a predator might
have been hunting. Nevertheless, there are one or two examples
from animal biology that are worth considering briefly.
It is known that elephants have sometimes been seen picking

up and handling the bones of their predecessors. Now of course
when an elephant is seen handling the bones of a dead group
member we have no idea whether this is true appreciation of
mortality or not. Elephants do seem to go particular places—
“graveyards”—to die and it might be that when a living elephant
is in a graveyard, it simply recognizes the bones by their location
rather than by any abstract concept of death. (In fact, elephants
do not appear to have a clearly developed sense of self,6 so the
perception that an elephant is ruminating on mortality when
handling bones may be anthropomorphic wishful thinking on
our part.)
About other animals we are also uncertain. Chimpanzees
seem to have some sense of self, but yet do not behave in any par¬
ticular fashion when they find a dead chimpanzee. The most
common situation is for a mother chimpanzee to find that her
baby has died. When this happens she may carry the dead child
for several days, but this may be force of habit, perhaps expecting
the child will revive, rather than grief or denial of death.
Humans, on the other hand—as we all know—can clearly
distinguish dead from living. In fact, Neanderthals appear to have
buried their own, perhaps as far back as 100,000 b.c.e. Sometimes
certain types of objects have been found in the grave, and there is
the possibility that these may be true “grave goods”—material
objects placed alongside the deceased to accompany him on the
journey into the Land of the Dead. Of course we cannot know
whether the first motives of the Neanderthals were simply to pro¬
tect the dead body from being eaten by animals. But even if the
primary motive were no more complex than that, it would still
imply some sense of identifying something about the body that
needed to be protected from the animals. Even if the first motive
were defense against scavengers, that would still imply the begin¬
nings of some form of respect—if not actual reverence—for the
remains of the dead person, as opposed to the corpse of any other
animal. Neanderthals may have had a concept of a Land of the

Dead or they may not—but they definitely recognized the signif¬
icance of a dead group member and accorded him or her the spe¬
cial treatment of interment.
So humans could recognize dead bodies as things that were
once living humans. But thereTs, of course, a wide gulf between
recognizing the dead and fearing them. Fear of the dead is quite
different, and implies a level of abstract thought and conceptual¬
izing which—we assume—is an exclusively human characteristic.
Early humans, recognizing death, tried to cope mentally with
the difference between the dead and the living—the loss of “life”
or “life force”—and this was a feature of all early religions and
belief systems as far as we can establish. Writers and investigators
such as the Victorian anthropologist James Frazer and Joseph
Campbell have suggested very strongly that part of the raison
d’etre of religious belief was overcoming the fear of dying. It was
easier to cope with the idea of death once a concept of a Land of
the Dead, and some semblance of immortality, was established.7 It
is easier to accept the phenomenon of death if one imagines that
not everything to do with a person dies when that person dies.
The development of this system of belief is not difficult to
imagine. It would make intuitive sense for people to view the
transition from living to dead as the loss of a vital force, or life
spirit—the animus or soul—often identified with the cessation of
breathing. This explains why in so many languages the meanings
of “life spirit” and “breath” are so closely allied. When the person
breathes his last, something has gone from him: life leaves the
person at the same time as breath. From that point on, it is then
fairly easy to imagine that the spirit or life force (or breath)
having left the person goes somewhere else; in other words, there
is a Land of the Dead. Among thousands of examples, it was
noted that when some intrepid Australians ventured into the inte¬
rior of New Guinea in the early twentieth century, the indigenous
people took the visitors for their disembodied dead ancestors.
The idea of the existence of a Land of the Dead is a fundamental

one, and is common to almost every known religion. In many reli¬
gions, it was assumed that the spirits of dead ancestors were benev¬
olent, but not always. In some cultures, it was generally assumed that
most immortal spirits were benevolent and helpful to the living, and
in many communities the bones of the deceased were cleaned,
brought back to the home, and kept in a place of honor.
Frazer gathered reports on this aspect of early religions from
all around the world.8 He quoted dozens of examples in which a
peoples religion included—or was founded on—the belief that
the spirits of their dead ancestors were basically spirits or forces
controlling the everyday events of the living. Prayers, sacrifices,
libations, and all kinds of offerings are listed.
For example, the Kiwai of New Guinea used to leave offerings
of food and coconut-milk on the graves of their ancestors at the
start of the turtle-fishing season with the incantation “Give us
turtle: we give you food.” If the fishing was bad, a fisherman
would go to his fathers grave and say, “We have cleaned your
grave and given you a drink. Come with us.” After that, they
thought the fishing would be good. Since eventually the fishing
would be good anyway, the action of repeating the ceremony until
the community’s luck changed would always confirm the power
of the spirits, and of the ceremonies needed to propitiate them.
It is also worth pointing out that in many religions there was
no clear distinction between the spirits of dead ancestors (who
were basically omnipotent) and gods. People were afraid of
angering the powerful souls of their ancestors, and did not clearly
delineate between those spirits and the gods. That kind of fear
was a major factor in shaping their early religions: the spirits of
dead ancestors needed to be placated and to be granted peace,
which required special and specific ceremonies.
Perhaps, then, speculating about the events of death and what
happens after it were the true beginnings of spiritual and religious
thinking. Soon after—we may presume—humans started
thinking about how to cope with death and, preferably, overcome

it and ensure that the cycle of living and dying continued.
DEATH, REBIRTH, AND FERTILITY RITUALS

xk’
Attitudes to death changed quite dramatically as human society

evolved from being predominantly hunter-gatherer to farmer-
cultivator. While humans obtained their food by hunting and
gathering their wishes and beliefs were commonly directed to the
spirits of the animals. In general, hunting communities—in rit¬
uals and prayers that continue to this day—thank the animals
that they depend on for providing a source of food. But when
humankind made the transition to farming and cultivating the
nature of their beliefs and of their rituals altered considerably.
When humans learned to plant, cultivate and domesticate
certain types of plants for food, their growth and the land’s fer¬
tility became paramount. It is worth stressing here that the
importance of fertility of crops might well be impossible for us to
imagine accurately nowadays. If there are storms or floods or
droughts and a harvest fails in some area, on the North American
continent we might have to endure a rise in the price of certain
foods or perhaps—almost unimaginable but possible—an actual
shortage of one type of food. But of course, in small early human
societies based on agrarian food sources, a disastrous harvest
would be correctly seen as the harbinger of their own extinction.
Communities could die if the crops failed—hence the importance
of understanding, and perhaps influencing, the cycles of the sea¬
sons and the regrowth of plants after the harvest and replanting.
THE MOON AND NATURAL CYCLES
It is probable that humankind’s first thoughts about the cycles of

all natural events came from their observations of the moon. The
evidence for that is based on the fact that almost all mythologies
include legends to explain the way the moon grows large, dies,
and disappears and then reappears. In many cosmogonies—
explanations of the beginnings of the universe—the moon is
killed by a deity and then revives. As Joseph Campbell observed,
this represented a very considerable change from the belief sys¬
tems of the hunting communities: “Among the primitive hunting
societies the way was to deny death, the reality of death, and to go
on killing as willing victims the animals that one required and
revered. But in the planting societies a new insight or solution was
opened by the lesson of the plant world itself which is linked
somehow to the moon, which also dies and is resurrected and
moreover influences, in some mysterious way still unknown, the
lunar cycle of the womb.”9
In fact, as Campbell’s studies showed, the whole concept of
cycles of life is common to many higher civilizations. Comparing
the civilizations of the greater Maya-Aztec and Peruvian late
periods with their counterparts in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India,
and China, he noted a large number of features in common,
including: “the idea of cycles of creation and dissolution . ..
heavens stratified above and hells below, a weaving goddess of the
moon, and a god who dies and is resurrected.”10 It is also signifi¬
cant that the duration of the lunar death—the time that the
moon is absent from the sky—is three days, and this time interval
occurs in many death-and-resurrection legends.
Many other rituals were centered on celestial events. For
example, the Sencis of Peru had a ritual in which they shot
burning arrows at the monster that appeared to be eating the sun
during a solar eclipse. Similarly some tribes of the Orinoco had
rituals which involved burying burning brands for lunar eclipses.
Some rituals were based specifically on ensuring the revival of
the moon. Here is an example from West Ceram (an island to the
west of New Guinea). The divine maiden Rabia is claimed as a
bride by the sun-god Tuwale. His method of taking her is quite
violent: she is sucked into the earth. As she sinks she cries out to
her parents, “ ‘It is Tuwale, the sun-man who has come to claim
me. Slaughter a pig and celebrate a feast; for I am dying. But in
three days, when evening comes, look up at the sky where I shall
be shining upon you a light.’ And when her relatives had killed the
pig and celebrated the death feast for three days, they saw for the
first time the moon, rising in the east.”11'As in many legends, this
one has several linked themes—the sinking into the earth (a
metaphor for planting—and shared with many other mytholo¬
gies and figures including Persephone), sacrifice (in this case of a
pig), and the revival of the moon.
FERTILITY AND DEATH-REBIRTH RITUALS
As with the cycles of the moon, so it was with the cycles of plants.
The link between death-and-revival and the process of planting is
seen in many rituals that center on wheat, for example.
Frazer s The Golden Bough is full of detailed accounts of rituals
and ceremonies to make sure that the spirits or gods of weather, fer¬
tility, and crops (according to animist belief) did what was required
of them. For example, the Romans would sacrifice a horse annually
on the fifteenth of October after a chariot race on the field of Mars
and use the blood (and some body parts) to encourage a good har¬
vest. Whatever the ritual or ceremony, however, since spring did
follow winter and the crops did usually grow, the practitioners
came to the conclusion that these rituals were pretty effective, and
they were soon regarded as being essential. Animism—and the rit¬
uals it required—seemed to be pretty reliable.
What worked for the fertility of the fields was also applied to
the fertility of humans. Rituals and ceremonies to guarantee con¬
ception were just as important—and almost as varied. For
example, the god Osiris was regarded as a crucial factor for guar¬
anteeing fertility of all kinds of living organisms, including
humans. One hymn to Osiris proclaimed that the world waxed
green in triumph through him, and another that “thou art the
father and mother of mankind, they live on thy breath, they sub¬
sist on the flesh of thy body”12 To which Frazer adds:
We may conjecture that in this paternal aspect he was supposed,

like other gods of fertility to bless men and women with off¬
spring, and that the processions at his festival were intended to
promote this object as well as to quicken the seed in the ground.13
In all these religious ceremonies, there were two assumptions that

were regarded as unarguable: (a) that the events that were the
focus of the ceremonies were controlled by external deities—
intelligences who decided the destiny of the worshippers, and (b)
that the deities could be (and should be) propitiated, in other
words that by going through the ceremony, the people would earn
the favor of the deity who would then grant them the outcome
they were asking for. One might call it special pleading, or even
bribery, but it was really a form of bargaining: “We will do this in
the hope that you (i.e., the deity) will do that.”
What becomes quite clear from these accounts is the way that
our species thought about natural phenomena. When some natural
event appeared to threaten or harm them (or when there was a nat¬
ural event that was desirable) they devised rituals to intercede with
the controlling forces. All over the planet, people prayed for rain.
They prayed in their own language and in their own way, using for¬
mulae and symbols that made sense to that community and that
acted as a cohesive force, binding members of the community to
each other. Yet in all of these observances, the central element was
constant—a contract with the deities: “We will do our bit, so please
do yours.” Animism imbued almost every force that we now call
natural with intelligence and sapience—and this was highly suc¬
cessful. However, there were more types of spirits and gods than the
everyday ones which inhabited and motivated every visible physical
object in the world. There were also the unseen ones.
Lithuanian worshippers of Perkunas, the god of thunder,

would sacrifice oak trees to get good crops. Frazer also detailed a
large variety of corn-god rituals; for example, the Mandans and
Minnitarees of North America had a ritual involving offerings of
dried meat made to a spirit of the corn called the Old Woman
Who Never Dies. The Dieri of Australia, as another example, had
a very dramatic ceremony to encourage^rain:
Two wizards, supposed to have received a special inspiration

from the Mura-mura [spirits] are bled by an old and influen¬
tial man with a sharp flint and the blood ... is made to flow on
the other men of the tribe who sit huddled together. The blood
is thought to represent rain.14
Frazer describes many similar rituals in which members of the

community represent the corn-god, or even strangers are seized
and forced into participating. Often these rituals involve a sym¬
bolic sacrifice, with varying degrees of damage to the representa¬
tive, but in many other ceremonies, the ritual culminates in
human sacrifice. A typical example was found among “the Khond,
a Dravidian race in Bengal,” where the sacrificial victim was
anointed and revered, and, after days of celebration and orgies, the
members of the community competed to obtain a lock of hair, or
even a drop of his spittle. They then said, “O God, we offer this sac¬
rifice to you, give us good crops, seasons, and health,” and said to
the victim, “We bought you with a price and did not seize you, now
we sacrifice you according to custom, and no sin rests with us.”
Then the victim, drugged with opium, was strangled to death
using a cleft branch and then dismembered and eaten. In other
districts, such as Chinna Kinnedy, the victim is eaten alive.
There are records of such ceremonies being carried out using
prisoners or captives from neighboring communities. Apparently
the Pawnees were known to have sacrificed a Sioux girl (recorded
as having happened in 1837 or 1838), having received instruc-
tions that were believed to have come from the Morning Star car¬
ried by a certain bird sent as a messenger.
Another similar ritual of human sacrifice this time among the
Aztecs was recorded by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun in which a
young girl represented the Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. After
being ceremoniously dressed and anointed as the representation
of the goddess, she was led from house to house and then to the
temple. There the males of the community drew samples of their
own blood as an offering. Then the young girl representing the
goddess was beheaded, and her trunk was flayed, following which
a priest was dressed in her skin; he then put on the robes she had
been wearing and performed ritual dances.
Interestingly, cultures that do not have cultivation of plants
still have very similar ceremonies and rituals, related to fertility,
and linking human fertility with that of the food supply. Camp¬
bell points out, for example, the importance of myths and legends
concerning the Monster Eel in Polynesia. Among the islands of
Polynesia, the major source of food is obtained from fishing, and
farming was until recently nonexistent. Many myths and legends
concern the mystical Monster Eel who, according to various sto¬
ries, visits various communities. In some legends he encourages
people to kill him and eat him, and is later resurrected. In one
legend he swims near to a shore and a young woman in the water
becomes pregnant by him simply by being in the same water. His
essence produces a visible change in the water. The themes here
are clear and important. The whole idea of death-eating-resurrec-
tion is clearly illustrated, as is the impregnation of a young
woman by the god figure. Furthermore the phallic symbolism is
apparent in the mythical. In the Tuamotuan version, Hina the
heroine of the story is “the wife of the Monster Eel, Te Tuna
(whose name means frankly, the Phallus)” and in many other
Polynesian legends, the names of the characters and the stories are
overt and explicitly sexual (often in considerable detail) linking
human sexuality with fertility and food for the community.15
What all these various beliefs and rituals show us is clearly a

perception of the cycle of life and death. Communities could
clearly cope with the concept of death more easily when it was
linked—as a necessity—for new life and renewal. The planting
ceremonies and the fishing rituals have the same purpose under¬
lying them. Similarly, there are strong links between death and
burial or interment as a factors requiredTor new birth. Arguably,
some—or many—of the rituals involving the death of the king
(the central theme of Frazer’s The Golden Bough) have the same
focus. The ceremonial and ordained death of the king mirrors the
disappearance and reappearance of planetary bodies and, it is
assumed, the deities associated with them. This concept of disap¬
pearance/death and reappearance/life is also perceived as the same
cycle seen in food crops and perhaps all life, including human.
In some rituals, human sacrifice, human fertility, and eating
of the sacrificial victim are combined to encourage, through sym¬
bolism and mimicry, the planting and regrowth of plants. Here is
an example recorded from what was previously known as Dutch
South New Guinea in the Indian Ocean. A people there known as
the Dema are known to have conducted rituals lasting several
days as rites of passage for the young men—the “initiates”—of
the village going through puberty. Puberty, obviously, has great
importance in early belief systems since it is the advent of fertility,
essential for the survival of the community. This ritual combines
the rite of passage of puberty with human ritual killing—sacri¬
fice—to ensure fertility of the society.
The boys’ puberty rites .. . terminate in a sexual orgy of several

days and nights, during which everyone in the village except the
initiates makes free with everybody else, amid the tumult of the
mythological chants, drums and the bull-roarers [villagers
making a particularly loud bull-like roaring noise]—until the
final night when a fine young girl, painted, oiled and ceremoni¬
ally costumed was led into the dancing ground and made to lie
beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of
the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another, and while
the youth chosen to be last is embracing her, the supports of the
logs above are jerked away, and the platform drops, to a prodi¬
gious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl
and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted and eaten.16
In this ritual, one can easily see the hope of the community that
the ceremony will ensure continuance of the death-fertility-
rebirth cycle. In the previous examples involving representations
of the corn-god and the maize-goddess, the rituals express the
symbols of the plants and of planting very clearly. In the example
of the Dema people we can see that the same theme underlies the
ritual, but with human fertility and regrowth instead. By
“planting” the human essence as they eat parts of the victims’
bodies, each of the community members takes a part of the life-
force on into the next cycle. Campbell thought that the act of
killing in the Dema culture was unlike the first killing (of Abel in
the book of Genesis) after which mortal man was to some extent
cut off from the divinities. “On the contrary,” says Campbell, “the
Dema, through man’s act of violence, was made the very substance
of his life. Something of the sort can be felt in the Christian myth
of the killed, buried, resurrected and eaten Jesus, whose mystery is
the ritual of the altar and the communion rail.”17 Campbell here
is touching on a very deep-running theme—perhaps one of the
deepest and most ingrained ideas in humankind’s attempts to
make sense of the world—the idea that death and resurrection are
necessary for new life. The old Latin proverb undoubtedly has a
great deal of meaning on several levels: Mors ipse succurrere vitam
docet—Death itself shall teach us to sustain life.
In fact, there may have been a psychological link between
death and regrowth even in the origins of the act of burial itself.
One may legitimately wonder whether the idea of placing the
dead in the ground—although it predates organized agriculture
and cultivation by more than 60,000 years18—may not have
embodied some symbol or hope for regrowth of the individual or

his essence. Perhaps the idea of “earth to earth” is a very ancient
one indeed.
THE KING MUST DIE
In many social and religious systems, the cycle of death-rebirth-

regrowth extended up to and included the leader of the commu¬
nity. The ritual death of the king, a renewal to ensure the growth
and prospering of his people, is of course the central theme of
Frazers The Golden Bough, and is clearly linked to concepts of
death and regrowth. As the German anthropologist Leo Frobe-
nius noted, “The great god must die: forfeit his life and be shut up
in the underworld. In Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia the
king representing the great god-head even bore the name Moon.
When the time arrived for the death of the god, the king and his
Venus-spouse were strangled and their remains placed in a burial
cave in a mountain from which they were supposed then to be
resurrected as the new or 'renewed’ heavenly spheres.”19
One example, from the sixteenth century, gives clear evidence
of the physical courage required in the ritual, and therefore of the
great depth of the belief and conviction underlying it. The god-
king of the south Indian province of Quilacare in the Malabar
coast area had to sacrifice himself in a particularly violent and
bloody ritual. This was performed “at the end of a length of time
required by the planet lupiter to return to its moment of retro¬
grade motion in the house of Cancer—which is to say twelve
years.” On a ceremonial scaffolding, after a ritual bath, and in
front of his people the king “took some very sharp knives and
began to cut off parts of his body—nose, ears, lips and all his
members, as much of his flesh as he was able—throwing them
away and round about, until so much of his blood was spilled that
he began to faint, whereupon he slit his throat.”20
With the comfortable distance of hindsight from five cen-
turies later we may shudder but then dismiss these ceremonies as

evidence of superstitions and magical thinking (“if we perform
these extraordinarily difficult things as offerings to the gods, they
will reward us extraordinarily weir’). However, there is more that
can be read into them. These ceremonies suggest not merely the
deeply held beliefs underlying them but also the way that human
minds—ours included—tend to work when confronted by things
we do not understand. Ceremonies and rituals, as many authors
in many different disciplines from Jung to Campbell have said,
offer perspectives and insights into the way the human mind
works. What these rituals have in common with our social pat¬
terns of belief and behavior may be far more important that than
the ways in which they differ.
RITUAL AND SYMBOL:

FACILITATORS OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Many communal experiences change our personal attitude and

mood. We shall talk about the wider aspects of community sig¬
nals and group or crowd behavior again in chapter 5, but in the
context of this discussion of aspects of ritual, a few general points
need to be stressed first of all.
We are all familiar with mood-changing features of many
communal settings. In nonreligious contexts, we all acknowledge
the emotional power of a national anthem, the feeling a crowd
gets from cheering for the home team, and the thousands of other
cues and factors that affect our decision-making and mood, from
music in supermarkets and elevators to the beat and the sound
level at a rock concert. In religious environments, we are all also
familiar with the effect of the tall vaulted design of cathedrals, of
slow solemn music (Gregorian chants are a good example), and
probably the visual impact of exquisite stained glass and of the
particular smells of incense.
All of these examples are of course illustrations of communal

cues in action. We are united—to some extent—by our response to
stimuli that have been designated by the community as inducing
and signifying a particular state of mind. Some of these stimuli may
have a physiological basis, while others may be simply a matter of
esthetics, chosen more or less^arbitrarily by a community. In the
first category these is some evidence that certain kinds of music
produce specific effects on an individual, even on someone who has
not heard them before. (Some mantras may have a neurological
power which is not related to any learned devotional or spiritual
experience. Some musical frequencies may produce physiological
effects distinct from other frequencies or sounds.)
The point is that many sources of input other than mental
concentration may change an individual’s spiritual state, and that
our traditions, customs, and devotions all pay attention to this
fact. Spiritual experiences, like most human experiences, can be
promoted and conditioned by environmental stimuli, and there
are as we all know features which can be set up in the setting in
order to prompt and induce members of the community to
undergo spiritual experiences.
The same is true of language. The fact that, in many religions,
a particular language is used which is not the language of daily life
may be very significant. In some communities, it may be easier for
a person to undergo spiritual or “special” experiences if the lan¬
guage is partly or totally incomprehensible, and is associated
exclusively with spiritual occasions. This “power of strangeness”
may explain in part the many disputes about whether Latin
should or should not be used in Christian masses, and similar
debates in Russian Orthodox churches and so on.
Depending on one’s own philosophical stance it is permis¬
sible to say that the whole point of religious experience is to
change the mind and state of being of the individual. In many
religions—particularly those of the east—the entire objective is to
render the individual into a different state of mind, a transcen-
dent state in which the ordinary everyday values and concerns are
temporarily ignored. This change of state may be facilitated by
any of the things we have described above, and also by language if
it provokes or stimulates the individual into thinking about—and
then experiencing—issues of transcendence. In other words, the
music, the building, the sights, sounds, and smells—and perhaps
the presence of many others seeking a similar change of experi¬
ence—encourage a change of consciousness. But they do not pro¬
duce that change in themselves—the individual has to do that.
In A History of God Karen Armstrong makes this point very
clearly. The objective is to achieve a change in the conscious state of
the person, an act of transcendence. The environmental stimuli may
encourage that, but they are not the objectives in themselves. To put
it simply, repeating the words of the prayer is not the object of the
exercise: unless the person praying achieves a change in spiritual
state, then the prayer is not doing what it is supposed to do. Con¬
versely, if the person praying does achieve that state, then it does not
matter what form of words or songs he or she uses to achieve it. Rit¬
uals and symbols are facilitators of spiritual experience, and their
power and symbolism is derived from their ability to produce those
changes; they are not spiritually powerful in their own right.
As we shall discuss in chapter 7, disputes over the forms of
devotion have been very common in humankind’s history and are
often based on the idea that the form of devotion is of primary
importance. These disputes are prompted by the assumption that
the act of devotion is not an individual experience, but is a matter
of conforming to that particular community’s agreed behavior
patterns. It is this principle that has led, in part, to so many of the
conflicts—and even wars—over quite small variations in the
observances of a religious ceremony or the words in a prayer or
holy book. To many religious people, particularly in the east, this
is totally incomprehensible: focusing on the format while
ignoring the objective, that is, the experience of the individual
religious observer, makes no sense at all.
Another theme that is common to many legends is the pres¬

ence of God or the gods in the ceremony. In many religions the
presence of the divinity is optional—in fact it is not the presence
of the god that is of prime importance. Many religions believe
that the enactment of the gods role achieves the true objective.
The person participating in the ceremony completes the raison
d’etre of the ceremony—the enactment is the purpose. It is per¬
haps similar to the way we experience movies. We sit in a theater
and (depending on the movie) we gasp with surprise, wince with
fear, or—quite often—cry at the sadness we see portrayed. Of
course we know that, say, Russell Crowe isn’t there in the theater
fighting other gladiators, and that, in fact, Russell Crowe isn’t
really a gladiator at all. We know these things, but we engage with
the drama as it is portrayed, and we experience the stirring of our
emotions anyway. The “reality” is not the important point—the
representation of the events and the emotions is.
The same is true—as Campbell makes clear—about many
religions. Putting on the traditional mask of the god is the impor¬
tant part of the representation (which is why he called his master-
work The Masks of God). To most of the adherents of these types
of religions, the idea of a transubstantiation, in which the material
body of the savior materializes during the service, would be irrel¬
evant. They would not look for or expect such a thing, any more
than we would expect Russell Crowe to emerge bloodstained and
exhausted from behind the cinema screen. In many religions, it is
quite expected that the representations of the god will occur in
several places simultaneously. The ceremony and the representa¬
tion are the important features of the religious experience.
Wearing the mask, participating in the ceremony and experiencing
the transcendence is the religion. The format is the content.
There is therefore a very close relationship between the ritual
and the belief underlying it, and this is why understanding rituals
and ceremonies tell us so much about human beliefs and about
the ways in which humans conceptualize the world. The study of
beliefs—and of the rituals and ceremonies derived from them—

is much more than some diluted from of social psychoanalysis.
Rituals give us fundamental insights into the fundamental pat¬
terns of thoughts that different people employ as they conceptu¬
alize nature and the role of humankind within it.
Let me illustrate that point with an example. Take the English
maypole dance, an ancient rustic tradition in which young men
and women dressed in particular costumes dance with ribbons
attached to a tall pole set up on the village green. Many observers
have correctly concluded that the maypole itself is a phallic
symbol. On its own, that is not a very important observation.
What matters far more is that early human communities in many
different parts of the world took fertility very seriously, conducting
major rituals based on the phallus in order to propitiate the gods
or spirits and increase fertility. This was not an abstract form of
“phallus worship”; it spoke to the importance that early religions
gave to fertility and, because of it, sexuality, and their serious wish
to increase their population. In other words, we are not merely
indulging in a little Jungian (or even Freudian) analysis and
saying, “Isn’t it fascinating that the maypole looks so much like a
phallus?” Instead we are noting that human communities have a
long history of fertility rites including rituals centered on the
phallus. Those communities were not benighted or deluded, they
were trying to influence nature and alter the odds in their favor.
The maypole dance isn’t just some fascinating piece of outmoded
Freudiana, it is a symptom of how the human mind works.
By the same token, we should add, the phallic symbolism of
the dance does not imply something wrong or immoral or “god¬
less” about a maypole ceremony. Being aware of the mythological
and symbolic origins of a social activity does not make the dance
itself an immoral exhibition by our current standards. Even
though it was originally intended to allay deep-seated fears of
extinction, it is still a maypole dance and enjoyable as a com¬
munal artistic event for all that. But to be aware of the origins of
the power of the ceremony is equally important: our rituals and

the symbols are illustrating us important and deeply characteris¬
tics of ourselves. Carl Jung s concept of a collective unconscious is
a statement about the way we have evolved and about the foun¬
dations of the way we think of the world around us.
MORTAL AMBASSADORS
TO IMMORTAL DIVINITIES
Belief in the existence of extrahuman divine forces called for the

development of specific and particular methods of communica¬
tion between the mortals and the immortals. The way in which
these lines of communications developed—at first with shamans
for the hunter-gatherers, then with priests for the agriculture-
based communities—tells us something about the way human
society likes to arrange itself.
In very general terms, hunter-gatherer cultures relied on
shamans: individuals who communicated with the gods as indi¬
viduals, and who were special and extraordinary—in its literal
sense of being outside the range of the ordinary. They were usu¬
ally regarded highly and sometimes with fear. Shamans were indi¬
viduals who had personally received “the call” from the gods, and
were able to communicate with them because of their own per¬
sonal relationship with the forces.
Shamans were often revered by their community and, equally
often, feared. They were unpredictable since their divine commu¬
nications were entirely personal and idiosyncratic. In many com¬
munities they were the people who did the dangerous and fright¬
ening tasks—dealing with sick or hysterical or possessed—that
the ordinary members of the community did not want to do. The
lay members of the community were relieved that the shamans
were there to do these things, and part of the elevated status of the
shaman was due to the way their function relieved the laity. In
some communities, they were highly prized that they were

“poached” by neighboring groups and in some tribal conflicts it
has been recorded that they were targeted and killed first in tribal
battles—presumably to prevent them from using their powers to
protect their group.
Training was vocational. The candidate either was granted the
shamanistic power—or not. In many communities, the getting of
the power of the shaman was an important event—perceived as a
major crisis for the candidate.
Here is one example of a shaman from Siberia describing his
initiation at the age of fifteen: “My ancestors ... stood me up like
a block of wood and shot at me with their bows until I lost con¬
sciousness. They cut up my flesh, separated my bones, counted
them and ate my flesh raw.... I ate and drank nothing for the
whole summer. But at the end the shaman spirits drank the blood
of a reindeer and gave me some to drink, too.”21 This theme of dis¬
solution of the body—including the feeling of having one’s bones
separated—is common in many shamanistic traditions, and is a
generally recognized feature of the vocational summons.22
This personally grueling experience—a crisis rather than a
graduation or coronation—stayed with the shaman for the rest of
his life. Even modern-day counterparts, such as the Cajun traiteuses
(“those who treat”) of Louisiana speak quite naturally of the time
they get the call, and feel themselves ready to receive the gift of
healing power from an established traiteur. The traiteur tradition is
directly descended from shamanistic traditions, and I interviewed
a Cajun traiteur myself in the bayou country of the Atchafalya
Basin. He told me that his power, of healing medical conditions by
tying a piece of string around the affected area, would be passed to
his successor when the time was right and from that moment on
he—like his predecessor—would lose the power himself.
Shamans were basically independent contractors—they were
individual entrepreneurs who were the conduits of divine powers
because of their own personal relationship with the immortals.
They were not trained, they were called. There was no “basic syl¬
labus” or training system recognized by other shamans. Things
changed—over a long period of time—when most human com¬
munities discovered or invented the cultivation and domestica¬
tion of plants as a source of food.
When human communities started agriculture and the culti¬
vation of plants for food, the shaman class was replaced by what
we would now recognize as the priest class. There was a change
from, so to speak, the “freelance entrepreneurial contractor”
model of the shaman, to the hierarchical “corporation man”
model of the priest class. Often that process of replacement, by
the way, was quite uncomfortable, and Campbell records a ritual
commemorating the demotion of the shamans.
Whereas shamans were imbued with the power of the
immortals on an individual basis, the evolution of the priest class
represented an institutionalization of mediating with the gods. As
societies became more organized and sessile—that is, rooted to
the spot—their religions also took on aspects of institutions and
organizations. Although entry to the priesthood was still a matter
of vocation rather than of pure training, there were beliefs, truths,
and rules that all members of the priesthood had to accept and
abide by. Although of course the personal style of the priest was
an individual matter, there were hierarchies—priests elected or
chose senior members of the group who had command in some
areas over the activities of their juniors. By definition all of the
organized religions of the world have this hierarchical system of
organization, with the major figure of the religion at the head.
Thus, in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, the pope is
known as God’s vicar, and the word “vicar” is derived from the
same root as “vicarious” and means “the representative of.” From
the point of view of this book, it is important to understand that
organized churches and religions are not the only way of com¬
municating with the deities, and that before there were churches
and priests there were individual shamans.
The need to believe is such a strong force in human behavior

that the power vested in the priests—from the people’s desire to
get the deities to intercede—became, and remains, large: and it is
because of the depth and the breadth of the people’s need that the
political impact of the organized religions is derived. Humans are
good at collaborating, and an efficient way of producing the max¬
imum output from a collaborative effort is to have a hierarchy—
a pecking order.
RITUAL, CONFORMITY, AND SOCIAL PRESSURE
Reading reports of some of these—to our way of thinking—bar¬

baric and even horrifying rituals, it might be difficult for us in the
twenty-first century to imagine why anybody would comply with,
and enter into, ceremonies and rituals when their own suffering
or death are inevitably involved. Why, for example, would the
king of Quilacare sacrifice himself so bloodily at the end of a
twelve-year reign? Why would the young Dema couple agree to be
killed and eaten—a fate that they obviously knew from their com¬
munity’s lore and legends—in the puberty-fertility ritual? Why
would thousands of Aztecs willingly die in ritual mass sacrifice, or
even compete for that honor, by being on the winning team in a
tournament of tlachtili, an ancient game similar to basketball, in
which the victors (not the losers) were ritually sacrificed? What
forces or motives underlie these actions? Of course, in some cases
the victims were captives and participated against their will, and
in others the victim was drugged or intoxicated, but often it is
clear that the victim knew and understood the nature of the
ritual. In other words, some of the victims participated of their
volition. Can that ever be intelligible to us nowadays?
In our current society, altruism and social service have a very
different feel to them. We would see major differences between
the “sealed and certain” fate of those sacrificial victims—or par-
ticipants, rather—and the lot of, say, a soldier volunteering for

service in an army in Europe in 1916. The soldier does not know
for certain that he is going to die, yet acknowledges that his com¬
munity might perish without its army and that very many sol¬
diers will die in that cause. The drives which impel the person
toward altruism and self-sacrifice include a sense of the meaning
of a life in their community, and the loss of that meaning if duty
and service are rejected. In other words, the obligation to con¬
form with the community’s expectations is part of what gives
meaning to a person’s life in that community. In many societies,
individuals would have felt that life in their own society would be
totally valueless if social responsibility is rejected.
Hence, it is quite possible that a Khond man about to be sac¬
rificed as a representative of the corn-god would indeed feel that
his community’s existence did genuinely depend on his participa¬
tion in the ceremony. The young Aztec woman selected to portray
the maize-goddess might well feel that being selected for that role
was a great honor bestowed on her, on her family, and on her
memory. To refuse that honor would destroy the meaning of her
life in her community.
Even though this type of specified individual sacrifice is no
longer the subject of ceremony and ritual, the same peer-group
influences are still clearly visible in many societies and in many
different ways. We are all aware of people volunteering to become
suicide bombers, for example, in the Middle East and in Japan at
the end of the Second World War, or to be suicide fighters on
behalf of Tamil groups in Sri Lanka. The same sense of belonging
is part of these acts as it was in the past. The action accords not
only status but also role and meaning to the person who under¬
takes the task. The act often defines the actor—at least in the con¬
text of that particular community. To reject the opportunity that
carries with it esteem and which meets a perceived need of the
community is to makes oneself a pariah, and to destroy any sense
of kinship and community feeling thereafter. Hence for example,
we see the power of the “white feather” given to men in Britain

who were not in uniform during the First World War. Both social
status and social shame are society’s to award. These forces are not
alien to our contemporary culture.
This is a constant and central human theme of our social value
systems, and a vast number of books, plays, films, and other works
of art have dealt with this conflict between, on the one hand, a
sense of duty toward the community, and on the other, personal
goals and future plans. One could say that it is one of the top
three or four most popular themes of all time for fiction—though
perhaps some slightly less well-known examples may touch the
emotional core of this issue even more effectively.23 Perhaps it is
legitimate to see the urge or drive toward social conformity as a
significant factor in shaping our behavior for any of us living as
collaborative and cooperative individuals within a community (we
shall discuss this in further detail in chapter 5). Perhaps the soldier
in the trenches of World War I and the king of Quilacare are both
responding to deeply seated perceptions about the needs of their
community, their own role in meeting them, and the meaning of
their own lives in the context of the community.
NEW RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

IN OUR ERA: CARGO CULTS
From the tone of the preceding sections, you might think that the
process of evolving and developing new systems of religion and
belief concerns only series of events that occurred comfortably in
the distant past. It may seem, then, that the process of evolving
religions and belief systems was something that happened mil¬
lennia or centuries ago, and that we can only speculate about the
origins of religions from archeological findings or from anthro¬
pological studies of the modern counterparts of early religions.
This is not so. In fact, new religions have evolved even within the
last few decades, and have been accurately documented so that we

can see clear evidence of the way in which belief systems can
develop. This is important to the proper study of human belief—
particularly its role in coping with unintelligible events in the
world—because it is a line of evidence totally free of conjecture
and guesswork.
In our own era, societies have invented new religions and sys¬
tems of supernatural beliefs to explain the apparently inexplicable
and to intercede with what they believed to be divine beings. The
evidence lies in the existence of new religions known as cargo
cults which evolved during the late nineteenth and twentieth cen¬
turies in the Pacific islands of Melanesia. These cults offer a
unique insight into the ways in which we develop legends and rit¬
uals to interpret and to control the unknown.
Until they were colonized by Europeans, the people of the
islands of Melanesia had been basically untouched by Western-
style civilization. Once the Europeans arrived, their traditional
ways of life were seriously disrupted. The natives were coerced
into harsh, underpaid labor on plantations and in mines, and
Christian missionaries told them that their beliefs in their old
gods and ancestral spirits were false and sinful.
More important, the islanders had their first experience of
western material goods. Colonial officials and planters regularly
received what appeared to be astonishing, miraculous goods
which arrived in large (and apparently supernatural) steamships.
The indigenous people wondered why their own gods and ances¬
tors had denied them these wonderful things, and they developed
an entire system of myths and legends to explain this.
They realized that the white people who received the goods—
the officials and the planters—did not actually manufacture the
goods themselves. Furthermore whenever any of the machines
broke down, they had to be sent away to be repaired—which
made the indigenous people think that the officials and planters
were incapable of making and of repairing the goods. They came
to believe that these material goods were actually being created by

spirits on another island: they decided that the creators were their
own ancestors who had died and whose spirits were now living in
a volcano on another island. It was those dead ancestors, they now
believed, who were making these wonderful goods intended for
their descendants. The white people had therefore stolen or
appropriated these magnificent products that were actually
intended for them, the natives of the islands.
One of the most famous of the cargo cults began in the village
of Vailala, New Guinea, in 1919 and quickly spread to nearby com¬
munities. The wave of bizarre behavior that became known as the
“Vailala madness” was based on a prophesy that a steamship, oper¬
ated by the ancestral spirits, was on its way with a cargo of food,
tobacco, and weapons for the native Papuans, but they first had to
drive away the whites to receive it. The old ceremonies were obvi¬
ously no longer effective and they were now branded as wicked,
and new rituals rapidly sprang up. The old traditional ritual masks
and other sacred objects were consigned to bonfires. Existing food
supplies were destroyed, food gardens were abandoned, and all
plantation and mining work halted in the belief that the cargo
accompanying the soon-to-arrive ancestors would end forever any
need to work. Many people simply sat motionless.
New temples were erected that looked like small-scale models
of European buildings. Poles were set up in imitation of flagpoles
and radio antennas. Bibles were “read” by trembling, twitching,
illiterate natives who preached about a god who wore a coat, shirt,
pants, and shoes. One prophet claimed to have visited and
returned (after three days) from the land of the dead ancestors
with a new set of rules and rituals. The impending arrival of the
steamer was repeatedly predicted, and each time it failed to
appear on schedule a new arrival date was prophesied. There were
also repeated rumors of the steamer actually having appeared
(elsewhere of course). In at least one case, local natives had to be
forcibly prevented from storming a trading vessel and seizing the
cargo which they considered rightfully theirs: the white crew, they
insisted, were their dead ancestors.
The Europeans, concerned about the islanders’ refusal to
work and the threat of violent rebellion, arrested the cult leaders.
In most villages, when the supernatural steamer continually failed
to arrive, the inhabitants finally gave up and chopped up the sim¬
ulated European buildings and furniture for firewood. The “mad¬
ness” gradually began to fade, and the natives returned to their
ancient ceremonies—as well as to the mines and plantations.
New cargo cults developed during the Second World War, par¬
ticularly when American planes began to use previously unvisited
islands as temporary airbases. Riches arriving from the sky
appeared even more godlike than material arriving by sea. A well
known example of these more recent cargo cults—and one which
is still active—is that devoted to John Frum. John Frum is a mys¬
terious figure whose name first appeared in 1940 in the records of
the colonial administration on Tanna, one of the islands that make
up the nation of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides).
No one has been able to identify who Frum was, or indeed if
such a person ever existed. He is supposed to have come to Tanna by
airplane during the 1930s with the power to speak and understand
all languages. When he left, he promised to return with a bountiful
cargo, ushering in an earthly paradise. First however, the natives
would have to reject the Christian missionaries, expel the whites,
spend or throw away all their money, kill their pigs, and neglect their
gardens. Frum would then provide everything they needed.
A wide range of beliefs about John Frum has since developed.
They variously describe him as being big and strong, short and
slight, white or black (with fair hair), living in the United States
or living in a volcanic crater on another island, the reincarnation
either of an ancient deity or of a powerful tribal ancestor. At var¬
ious times, natives have appeared on the scene claiming to be
Frum himself or one of his sons—or that they have received
orders directly from either Frum or a Frum son.
Published accounts describe how, to show that they were pre¬

pared for Frum’s return, the natives built an airfield for him to
land on. They equipped it with a wooden replica of an aircraft to
adorn the landing strip and a wooden hut to serve as a control
tower, in which a native wore two wooden earphones with
bamboo antenna. They also built a radio tower with tin can
speakers strung from wires to allow him to speak to his people.
Every February 15—the day his followers believe he will
return—they hold a ceremony for his expected return with offer¬
ings of prayers and flowers. His repeated failure to appear has not
dampened their hopes to date. As one Tanna resident told a vis¬
iting Toronto Star journalist in 1999, “Christians have been
waiting 2,000 years for Jesus Christ. We have been waiting only 60
years for John Frum to come back. Why are we the ones who are
thought strange?”24
As further evidence of the evolution of new beliefs, the people
of Tanna also believe in the supernatural powers of other figures.
After Britain’s Prince Philip visited the island in 1974, he, too,
became the focus of a new religious cult. He is believed to be, like
John Frum, a holy reincarnated ancestor-spirit destined to return
some day laden with bounty.25
The cargo cults of Melanesia clearly evolved as purposeful
religions: dedicated to showing the supernatural powers that the
worshippers were worthy of receiving the magical commodities
previously only available to Europeans, and that they would wel¬
come the return of the spirits and their planes (or ships) bearing
the cargo.
Eventually most of the cargo cults died out as colonialism
waned and awareness grew as to the real source of the manufac¬
tured goods. But their rapid development, format, and rituals
provide an extremely important insight into the way in which
beliefs spring up to help explain the unknown—and to try and
change the unknown forces to the worshipper’s advantage.
Cargo cults are not merely exotic anthropological curiosities.
The beliefs and rituals that we see are not simply an aberrant or
alien form of behavior pursued by peoples so totally different to
ourselves that we can maintain a comfortable objective and rumi¬
native distance. In fact, the opposite is true. They are important
signs and illustrations of the way in which the human mind
works when confronted by perplexing features of the outside
world. We are easily provoked into erecting a new system of
beliefs to explain previously unknown circumstances. This is
clearly something that humans do: when confronted by events
beyond our initial understanding and experience, we invent sto¬
ries to explain those events and then they believe those stories. As
joseph Campbell put it, “Man, apparently, cannot maintain him¬
self in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the
general inheritance of myth.”26 It is a universal way of gaining
comfort. Building a system of becauses quells the anxieties we feel
when we meet a cluster of whys—and the cargo cults are contem¬
porary evidence of that mechanism at work.
Furthermore, the resemblance of the cargo cults to various
religious forms and beliefs of the developed world are not a coin¬
cidence either: they are also telling us something. They clearly
indicate that humans have a deep urge—an instinct perhaps—to
create deities, models (literal and metaphorical) of what they
most wish for, and then to invest supernatural powers into those
deities whom they hope will be propitiated and will reward them
for their devotion.
The rapid appearance of these new religions shows how
readily and quickly that happens: how rapidly humans ascribe
unknown events to deities, and how quickly they can develop a
system of beliefs, and can devise ceremonies and rituals to earn
reward from those deities.
BIOLOGY AND THE NEED TO BELIEVE
This chapter has presented a brief overview of belief and our

drive or need to believe. The main thesis here is simply that
humans have always been propelled into forming a set of beliefs
as part of their way of dealing with the world—and in particular
as part of the search for a because to answer the millions of whys.
I am suggesting that belief is a fundamental part of the human
approach to the world, and has been, throughout our history, a
prominent feature of our way of making sense of the world. In that
respect, it is justifiable to call it an urge or even an instinct—it is so
deeply ingrained in the human worldview that it is part of the char¬
acteristic way of forming thoughts and views that we call “human.”
This hypothesis differs from many earlier authors and from the
conventional wisdom of a century ago. Until the last few decades,
it was taken as a given that belief was a conscious and rational
choice, a decision made by consenting adults after rationally con¬
sidering the alternatives. For example the psychologist William
James (see next chapter) in his book of 1898 The Will to Believe felt,
like most of his contemporaries, that belief was a matter of con¬
scious choice, and was an act of will. All the data that we have dis¬
cussed in this chapter supports the opposing view—that the act of
belief is not a conscious and rational choice made after considering
the alternatives, but is a deep-seated instinct or urge, residing close
to the center of the human psyche and forming an integral part of
the way in which humans cope with world events.
In the remaining chapters of part one we shall analyze how
and why that deep-seated need to believe so often focuses on an
external deity, and we will start by looking at the process of deifi¬
cation—of making gods out of heroes or out of legends or fables.
To start that exploration, we shall look in the following chapter at
the fundamental relationship between us and our legends and
myths, and at the ways in which we place persons, objects, and
ideas at the center of them.
NOTES
1. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, vol. 1 of Masks of God

(New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 295.
2. A Professor Lowie spent time with the Crow Indians between
1907 and 1916 and documented that most of the older men in the com¬
munity lacked one or more finger joints. The prayer to the Morning Star
v
accompanying the act of sacrifice asked for several material possessions

and happiness. Quoted in Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 289.
3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York:
Classics of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences Library, 1992), p. 112.
4. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 149.
5. Ibid., p. 150.
6. When an elephant is anesthetized and given a paint mark on its
body, when awoken and seeing its reflection in a mirror it does not con¬
nect the image of the paint mark with anything on its own body.
7. See J. G. Frazer Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (New
York: Biblo & Tannen, 1933).
8. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 212.
11. A. E. Jenses, Die Mythische Weltberachtung der alten Pflanzer-
Volker (Zurich 1949).
12. James Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan 8c Co.
Ltd., 1959), p. 74.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 48.
16. Ibid., p. 182.
17. Ibid.
18. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Neanderthals may have
realized that growing trees and plants come from roots in the ground
and are clearly growing out of it. They may have thought about the
ground as the mystical source of growth even though they did not delib¬
erately plant seeds in it themselves.
19. Leo Frobenius, Schicksalskunde im Sinne des Kulturwerdens
(Leipzig: R. Voigtlanders Verlag, 1932), p. 127. Quoted in Campbell,

Primitive Mythology, p. 166.
20. Duarte Barbosa, Description of the Coasts of East Africa and
Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (London: The Hakluyt
Society, 1866). Quoted in Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 274-75.
21. G. V. Ksenofontov, Schamenengeschuicten aus Siberien, trans. A.
Friedrich and O. Buddruss (Munich 1955). Quoted by Campbell, Prim¬
itive Mythology, p. 252.
23. One of the films that dealt with this issue in a way that I per¬
sonally found unforgettably powerful is the Japanese film Woman of the
Dunes. A woman is seemingly imprisoned in a hut at the bottom of a
crumbling sandy cliff. She has to send all the sand that falls from the cliff
top after a storm up to the village at the cliff top in a bucket. At the end
of the film it is revealed that a member of the village is selected each year
to do this task, and that without somebody doing it the edge of the cliff
would crumble totally and the cliff top village would be lost.
24. Mitchell Smyth, “Islands of Fire,” Toronto Star, 4 January 1997,
final edition, p. 61.
25. One is reminded of the Roman Emperor Claudius who was
astounded to be told that in some far-flung outpost of the Roman
Empire—a little town called Colchester in England—he was worshiped
as a God. Deification that happens while the subject is still alive must be
the highest form of flattery.
Chapter 3
Worship and Heroes

The Machinery of Belief
WORSHIP
yr
JL Aaving established that as a species we all share a deep-
seated drive to believe, we may now examine a second aspect
of humankind s systems of theistic belief: the act of worship,
and the need to identify specific figures, persons, or objects as
being worthy of worship. Like the act of believing itself, wor¬
shipping seems to be an activity that humans have been
involved in since the earliest origins of civilization, and like the
act of believing, it is clearly part of what it means to be human.
So we shall move from analyzing the activity of be¬
lieving itself to considering the figures—the divine and the
heroic—at the center of those beliefs. For it is a simple fact
of human behavior that, in addition to believing—or as part
of it—we have always found objects and persons to worship
and around whom our belief systems revolve. Furthermore,
the immortals and the mortals have always been involved in
64
WORSHIP AND HEROES 65
two-way traffic: throughout our history, there have always been

exchanges and transfers between the world of the gods or God
and the world of mortals.
There are two aspects of belief in a divinity which are almost
universal. First, that there is interaction and traffic between the
nondivine humans (the mortals) and the gods. Exalted or partic¬
ularly admirable humans have been—in all cultures—worshiped
and granted special status and in most cultures some individuals
become elevated to the level of gods or become transformed into
gods. Second, humans characteristically conceptualize and
transmit the images of their divinities to each other in the form of
myths and legends. Telling stories about the objects of our beliefs
is a hallmark trait of all human societies.
Hence in this section of the book, we will start with a discus¬
sion of heroes and hero-worship, and then move on to consider
the role of myths and legends in our societies and ideas in general.
HEROES AND LEGENDS
So long as men worship the Caesars and

Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise
and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley,
Ends and Means 1937
There have always been heroes. There seems to be no human

community that does not set a few people apart and exalt them.
Heroes have been, as far back as we can see, a feature of the way
we organize our societies, with a few admirable persons extolled
and worshiped above all others. But until quite recently, few
people, if any, thought critically about heroes and about their
place in human societies. Heroes were simply there: they were a
feature of the landscape, as one might imagine that most
Nepalese admire and respect the Himalayas but do not spend

every day wondering what the land would look like without them
or how they came to be there in the first place. So with heroes and
the act of hero-worship—they were aspects of daily life, they were
fixed points, they were a given.
Perhaps the epitome of this*previous—and now rather old-
fashioned—attitude to heroes can be found in Thomas Carlyle’s
1840 book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.
Carlyle was the grand historian and the grand explainer of the Vic¬
torian age. He was a hard-working self-made man at a time when
there was a widespread sense of confidence and security in the nat¬
ural order of things (including the justifiable rise of hard-working
self-made men). Most historians and writers believed as he did
that there was such a thing as Universal Truth—about everything,
including all aspects of history, nature, science, and morals. Most
of them believed that with sufficient diligence, research, and effort,
the Universal pattern could be captured and set down; and Carlyle
was a true product—and propagator—of that spirit. He was a dili¬
gent and extraordinarily prolific writer, sometimes a great thinker
and occasionally an astute and perceptive philosopher. In 1840,
based on a series of his lectures, he published the worlds first
major analysis of heroism and hero-worship.
In Heroes, he attempted to analyze and define what it is that
makes a hero heroic. His starting point was quite straightforward:
he believed that some people—a very small number—were
stamped with the mark of true greatness and that they had cer¬
tain qualities which inevitably set them apart from the common
person. He believed that truly great men were born, that the qual¬
ities of greatness could not entirely be made, and that history was
the unfolding of the stories of these great men (“History is the
biography of great men,” as he put it).1 His view—in this respect
similar to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Uhermensch, the
superman (see page 143)—was that heroes existed almost as a
separate species, a rare breed, and that they would inevitably rise
to occupy the pedestal they deserved. He gave no space or cre¬

dence to the idea that heroes could be merely “men of the
moment” or that they could as easily be created by social forces
and opportune timing as by inherent greatness. He would have
found himself in total disagreement with the epigram of Aldous
Huxley s at the top of this section. Carlyles opinion was straight¬
forward and simple: it was the hero who created the circum¬
stances, not the circumstances which created the hero. In his view,
heroes were “the leaders of men, these great ones: the modelers,
patterns ... of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to
do or attain.”2—the “movers and shakers.”
Dividing his hero-figures into six categories, Carlyle identi¬
fied what he thought of as the major factors in their preeminence.
He considered them under six headings: the hero as divinity, as
prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters (a nod in the direc¬
tion of his own endeavors, perhaps), and as king. In each category
he attempted to define those qualities that made the person a hero
and what it was that revealed the stamp of true greatness. Carlyles
analysis was a major success at the time and it set the tone on this
subject for decades—arguably, remnants of it still clung on until
the end of the Second World War.
There are many good and important lines of reasoning that
can be taken from Carlyle whether he intended those conclusions
to be drawn or not. He pointed out, for the first time as far as the
general public was concerned, that humankind had a strong
predilection for worship. In the very selection of the mixture of
heroes that he chose he demonstrated that the activity of worship
is the common factor. His cast of characters is interesting and
eclectic. Among the divinities he chose Wotan/Odin, the pagan
and the Norse gods. In the category of prophet he wrote a warm
and sympathetic account of Mohammed. Among poets, he picked
Dante and Shakespeare; among priests, Luther; among men of
letters, Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns; and among kings,
Cromwell and Napoleon (his words and his choices). He showed
that the act of worshipping has a similar appearance whether the

object of that worship is a human hero, a God, or a hero that later
becomes a God. In this paragraph, for example, Carlyle lumps
together Odin, Jesus, Voltaire and Johnson as objects of worship:
Yes, from Norse Odin to EnglisNSamuel Johnson, from the divine

Founder of Christianity to the withered pontiff of Encyclopaedism
[Voltaire] in all times and all places, the Hero has been worshiped.
It will ever be so. We all love great men: love, venerate and bow
down submissive before great men: nay, can we honestly bow down
to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself
made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him. No
nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in mans heart.3
Perhaps that is the most important point of all: the act of worship
elevates not only the object of the worship but also the worshipper,
which is why it is such a pleasurable and rewarding activity.
Carlyle was in some respects what we would nowadays call a
“groupie” for heroes and fame. Among all the praise and adula¬
tion, he never drew any clear lines between fame, glory, genius,
heroism, and godhead. To him the figure at the center of each
hero-legend was there because he (almost always a he) was, and
always had been, a hero. Yet by the very choice of his subjects, he
demonstrated something of major importance—humans create
heroes and there is a continuum between human/mortal heroes
and the gods. Many heroes became gods at the end of their earthly
life or career (Wotan was an example—and several other humans
were thought to have ascended directly into heaven from earth).
Conversely, many gods visited the earth in the guise of heroes (or
sometimes in other roles to test the perspicacity of earthlings).
That continuum—the spectrum extending from mortals through
heroes to gods—was in many respects a classic Victorian world¬
view. It assumed that there was a divine natural order, one handed
down by God, and that the officers and executives of that Divine
Plan were the Great Men, the Heroes.
In his writings and in the acclaim that they drew, Carlyle

demonstrated how deeply we all hanker after a hero-figure that
has superhuman powers and who will sort out the various sorry
messes of our lives. His book on hero-worship was in itself an act
of hero-worship: in his view the heroes were heroes because they
were made of different stuff, of heroic material. And what was the
definition of heroic material? Most people in the late nineteenth
century, including Carlyle, felt that heroic material was revealed if
the person became a hero. It was really a circular argument, a self-
fulfilling prophecy, and it ignored completely the role of the
public’s attitude—the role of the people who elevated the poten¬
tial-hero from the level of the commoner to the heights of hero.
That part of the equation was never even considered by Carlyle
nor by anybody in the Victorian era.
It was more than a hundred years after Heroes before a fresh
thinker and scholar would state plainly—and in a style accessible
to the general reader—that myths, legends, gods, and hero-wor¬
ship are all phenomena of the human way of seeing the world and
coping with it. That scholar was Joseph Campbell.
HUMANKIND AND MYTHOLOGY:

A PERPETUAL RELATIONSHIP
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) summarized the relationship

between humans and their mythologies succinctly when he wrote:
“Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without
belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth.”4
This central theme ran through all of Campbell’s works, and it
was certainly a revolutionary thought. Campbell implied that all
societies have their own myths and legends, but not because they
v/ere all variously trying to describe different phenomena that
their ancestors had seen or witnessed, but because that activity—
of creating myths and legends—is part of the way in which all of
humankind cope with the world about us. In other words, Camp¬
bell was stating that myths were not a way of setting down earlier
and literal truths but were and are a fundamental mechanism—
and one crucial to human thought—by which we try to make
sense of the unknown. Myths are part of the human mindset.
Campbell, the world’s greatest authority on myths and
mythology, was a scholar, a teacher (staring in 1934 at Sarah
Lawrence College), and a writer. His name became widely known
to the general public shortly after his death when a series of inter¬
views with the broadcaster Bill Moyers was made into a television
series, The Power of Myth, in 1988. However, his extraordinarily
deep understanding of mythology and his phenomenal and
detailed knowledge of the worlds legends and myths had been
widely known and respected in the academic world long before.
In his groundbreaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
first published in 1949, Campbell set out a wide-ranging yet
scrupulously detailed analysis of mythology and humankind’s
attachment to it. He pointed out that myths are part of the fabric
of human understanding (which is why, as he said, we get the
same feeling of contact and recognition from, say, an Inuit fairy
tale or the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse). It is the image, legend,
or fable that we seem to have known before and now recognize.
Campbell showed that in anthropological terms, myths are at
their most useful at particular stages in our development—phases
of transition when they form part of the rites of passage (birth,
naming, puberty, marriage, and death).
However, he went on—as the title implies—to show that
there is a common, almost constant theme underlying so many
superficially different myths. All religions have a Land of the
Dead, most religions have something analogous to death-resur¬
rection-rebirth of a savior or God, and many religions have
themes akin to a virgin or miraculous birth of a god.5
The most important underlying theme, seen in most reli¬
gions, is that of the savior (either come and gone, or about to
come)—the hero and conqueror of evil forces. Campbell com¬

pares the legends of literally dozens of them such as Theseus,
Prometheus, Osiris, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Cuchulainn, King
Arthur, Heracles, Krishna, Gilgamesh, Maui, and many others.
The progress of the hero-savior to some extent resembles the rites
of passage of life. There are three salient stages of the process by
which the savior-hero changes the old order to the new, dis¬
cernible in all of the myths of the gods.
First, he emerges from obscurity, or at least from “the out¬
side.” The hero is almost never a member of the ruling class or
power structure at birth.
Second, he undergoes a struggle with vast forces during which
he achieves an epiphany (metaphorically, as Campbell puts it, he
“dies to the past and is reborn to the future”6). The examples of that
second stage—the epic conflict—are legion: Jacob fighting the angel
and creating Israel, Jesus battling Satan in the desert, Buddha, Jonah
in the belly of the whale, Heracles fighting the sea monster, Finn
MacCool and the monster peist, Maui swallowed by his great-great-
grandmother Hine-nui-the-po, and all the Greek gods (with the
exception of Zeus, swallowed by their father Kronos). Many reli¬
gions share more specific themes and images within the category of
epic struggles: Campbell points out, as one example, that crucifixion
is common to several of them, including legends of the Norse god
Wotan (who had previously undergone other acts of self-sacrifice):
The pagan Germanic divinity Othin (Wotan) gave an eye to

split the veil of light into the knowledge of this infinite dark,
and then underwent for it the passion of a crucifixion:
I ween that I hung on the windy tree

Hung therefor nights full nine
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.7
Then in the third stage—the rebirth, new beginning, or resurrec¬

tion, an event also common to a large number of religions8—the
hero brings to the world the benefits of the wisdom or enlighten¬
ment he has gained. As Campbell shows, the constant theme of
this voyage or journey underlies a vast number of legends and
provides the consistent link between the savior and the notion of
resurrection common to so many legends, histories, and religions.
What all the myths on this theme have in common is very impor¬
tant: they all illustrate humankind s very deep longing—almost an
ache—to be rescued. We all yearn for redemption—the deep
primeval hope that whatever our current problems, there is some¬
body out there who will come in and rescue us. The ultimate longing,
of course, is for salvation from death, the hope of an everlasting after¬
life, a resurrection. Joseph Campbell shows that these themes were
common to the majority of myths and legends in most religions and
cultures. The god-hero wears many masks and has many different
appearances depending on what has been painted onto the mask of
ones own culture and history, but, at the deepest level, what we all
want from that heroic figure behind the mask is the same.
THE TRAGEDY OF TAKING MYTHS LITERALLY
Mythology is psychology misread as biography;

history and cosmogony.
Joseph Campbell,
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
It is clear, then, that humans are driven to believe and also driven
to mythologize—and that the format of our myths and beliefs tells
us something about the way the human mind copes with the world.
This is a consistent trait of human societies: it is what we do.
As a species, from the beginnings of our records, we have con¬
sistently demonstrated a deep urge to believe, and have also
demonstrated that, in the communication of abstract concepts

between human beings, myths and legends have always been
important and powerful instruments. We communicate our most
difficult and abstract concepts in story-form to each other, and we
use the myth and story format often, particularly when we are
talking about deep-seated abstract concepts such as our beliefs. As
we have seen, those beliefs, and their associated legends, may
center around historical figures—heroes—or around gods: in
many cultures there is clearly a continuum with overlap and
blending of the two. All of this is therefore part of the way our
minds work and probably it will always be like that. Myths and
legends serve specific and important functions in the way human
minds work. In itself, that is not the problem.
The problems for humankind begin when myths are taken liter¬
ally. In fact, one might go so far as to say that if myths and legends
were not taken so literally, there would be far less trouble in the world.
Troubles start when one group of people take their own
myths, legends, and beliefs literally and start feeling justified in
conquering or killing people of different beliefs. Worse still, they
may project their unconscious desires and ambitions into myth-
form and so create a legend that justifies their own desires. This
aspect of myth was analyzed in considerable depth (and breadth)
by Campbell, and by those that influenced him, including Carl
Jung. CampbelFs writings make the important point that while
myths may be interpreted as expressions of the subconscious, that
connection can work in both directions. As Campbell put it,
“Mythology ... is psychology misread as biography, history, and
cosmogony.”9 When we put somebody or something onto a
mythic pedestal—however enjoyable and rewarding that activity
is for us—the choice of what we put there and the ways in which
we regard it may be more a reflection of ourselves than of the
object of our worship. Myths work best as myths—they cause
trouble when they are taken as literal truths, as we shall discuss in
detail in chapter 7.
Campbell understood the social role and the symbolic power

of myths and legends within a community better than anyone.
Their value and potency within a society is so great that it gen¬
uinely cannot be overstated. Myths and legends, among their
many functions, serve as outward and publicly acceptable mani¬
festations within a communityof the inner thoughts and desires
of its members. They are ways in which we all may express our
deepest and most secret longings for many things, including the
promise of rescue and redemption. Myths are social projections
of our inner dreams and aspirations. When we carry out a public
act of worship based on a shared belief and a communal myth or
legend, we gather together publicly and in unison express our
inner desires. This communal act of belief makes us feel better,
and exemplifies, clarifies, and reinforces within the community
those things that we believe are good. That much is clear and is an
observable phenomenon. When, however, the stories and myths
that bring us together are interpreted not as social bonds but as
literal truths, serious conflicts will arise.
Consider a simple example of “metaphorical value” versus
“literal truth.” Somebody might have, let us say, a serious drinking
problem and might be making every effort to stay dry and to
rehabilitate. Speaking of that person, one might say, “He’s fighting
his own demons—and right now he’s winning.” That concept is
immediate and useful. It gives the listener an instant picture of
the man expending serious effort in trying to control a habit that
has been damaging him. Hearing that, you would not immedi¬
ately think of it as a literal truth: a man literally fighting with
some horror-movie demon. The image is useful; the literal truth,
on the other hand, is totally unhelpful. We are accustomed to this
kind of metaphorical language in many ways: when we are in a
tearing hurry we say, “I rushed around like a man possessed”;
when we commit a minor social infraction we might say jokingly,
“The devil made me do it.” Obviously these are not statements
about our literal belief in demonic possession, requiring a Salem-
type inquisition. These, and hundreds of others, are simple

everyday illustrations of the usefulness of metaphor—an example
in miniature of the power of myths and images.
Unfortunately, throughout history, communities have shown
a tendency to forget the function and the purpose of their
mythologies and have interpreted them as revealed truths—facts
that would only be denied by desecrators and infidels (literally:
nonbelievers). This is when conflicts over religious ideas begin.
The beauty of mythology is that it can be interpreted in many
ways. The danger of mythology is that it can be interpreted in many
ways. Sadly, we have a long history of going to war over ideas that
(as we shall see in chapter 5) are ambiguous and ill-understood: we
fight over minor differences in interpretation when we shouldn’t be
interpreting at all, but should be taking the metaphor as a concept
of value in itself. Metaphors are part of the way we think: they help
us come to grips with vague and big ideas. When we confuse them
with literal truths they lose their value to us, and become (if you’ll
forgive the metaphor) bones of contention.
Perhaps the best and most definitive summary of the many
facets of mythology can be taken from Campbell:
Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a

primitive fumbling effort to explain the world of nature
(Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric
times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a reposi¬
tory of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his
group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of arche¬
typal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as
the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical
insights (Coomaramswamy); and as God’s Revelation to His
children (the Church). Mythology is all of these.10
There can be no better way of expressing the central role of myths

in our societies and in our understanding of the world around us
than that: “mythology is all of these.”
We shall see in chapters 6 and 7 how our mythologies, while

they provide concrete images behind our beliefs, can inspire great
achievements or incite major conflict. But before we discuss those
topics we shall look, in the next chapter, at some new research
data from the field of neuroscience which provides a coherent
hypothesis explaining why the human mind works in this way,
and how it contains these patterns of thought within its design.
NOTES
1. Thomas Carlyle, On Heros, Hew-Worship, and the Heroic in

History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 62.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 96.
4. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, vol. 1 of Masks of God
(New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 4.
5. Campbell himself translated one tract from the Sanskrit which
described a god being born from the heart of his father. As Campbell
said, this was an image of a miraculous origin, a way of conceptualizing
the god as something totally different from our own existence. Miracu¬
lous births involving only one parent are not rare in the mythologies of
the worlds religions. Primitive Mythology, p. 78.
6. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 62.
7. From Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces; the
poem quoted by Campbell is from Poetic Edda “Hovamol” (translation
by Henry Adams Bellows), published by the American Scandinavian
Foundation, New York, 1923.
8. This is just a small example of both the breadth and the depth
of CampbelFs knowledge and insight: “Throughout the ancient world
such myths and rites abounded: the deaths and resurrections of
Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, Virbius, Attis and Osiris. . . . are known to very
student of comparative religion: the popular games of the Whitsuntide
Louts, Green Georges, John Barleycorns and Kostrubonkos, Carrying-
out-Winter, Bringing-in-Summer and Killing of the Christmas Wren
have continued the tradition in a mood of frolic into our contemporary

calendar; and through the Christian church (in the mythology of the Fall
and Redemption, Crucifixion and Resurrection the “second birth of bap¬
tism, the initiatory blow on the cheek at confirmation, the symbolic
eating of the Flesh and drinking of the Blood) solemnly and sometimes
effectively we are united to those immortal images of initiatory might. . .
which man, since the beginning of his day on earth has dispelled the ter¬
rors of phenomenality and won through to the all-transfiguring vision of
immortal being.” Primitive Mythology, p. 92.
9. Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 256.
10. Ibid., p.382.
Chapter 4
The Neurology of Belief
THE TEMPORAL LOBES

AND THE LIMBIC SYSTEM
s o far, we have been talking about belief as an activity

that goes back as far in human history as anything that we
can call human. From the evolutionary point of view, the act
of believing is intrinsic to humankind—and in the last few
decades we have begun to amass evidence as to why that is.
To put it simply, the activity of believing is built into—is
hardwired within the structure and layout of—the human
brain. It is a feature of the human mind that we can legiti¬
mately call innate.
Neuroscience has been producing new evidence which
points to a set of structures within the brain that have a cen¬
tral role in this aspect of human psychology. These struc¬
tures form a network of individual components situated
toward the middle of the brain, and together they comprise
78
THE NEUROLOGY OF BELIEF 79
what is called the limbic system. The limbic system consists of the
deep parts of the temporal lobes (the lobes that are situated at the
temples, i.e., in front of and slightly above the ears), and in addi¬
tion two nuclei—one on each side—called the amygdala and
some other areas. The connection between the limbic system and
the deep parts of the temporal lobes is so intimate and intricate
that the temporal lobes are often called the limbic lobes, and it has
been known for many years that the activity of these lobes pro¬
duces effects quite different to other lobes of the brain.
The left temporal lobe is a major component of your language
skills and (depending on the part of it we are talking about) some
aspects of your motor skills. Damage in this area (for example by a
stroke or a head injury) usually produces major difficulties with
speech (such as aphasia or dysphasia) or certain types of difficulties
in moving or doing things (sometimes called a dyspraxia).
At first, it was not entirely clear what the temporal lobe on the
right side of your brain (whether you are right-handed or left-
handed) actually did.1 It was clearly something quite complex
and subtle, as we shall discuss in detail in a moment. It seemed to
be something to do with the person s interpretation of stimuli
(hearing, taste, and so on) as well as something to do with the
person’s perception of reality and of himself or herself.
SEIZURES OF THE TEMPORAL LOBE
The first evidence concerning the specific functions of the tem¬

poral lobes came over a century ago from the neurologist Hugh-
lings Jackson, who studied (among many other neurological con¬
ditions) different types of epilepsy and seizures. The more
common kind of epilepsy may begin in one limb and rapidly
spread to involve all limbs in the classic tonic-clonic seizure fol¬
lowed by a brief period of unconsciousness. People who have this
type of seizure are found to have problems in the motor cortex
(the highest point of the brain when we are standing). Seizures
such as these have been known and recognized for millennia

(they are described in ancient Greek writings and in the New Tes¬
tament). It has also been known for centuries that injuries to the
motor areas in the brain and tumors in those areas are quite likely
to cause this type of seizure. In the 1940s when the EEG was
invented and it became possible to record the electrical activity in
different parts of the brain, it was obvious that particular types of
spasmodic electric activity in the motor areas were the cause of
these convulsions. In other words, electrical disturbances in these
parts of the brain were the cause of the epileptic seizures.
However, it has been known for more than a thousand years
that certain people have seizures in which they suddenly see a
vision or hear a voice and—in many cases—get a feeling of
tremendous peace. In this less common type of seizure, the first
symptoms (usually called the aura of a seizure) include some very
particular sensations and experiences. These may be any (or sev¬
eral) of the following: auditory hallucinations (hearing voices),
deja vu (the feeling of having seen something before), visual hal¬
lucinations, experiencing funny smells, a feeling of particular
peace, a sensation of deep understanding or of deep and signifi¬
cant knowledge, a feeling of being outside one’s own body, and
many other similar types of experience. These episodes were often
followed by a period of dreamlike absence or unconsciousness
similar to the usual type of seizure.
Jackson found that people with this type of seizure—some¬
times termed the Joan of Arc type of seizure—later turned out to
have problems in the temporal lobe (usually the right temporal
lobe because lesions in the left temporal lobe are often accompa¬
nied by memory loss so the nature of the seizure cannot be
recalled). From this, Jackson concluded that the temporal lobes
mediated complex sensory experiences and some types of halluci¬
nation, often accompanied by emotions of peace and tranquility.
When, many years later, EEG tracings were done on people with
this kind of seizure, they confirmed Jackson s observations—that
the “Joan of Arc” type of seizures with complex visions, sounds,

and experiences did indeed originate in the temporal lobe. Fur¬
thermore, when these people were given particular medications
(different from the usual anticonvulsants) that have specific
activity in controlling the abnormal seizure activity of the temporal
lobe, the symptoms diminished or disappeared in most cases.
In fact, some neurologists looking back at history believe that
temporal lobe epilepsy was indeed the medical condition that
caused Joan of Arc to have her visions of Archangel Michael and
to hear the voices—including the voice of God—that told her
what to do. Similar symptoms were recorded centuries later by the
Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who also had temporal lobe
epilepsy (as we would now call his seizures). Fie also described his
feelings of great peace and the sensation of an extracorporeal
essence and of an all-embracing knowledge and understanding:
All of the forces of life gathered convulsively all at once to the

highest attainable consciousness. The sensation of life, of
being, multiplied ten-fold at that moment: all passion, all
doubts, all unrests were resolved as in a higher peace: then a
peace full or dear, harmonious joy and hope. And then a scene
suddenly as if something were opening up in the soul; an inde¬
scribable, an unknown light radiated, by which the ultimate
essence of things was made visible and recognizable. All this
lasted at most a second.2
Dostoyevsky also wrote many extraordinary and brilliant descrip¬

tions of those experiences in his fiction, for example, in his
famous novel The Idiot.
STIMULATION OF THE TEMPORAL LOBE
So, the evidence was clear that epilepsy originating in the tem¬
poral lobes was associated with complex visions and experiences,
some of which were spiritual and emotional in nature.
Then in the 1930s, the talented Canadian neurosurgeon

Wilder Penfield confirmed this by stimulating the temporal lobes
with an electrical probe during brain surgery. (This sounds as if it
might be painful, but since the brain tissue itself has no pain
receptors the procedure—which is necessary in order to ensure
that no healthy brain tissue was damaged during the surgery to
remove an abnormal area—is completely painless.)
When Penfield stimulated the motor areas at the top of the
parietal lobes, the patients experienced involuntary movements
or twitches of the arm, leg, lips, or some other part of the body.
But when Penfield stimulated the temporal lobe on the right side,
there was no movement of any part of the body. Instead the
patients reported a wide variety of significant experiences, per¬
ceptions, and/or feelings. The reports were basically the same as
the auras accompanying temporal lobe seizures: feelings of great
peace; of deep understanding; of consciousness of an external
intelligence or another being present near them; of sensations of
taste, smell, vision, or hearing; and so on.
Here, then, was further evidence that the right temporal lobe
was involved in the complex process of perception and of con¬
sciousness (of self and of “nonself”). Further studies confirming
Penfield s observations were made by other members of the Mon¬
treal group including Dr. P. Gloor, and by other neuroscientists
including S. Horowitz.
At this point then, the conclusion was inescapable that the
right temporal lobe was a crucial component in our process of
perception—in all modalities—and in the process by which we
are conscious of ourselves and of things around us.
Thus, the findings of Wilder Penfield confirmed the observa¬
tions of Hughlings Jackson—that the temporal lobes were not
like the parietal lobes concerned with motor or sensory functions,
but were concerned with complex perceptions and experiences.
That was the state of our knowledge of the temporal lobes basi¬
cally until the 1970s. Then a new era in neuroscientific research
began, amongst the leaders of which was—and still is—Michael

Persinger, Professor of Neuroscience at the Laurentian University in
Sudbury. Persinger stimulated the right temporal lobe not by using
an electric current in the Penfield manner but by creating complex
electromagnetic fields that were basically electromagnetic imita¬
tions or models of temporal lobe epilepsy. When these imitation
temporal lobe seizures were “played back” into the temporal lobes of
volunteers by using magnetic solenoids built into a helmet, the
persons temporal lobe was essentially immersed in an electromag¬
netic atmosphere very similar to that of temporal lobe epilepsy, the
intensity of which could be adjusted by Persinger at will.
When the intensity was set above the appropriate threshold,
the person experienced one or several of the temporal lobe type
of symptoms which will be described in detail below.
THE CENTRAL HYPOTHESIS OF

TEMPORAL LOBE SENSITIVITY
However, it was not merely the type of experience that was

important. The really important finding was that everyone had
their own particular threshold for getting temporal lobe experi¬
ences when they were tested. Persingers work discovered that dif¬
ferent people had differing sensitivity to the stimulation of the
temporal lobes by the magnetic fields created inside the helmet.
There was, in fact, a spectrum of temporal lobe sensitivity from
the “very sensitive” to the “not particularly sensitive” and every
person has his or her threshold. Furthermore, this continuum of
sensitivity correlated directly with medical conditions affecting
the temporal lobe—from people with clearly diagnosed medical
conditions of the temporal lobe to the normal population.
At the top end of the sensitivity scale, people with temporal
lobe epilepsy have—as you would expect—extremely sensitive tem¬
poral lobes: so sensitive in fact that they fire off by themselves
without any stimulus (which is the cause of the epileptic seizure).3
People with slightly less sensitive lobes are the kind of people
who have “absences” or episodes in which they seems to switch off
from the real world for a moment or two, or have other types of
episodes.
Then there are people who do not have any kind of seizure
but are able to fully “get into” an imaginary world readily
Persinger tested a group of poets and found that they had tem¬
poral lobes which were much more sensitive than the general
population. The same was true of drama students. This is clearly
consistent with the main hypothesis since acting requires the
person to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, and
to inhabit an imaginary world for a time.
When Persinger’s group did these tests on various groups of
people and correlated the results with those people’s religious
experience, they found that there was a fairly close relationship.
The more sensitive your temporal lobe is, the more likely it is that
you will have regular (and deep) religious experiences.
Over a series of experiments involving hundreds of people,
Persinger’s hypothesis emerged as an accurate and workable
model of the way the right temporal lobe works as a mediator of
our perception of reality and our consciousness of self and of the
emotions and feelings that go along with that.
Every single one of us has a threshold level of sensitivity
inbuilt into our right temporal lobe. If you are a person who hap¬
pens to have an extremely low level for that threshold (meaning
that your temporal lobe is extremely sensitive), it will fire off by
itself and you will suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy—a sponta¬
neously discharging temporal lobe. If it happens that your
threshold is a bit higher but still much lower than the average (a
temporal lobe that is “quite sensitive”), then you will have odd
episodes and experiences but not recognizably epileptic seizures.
If your temporal lobes are less sensitive than that but still more
sensitive than average, you will be a relatively creative person—a
poet or an actor, for example.
ELECTRICAL THRESHOLD AND QUESTIONNAIRES
So, the right temporal lobe has its own “setting” of sensitivity in
each of us, and this correlates with certain aspects of our experi¬
ence and of our perceptions. Persinger and coworker Kate
Makarec then went on to see if they could identify any specific
patterns of experience of behavior that matched their observa¬
tions on the temporal lobe. In other words, if a person has a par¬
ticularly sensitive right temporal lobe, what are they likely to
think, and what are they likely to feel?
They adapted a standardized questionnaire (the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory) and then tested a large series
of questions of their own to see if they could produce a reliable
guide to the sensitivity of the right temporal lobe in the form of
patterns of answering questions. The result was a tool that they
called the Personal Philosophy Inventory (PPI), and it turned out
to be a very reliable and useful indicator of many features of the
persons thought and behavior, including indications of the sensi¬
tivity of the right temporal lobe. For example, some people have
a particular type of episode that is similar to a brief (and less dra¬
matic) mild version of a temporal lobe seizure. These episodes are
called Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Experiences (CPELs) and,
sure enough, Persinger found that people who have CPELs could
be identified by certain items on his PPI.
So now, by an unarguable series of experimental observations
we have a chain of evidence that links the temporal lobe with a series
of thoughts and attitudes specifically concerning spirituality, reli¬
giousness, perceptions of reality, readiness to feel the presence of
another being, and so on. That chain of evidence—as explained
above—goes back to the first descriptions of temporal lobe seizures
(like the ones later described by Dostoyevsky) to the observations of
Hughlings Jackson, to the experiments of Wilder Penfield and then
to the electromagnetic field experiments of Persinger et al. and to
the series of thoughts and attitudes tested on the questionnaires.
CORROBORATING EVIDENCE
Further evidence supporting all of these conclusions came from

some other methods of studying the brain. There are some
methods of scanning that can show which areas of the brain are
actually working at the moment of scanning. One of these
methods is called a SPECT scan, where an isotope is injected into
the blood stream and is tracked by a special system of scanning.
These SPECT scans show which areas of the brain are working—
for example, using up glucose or oxygen—at that moment. Sure
enough, when the person is having a religious or spiritual experi¬
ence (or any of the other experiences listed above), it is the right
temporal lobe that is seen on the SPECT scan to be in action.
The same is true of another method of brain imaging—the
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan. There is a special way of
doing MRI scans so that the function of the different parts of the
brain can be seen. This is called F-MRI scanning—and the results
are the same as with SPECT. When the person experiences what
have been listed above, the right temporal lobe shows activity—
further corroboration of the Persinger hypothesis.
EXPERIENCES ASSOCIATED WITH THE RIGHT

TEMPORAL LOBE AND THE LIMBIC SYSTEM
If you take all the results of Persinger’s studies together, they add up
to a fascinating picture of what the right temporal lobe does. In
summary form, the features of thinking and feeling that are associ¬
ated with the right temporal lobe are many, and here are the main
groups. Two of these will be illustrated in detail with case histories.
♦ Auditory experiences: sounds or hearing voices (auditory

hallucinations), often talking directly to the person, some¬
times voices of people from one’s past
♦ Visual experiences: seeing lights, patterns of light and dark,

sometimes including the white-light-at-the-end-of-the-
tunnel, sometimes entire images from ones past including
images of deceased relatives and friends
♦ Vestibular experiences: the sense of whirling through space,
going into a tunnel and other changes in orientation and
position
♦ Taste and smell experiences: sometimes smells that are
familiar from the past, sometimes new ones
♦ Memory changes: deja vu (the sense of having seen some¬
thing before—when one hasn’t), jamais vu (the sense of
never having seen something before when one has)
♦ Extracorporeal experiences: the sense of being outside one’s
own body
♦ Morning highs: people who get a “high” in the morning
have higher scores than average in temporal lobe signs
♦ Drama, poetry, and other creative acts: activities that
require the person to “get into” another world or another
mode are associated with high temporal lobe scores
♦ Sense of presence: the feeling that one is in the presence of
another intelligence (sometimes religious—i.e., God—
sometimes an alien, sometimes a spirit or ghost-—see
below)
♦ Other religious and spiritual experiences: many different
kinds of deep and spiritual experiences including a sense of
peacefulness, being at one with nature, understanding in
some intangible way the working of the cosmos
♦ Signs of special significance: the feeling that various things that
happen in the world are specific signals directed at the person
4- Pseudocyesis (false pregnancy): women who have experi¬
ences of cessation of menstrual periods, enlarging
abdomen, and breast changes (when they are not in fact
pregnant) have high scores on temporal-lobe signs (see
below)
♦ Near-death experiences: the white light and the sense of

peace often associated with near-death experiences (e.g.,
drowning or hypothermia)
♦ “I would kill in God’s name”: this is a very important fea¬
ture of the temporal lobe and is discussed in detail after the
following case histories*
TWO ILLUSTRATIVE CASE HISTORIES
It is worth setting out the details of two of the cases studied by

Persinger, which illustrate the nature of the experiences associated
with the temporal lobe in greater depth.
The first of these is an example that provides, of itself, com¬
pelling supporting evidence for the hypothesis of temporal lobe
function.4 Since I had an opportunity to discuss the experiences
in detail with the person who underwent them, I shall take the
liberty of setting the case out in some detail.
The subject is a journalist and broadcaster and was in his early

forties when he moved into a house in Alberta that would be
called—in the general use of the word—“haunted ” He had had
no personal previous experiences of ghosts or hauntings, and
was not particularly inclined to give credibility to stories of the
supernatural.
In the first years in the haunted house, he noticed several
things which he regarded as unusual and “creepy.” There were
noises and bangs in the nights (perhaps this is not very unusual
in older houses) and electric light bulbs would suddenly go
dim or burn very brightly, and he thought that some would
glow even when they were turned off. On at least one occasion,
a light bulb shattered without warning. None of these events
are in themselves unique.
However, the most signal experience was when, together
with a friend of his, he investigated a crawl space in the base¬
ment. Both men thought they saw an apparition—although,
significantly, they each described it differently. However, both

of them experienced at the same moment a feeling of great
dread and, basically, terror and panic. Neither of them had ever
experienced anything like it before, and neither of them had
ever felt they had seen a ghost or had had an experience of any¬
thing that they would have described as supernatural.
Shortly afterward, the subject sold that house—for reasons
that included the experiences—and moved many thousands of
miles away.
Four years after this single experience of “haunting,” while
working as a journalist, he came into contact with Michael
Persinger and volunteered to try the “temporal lobe” helmet
with the solenoids in it as described above.
Extraordinarily, in his case, when the solenoids were acti¬
vated and the electromagnetic fields were created in the helmet,
he experienced an almost exact “replay” or recreation of the
haunting experience. In particular, the same emotions experi¬
enced at the haunting were aroused when the electromagnetic
field was switched on in the helmet. The subject felt exactly the
same sense intensity of dread, terror, and panic. At that moment
he also felt quite clearly that there was a presence in the labora¬
tory room with him. The emotions and that feeling both disap¬
peared when the electromagnetic field was turned off.
He is quite certain that he has only had two experiences
like this—the first in the basement of his house in Alberta, and
the second while undergoing electromagnetic stimulation of
the temporal lobe in Persinger’s laboratory four years later.
This story is important—and it fits in with the general hypothesis

of temporal lobe/limbic system stimulation. As regards the mech¬
anisms by which ghost experiences are created, there are as many
questions raised by this story (and the others like it) as there are
answers provided.
It is possible that the experience of a ghost or a haunting is
purely a matter of the temporal lobe. That is certainly a conclu¬
sion that can be drawn from the recreation of the ghost experi-
ence in the laboratory. However, it must also be said that this does
not provide us with an explanation of why the patient experi¬
enced the ghost in the basement in Alberta. It is possible that
there were, or are, low intensity magnetic fields (local variations
in the earths magnetic field) present in that area, and that people
with a low threshold for stimulation of the temporal lobe will
have an experience. However, that is not an inevitable conclu¬
sion—we simply do not know precisely why the patient had the
experience in his house basement.
However, we know for certain that the experience was repro¬
duced by the experimental low intensity fields in Persingers lab¬
oratory. This proves conclusively that the temporal lobe mediates
experiences of ghosts and haunting, but it does not explain—
yet—what precipitates those experiences in nature and outside
the laboratory.
The second case is also an important story. It concerns a
young woman with a false pregnancy (pseudocyesis).
The patient had been involved in a car accident when she was
young (under five years old) and had sustained quite marked
head injuries. While growing up she had had some behavioral
problems, which had required different types of treatment.
At the age of seventeen she reported that she was pregnant,
and experienced cessation of her menstrual periods, enlarge¬
ment of the breasts, and swelling of the lower abdomen. She felt
that she had been impregnated by God. Because she had several
features—including the false pregnancy—of temporal lobe
problems, her behavior and her home environment were inves¬
tigated. It transpired that the patient had several idiosyncratic
behavioral patterns, which included sleeping with a clock held
directly on to her right ear. This particular clock was of the new
type that is adjusted regularly by a satellite signal. This patient
was therefore receiving regular low-intensity electromagnetic
fields to her right temporal area. In fact, her bedroom was inves¬
tigated for the size and strength of magnetic fields, and it was
found that in general there were only very slight magnetic fields
caused by various pieces of household machinery being turned
on and off (these generated fields of 0.1 to 0.2 micro Teslas). But
when the clock was investigated it was found that it generated
magnetic fields of 3 or 4 micro Teslas (more than ten times the
background). Furthermore, the young woman was sleeping with
the magnetic fields generated by the clock held close to her right
temporal lobe. When this habit was discontinued, the symptoms
of the false pregnancy and the sensation that she had been
impregnated by God disappeared.
Now of course it is not known for certain whether these
magnetic fields—created by the clock and applied to the right
temporal lobe—had anything to do with her perception of
pregnancy. After all, every false pregnancy ends after a while, so
the discontinuation of her sleeping with the clock and the end
of the false pregnancy might well have been a coincidence.
Nevertheless it is an interesting case-history and it may at least
support—rather than contradict—the hypothesis of the
activity of the right temporal lobe.
Finally, to put the case into wider perspective, it is important to

realize that false pregnancies are not rare occurrences. In fact,
informal surveys suggest that as many as twenty percent of female
university students have, at some time in their life, felt that they
were pregnant, and have experienced breast changes and abdom¬
inal swelling (not merely a menstrual period delayed by a week or
two). In many cases—throughout history as well as in various
parts of the world currently—the perception of having been
impregnated by God is also quite common. In general when there
is a false pregnancy, after a time the symptoms resolve. In some
cases, the woman has a perception that the fetus has been “stolen,”
sometimes with theological overtones. These are occurrences that
are well known in medicine and in history—what is new is that
theories about the way the right temporal lobe operates may offer
part of an explanation for these phenomena.
One final and fascinating perspective on this area of neuro¬

science came recently from Japan. The function of the right tem¬
poral lobe has reached such a level of acceptance that it has actu¬
ally been misused in an attempt by a Japanese religious cult to try
and create an electromagnetic form of brainwashing. The Aum
Shinrikyo cult were the ones-responsible for the infamous poi¬
soning of passengers by the nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo subway.
When many members of the cult were subsequently arrested, sev¬
eral of the younger and more junior acolytes of the cult were
wearing what appeared to personal stereo sets connected to some¬
thing that looking like headphones but which were placed over the
temples. These devices were taken and subjected to “reverse engi¬
neering”—a process of working out the function of the devices by
examining and analyzing their structure and their components.5
When these devices were reverse engineered, they were shown to
be generators of electromagnetic signals which created low-inten¬
sity, complex electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the temporal
lobes. In other words, they were deliberate imitations of the
Persinger helmet, designed to create compliance and obedience in
the acolytes who would be put into a state of perception of one¬
ness with the universe and ready for spiritual instructions from the
senior cult members. It is a rather bizarre compliment to scientific
discipline that its precepts are being pirated for abuse, but it does
at least attest to the perceived value of the concept!
“I WOULD KILL IN GOD’S NAME”
History affords us thousands of examples of communities united

by religious beliefs recruiting and employing military might—or
vice versa, depending on your interpretation of events. Over the
centuries, the image and the name of God have been joined to
almost every conceivable kind of military endeavor. And leaders
have always claimed, almost from the earliest origins of civiliza-
tion, that their struggle was blessed by their God or gods

(although no side has ever made that same claim after they have
lost a war). In fact, no leader has ever dared say that their struggle
was not blessed by God. As the old joke goes, ccNo general has ever
appeared in front of his army and said, CI had a long talk with God
in my tent last night, and He said that unfortunately this time
He’s going to side with the Turks.’ ”
Historically, then, religion and military might have had a close
relationship. The important question is now: Do recent advances
in neuroscience partly account for this in any way? As we have just
seen, the sensations associated with religious experience and spir¬
itual sensations have been shown to be mediated by the right tem¬
poral lobe. The essential question at this juncture is this: Is there
anything about the temporal lobe that might suggest its connec¬
tion, not only with religion, but also with aggression? The answer
lies in some important new neuroscientific findings that actually
go some of the way toward explaining the close link between reli¬
gious beliefs and aggressive behavior. And they shed further light
on the function of the temporal lobe and the limbic system.
As already described, Michael Persinger has spent most of the
last three decades investigating various features of the limbic
system and the temporal lobes, and their influences on behavior.
He developed and validated a detailed questionnaire called the
Personal Philosophy Inventory (PPI), and has been able to show
over many studies that the answers to certain clusters of questions
on this questionnaire are closely correlated with electric fragility of
the temporal lobes. Particular patterns of answers to those ques¬
tions on the PPI can reliably identify those people who have par¬
ticular episodes that are similar to (but less dramatic than) full¬
blown temporal lobe seizures. These are known as complex partial
epilepticlike experiences (CPELs) and Persinger was able to corre¬
late the tendency to suffer from CPELs with a high score on what
Persinger calls the “temporal lobe” items on the questionnaire.
That much we have already reviewed; what follows now is new.
Persinger used his carefully validated PPI questionnaire on

groups of university students over a period of fifteen years
(between 1982 and 1996). Included in the PPI was item 136: “If
God told me to kill, I would do it in His name”—requiring an
answer “yes” or “no ” Over the fifteen years of the study, among a
total of 1482 university students, the number who answered “yes”
to that item was 7 percent. In other words„out of every hundred
university students, no less than 7 say that they would kill another
person if they were told to by God. Furthermore, that figure of
seven percent was steady over the fifteen years: it did not vary
with political or social climate, or with any variations in the
demographics of the young people who enter university.6
Clearly, this was not a trivial finding, and Persinger followed up
by asking all of the “yes” respondents in a semistructured interview,
whether they really meant to answer “yes.” None of the “yes”
responders were joking. None of them had ticked the “yes” box as
a joke or out of bravado. Typically they said that they felt seriously
about the role of God in their daily lives, and if they really were sure
that God was giving them an instruction, they would obey it.
The correlations of the “yes” answers bear this out, and are
even more thought-provoking. First of all, the tendency to answer
“yes” was higher in males than in females. Perhaps this is not
unexpected, but of all males in the surveys 10 percent answered
“yes” and of all the females 5 percent answered “yes.”
Far more significantly, of the students who went to church
once a month or more, the percentage of “yes” responders rose to
much higher levels. Of the females who went to church once a
week most weeks, the percentage who would kill in Gods name
was 9 percent, but in males it was 25 percent. One quarter of the
men who went to church once a week most weeks said that they
would kill in Gods name.
When factors associated with the temporal lobe are analyzed,
the proportion is even more significant. Of the males who go to
church regularly and who have had a personal and significant
religious experience, no less than 35 percent say they would kill in

Gods name. Of the males who in addition have high scores on the
temporal lobe questions in the PPI, the proportion who would
kill in Gods name rises to 50 percent. Half of all the men who go
to church once a week who have had a religious experience, and
who have high scores on the temporal lobe questions state that
they would kill someone if God told them to do so. Interestingly,
among women with all three of these characteristics, the propor¬
tion was 15 percent.7
There are several important points that need to be made from
these studies carried out over a fifteen-year period. First, they are
reliable in the sense that they are constant from year to year and
did not fluctuate with the economy or with popular political or
social movements. Furthermore, the students who answered “yes”
did genuinely mean that they took the word of God seriously.
Second, the students who answered “yes” are only saying that they
would kill in God’s name and we do not know—fortunately—
whether they actually would commit murder or not.
Third, this finding is not due to a stream of psychopaths irre¬
sistibly drawn by some mysterious attraction to enroll at the Lau-
rentian University! If the “yes” respondents to the question “I
would kill in God’s name” were the sort of people who would kill
under many other circumstances, that would be revealed in other
aspects of their personalities. Persinger administered the well-
known and well-validated personality test, the Minnesota Multi-
phasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI has been in use
for many decades now and tests many aspects of the subject’s per¬
sonality, including depression, hypochondriac tendencies, hys¬
teria, manic tendencies, psychopathic deviancy, social introver¬
sion, paranoia, and schizophrenic indicators. The results of the
students taking the MMPI in Persinger’s studies show no differ¬
ence in any of these scales between the “yes” responders and the
rest of the general population. (In statistical terms, the “yes”
responders were within what is called “two standard deviations of
the mean”—in other words, they came within a range that con¬
tained approximately two-thirds of the population.) These results
are unequivocal. The “yes” responders were not different in any
psychiatrically meaningful way from the general population—
they were not “natural born killers.” The “kill in God’s name” ten¬
dency and the other features ofThe temporal lobe are linked—but
there is no linkage to any other personality defect. This makes the
results even more important.
Finally—and this needs to be stressed—these results do not
suggest that religion itself is a cause of the tendency to kill. Rather,
they suggest that both the tendency to have religious experiences
and the predisposition to kill if told to by God are associated with
an increased sensitivity of the temporal lobe. The low threshold of
the temporal lobe is—as it were—the original culprit, and both
the increased religious observances/experiences and the predis¬
position to kill are manifestations of it.
The central point here is of exceptional importance: enhanced
religiosity is associated with an increased tendency to become
involved in religious-based killing. The close relationship of a
strong religious belief and killings done in the name of religion is
not necessarily a coincidence. In fact, these surveys suggest that
they are both symptoms of the same state of the limbic system.
So, now this leads us to an question of major importance: If
these proportions of university students declare themselves ready
to kill, then why are murders—religious killings in particular—so
relatively rare compared to these numbers? Part of the answer lies
in some regulating and controlling mechanisms, particularly a
part of the brain called the orbito-frontal cortex.
INHIBITION OF THE LIMBIC SYSTEM

BY THE ORBITO-FRONTAL CORTEX
There are many observations from our knowledge of neuro¬

anatomy that may cast important light on the subject of regula-
tion and control of the amygdala and the limbic system. By them¬
selves, they support a general hypothesis concerning the way
aggressive drives are controlled in animals and there may be, as
we shall see, a few pieces of evidence pointing to the same types
of mechanisms in humans, but it needs to be stated clearly that at
present much of what follows is conjectural and could be dis¬
proved in time.
It is known and accepted that the amygdala (the two amyg¬
daloid nuclei which form part of the limbic system) are associated
with aggression, and with the way we respond to other peoples
emotions. Many studies demonstrate that people who have suf¬
fered damage to the amygdala in early life have severe social
behavioral problems and may be very aggressive.8 In laboratory
animals, stimulation of the amygdaloid nuclei is associated with
many types of aggressive behavior. It is also known that the amyg¬
dala can be inhibited by a stream of signals from an area of cere¬
bral cortex; the general area is known as the prefrontal cortex.
One particular part of the prefrontal cortex, the area located just
above the eye socket or orbit, is called the orbito-frontal cortex
and is well recognized as an inhibitor—or controller or moder¬
ator, perhaps—of the amygdala and aggression.
Even more significantly, failure or underactivity of the orbito-
frontal cortex or in neighboring areas of the frontal cortex have
been noted and observed in association with human aggression.
One of the earliest and most well-known cases was that of the
nineteenth-century railway worker Phineas Gage. The history of
his case is part of the background teaching of neuroanatomy for
every medical student. Gage was using a tamping iron to tamp an
explosive charge when it detonated accidentally and the tamping
iron was fired upward suddenly into his face. It entered his eye
socket and went upward through the front part of his brain,
destroying a large amount of the brain tissue in the frontal lobes
and then exiting through the skull. Everyone expected him to die
shortly afterward, but with excellent medical care he survived. For
the rest of his life after the accident, lacking most of the frontal
lobes of his brain, his behavior was quite different from his accus¬
tomed pattern before the accident. His memory was unaffected
and he had no seizures, but he was more aggressive in his
behavior, he swore more often, was inclined to pick arguments
and fights, and was generally more “upbeat” and what we would
now call “disinhibited .” These results, caused by losing the frontal
lobes of the brain, were the main inspiration in the neurosurgical
operation called prefrontal leukotomy in which parts of the
frontal lobe were deliberately cut or removed as a treatment for
depression (before effective antidepressants had been developed).
Hence the Gage data suggested that the frontal lobes have a
moderating or regulating effect on aggressive drives, and this is in
keeping with much animal data since.
Another extremely well-known example is the case of Charles
Whitman, a young man who went up a clock tower in Austin,
Texas, in 1966 and shot and killed twelve passersby and injured
thirty-two more before being killed himself. The results of the
autopsy on Whitman showed an unexpected finding. There was a
brain tumor—a glioma (or cancer)—in the deep posterior part of
his right temporal lobe, relatively close to the amygdaloid nucleus.
Of course it is not known whether the presence of this tumor
had anything to do with his violent and murderous outburst.
However, it is known, as stated above, that the amygdala, part of
the limbic system, is the main center mediating aggression, and
that electrical stimuli from the cortex inhibit the amygdala, and
thus reduce aggressive behavior. It is possible—but not by any
means certain—that the tumor in Whitmans case was in the
appropriate position to interfere with the cortex’s ability to
inhibit the amygdala. In other words, the tumor might have made
his aggression more difficult to control by his rational processes.9
There are other studies based on modern scanning tech¬
niques of the brain—for example, the magnetic resonance
imaging or MRI scan—that also suggest a connection between
flaws in the prefrontal cortex and abnormal behavior. For

example, one study of twenty-one men who admitted (in strict
confidence) to having committed violent crimes had structural
deficiency—shrinkage—of the prefrontal cortex by up to 14 per¬
cent compared to normal seen on their brain MRI scans.10
Another study showed that deficiencies of the hippocampus—an
area adjacent to the amygdala—seen on MRI scans were associ¬
ated with increased tendency to psychopathic personality traits
among alcoholics. It is important to point out that this is an area
of very active research and some controversy. Some neuroscien¬
tists, such as fames Blair, are proponents of the idea that the
amygdala—and damage to the amygdala—are of prime impor¬
tance in producing a propensity to aggression. Other scientists
hold that the primary defect is the failure of the orbito-frontal
cortex controlling the amygdala. Of course it is quite possible that
both are correct, and that normal behavior—that is, the absence
of psychopathic tendencies—depends on an undamaged amyg¬
dala that produces normal responses to emotion, and a fully func¬
tioning orbito-frontal cortex (and perhaps other parts of the
cortex in the same region) that provides the input of rational
thought and conscious decision making to the limbic system and
the amygdala. At present, the data from neuroscience are consis¬
tent with this hypothesis, but do not yet prove it conclusively.
These and other observations suggest then—but do not
prove—that areas of the cerebral cortex inhibit and moderate the
influence of the amygdala, part of the limbic system, and reduce
the drive to aggressive behavior. Some people, we conjecture, may
be born with particularly under-active orbito-frontal cortex areas
and so may be less able to control and restrain their aggressive
urges and propensity to commit murder, and others may have
damage or hypersensitivity of the amygdala. Some, of course, may
have both. Of course this does not mean that all acts of murder
can be explained by structural problems in the brain, but it does
mean that some people who have such flaws may have a serious
propensity—may be preprogrammed or hardwired—to commit

aggressive acts.
Persinger expressed the wider implications of these observa¬
tions when he wrote (perhaps a little sweepingly):
Although wars may be driven by economic and political vari¬

ables, the capacity to maintain the group dynamics is strongly
determined by the manipulation of religious beliefs. Religious
belief systems, which could be considered the social represen¬
tation of normal individual egocentricism, encourage an asso¬
ciation between personal immortality and the total validity of
the cultures god. The discrimination of signs particularly if
they are paired with religious beliefs can be and have been
interpreted as justifications for killing other human beings
during periods of economic or social uncertainty.11
This is, of course, science in its infancy. We simply do not have, as

yet, the scientific data—or even the vocabulary—to make more
definitive or conclusive statements, so we cannot go any further
along that path at the moment. Still, these early results are signif¬
icant and genuinely thought-provoking.
THE MIND OF GOD, OR THE GOD OF MIND?
THE BICAMERAL MIND
Before we leave this subject, it is worth highlighting an important

way in which these results link up with some earlier theories
about the way the human mind works.
In 1962 Julian Jaynes, a scientist (and historian and thinker),
popularized the idea that our minds all work in a “right-brain-
left-brain” manner.
Of course the fact that the human brain consists of two halves
had been known for millennia, but Jaynes examined the differing
and complementary activities of the two halves and backed up his

view with neurological data as well as archeological and historical
evidence. InThe Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind, Jaynes came to some startling conclusions.
He suggested that consciousness—that is, awareness of one’s
self as a person and personality—did not evolve steadily or even
early in humankind’s history. Jaynes suggested that what we nowa¬
days regard as “our own thoughts” were originally perceived by the
person as voices coming from the spirits of their dead ancestors.
Jaynes proposed that thoughts originating in the right side of the
brain crossed over into the left where they were not recognized as
the person’s own, but seemed to arrive from outside.
The neurological facts and theories which underpin the idea
of transfer from one side to the other are widely known and now
accepted. Perhaps some of Jaynes’s historical data are more con¬
troversial (he believed that the use of different words for soul or
spirit or mind showed that consciousness “arrived” quite sud¬
denly in early Greek times), but the overall concept of the two-
chambered (bicameral) mind sending information from one side
to the other was—and is—of great importance. Furthermore, the
idea that some complex thoughts and experiences “arrive” at areas
of the cerebral cortex where they are interpreted in the light of the
person’s previous experience is an important one, and was at the
time truly revolutionary. It is highly likely that many of the expe¬
riences that arrive in this way may originate not merely in the
opposite cortex but probably in the limbic system—and every¬
thing we have been discussing above suggests that the brain is
organized in a way that makes this likely.
BEHAVIOR AND THE LIMBIC SYSTEM
Taken together, the experiments of Penfield, Persinger, and many

others are of exceptional importance because they show that the
limbic system, including the temporal lobes and the amygdala, are
crucial factors in many complex experiences, feelings, and some

aspects of behavior.
In particular, the experience of being close to, or in the com¬
pany of, an external benign intelligence—whether it is a God or
an alien—is one of these experiences and can be produced by
electric stimulation of the brain itself, or by special magnetic
fields applied over the skull.
Now, this does not, of course, prove that the presence of God
is merely or entirely a property of a piece of brain tissue. In them¬
selves, these results cannot and do not prove that God does not
exist or that the concept of God is simply a product of the brain.
After all, almost any subjective sensation can be produced by
stimulation of the correct part of the brain, and this does not
negate the real experience when it happens. For example, if a
person s occipital lobes are stimulated electrically, that individual
will report seeing a bright light. Of course, at that moment, there
was no bright light—there was only an electrical stimulation of
the occipital lobes. The fact that stimulation of this area of the
brain produces the experience of seeing a light does not mean
“there is no such thing as a light.” When, in the ordinary way, a
person sees a bright light that is flashed in front of them, the light
creates electrical signals in the retina which travel to the occipital
lobes. The individual then interprets those signals as being evi¬
dence that a light has flashed on somewhere in the outside world
in front of their eyes. The fact that the same interpretation can
also be produced by direct stimulation of the occipital lobes does
not disprove the existence of flashing lights.
The same is true of the right temporal lobe and the experience
of God. When the temporal lobe is stimulated, the person experi¬
ences God. This does not prove conclusively that there is no such
thing as God; it is simply telling us something about the way our
brains are designed, and that fact in itself is neither bad nor good.
Perhaps another example may illustrate this point even more
clearly, and may also support the idea that knowing more about
our brain’s design neither belittles us nor aggrandizes our sense of

reality and our consciousness.
This is an illusion that is very well known, and is often used
as a party trick: Ask a volunteer to cross his or her middle finger
over their index finger (as in the time-honored gesture of hoping
for something). Then get them to close their eyes. Then slide a
pencil along the V-shaped crook of their crossed fingers back and
forth a few times (see figure 1). Ask them what they feel: is there
one pencil making the movement or two pencils? If they have
their eyes closed, it will feel to them as if there are two pencils.
This is a simple illusion and it is caused by the fact that the
brain interprets information from the outside surface of two fin¬
gers in a certain way. Normally (that is, when your fingers are not
crossed) when the brain receives “something is touching skin” sig¬
nals from the thumb-side of the index finger and the ring-finger
side of the middle finger, it means that there are two “somethings”
in the outside world, each making contact with a finger at the
same moment. When a person crosses his or her fingers, the brain
cannot override that impression with the new piece of informa¬
tion that the fingers are crossed. Hence it interprets the signals as
a two-pencil situation. It cannot do anything else—it’s the way
the brain is hardwired.
This illusion is based on a simple fact of human physiology.
It is not derogatory and it does not challenge our concept of free
will or suggest that our brains are faulty or malfunctioning. It is
simply a feature in the design of the brain and an idiosyncrasy of
the way our neural system is set up.
Just as important, the universality of this perception does not
imply or create a new reality. The fact that every single human
being feels as if there are two pencils there does not mean that
there are actually two pencils there. It simply shows that “being
human” means that when your fingers are crossed you will per¬
ceive one pencil as two. It is a fact of perception, not a statement
about a new form of reality.
Figure 1
Ask volunteer to cross Slide a pencil in the "V" of the

middle finger over index fingers and ask if person feels
finger and close their eyes. one pencil or two.
Exactly the same is true of all illusions: optical illusions such

as mirages are good examples. It is now known that the layers of
the air above a flat surface in hot sunshine—a tarmac or a desert,
for example—undergo what is called a temperature inversion. A
layer of particularly hot air very close to the ground (air which is
relatively lighter) becomes trapped beneath the slightly cooler
and denser air above. This situation—lighter air trapped below
heavier air—is called a temperature inversion. Because the layers
of air have difference densities, the boundary between them acts
as a lens and bends the light from the sky above back to the
observer. The observer s eyes have no way of telling that this light
did, in fact, originate in the sky: it appears to him or her as if the
light is originating from a source on (or even below) the ground.
To the observer, then, the effect is like seeing a patch of ground
reflecting the sky; this pattern only makes sense if you are looking
at a lake or a pond or a patch of reflecting liquid. In other words,

when there is a temperature inversion, an observer sees a pattern
of light that can only be interpreted as “water” or “oasis” or some¬
thing similar. That is how a mirage occurs.
We all experience that effect when we are exposed to those
physical circumstances. Even a photo of that particular area at
that moment will clearly show the mirage. The mirage exists
because that is the way the optical analysis of the human brain
works. It is incapable of distinguishing between light reflected in
a temperature inversion from the light reflected from a lake or
oasis. Every human will see the mirage, but that does not mean
that every human brain is somehow faulty, nor does it mean that
there is actually an oasis there. The perception tells us something
about the way our brains work. The illusion—whether it is a
mirage or a “two-pencil” trick—is telling us something about par¬
ticular patterns of perception built into our brains. It is telling us
something about the way human beings interpret the world.
The same is true with all the temporal lobe data we have been
discussing in this chapter. These observations do not demean or
insult human minds, and they do not prove that we are faulty
machines or that we are constructed on a bedrock of neurological
errors and glitches. These data—like the pencil trick—tell us
something about the way our brains are hardwired to interpret
the world. The observations tells us something about the patterns
that are built into our limbic systems in the same way the pencil
trick tells us something about our tactile sensory inputs.
It is important for us all to acknowledge these facts about
ourselves and our brains—we are built to think “two pencils”
when our fingers are crossed, or to think “oasis” when we see a
mirage—and that doesn’t matter very much. We are also built to
readily perceive the presence of an external intelligence and other
extracorporeal phenomena, and in the vast majority of situations
that doesn’t matter much either, but in some circumstances it can
matter a great deal (as we will discuss in chapter 6). The impor-
tant point is to acknowledge the observations and accept what

they are telling us about our brains modus operandi. We cant
change it, but the more we learn about it the better for all of us.
NOT “JUST” ELECTRICITY AND CHEMICALS
One further point that needs to be stressed before we end this dis¬
cussion—and it is of great importance. The general hypothesis
about the right temporal lobe set out in this section does not
imply that human imagination is devoid of spirituality or
meaning. Emotions and experience are certainly created and
mediated by—to some extent—the right temporal lobe. But this
does not mean that spirituality or experiences of nature (or any¬
thing else) are “just” the temporal lobe or “nothing but a low
voltage passing through an area of brain tissue.” Scientific data are
no more than—and no less than—that: they are scientific data. By
contrast, an experience is what the person who experiences it
feels. There is no scientific proof that Rembrandt was a better
painter than his peers, or that Mozart was a true genius. There is
no scientific proof because there cannot be such. Science is about
observable, reproducible, and falsifiable facts about the physical
world. By contrast experience is interpretive—and experience is
what a person makes or constructs of incoming data. It is cer¬
tainly comprised of electric signals and neurotransmitter mole¬
cules, but it is not “merely” electricity and chemistry. An experi¬
ence is an experience and not “merely” electricity, any more than
a house made of bricks is “merely” bricks. There is a great differ¬
ence between a pile of bricks and a house—that difference
includes elements of architecture and artistry and esthetic deci¬
sions and so on. Similarly there is a great difference between the
building blocks of neurochemical transmission in the brain and
an experience. Reductionism is not a valid conclusion of these
observations we have been discussing here.
That conclusion—eschewing reductionism—is true of every-
thing we have been discussing in this chapter. If the limbic system

including the right temporal lobe is the main pathway for spiri¬
tual experience, this does not remove the significance, the beauty,
the meaning or the value of spiritual experience (or of any of the
artworks inspired by it). It is an explanation of the mechanism—
and is not a dismissive summary of the result.
The experiments of Drs. Jackson, Penfield, Persinger, and
others that I have been discussing lead us to an important—and
inescapable—conclusion. The structure of the human brain is
such that experiences of God and heaven are hardwired into it.
Our brains lead us to readily undergo experiences that we have
chosen to call God, spirituality, oneness with the universe, or sim¬
ilar words and names.
If the limbic system is activated by means of the right-sided
temporal lobe, the person will have an experience of the spiritual
or divine type. God is literally a state of mind.
It must be emphasized yet again that this sequence of discov¬
eries and experiments does not necessarily mean, or conclusively
prove, that God is only or merely a state of mind. That is an
entirely different subject, and beyond the mandate of this book.
As I have said several times, this book is not about the existence
or the nonexistence of god; it is about the effects of a basic human
instinct, the need to believe. I need to state again clearly that—
even with the conclusions reached by Persinger’s research—it is
still possible that there exists an external deity, a God, outside
human life, and that contact with this external deity requires a
certain state of the recipients mind. It is possible also that the
state necessary to make that contact is (fortunately for the
believer) hardwired into the design of the human brain, and that
only those persons who maintain their temporal lobes “tuned” to
receive communications from God will actually receive them.
According to this hypothesis, the nonbeliever will be oblivious of
Gods messages, in the same way in which a radio will not receive
signals from a radio station if it is not tuned to that frequency (or
if it is switched off). This hypothesis—that there is a God and that

humans require a specific set of neurological settings to hear from
that God—is not impossible, and it cannot be disproved.
These experiments and studies taken together offer a simple
and clear explanation of why humans throughout our history
have so often felt themselves in The presence of a God. The exper¬
iments add up to an unarguable account for the way humans have
spiritual experiences, but they cannot prove conclusively that
there is no God. The existence of God remains a possibility,
although of course in my personal view it is highly unlikely.
Once we realize that fact, we can still decide for ourselves
whether there is—or is not—something or someone out there
who communicates with us when we are in the appropriate state.
However, we all—believers in an external deity and nonbe¬
lievers—need to acknowledge the fact that the human brain is
designed and prepatterned to tell us that there is an external god,
whether there is one or not.
We also need to acknowledge the fact that we all develop
varying degrees of sensitivity of the temporal lobes—some of us
are highly predisposed to religious experience and some are not.
Similarly, there are almost certainly differences in the ability of
other parts of the brain—particularly the frontal lobes—to con¬
trol or moderate temporal lobe and limbic drives. Biological vari¬
ability being what it is, there are some individuals who have
highly sensitive temporal lobes and poor or hypofunctioning cor¬
tical control systems. That combination is, there is reason to
believe, dangerous—in the sense of being highly predisposed to
religious aggression. Of course, this type of research is still in its
infancy, and we need to find out much more about these topics.
Even so, the data presented above do give an inkling of potential
explanations of some of the phenomena we have been discussing.
In conclusion, it is arguable that—as was stated during the
birth of modern nuclear physics—our dramatic progress in under¬
standing the basic nature of the brain is like seeing into the mind
of God. Since the existence of God—including the mind of God—

is not a matter that can be established or disproved as an objective
fact, that statement of course may or may not be true. However, as
we have seen in this chapter, it has been demonstrated, unequivo¬
cally and unambiguously, that the experience of God is built into
the human mind. The God of mind is undeniable; the mind of
God will forever remain a matter of personal belief.
NOTES
1. A quick note of explanation: Ninety percent of humans

(approximately) are right handed, and the right hand of the body is con¬
trolled by the left side of the brain, which also contains the centers for
speech and writing. Some people are left handed but the majority of left
handed people still have the centers for speech and writing contained in
the left side of the brain (and not in the right as you might expect). Only
a small percentage of left-handed people actually have the centers for
speech and writing contained in the RIGHT side of the brain. In all
cases, it does appear—as far as we can tell—that when it comes to the
temporal lobes, in the vast majority of cases, the left temporal lobe is
associated with words, and the right temporal lobe is associated with
experiences and spirituality as we are discussing here.
2. From Fedor Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences (Freeport,
N.Y.: J. Middleton Murray, 1971), quoted in “The Epilepsy of Dosto¬
evsky,” S. Murray and T. J. Murray in The Nova Scotia Medical Bulletin
(August 1980): 90-94.
3. We know a little about this process, too. It is called recruit¬
ment—and the more nerves that are recruited into an electrical dis¬
charge, the higher the chance of the discharge resulting in a seizure. In
fact, studies by many neuroscientists (in line with Persingers studies)
show that if a large percentage of nerve cells become recruited compa¬
rable to a big avalanche—in fact over 20 percent of those nerve cells in
the area—a seizure will occur. If more than 7 percent or so are recruited,
the result is a miniseizure—which is not recognizable as a true (or
major) seizure by the patient or the doctor. In the temporal lobe area
these are called TLEPS—they are recognizable on the EEG and the
patient experiences certain types of episodes at the time. CPES are a sign
of an irritable or sensitive temporal lobe.
4. M. A. Persinger, S. G. Tiller, and A. Koren, “Experimental simu¬
lation of a haunt experience and elicitation of paroxysmal electroen-
cephalographic activity by transcerebral complex magnetic fields:
induction of a synthetic ‘ghost,’ ” Perceptual and Motor Skills 90 (2000):
659-74
5. S. A. Koren and M. A. Persinger, “Analysis of the Aum Shin-
rikyo ‘Brain Stimulation Device,’ ” unpublished paper, August 1997.
6. As with all scientific studies, these studies need repetition in
other research institutions to confirm the incidence of “yes” responders
in the MPI questionnaire.
7. This analysis of his original published data was performed for
me by Michael Persinger (personal communication). As mentioned in
the previous endnote, these studies will require repetition at another
research institute.
8. A key worker in this area is Antonio Damasio. S. D. Anderson,
A. Rechara, I. L. Damasio, D. Tritnel, and A. Damasio, Nature Neuro¬
science 2 (1999): 1032-1037. An excellent overview is in Nature 410
(2001): 296-98.
9. J. Martinus, “Homicide of an Agressive Adolescent Boy, With
Right Temporal Lobe Lesion: A Case Report,” Neuroscience and Biobe¬
havior Reviews 7 (1983): 419-22.
10. A. Raine et al., “Reduced Prefontal Gray Matter Volume and
Reduced Autonomic Activity in Antisocial Personality Disorders,”
Archives of General Psychiatry 57, no. 2 (2000): 119-27.
11. M. A. Persinger, “ ‘I would kill in God’s name’: role of sex,
weekly church attendance, report of a religious experience and limbic
lability,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 85 (1997): 128-30.
Part Two
Belief and Behavior
111
V
Chapter 5
The Behavior of Groups
THE SPECIES, THE HERD,

THE TRIBE, AND THE CROWD
t is obvious to all of us that we human beings behave dif¬

ferently when we are in a crowd. Something occurs—or
more probably a series of things occurs—that causes indi¬
viduals to submerge some of their individual decisions,
choices, and doubts in a form of communal behavior, and
that as a result a crowd is capable of performing actions that
individuals are not. The nature of the behavior of groups or
crowds is of considerable relevance to this discussion of the
evolution and function of religion in human communities
since religions develop early in any particular people, com¬
munity, or group, and radically affect the behavior and des¬
tinies of vast numbers of people.
Yet, although the difference in behavior that occurs
when we are in large groups is obvious, and although it been
113
observed and noted for—literally—millennia, it is only recently

that we have begun to understand even a little about the mecha¬
nisms involved, as we shall discuss in this chapter.
We can start this discussion of group behavior with a very
brief survey of the role of biological processes in keeping a group
of individuals of the same species together. Then we can go on to
look at the influences of certain vestiges—or rather, evolved
refinements—of those biological patterns in human behavior.
But before we do those things, we need to review briefly the sci¬
ence of a fundamental characteristic seen in the behavior of all
higher animals: we need to discuss the biology of aggression.
AGGRESSION
Aggression is a term used by biologists to describe particular pat¬

terns of behavior exhibited by animals under specific circum¬
stances. By and large, the patterns that we call aggression are
exhibited when an individual of a species is defining and
defending his—usually “his,” sometimes “her”—territory or off¬
spring (or both), usually against another individual of the same
species, occasionally against a predator.
In nonbiological everyday parlance we used the word aggres¬
sion to imply anger or a motive underlying an attack on someone
or something. In biology the meaning of the word is much more
specific, and the pioneering work in this area is undoubtedly that
of the biologist Konrad Lorenz.1 Lorenz was the first to clearly
represent aggression as a pattern of behavior seen in all higher
animals which serves several very important functions. It serves
to space the individuals of the species out across the habitat, max¬
imizing the distribution of the food supply and ensuring that as
little as possible of the available food will be ignored. It also serves
in the role of sexual selectivity—so that only the stronger, braver
individuals will win an aggressive encounter and then mate with
the females. This will increase the chance of the offspring being
THE BEHAVIOR OF GROUPS 115
strong and brave—in other words, the aggressive encounter acts

as an agent of natural selection. Interestingly, there are many
observations that support the linkage between aggressive encoun¬
ters and sexual activity. In snakes, for example, when two males
fight, the winner will often indulge in sexual activity with a female
immediately afterward whereas the loser will usually be sexually
inactive for several days. Just as an aside, we are all aware of this
same linkage in humans. Countless novels and films attest to the
maxim “To the victor go the spoils”—and the spoils almost
always include sex. There is a charming and unforgettable note in
the diary of the Duchess of Marlborough: “My lord returned from
the war today and pleasured me twice in his top-boots.”2
Aggression—throughout the animal kingdom with the
exception of the human species—is rarely associated with killing.
When animals kill other animals they almost always do so for
food. Furthermore, an animal killing prey for food does not
exhibit any of the behavior patterns associated with aggression.
Lions, for example, when stalking a prey, have an entirely different
body language and do not show any the snarling and spitting pat¬
terns which they show in aggressive encounters.
Aggressive behavior patterns are recognized as such by other
members of the same species—which is why they act as patterns
that separate and space out individuals across the territory. These
innate behavior patterns also include behaviors that indicate sub¬
mission—so that not only is an aggressive signal clearly recog¬
nized but a signal of submission is also unmistakable. For
example, Niko Tinbergen showed that black-headed gulls have a
very intricate system of settling border disputes. When two males
are defining a border between their two territories, they honk at
each other and strike aggressive poses as they move back and
forth over the border area. When one of the males feels that he is
now out of his own territory and inside his opponents land, he
shows that by adopting a submissive posture. Tinbergen showed
that this posture—of dipping the head down and looking up at
the dominant male—is a piece of mimicry. The submissive male

in fact mimics exactly the positioning and angle of the head of a
baby gull in the nest. In other words, the submitting male is basi¬
cally saying, “Stop being aggressive now—you wouldn’t be angry
with your own kid, would you?”
These signals—one might £ven call them rituals—thus serve
a clear function of settling a dispute with only a slight chance of
physical damage to either party. In fact, after the resolution of the
dispute, these encounters can serve as the basis for bonding
between individuals. Animals after an aggressive encounter can be
seen to be displaying imitations or echoes of part of the aggres¬
sion-submission repertoire as a bond between individuals. It is
believed that humans do the same when they shake hands. The
gesture originated—it is thought—as a signal demonstrating the
absence of aggressive weapons. The absence of aggression com¬
municates the intention of being friendly.
Hence, aggression—in the biological sense of the word—is an
innate or instinctual behavior pattern shared by all higher ani¬
mals, usually exhibited by males and rarely involving serious
injury or death (which, if they were common outcomes, would be
a disadvantage to the survival of the herd). Aggressive behavior
patterns often become symbolic—the animals hiss and spit, for
example, without making actual bodily contact—and thus reduce
the chance of damage yet further.
Unfortunately humans are different, and are the only animal
that regularly kills large numbers of the same species. Other animals
kill to eat (without aggression), and show aggression (without
killing) to claim territory or mates or to defend their young. Humans
have an unfortunate tendency to link aggression with killing.
We shall discuss later what happens to aggression when ail of
the available environment is fully exploited and the aggressive
behavior patterns cannot serve to space individuals out because
there is no more space available. But for the moment, we need to
have this very basic understanding of the patterns of behavior
used as displays of aggression in mind as we consider the ways in

which animals organize themselves into groups or herds.
Aggression—in the sense in which Lorenz and many subse¬
quent biologists use the word—is thus a basic trait that is
common to most of the higher animals, and the underlying prin¬
ciple is a very important one. There is a continuum extending
from innate behavior patterns which are not learned (and do not
therefore require conscious thought) up to socialized signals
which do require some conscious thought in their performance.
Precisely how those elements interact is still a matter of con¬
siderable debate and controversy. In very simple terms this is the
familiar “nature-versus-nurture” debate, and over the last few
decades, it is fair to say that there have been basically two different
schools of thought. Some suggest that most of human behavior is
derived directly from animal instincts (“nature”) that have
evolved as survival mechanisms, and others (the “nurture”
school) suggest that the evolution of rational thought has
changed everything and governs most of what we do. Probably,
we now see the truth as a synthesis of both these views—it is not
a case of “either-or” but of “both-and”—-even though the exact
areas of overlap are still undetermined. Some of what we do
springs from innate patterns of behavior, and some is modified or
even abolished by conscious thought.
From the point of view of the central theme of its book, we
only read to accept that there are elements in our behavior that
originated as innate patterns—and that displays of aggression are
inbuilt and are common to all higher animals. We only need to
accept—at this point in the discussion—that there are such things
as innate or inbuilt patterns of behavior, and have that thought in
the background as we examine the various factors that influence
behavior, including innate drives and conscious thoughts.
Now we can go on to survey the different factors—which
include behavior—that serve to bind groups or herds of animals
together.
GROUP COHESION: VISIBLE AND AUDIBLE SIGNALS
We know a little about the main mechanisms involved in keeping

groups and communities together, although what we might call
the biology of social adhesion is still in its infancy. Let us start at
a very general level by considering the ways in which animals rec¬
ognize other individuals of the same species or grouping.
Obviously physical appearance is by far the most significant
factor in the recognition, for example, of a mouse by another
mouse of the same species and genus. Clearly all animals can
immediately register large-scale differences between themselves
and others. Instantaneously a mouse knows when it is looking at
another mouse, and it behaves differently when looking at a
predator such as a carnivorous cat or a snake. Members of the same
species recognize each other by several different mechanisms, of
which the most obvious is the gross visual appearance—size, shape,
color—of the other individual. If that registers as another indi¬
vidual of the same species, the next level of recognition would
involve fairly large-scale behavioral patterns such as speed of move¬
ment, style and direction of movement, and so on. But how do they
know that the other animal that they are looking at is one of “us”?
Konrad Lorenz investigated this and termed the learning
process by which an animal discovers what it looks like as “im¬
printing.” He showed that in most species there is a period of
imprinting for a short time after birth during which the newborn
of a species learns what it looks like from the appearance of the
adult looking after it. If it is a newborn goose, then it imprints on
the mother goose who is looking after it, but if the caretaker hap¬
pens to be an adult of a different species—for instance a biologist
like Konrad Lorenz himself—then it will assume that that is what
it looks like.
The old adage, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and
says quack,’ it is a duck,” has a grain of truth in it as regards the
coarser features involved in recognition for the vast majority of
animals. But the real principle underlying it is “If my mother

looks like a duck, walks like a duck and says ‘quack’ then Em a
duck.” What is true of other species is also true of humans in this
regard. Obviously humans are also capable of recognizing other
humans—though despite legends of Romulus and of enfants
sauvages we do not really know whether a newborn human can
imprint on another species or not.
At a finer level of detail, more minor behavioral patterns are
important in recognition and cohesion. For example, does the
approaching stranger change direction or speed of movement
when coming closer? Does the approaching individual hide? Does
the other individual show any special behavioral signs associated
with the group or herd (for example, rabbits signal the presence
of danger by the famed raising of the white tail or scut—other
rabbits innately recognize this behavior pattern as an important
component of herd or group behavior)? Recognizing those
behavior patterns in other individuals of the same appearance is
part of the system by which social animals—including rabbits
and humans—cohere in communities.
Imprinting, then, in some species, seems to be a learned
attribute. However, some behavioral patterns that depend on
recognition are not. One well-known example is the recognition
of a hawk in the sky by a newborn chick on the ground, which
immediately seeks cover. The chick (the potential prey) has never
seen a hawk (the predator) before, yet responds in a way that
enhances its chances of survival. There would be very little oppor¬
tunity for a learned response in such a situation, since, if no pro¬
tective reflex existed, the first time a chick saw a hawk would
probably be the last.
Another example, which may perhaps underlie more social¬
ized and sophisticated behavior patterns in human societies, is
the recognition of blood. Recognition of a dead member of the
same species and, in addition, recognizing the significance of
blood on and around the body would be a very useful survival
trait. An antelope, let’s say, that can distinguish another antelope

“just sleeping” from one that is motionless and covered with
sploshes of red blood would have a considerable survival advan¬
tage. We might assume, although we do not know, that the avoid¬
ance behavior—running away from a dead individual covered
with blood—is at least partly, innate and could be termed an
instinct or even a reflex. v
It is also possible, though also not proven, that as a result of

that reflex, the color of blood has an inbuilt “warning” significance.
As humans—equipped with conscious and rational thought
though we are—it is possible that our response to the color red is
derived from an instinct, not from an esthetic choice. Similarly, ani¬
mals that are hunters and gatherers might have innate drives to find
areas where foliage and vegetation are abundant. Green areas are
more likely to offer a good food supply than brown ones (deserts or
scorched areas, for example). Hence, it is possible that the color
green also has an innate signaling value, and that again humans are
not simply behaving in response to an esthetic choice when they
move toward a green signal. In other words, the symbolic value of
red and green—in traffic lights, for example—might not be purely
arbitrary, or a simple matter of convention or esthetics, but might
be derived from innate reflexes which had survival value.
At the same level, in the realm of audible signals, it is possible
to think of audible signaling systems in a similar way. We have
known for a long time that the different songs of birds carry con¬
siderable amounts of information. One particular song, for
example, may transmit not only the information “I am a thrush”
but also “This is my territory, keep out.” Similarly, mating calls
carry information about the availability of the singer for repro¬
ductive purposes. It is quite likely that our verbal language is
based on similar species-specific signaling systems, but at a far
higher level of sophistication and subtlety made possible by our
neocortex. Nevertheless, all our verbal communications with each
other are carrying a basal message “I am a human” and function
as herd glues even while at higher levels the words may identify—
and even split off—factions of that herd.
The points being made here are both simple and funda¬
mental—animals recognize their own kind not only by physical
appearance but also by behavior, and although some of these are
imprinted after birth, some crucial elements of that recognition
and subsequent behavior are probably inbuilt and inherited. Fur¬
thermore, if some of this is true of humans as well, it is important
within the context of this book. Some of our own behavior (of
which perhaps traffic lights might be but one small example) may
be based on innate patterns.
CHEMICAL SIGNALS
So far, then, we have discussed physical characteristics, the coarser

behavioral traits and reflexes, and some of the finer behavioral
patterns. But there are other mechanisms that cause individuals
to respond to each other—to “tune into” each other’s mood or
state—and they are chemical signals. Pheromones are basically
long-distance hormones. Whereas hormones are secreted by spe¬
cific organs in the body (glands), travel through the blood stream
(or part of it), and produce an effect on another organ a distance
away, pheromones are secreted onto the skin and produce
changes not in a different organ in the same individual, but in dif¬
ferent neighboring individuals. There has been evidence for the
use of chemical signals for many decades—for example, the paths
that ants mark out are known to consist of tiny droplets of chem¬
ical signals, but in higher animals pheromones can have much
more sophisticated functions. In mice, for example, it is known
that certain pheromones can produce aggressive behavior, and
others can produce mating behavior. In other words, a mouse that
is quiescent and is given no other external stimuli can receive a
small amount of pheromone and will respond with either aggres¬
sive or mating behavior.
Although we don’t find this fact comfortable, we know that

pheromones can have certain effects in human beings, too. The
famous McClintock observations in the 1960s showed that ado¬
lescent girls who have been to rock concerts on the same date all
menstruated at the same time after it. Similarly, women in close
contact with each other—in .dormitories, for example—men¬
struate in synchronization with each other. Furthermore,
pheromones are species specific—they act as signals only to ani¬
mals of the same species that have receptors specifically designed
to respond to them. Hence, humans don’t feel a sense of panic
when they are in the presence of a startled rabbit—though
another rabbit would surely undergo a panic reaction.
At the moment, although we can speculate about the ways in
which pheromones might influence the behavior of our neighbors
in many ways, the hard evidence is still quite scanty. It is likely that
pheromones play a part in the attraction of one human being to
another (particularly at rock concerts). Similarly, pheromones may
play a part in influencing crowd behavior toward aggression,3 and
perhaps panic (although this may be less likely since visual and
auditory signals are faster and more rapidly transmitted).
Furthermore, there are some facts of neuroanatomy that sup¬
port the idea that pheromones may influence emotions. The nose
is of course the area with which chemicals in the air first make
contact. The nerves that carry messages from the nasal lining (the
mucosa) are the olfactory nerves which run from the nose up to
the underside of the frontal areas of the brain to a neurological
processing station known as the olfactory bulb. It has been known
for a long time—though the function is still undetermined—that
the olfactory bulbs have a richer network of nerves connecting
them to the deep aspects of the temporal lobes (and therefore the
limbic system) than any other cranial nerve input stations. In
other words, the sense of smell has a more direct and a richer con¬
nection to the limbic system than any other sense. As yet, we do
not fully understand the function of this connection. But it is pos-
sible that pheromones have a “royal road” to the emotions—via

the olfactory bulb and the emotions.
Even though this area of human biology is still in its infancy,
it is quite likely that pheromones play a part in inducing coher¬
ence and coordination in human crowds, and act as herd glues in
their own right. Like many of the mechanisms we have been dis¬
cussing—physical appearance factors, reflexes, and behavior pat¬
terns (including visual and auditory stimuli)—pheromones
would almost certainly be undetectable at a conscious level by the
person responding. The individual would probably feel a sense of
attraction or aggression or panic but would not necessarily be
aware of the cause of that emotion, even though he or she might
be aware of the source of the stimuli.
So, if individuals of the same socialized species can recognize
each other, how do they end up living in different communities—
for example, herds? Part of the answer lies in the way a group of
animals recognize an area as their own territory or home.
Again, there are large gaps in our understanding of how pre-
ciselv this works, but research in animal behavior has shown over
the last fifty years and more that two features are common to all
socially oriented animals. Those two essential features are: a recog¬
nition of their own territory and patterns of behavior that demon¬
strate aggression—which are recognized as such by other members
of the species—to keep the communities separated in the habitat.
This subject is of course an entire discipline of biology in its
own right, and scientists such as Konrad Lorenz4 and Niko Tin¬
bergen have pioneered and stimulated enormous quantities of data
in many animal species. As a result of their work, and the work of
hundreds of others, it is now generally accepted that aggression is
common to all socially organized animals and serves the function
of distributing communities of animals across a habitat, thus max¬
imizing the exploration and utilization of food supplies.
TERRITORY AND TURF: “OURS” VERSUS “THEIRS”
One of the real mysteries of animal behavior is how animals rec¬

ognize or know their own “turf” It is an ability shared by almost
all of the higher animal species, but precisely how it occurs is very
difficult to define.
For an animal to defend its own territory, to return to it and
to show a homing instinct, it must have an ability to recognize its
own home and to—at some level—feel comfortable in its own
territory and less comfortable elsewhere. Again, this is a major
topic in animal ethology, and I cannot pretend to understand all
the current details. It does seem, however, that there are many
mechanisms involved and that different species use different
combinations of them. Much of this still remains to be discov¬
ered, but different animals use combinations of visual signals; dis¬
tributions of different types of plants, temperature variations;
geographical features, including major landmarks, sunlight, and
so on; probably some magnetic variations; and also chemical sig¬
nals, both subtle variations in the environment and chemical
pheromones and other markers that they have placed them¬
selves.5 By some combination of these various mechanisms, an
animal recognizes an area of the habitat as its own home and
defends that area from competing members of its own species by
clear displays of aggression that are innate and not learned. A very
useful and highly entertaining analysis of this topic is Robert
Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative. Although not a biologist him¬
self (he had many careers, including that of playwright, which
shows in his engaging and interesting writing style), he draws on
detailed research studies from many species. The bottom line, as
it relates to the central theme of this book, is a simple one: there
is such a thing as home (and there is no place like it). Although
we do not understand all the mechanisms, animals have the
ability to recognize and defend an area which they regard as
“home turf”
Clearly humans are capable of that as well, but it became of

greater importance about ten thousand years ago. Humans, as all
primates before them, started out as hunter-gatherers, having a
“home territory” in general terms but being basically nomadic,
and depending for their food supply on what they could find in
the area. Then, as we have already discussed, approximately nine
or ten thousand years ago, and at different times in different areas
of the world, humans developed the techniques of cultivation and
became farmers. This change in social organization made the issue
of territory even more crucial than it was before. After all, if one
group of nomadic hunter-gatherers tries to enter another group’s
territory and is rebuffed, they can move on to a different area fairly
easily. But once a community becomes rooted (metaphorically
and literally) by agriculture, their ability to move away is seriously
diminished. A migration would involve loss of all of the agricul¬
tural effort and organization, and runs the serious risk of starva¬
tion for the community. Hence, clearly, agriculture intensifies a
group’s attachment to its own territory.6 So if a group or a tribe
already possesses inbuilt traits that bind them together, if they
have some social cohesion, those ties would intensify considerably
when their survival depends on the land. Undisputed occupancy
of land means the difference between life and death for farmers.
This is where “them versus us” grows in importance.
It is valuable for us to be aware of the different varieties of
animal signals and of the various behavior patterns including
aggression of which they are symbols. There is a continuum from
recognition of another individual as being a member of the same
species, up to—and beyond—recognition of another individual
as a member of the same community. The precise level along this
continuum at which conscious thought becomes involved is at
the moment (and may always be) somewhat controversial.
One final point needs to be stressed before we leave this area
of animal behavior and human prehistory and move to a discus¬
sions of human group behavior and crowds in the recent past. All
animals have the ability to discriminate—to recognize specific

characteristics on one individual that distinguish him or her from
the rest of the group. Of course physical appearance is important
here. For example, humans recognize each others’ faces, many
higher animals in flocks or herds can clearly recognize others, and
in many species (among cattle* for example) mothers can identify
their offspring, probably by a combination of smells and physical
attributes. Distinguishing one individual from the group is an
attribute of the higher mammals, and extends from the physical
attributes to the behavioral ones. We recognize each other by the
way we walk, how we talk, how we stand, what our body language
is like, whether we wave our arms as we talk, whether we have
mobile facial expressions, and so on. Furthermore, I would like to
suggest that this discriminating power may extend beyond visible
appearance and behavior to the content of a persons individual
choices, decisions, and beliefs. I would like to suggest that in some
respects, group cohesion—recognizing and uniting “us” as
opposed to “them”—is another trait of the highly sophisticated
human behavioral repertoire. We like being with fellow humans
of the same species, and feel initially more comfortable with indi¬
viduals who move in the same manner, talk in the same manner,
and—ultimately—think and believe the same way we do. Perhaps
this concept can be described as behavioral “herd glues”—pat¬
terns of behavior that stick members of the group together. It is
possible that the binding together function—from which the
word religion is derived (see page 19)—is an extremely sophisti¬
cated, highly evolved, and partly rationalized herd-glue process
derived from the original basic mechanisms by which groups of
individuals are held together. As I said on page 19, it may be no
coincidence that followers of a religion are termed “adherent”: the
process of sticking together or keeping together the individuals in
a group is of paramount importance.
It needs to be stressed again that the leap from animal behavior
to human conduct is fraught with speculation, but it is helpful to
be aware of the biological background as we move on to discuss an

aspect that has done more than anything to change the course of
human civilization—how we behave when we are in a crowd.
THE CROWD: ITS SIGNALS AND ITS GLUES
We think, speak and write as individuals: but we

make history as crowds.
Robert Buckman
One could legitimately define a crowd as a “herd with attitude”

We all know that a group of people located in the same place is
not necessarily a crowd, and that somehow a form of cohesion—
of uniting—has to occur in the group before we would recognize
it as a crowd. That is what turns a group of people into an “us.” It
is the essential first step in subsequently recognizing or identi¬
fying other people and other crowds as “them.” Although this
process of uniting is of great importance in our social organiza¬
tion and the events of our history we actually know only a little
about the process itself and about the biology of the mechanisms
involved in it. We all know and see it, and we are all familiar with
detailed discussions and portrayals of the phenomena of crowd
behavior, not just in history but also in fiction, in books, plays,
films, and music—but of the biology that underlies what we all
can see, we currently know only a little.
As regards objective descriptions of the patterns of crowd
behavior, a few authors—surprisingly few—have written
coherent and cogent descriptions of crowd behavior and it is
worth summarizing some of their conclusions, even given the fact
that we know so little about the mechanisms involved.
The earliest major work on crowd behavior is the delightful
book by an English scholar (and songwriter) Charles MacKay
(1814-1889). In his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds (1841) he simply recorded what everyone else

at the time was aware of, but never bothered to note.7 He watched
mass movements of the English and of some European and
American people and wrote down what he understood of them.
For example, he recorded the history of a famous economic dis¬
aster called the South Sea Bubble (so named because shares for
the various ventures were sold at South Sea House in London).
The description of crowd emotions starting from totally
unfounded overconfidence followed by hysteria and then panic
would fit quite closely with a chronicle of the 1929 Wall Street
Crash and also has much in common with the slightly more
gradual and less precipitous collapse of high-technology
“dot.com” investments. MacKay also described sudden surges in
various areas of fashion: a European fascination with the style of
beards and its influence on politics, the mania started in Holland
for tulips, and sudden changes in the use of language and slang
phrases (for instance “flaring up” suddenly became a phrase in
vogue). In all of these descriptions, MacKay pointed out the con¬
tagious nature of fashions and emotions in crowds. Trends—in
clothes, language, investments, and the like—suddenly “caught
on” and became “all the rage.” MacKay was, as far as can be estab¬
lished, the first person to highlight and detail the infectious
nature of behavioral changes among crowds.
A few decades later, two physicians added some very cogent
observations to the literature of crowd behavior: one was French
and the other English.
Gustave LeBon (1874-1931) was in many respects the
modern father of crowd psychology. Although he took some of
his thoughts and many observations from others—including his
friend Gabriel Taude, for example—Le Bon was probably the first
to codify the behavior patterns and the components of crowds.
His book was an extraordinary success, published in sixteen lan¬
guages and translations are still in print in many countries. After
the Second World War his work was largely ignored, which—
some authors believe—was due to the unfashionable political

positions that he had espoused.
For all that, in his 1896 book The Crowd: A Study of the Pop¬
ular Mindy LeBon was the first to try and systematically categorize
and catalogue crowd behavior, the nature of crowds, and the fac¬
tors that inspired or molded their behavior.
Le Bon was writing nearly twenty years before the start of the
First World War8 and based his observations and hypotheses not
only on what was going on at that time, but also on what had hap¬
pened in the past. Some of the major phenomena that he analyzed
included: the French Revolution (nearly 150 years previously), the
influence and tremendous popularity of Napoleon, the various and
bitter sectarian wars that had gone on in different areas of Europe,
and many other conflicts and examples of mass behavior and hal¬
lucinations. Nobody before had tried to categorize crowds or to
describe—in general or lay terms—the factors that constitute the
behavior of human groups. By today s standards, much of what Le
Bon said would be deemed politically incorrect—he had very set
ideas about the class structure in Europe in the early twentieth cen¬
tury, for example—but the basic concepts underlying his analysis
of crowds are as important today as they were then. It is therefore
worth detailing many of Le Bons ideas and observations, even
though they may seem obvious to us and even though some of it
lacks what we now term political correctness and delicacy.
Le Bons central thesis was twofold: first that there is a phe¬
nomenon which can be called the collective mind, and second
that when a crowd forms, an essential component is the sug¬
gestibility of its members, producing the ‘"contagion” of ideas,
beliefs, and plans.
Le Bon basically defined a crowd as a group that shared at
some level a communal consciousness. In other words, a crowd,
by his definition, was a group of people that had in common
some psychological features, including thoughts, emotions or
beliefs. This may seem obvious to us today, although I should
point out even some contemporary authors do not include the

criterion of “a collective attitude” in their definition of the word
crowd. In any event, Le Bon stated what perhaps many of have
always known without being specifically conscious of the fact—a
group of people in the same place is not a crowd. Individuals can
be in the same place together^and remain as individuals, gov¬
erning their own behavior by their own choices and decisions. A
group of fifty people on a bus or a coach, or a train carrying hun¬
dreds of commuters, is not necessarily a crowd.
At some point, due to a wide variety or circumstances and
stimuli, an event or series of events occurs that induce the indi¬
viduals in the group to subjugate their own differing individual
decisions and behavioral patterns into a common frame, and they
become a crowd. The actual mechanisms by which this occurs, as
Le Bon was the first to point out, are unconscious. His language,
or rather that of his translator, is more impressive: “A numerically
strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a
crowd.”9 The individuals do not decide one by one to become a
crowd without reference to other people. There is an unconscious
process—but not necessarily a mystical one even though we know
very little about it so far—by which individuals suppress their
own decisions and choices. In Le Bon s view this was clearly linked
to innate behavior or instinct. “Crowds, doubtless, are always
unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the
secrets of their strength. In the natural world, beings exclusively
governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvelous com¬
plexity astound us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too
recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the
unconscious, and still [less] to take its place.”10
As we all know, the individual in a crowd feels different about
himself or herself—and about the limits of what can be achieved.
As he put it: “The notion of impossibility disappears for the indi¬
vidual in a crowd.”11 The crowd is powerful and brave: the Bastille
can be stormed (as indeed it was).
Le Bon went on to say that this process—of suppressing indi¬

vidual choice and of feeling virtually invincible—means
inevitably that a crowd was liable to be dominated, in his words,
by “ignorance and foolishness” This was undoubtedly an indeli¬
cate way to phrase the observation, but there is some truth in the
idea that crowd psychology inevitably involves a process of “aver¬
aging down .” Within a crowd, the level of learning, experience,
knowledge, or judgment by an individual is unexamined—a
crowd, almost by definition, means that one person has the same
significance as his or her neighbor.
Le Bon then went on to classify and categorize the different
types of crowds, and pointed out that some crowds are largely
homogenous, comprising individuals of the same group or class,
and some are heterogeneous. He divided the category of homoge¬
nous crowds into anonymous crowds (such as street crowds) and
nonanonymous crowds (such as juries, parliamentry assemblies,
and so on). He divided the heterogeneous crowds into two
groups: Sects (political, religious, and others) and castes (the
priestly caste, the working caste, and so on). He then went on to
try and identify the characteristics of what he called a criminal
crowd, and also some of the dynamics that go on within juries.
He analyzed the role of leaders and the techniques (conscious
and unconscious) that they used in order to maintain the coher¬
ence of the group and its obedience. He made the point that it is
the crowd that gives the leader his or her power, and he used the
word “prestige” to describe the perceived quality which all leaders
must possess in order to lead. This concept of prestige is an
important one, and is probably the same thing as social value or
social esteem. As all authors on collective behavior acknowledge,
there are many objects and personalities that become important
when they are endowed with the prestige or social value awarded
by large numbers of people. Without “prestige” the object or the
person would amount to little: as Le Bon said, the ruin of the
Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens holds tremendous prestige
because of its historical value and our knowledge of Greek civi¬

lization. Without that aura, and without the understanding of
history and the interest we bring to it, we would have to admit
that it is “in its present state, a wretched ruin utterly destitute of
interest.”12 Prestige—like beauty—is in the eye of the beholder.
Of course there are many* other factors that leaders use to
maintain their leadership—these include force, fear, and brain¬
washing among others—but the most common and widely used
set of techniques is what we would now call public relations or, if
we are opposed to its objectives, propaganda.
In considering the factors that sway a crowd and influence its
behavior, Le Bon was a bit of an elitist, but not “merely” an elitist.
Although he was a strong proponent of many aspect of the class
system and although he did believe in the “averaging down” of
crowd,13 he did point out that the moral codes of crowds were not
necessarily purely vindictive. As he said: “The crowd is as easily
heroic as criminal,” and as capable of playing the role of martyr as
of executioner.14
There were three factors that Le Bon identified as essential in
catalyzing crowd behavior, and Le Bon called them affirmation,
repetition, and contagion. The members of the crowd must
receive reinforcement of the idea that they belong in that crowd
at that moment, they must be told the central points of their
views and/or action repeatedly, and there must be an element of
suggestibility among the crowd members to facilitate the trans¬
mission—the contagion—of the idea or plan.
Of these three interrelated topics it is the idea of “contagion”
or “suggestibility” that is most significant. Ideas, beliefs, and emo¬
tions can be transmitted to large numbers of people very quickly,
but there is a necessary precondition and that can be termed “sug¬
gestibility” or “impressionability” or even “persuadability.”
There have been countless examples over the centuries of
large numbers of people being persuaded of something that in
other moments they would not accept. At the lightest and most
trivial level, there is stage magic and conjuring: we go to the the¬

ater knowing that the lady will not really be cut in half, and that
the dove was not really created from the molecules of the silk
handkerchief. We do not (usually) know how it is done, and at
some level we acknowledge that we are not seeing reality, but we
enjoy the spectacle on its own merits.
From that level onward, suggestibility is potentially more
serious. A Victorian psychologist, Sir Humphrey Davey, did a
series of basically low-grade conjuring tricks in front of a group
of England’s greatest scientists and fooled them all into believing
that they were witnessing supernatural phenomena. As Le Bon, a
contemporary observer (who knew the true nature of the demon¬
stration), commented: “What [is] the most astonishing feature is
not the marvelousness of the tricks themselves but the extreme
weakness of the reports made with respect to them.” In fact, “the
methods invented by Davey were so simple that one is astonished
that he should have had the boldness to employ them; but he had
such power over the mind of the crowd that he could persuade it
that it saw what it did not see.”15
The same problems with suggestibility can be traced back
over the centuries and still go on today. A group of eminent sci¬
entists professed themselves convinced that Yuri Geller could gen¬
uinely harness new and hitherto undescribed forces in bending
spoons. Another group of physicists believed that a medium who
claimed to be able to perform psychokinesis (moving objects by
the power of the mind alone) could actually do it. They watched
him move a small model sailboat floating on water in a sealed
glass dome, and believed it was true psychokinesis, until it was
shown that the boat was moving due to the heat generated by
strong lights needed for the TV cameras. When switched on, the
lights heated and created convection currents in the air under the
dome. The boat moved only when the lights were turned on in
order to film the actions of the medium. When there were no
lights switched on, there was no movement.
Another famous experiment some twenty years ago sum¬

moned a group of UFO watchers to observe a supposed phenom¬
enon high in the sky. Later, the photographs of the event were
forged to show some purple lights near the horizon—which none
of the observers had mentioned at the time (because they were
created in the photo-finishing process and did not exist). Never¬
theless, several of the observers afterward claimed to have seen the
lights and even wrote articles and letters about them. Sug¬
gestibility is no respecter of scientific status.
On a larger scale, we have the phenomena of mass hallucina¬
tion or mass suggestibility. There are thousands of such incidents
documented: Le Bon describes in detail the apparent sighting by
a ship s entire crew of bodies in an open boat, which turned out
to be clumps of seaweed. Other instances include outbreaks of
mysterious and nonspecific illness, particularly involving dizzi¬
ness and fainting, in certain buildings or a period of a few days,
for example. One such incident that I investigated personally was
at an annual pop concert. For two years in a row, many of the
audience, predominantly young girls, had felt dizzy and some had
fainted, and it was suggested that there was some poison or infec¬
tion in the air. Many of those present told me that it was clearly
not an example of hysteria because police horses had fainted and
collapsed as well, and they would of course be immune to human
emotions and hysteria; hence, the incidents were clearly caused by
toxic materials or infections. I had to admit that if police horses
were affected this would be a piece of important evidence. When
I then spoke to the policemen who had been on duty at that time,
they said that they had been with the horses all the time and the
horses had not fainted, collapsed, or behaved in any unusual way.
The same phenomenon was seen with crop circles. Even when
groups of hoaxers confessed to some of them, and even after one
group sent in some film of themselves creating the crop circles,
some spokespeople still said publicly that they could distinguish
between the crop circles created by hoaxers from the “genuine”
crop circles created by aliens visiting our planet. Suggestibility is

a genuine phenomenon—it happens all the time, and in many
instances creates no harm.
However, to return to our main theme—the effect of belief
on behavior—it is relevant that religious beliefs can also produce
the same kind of effects on perception and description. Some of
these events—apparitions or miraculous occurrences—are still
hotly disputed even centuries after they happened. Some are
much less controversial and are not considered seriously even by
the most ardent believers. One example of the latter occurred in
a spare-parts auto shop in Progreso, Texas, in 1990. It was
reported that the face of the Virgin Mary appeared in the concrete
of the floor of the toilet in this particular store. Over a thousand
people a day visited the shop (to the owner’s growing irritation)
and many claimed to have seen the face. “She’s so beautiful, so
beautiful,” said one fourteen-year-old girl with tears streaming
down her face. Some people took it as a sign that they had been
neglecting their religious faith, though no one could think of a
reason for this spiritual message being transmitted via the con¬
crete floor of a washroom. The face became no longer discernible
after a few weeks.
From contemporary comments made about the sighting, it
seems that it was almost as easy not to see the stains in the con¬
crete floor as the face of the Virgin Mary as it was to perceive them
as her face. The point of all these examples is simply that percep¬
tion can be altered: it is often malleable, and sometimes to a con¬
siderable extent. We have seen in these examples that perception,
and the sense of what is really happening, can be changed by
people (of any educational background or experience) if they
have a strong preexisting wish to have their perception changed,
and this can apply to any preexisting idea, emotion, or belief,
including religious themes.
So suggestibility and the “contagion” of a perception are
major factors in shaping the behavior of a crowd in response to
an idea or a belief. And it usually was an idea or a belief—and not

a line of rational thought or logic. Le Bon was the first to state
what so many thousands of authors, playwrights, historians, and
others had always known but never examined as a theorem: that
crowds are motivated by ideas and beliefs rather than logic, emo¬
tions rather than thoughts. Furthermore, these concepts do not
necessarily need to be completely explained or understood—a
vague outline or amorphous idea may be just as powerful in
affecting a crowd, perhaps even more so than a finely detailed
concept. A crowd, as Le Bon put it, “thinks in images,” and images
call up other images which may not be connected to each other
logically.16 It does not necessarily reduce the power of the image
or the concept if it cannot be fully understood. As Le Bon put it,
“How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death
for beliefs, ideas and phrases that they scarcely understood.”17
From the vantage point of modern neuroscience and anthro¬
pology we might easily conjecture why emotions are transmitted
with such greater rapidity than thoughts. Emotions can be sig¬
naled instantly from person to person by facial expressions, body
language, or single sounds (shouts, grunts, and sighs, for
example). Emotions are the “one picture” that are worth the
“thousand words” of rational thought. The visual image, as Hol¬
lywood has demonstrated with wild success, can say it all.
Thoughts, after all, require a logical progression formed in the
mind of the speaker to be understood and reassembled in the
mind of the listener. By definition, the rational logical process is a
function of the cerebral cortex (of both parties). What we call
emotions can be transmitted instantly from the signal sender to
the signal receiver. We do not yet know for certain that the range
of human emotions is based on the herd signals of other animals,
but it is beginning to seem likely that what we feel is the cerebral
correlation of the group signals and herd glues that we see in other
species. This is a big and controversial subject; nevertheless, from
the limited point of view of this book we need only accept at this
juncture that crowds are motivated by emotions more readily than

they are by reason, and that, as history and the study of collective
behavior has consistently shown us, if you want to have the crowd
on your side, appealing to emotion is they way to do it.
I have deliberately spent so much time on Le Bon because he
was the first to make these observations, and because his work
influenced so many researchers and commentators on crowd
behavior, even to the present day. Chronologically the next major
work on crowd behavior came in 1915 when an English physi¬
cian, Wilfred Trotter, published his book Instincts of the Herd in
Peace and War, which was based on two articles he had written in
1908 and 1909 (the dates are significant). He had no particular
qualifications as a behavioral psychologist or researcher in animal
behavior or human psychology, but his thoughts are nonetheless
surprisingly useful. He had been prompted to discuss the subject
of crowd or herd behavior because of what he observed was hap¬
pening in the world as it primed itself for the First World War. His
assessments—and predictions—proved to be all too accurate in
the following years, unfortunately for everybody. Trotter’s book, a
work of clear and simple thinking, was genuinely revolutionary
for its time, and changed the way that people thought about the
influence of crowds and groups on the behavior of individuals.
Trotter took his cue from a few rather superficial observa¬
tions of animal biology and looked for comparisons in human
behavior (an activity that is often regarded as controversial and
chancy). He felt that the three major instincts—self-preservation,
food, and sex—were insufficient to explain the totality of human
behavior. He felt that a fourth major component of human
behavior was needed to explain our history. The fourth instinct,
Trotter proposed, was gregariousness—the herd instinct. He was
guessing, and he had not done much of his homework, but he was
logical and, as it turned out, he was mostly right. Trotter was not
a particularly great or original ethologist, nor had he done a great
deal of detailed research, but he was among the first to say pub-
pletely a crowd’s previous belief. One of the best examples is the:

speech by Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The
crowd, having just heard of the assassination of Caesar in the
Senate, are very much on the side of the assassins (led by Brutus).
Mark Anthony, renowned as an orator, has a difficult job in trying
to persuade them of any virtues the murdered Caesar might have
had, but he does succeed, using the increasingly sarcastic repeti¬
tion of the phrase “Brutus is an honorable man.” Nearly four hun ¬
dred years after that play was written, our contemporary political
speech writers are not that much better than Shakespeare, and are
certainly less memorable.
As a minor diversion, 1 have written a Le Bon-style political
speech based on the three principles of affirmation, repetition,
and contagion. You might perhaps read it aloud to yourself and
try to imagine how you would feel if you heard it when you were
in a crowd at a political rally in Bellicosia. Of course, at this
moment you do not know anything about the history of the
country of Bellicosia (for it is imaginary) or of its repeated
attempts to conquer its neighbor, Concordia. You have not heard
of the historic Battle of Flosse and do not know anything of the
territorial disputes over the Gingival Islands. Yet even though you
do not know anything about these events, the emotional content
of this speech, written in the Le Bon idiom of affirmation-repeti¬
tion-contagion demonstrates, I believe, the power and the appeal
of emotions over reason. When the prime minister of Bellicosia
wishes to justify fresh aggression against Concordia, he may make
a speech somewhat like this one:
My fellow Bellicosians, we are not an intolerant or an impatient

people. In fact, throughout our entire history, we have always
been the ones so ready to forgive and to move on. After the
atrocities of the Battle of Flosse, we survived, we forgave, and
we moved on. Buckling under the unfair trade tariffs imposed
for two centuries after that monstrous and inhuman act of
injustice we survived, we forgave, and we moved on. When
other nations, our neighbors particularly, exploited their own

children—their own children—and unfairly flooded the
market with cheaper goods, we survived, we forgave, and we
moved on. Though our own domestic industries and the sin¬
cere and hard-working craftsmen were threatened—I mean all
of you, my countrymen, all who uphold the standards that we
Bellicosians live by!—when we all faced financial loss and even
ruin, we survived, we forgave, and we moved on. Even in dis¬
putes about the possession of a few small islands on our
coast—fine!—we survived, we forgave, and we moved on.
But now, the pollution from the ill-regulated and disor¬
derly Concordian factories threatens our very water and the
purity of our very air, and, with it, the beating heart of our
manufacturing industry and the health of every man woman
and child in our country—now if we forgive, now if we simply
move on, now we will not survive. Of course, nobody would
accuse the Concordians of being Godless or simply driven by
greed and aggression, but now we have regretfully to draw our
line in the sand. Now, with our patience exhausted and our
resources similarly near depletion, it is the time for us to say,
“They shall not pass.” No longer can we—we gentle and tol¬
erant Bellicosians—no longer can we survive if we forgive and
we move on. Now we have to movel
I make this point simply to reinforce the power of orators and

leaders to affect us directly and to change the way we feel. These
techniques are important in politics and also in all other activities
involving large numbers of people, including religions. Infor¬
mally, during sermons and speeches, the techniques of affirma¬
tion and repetition are used, and also in many religious services—
particularly those where the audience or congregation make
repeated responses—these are powerful techniques and familiar
to us because they are used so often. And they are used so often
(if you’ll forgive the repetition) because they work so well.
To summarize, we have seen in this chapter some of the fac¬
tors that change the collective mind (as Le Bon terms it) and shape
pletely a crowds previous belief. One of the best examples is the

speech by Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The
crowd, having just heard of the assassination of Caesar in the
Senate, are very much on the side of the assassins (led by Brutus).
Mark Anthony, renowned as an orator, has a difficult job in trying
to persuade them of any virtues«the murdered Caesar might have
had, but he does succeed, using the increasingly sarcastic repeti¬
tion of the phrase “Brutus is an honorable man.” Nearly four hun¬
dred years after that play was written, our contemporary political
speech writers are not that much better than Shakespeare, and are
certainly less memorable.
As a minor diversion, I have written a Le Bon-style political
speech based on the three principles of affirmation, repetition,
and contagion. You might perhaps read it aloud to yourself and
try to imagine how you would feel if you heard it when you were
in a crowd at a political rally in Bellicosia. Of course, at this
moment you do not know anything about the history of the
country of Bellicosia (for it is imaginary) or of its repeated
attempts to conquer its neighbor, Concordia. You have not heard
of the historic Battle of Flosse and do not know anything of the
territorial disputes over the Gingival Islands. Yet even though you
do not know anything about these events, the emotional content
of this speech, written in the Le Bon idiom of affirmation-repeti¬
tion-contagion demonstrates, I believe, the power and the appeal
of emotions over reason. When the prime minister of Bellicosia
wishes to justify fresh aggression against Concordia, he may make
a speech somewhat like this one:
My fellow Bellicosians, we are not an intolerant or an impatient

people. In fact, throughout our entire history, we have always
been the ones so ready to forgive and to move on. After the
atrocities of the Battle of Flosse, we survived, we forgave, and
we moved on. Buckling under the unfair trade tariffs imposed
for two centuries after that monstrous and inhuman act of
injustice we survived, we forgave, and we moved on. When
other nations, our neighbors particularly, exploited their own

children—their own children—and unfairly flooded the
market with cheaper goods, we survived, we forgave, and we
moved on. Though our own domestic industries and the sin¬
cere and hard-working craftsmen were threatened—I mean all
of you, my countrymen, all who uphold the standards that we
Bellicosians live by!—when we all faced financial loss and even
ruin, we survived, we forgave, and we moved on. Even in dis¬
putes about the possession of a few small islands on our
coast—fine!—we survived, we forgave, and we moved on.
But now, the pollution from the ill-regulated and disor¬
derly Concordian factories threatens our very water and the
purity of our very air, and, with it, the beating heart of our
manufacturing industry and the health of every man woman
and child in our country—now if we forgive, now if we simply
move on, now we will not survive. Of course, nobody would
accuse the Concordians of being Godless or simply driven by
greed and aggression, but now we have regretfully to draw our
line in the sand. Now, with our patience exhausted and our
resources similarly near depletion, it is the time for us to say,
“They shall not pass.” No longer can we—we gentle and tol¬
erant Bellicosians—no longer can we survive if we forgive and
we move on. Now we have to movel
I make this point simply to reinforce the power of orators and

leaders to affect us directly and to change the way we feel. These
techniques are important in politics and also in all other activities
involving large numbers of people, including religions. Infor¬
mally, during sermons and speeches, the techniques of affirma¬
tion and repetition are used, and also in many religious services—
particularly those where the audience or congregation make
repeated responses—these are powerful techniques and familiar
to us because they are used so often. And they are used so often
(if you’ll forgive the repetition) because they work so well.
To summarize, we have seen in this chapter some of the fac¬
tors that change the collective mind (as Le Bon terms it) and shape
the behavior of groups. As we have seen, in a crowd we subjugate

some of our individual and personal decisions, choice, and
doubts; experience a feeling of increased strength; and are highly
liable to the influence of emotion rather than logic. Let me make
it clear that there is no judgement here: I am not implying (and I
do not believe) that emotion-is “wrong” or that reason must
always be right. The triumph of emotion over reason in shaping
collective behavior is not a matter of morals. It is not “wrong” or
“evil” that in a group we may be highly suggestible and that we
may take part in something we would not even consider if we were
alone. It is not wrong, it is simply dangerous.18 The power of a
group can produce—and has produced on many occasions—acts
of major aggression and destruction. It is the outcome that is
“wrong”—the process is something that (literally for good or evil)
seems to a property of the human mind. As we shall now see, in
itself that might not have posed a major problem until we became
an immensely successful species and dominated the planet.
OVERPOPULATION
So far then, in our discussion of why humans gang up in groups and

attack other groups, we have discussed the cohesive forces that hold
groups or herds together, and we have looked briefly at the instinc¬
tive force of aggression. Yet none of this would have created major
problems for the human species if there were still large areas of
habitat available so that our normal animal aggression could—as
Lorenz suggests—keep our species spaced out evenly. Unfortunately
we have become extremely successful as a species, and have achieved
levels of population so high that there is very little, if any, empty
habitable territory across which we can be distributed. There is not
enough room to accommodate all of us with our aggressive drives
without there being major problems. There are so many of us that
we constantly bump into each other and collide.
This topic is a complex and sensitive one and is necessarily a

little speculative, but many biologists have looked at it, and at
what happens in animal colonies (from mice to gorillas) and have
attempted to draw some parallels with human populations.
Among them, zoologists such as the popular writer Desmond
Morris, particularly in his book The Human Zoo, lay great
emphasis on two aspects of human behavior. First, we are a gre¬
garious and cooperative species of animal—and we are a species
of animal, not some race of alien beings entirely unrelated to the
“lower creatures.” As such we have many characteristics in
common with lower species (even though we would like to
imagine that we do not). Second, it is often emphasized that the
human species has been outstandingly successful in colonizing all
kinds of inhospitable environments and as a result of that success
and the breeding practices that we have been able to sustain, we
are now greatly overcrowded.
Just to put these things in perspective when we speak of
“greatly overcrowded,” we are talking about overcrowding by
many orders of magnitude. Morris speculates that a group of
about sixty hominid apes might have been wandering about the
savanna—living by hunting and gathering as described above—
and roaming over an area about twenty miles square, that is, four
hundred square miles. (These figures are only approximate.) If
that is true, then in the “natural” state—that is, as nomadic
hunters and gatherers—humans would probably have over six
square miles per person.
When humans developed cultivation and farming of food
plants, they increased their ability to support populous commu¬
nities on relatively small areas of land. As a result of all
humankind has achieved over the last nine or ten thousand years,
there are now just over six billion of us on this planet.
To give a sense of the magnitude of current overpopulation:
the city of New York (near the upper end of the overcrowdedness
scale) is about three hundred square miles in area, and has a
human population of about 7.4 million people. In the (postu¬

lated) natural state, instead of 7.4 million people, that land-space
would be home to perhaps a mere forty-six human hunter-gath¬
erers. In other words, an area the size of New York would have
been home to forty-six humans, but currently accommodates
over seven million. It is overpopulated by 160,000 times the esti¬
mated “natural” population.
Using those figures as a very approximate guide, the worlds
population, which is currently about 6 billion (i.e., 6,000,000,000),
would actually be no more than about 40,000 (60,000 at the most).
Morris and many other biologists suggest that many of the
problems humans confront in daily life are the result of these bio¬
logical factors. Our interpersonal communication systems
evolved among a species of hunter-gatherer apes and they are
now being used by a species existing at unimaginable levels of
complexity and overpopulation. Given the number of us inhab¬
iting the world, our wiring is extremely old-fashioned.
One aspect of the “old-fashionedness” is the expressions of
aggression among the highly overpopulated species. We may jus¬
tifiably ask what happens to the normal process of aggression (in
the biological sense) when there is no habitat left unexplored for
individuals to go to. What happens to the aggressive (“gimme-
some-space”) instinct in modern humans? After all, most of us
are not engaged in colonizing new environments and do not have
the option of moving into an uninhabited part of the country to
utilize new food resources. So what happens to that aggressive
instinct? What parts of our behavior are partly rooted in that
aggressive instinct?
The answer is neither simple—nor complete. Obviously the
aggressive instinct becomes manifested in a wide variety of
forms—including all the body signals of aggression such as
snarling, baring of teeth, and so on. As our social organization has
become more complex, those signals or representations of aggres¬
sive intent have become more and more socialized. In fact, as with
animals making representative movements or postures instead of

engaging in actual fight, we have constructed our expressions of
aggression into socialized patterns or conventions.
The basic language of aggression is easy to recognize. We have
no difficulty in recognizing aggressive patterns in our own species
and in many others: when a cat snarls, bares its teeth, makes direct
eye contact with a competitor, arches its back, raises the hairs on
its neck, and spits, we recognize that as aggression. We also have
no difficulty in recognizing similarly obvious behavior in another
person. On top of those primitive displays of behavior there are
more socialized signals. If someone hits us or bites us that is unar-
guably an aggressive signal. A more socialized form of the same
aggressive might be shouting loudly. At a level of still finer social¬
ized detail, the person might deliberately speak softly and say very
emphatically, “Get out of my way!” A signal that is yet more
socially systematized might be—if they are in a car for example (a
good example of an environment carrying drastic restrictions of
normal expressive behavior)—honking the horn or flashing the
headlights, or, at a level still more subtle, positioning their car in
a certain way and moving at a certain speed and at a distance rec¬
ognized by social convention as invasive (e.g., “tailgating”). The
patterns of expression of aggressive intention obviously depend
on the social structure of the species concerned—but the primary
objective is the same, to communicate clearly the motives of the
individual concerned.
While still acknowledging the inherent dangers of extrapo¬
lating from animal biology to human behavior, one can at least
consider some general hypotheses. If we take Trotter, Lorenz,
LeBon, and Morris (and some of Ardrey) together, an overall pic¬
ture emerges. Humans are basically a gregarious herd-bound
species held together by a variety of “herd glues.” We possess—in
common with most animal species—a considerable amount of
normal and natural aggression, which in the distant past had been
useful in spacing out individuals across the environment. Unfor-
tunately, we evolved a wide variety of extraordinarily successful

behavioral traits which allowed us to multiply way beyond the
natural (or at least, expected) limits. As a result, we now find our¬
selves as a herd filled with an excess of the “I-want-my-own-
space” aggression, and in a situation in which there is no space to
be given. The result is a constant turf war between our various
herds-within-the-herd; as our species haSvbecome more and more
sophisticated, so our turf-defending instincts become more
sophisticated, conscious, and socialized in their expression.
“WHEN YOUR BLOOD IS UP”:

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF FIGHT
THE FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT REFLEX SYSTEM
There is one more important physiological factor that we need to

discuss which plays an important role in turning conflict into
fight, and prolonging fighting even at the cost of harm or even
death. That factor is the reflex—involving several systems and
many parts of the body—which is activated during conflict and
which provides a final common pathway preparing the indi¬
vidual animal for either fight or flight. This reflex in part
explains why it is that when we are under pressure—when our
“blood is up”—we lose so rapidly and so completely our sense of
perspective and proportion.
That mechanism, the fight-or-flight reflex, functions in hu¬
mans—in line with its original purpose as an advantage for sur¬
vival—to override conscious inhibition. The entire value of a
fight-or-flight system is that, under major threat, the individual
should be able to suppress any inhibitions caused by pain, per¬
ceptions of danger, doubts, or uncertainties and act quickly and
resolutely to ensure preservation. The fight-or-flight reflex does
not have an inbuilt conscience of its own—in fact, it is there
specifically to ignore, override, and suppress the effects that a

conscience or any other inhibiting factor might have.
We know a fair amount about the factors involved in the fight-
or-flight arousal reflex (or more accurately, group of reflexes).
They include the autonomic nervous system, release of epineph¬
rine and norepinephrine hormones, metabolic changes in the glu¬
cose handling to enhance muscle contraction, endorphins to
reduce the perceptions of pain, and many other factors. The end
result is an animal mobilized for muscular activity with a cardio¬
vascular and neurological system primed to help, suppressing any
“nonurgent” activities such as digestion and sex. This much is well
known and is doubtless familiar to every reader. It is an archetypal
survival reflex and is seen in all manner of vertebrates. It works
well when it is required and, from a biological point of view, that
is hardly surprising since any animal that did not possess good sys¬
tems for fight or flight (unless heavily armored or defended)
would presumably have become extinct. Doubtless in some wild
corner of a savanna or veld this may have been—and may still
be—of considerable survival value. However, in the context of
contemporary human society, the reflexes that were of such
advantage early in our evolution are rarely a major advantage now.
As we see in almost every aspect of daily life, humans seem to
be particularly adept at losing all sense of perspective and pro¬
portion—often for very trivial reasons. This pattern of out-of¬
proportion response may actually be caused by the vestiges of that
ancient fight-or-flight reflex: once an essential mechanism for
survival, it is now a serious potential cause of damage.
We are all familiar with the sudden flood of rage over a trivial
mistake in a shopping bill or purchase, or “road rage” or other
examples of extreme overreaction to everyday trivial events, a few
of which lead to serious consequences and tragedy.19 There are lit¬
erally hundreds of millions of stories which illustrate this point—
every newspaper and news report has several—but one typical
recent tragedy will suffice, in this case an example of “road rage.”
On a highway in the United States, a woman felt that she had been
cut off by another driver (also a woman), although police were
later quoted as stating that there seemed to have been room for
both vehicles on that stretch of road. After several exchanges of
rude hand gestures and signals both drivers pulled over. The first
driver got out of her car and walked toward the second driver, who
happened to have a gun in her car. She took out her gun and shot
and killed the woman walking toward her. It later turned out that
the victim had been on her way to pick up her children: the
woman who had just shot her immediately made a call to the
emergency services on her cell phone saying that she could not
believe what she had just done. Another example actually occurred
on the day that this section was being written. A kitchen worker in
the United States killed another kitchen worker in a dispute about
the correct way to load cutlery into a dishwasher.
Why do events such as these occur so frequently? Why do we
all have this clearly common tendency to overreact in this way?
Why did a man shoot his wife because his computer system
crashed? Why do people shoot their neighbors over a dog that
barks at night?
Part of the answer lies, as we have been discussing, in the
limbic system—in particular the amygdala—and in the way that
the fight-or-flight reflex or instinct is organized. In territorial dis¬
putes, once an animal starts to fight, in order to win it has to be
able to suppress its own sense of pain, and probably its sense of
danger as well. Teleologically speaking, as I have said, that is what
the reflex is there to do. The final common pathway includes
functions of the autonomic nervous system, with the output of
hormones such as adrenaline and other chemical compounds
such as endorphins. Mechanisms such as these—autonomic
nerves, hormones, and endorphins—play a major role in allowing
an individual to go into a painful situation (such as a battle or a
fire) and suppress the usual response to pain by “ignoring” or
rather “not experiencing” the pain. It seems probable that this
state is partly initiated by the limbic system, including—as we saw

in chapter four—the amygdala, the brain centers that are most
concerned with expressions of aggression.
In appropriate circumstances, then, mechanisms such as
these will allow the individual to be heroic and perform altruistic
acts at great cost to the person. The downside is that the same set
of mechanisms will also allow the person to ignore the normal
curbs and limits to behavior in other, more inappropriate, cir¬
cumstances. Hence, it is postulated, there occurs a loss of the
sense of proportion, and resulting catastrophes such as road rage.
Perhaps in a future age-—with better and more detailed under¬
standing of the basis of behavioral patterns—we will no longer
refer to “road rage” or “air rage,” but will talk about “limbic rage”
(or perhaps even “amygdaloid rage”). In naming the neurological
or biochemical mechanism involved, we do not, of course, condone
as a society the behavior produced. At our present level of under¬
standing—and under our current laws—a person will be punished
for indulging in behavior that is murderous or destructive.
In a few areas of behavior, we are beginning to change the
social and moral threshold and judgment as our understanding of
the mechanism improves. For example, we recognize that clinical
depression leading to suicidal intention requires treatment, not
punishment. Hence if a woman, shortly after giving birth,
becomes suddenly depressed and, as happens rarely, kills one of
her children and then attempts suicide, she would be treated as a
case of postnatal depression (with enforced treatment and admis¬
sion to a secure psychiatric unit, for example). She would not be
given the same treatment or punishment as someone who kills his
or her child for a different reason with no identifiable affective
(i.e., mood) disorder.
The issues raised by this distinguishing of “mad” from “bad”
are even now changing the social atmosphere quite rapidly. A lot
depends on our level of information, and even more depends on
whether or not we have effective treatments. In any circumstance,
our society defines at any moment how much it expects its mem¬
bers to curb and restrain their instincts. Even though, for
example, we recognize the almost ubiquitous sexual urge, we do
not condone rape if a defendant says simply, CCI really wanted sex,”
anymore than a bank robber would be deemed guiltless if he said,
“I really wanted more money, and the bank had it.” Similarly, our
understanding of limbic activation and aggression has nothing to
do with our society’s definition of unacceptable behavior. In most
areas of behavior, we draw a line based on what we expect and
demand from our peers, not—at present, anyway—on our
understanding of the biological mechanisms involved.
Of course religion or spiritual beliefs are not implicated in
incidents such as these. This discussion—following on the neuro¬
logical data from chapter four and the social phenomena
described in this chapter—simply illustrates the fact that our
species is primed to behave like this in certain circumstances. Our
biology is set up to promote this type of aggression and destruc¬
tion. Road rage is an example of how easily the system is trig¬
gered. It is quite likely that other triggers can easily do the same—
among which are religion, territory, sexual competition, and so
on. It is not “the fault” of religion that behavioral patterns may be
triggered in this way. In fact, if anything, it is the “fault” of our
biological design combined with our overpopulation. It is a fact
of our current existence—and in part a biological fact—that the
powderkeg of human aggression is so easy to ignite, and that reli¬
gion is an activity that often and easily provides the right sort of
spark, as we shall discuss in chapter 7.
OBEDIENCE AND CRUELTY
In addition to the fight-or-flight reflex system, there are other fac¬

tors that may disinhibit an individual and facilitate his or her per¬
formance of acts of either courage or cruelty. One of these factors
is the influence of the people nearby. In our social organizations,
we are accustomed to the idea of obeying rules and orders. We

drive on the right, we stop at red lights, and so on. Social cooper¬
ation and collaboration in the matter of rules and obeying orders
is, unfortunately, something that can be recruited into acts of
individual harm. The most famous demonstrations of this effect
were the experiments done by Milgram in 1963. The findings of
these series of experiments are so important, and indicate charac¬
teristics of our propensity to comply with others that they are
worth reviewing in detail.
Milgram’s first series of experiments were done on a university
campus, using paid volunteers who replied to an advertisement.
They were males aged between twenty-five and fifty and came from
different backgrounds—some were engineers, some unskilled
workers. The situation was explained to them as an investigation
concerned with the influence of punishment on learning.20 The
subject of the supposed investigation (actually an accomplice of the
experimenter) was to be given electric shocks when he made mis¬
takes in a learning task. The machine that supposedly administered
the shocks had thirty switches (none of which actually worked
apart from the third one, which gave a small shock to show the vol¬
unteer that the machine worked). The labels on the machine stated
the voltages and there were eight labels referring to the severity of
the shock, ranging from “Slight Shock” to “Very Strong Shock,”
“Intense Shock,” “Extremely Intense Shock,” “Danger: Severe
Shock,” and finally “XXX.” The supposed learner made many mis¬
takes, and at each one the volunteer was told to increase the admin¬
istered shock more authoritively each time. At the first sign of
unwillingness, the experimenter said, “Please continue,” increasing
in firmness to “It is essential that you continue,” up to “You have no
other choice, you must go on.”
The results—now widely known—showed that 65 percent of
the paid volunteers continued right up to the severest shocks of
the “XXX” grade, and 35 percent refused to continue. Many asked
that the experiments be stopped, but when ordered to continue
did so even when the “victim” pounded on the wall as if in pain

and soon after stopped providing answers in the learning task.
These findings are very disturbing, and show that two out of
every three human beings will inflict severe pain on others when
told to do so. Of course, one might think that the setting—a
highly respected university campus—and the “trappings” of the
experiment gave the impression that the supposed investigation
was really very important, and that (this being a great university)
nothing could really be amiss. So perhaps the volunteers were not
really demonstrating such ready compliance, but were in some
way awed and impressed by the setting.
So Milgram did another series of experiments (which are less
well known). This time he ran the supposed investigation in a
run-down office building in the business district of a nearby city.
The results were just the same—62.5 percent of the volunteers
continued even when, in order to obey, the had to hold the
learner s hand and force it down on the shock plate. So, even
when the atmosphere of a prestigious university campus is
absent, people will obey.
Now, it is significant that in Milgram’s experiments, the super¬
visor made it clear that he took responsibility for the learners
health and safety. In similar experiments Tilker showed that when
the volunteer thought that the responsibility for the learners health
rested with him, obedience was significantly lower.21
Even so, these experiments clearly show that most of us have
a very ready tendency to cooperate and comply with authority.
Collaboration can of course work in either direction: resis¬
tance, once started, can grow quickly. It has been observed in many
situations that one brave and dedicated individual (or a few of
them) can defy the source of authority and that recruitment can be
rapid and wide, with many others joining. Later experiments by
Milgram showed that when two other people (actually accom¬
plices) defied the experimenter, the proportion of volunteers who
obeyed the orders went down from 65 percent to only 10 percent.
These findings have become part of our understanding of the

characteristics of our fundamental attitude to authority. They con¬
firmed what historians and psychologists of the past had always
known. Humans do not need much in the way of orders to carry
out cruel actions if they are told it is an important task. The volun¬
teers in the first experiments thought they were taking part in a
prestigious university’s interesting experiment about learning—
how much higher would the ante have been if they thought they
were rescuing the remains of the savior from the infidel in a Cru¬
sade, or protecting their church against fatal heterodoxy in the
Spanish Inquisition or in the massacre of the Piedmontese, or per¬
forming the patriotic duty of cutting a prison governor’s throat, as
Le Bon detailed, in the storming of the Bastille, if they are told it is
the patriotic thing to do, and “they will not consider themselves
criminals”? And what about the atrocities in the concentration
camps and the ghettos of Poland? Or Rwanda? Or Bosnia?
One can easily see a hierarchy of authority which, as the level
of authority increases, produces greater and greater compliance.
In the second series of Milgram’s experiments, the authority was
just an ordinary man in a run-down office; in the first series, it
was a campus-based figure assuring the volunteer that he took
responsibility; in an army, the superior officers have the authority
of the government; in government-supported racism or geno¬
cide, the authority is also the government’s; and in religions, the
highest authority is of course that religion’s interpretation of the
wishes of God. With the human tendency to cooperate and
comply being as clearly high as it is, it is hardly surprising that
obedience can be achieved so often and so completely.
Perhaps, then, the oft-repeated response by Nazi defendants
at the Nuremberg trails—“I was only obeying orders”—is not
necessarily a deception, nor entirely an admission of cowardice or
conscious complicity; it is in part derived from a deep human
behavior pattern to that we all (or at least two-thirds of us)
share—as Milgram has proved.
CONFORMITY: MIMICRY OR SUGGESTIBILITY?
The experiments of Milgram (as well as the sociological observa¬

tions of Le Bon and dozens of authors since him) show that most of
us are fairly eager to conform, to produce in terms of behavior what
we imagine is expected of us. This is not a value judgment: it is not
criticizing human behavior as spineless or craven, it is a simple fact
of how we behave when we are in a group. It might be derived from
the gregariousness instinct—animals that stay with the herd and do
what the herd does will have a better chance of survival—but in any
event it is a phenomenon of our social organizations.
The deeply seated urge to conform might go part of the way
toward explaining behavior patterns that we are sometimes tempted
to label mimicry or, in some circumstances, hysteria. A small
example (and every reader has seen literally thousands of similar
ones) occurred shortly before the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The line to sign the book of remembrance for Diana was extremely
long, and people at the back of it had been standing patiently for
many hours. There were several television crews recording the event
(and of course their presence may have been a significant factor in
changing behavior patterns). Suddenly a young woman declared that
she had just seen Diana as a beatific vision. The television crew inter¬
viewed her, and then went up and down the line asking if anyone else
had had a vision of Diana. Sure enough, two or three more young
women came forward and said that they had.
Of course, seeing a vision of a deceased person after a
bereavement is extremely common, and in this instance, as in so
many, it did not result in any harm. But what if we were not
looking at a line-up in London in the twentieth century, but a
rural community in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of the sev¬
enteenth century? And what if the vision was not “I saw Diana”
but “I saw Goody Bellows with the Devil”?22 And what if it was
not a television crew but an interrogation panel called together by
some witchfinder general? In Salem twenty people were executed:
but three hundred years later we no longer believe in witches or

feel that people should be executed for consorting with the devil.
During that era and in that part of the world, though, they did
hold those beliefs and twenty people died. Perhaps the social pres¬
sure to conform was part of the so-called weight of evidence in
the Salem witch trials.
The mysterious outbreaks of illness that I referred to earlier
(see page 134) may speak to the same underlying tendency. Per¬
haps also, so does the common sight of an interviewee on televi¬
sion crying over an incident that the interviewer thinks might
make a good human story. We like to perform what we perceive
as behavior patterns that are expected of us. If becoming dizzy
and fainting are in some ways expected—as in Victorian aristo¬
cratic society, or charismatic religious healing services, or in
closed societies or at rock concerts—there will always be a
number of individuals who produce those patterns. We can call it
hysteria if it is an ill-defined epidemic, we can call it swooning if
we are in Victorian England, we can call it witch-finding if we are
in Salem in 1692, we can call it suggestibility if we are sociologists,
or mimicry if we are animal behaviorists, but perhaps it is less
contentious to call it conformity. The desire to conform—pos¬
sibly derived from collaborative and gregarious instincts of the
herd—is a powerful one and is prominent in our crowd behavior
much of the time: the more we are aware of its influence, the
more likely we are to be able to control our own behavior.
THE EFFECT OF MEMORY
I would like to offer one further reason why the powder keg of
limbic rage might be so easy to ignite, and this point is not much
more than speculation on my part. The fight-or-flight reflex has
no memory—it arises when the appropriate triggers are touched
upon, and when those conditions have resolved, the reflex stops.
Although animals can learn to perform conditioned reflexes—such
as involuntarily associating electric shocks with a flash of light, so

that eventually they flinch at the light alone—this is not what we
would term cognitive memory. The animals (as far as we know)
cannot suddenly think of the flash of light when there is no stim¬
ulus and then flinch at their own behest. To have a secure and vol¬
untarily accessible long-term memory, you need a big brain, and
we are the only animals with brains big enough to remember (at
will) a conflict after the conditions for that conflict have resolved.
Animals require the original conditions to get their fight-or-
flight reflex restarted—or (as in operant conditioning) a factor
present at the original scene (such as the light that accompanies
the electric shock). When the potential aggressor or competing
male has gone, the animal reverts to its previous quiescent status,
and (as far as we can tell) forgets the whole thing. If the situation
recurs—for example with the same potential aggressor or com¬
petitor—then the reflex will be activated again, but if the situa¬
tion (or an operant conditioning factor related to it) doesn’t
recur, then the reflex won’t. Only humans have enough memory
to nurse grievances. Only we can remember a hurt whenever we
want, without any conditioned stimulus to prompt us.
Humans remember details of aggressive encounters (using
their highly powerful cerebral cortex) and can reactivate echoes of
their own fight-or-flight reflex at any time (we call that “stress”)
or even proactively seek out the precipitator of the encounter (we
call that “revenge”). If we humans had only a powerful limbic
system and had insufficient cortex to provide a good memory,
then we wouldn’t—I suggest—be plagued with wars and
vendettas. You need a fairly good memory to wage a continuing
struggle. However, by the same token, we also wouldn’t have
poetry or literature or history or art or nostalgia or remembrance
or anything else that makes human endeavors worthwhile (and
indeed memorable). As the old saying goes—and it applies to
human behavior in almost every aspect that you can think of—
“Our strengths are our weaknesses.”
Of all systems in the human body, perhaps the limbic system

is almost the archetypal example of “strengths and weaknesses .”
When cooperative and collaborative acts of courage are required,
limbic system arousal is part of what gives us the wherewithal to
perform the action, even in the face of disastrous personal conse¬
quences. When however these qualities are not called for, limbic
system arousal is part of what drives us to throw out the baby
with the bath water.
MOBS
It is significant that the words for “mob” and “riot” exist at all, and
that intuitively we can all recognize instantly the difference
between a crowd and a mob, and can distinguish an orderly
assembly from a riot. The literature on this subject is extensive,
and it is worth reviewing in brief a few of the salient points
because in the past religious differences have been very common
factors in starting riots and inciting mobs.
From the point of view of this book, and particularly when
considering the destructive effects of communal belief, we need
only to be aware that inciting large groups of people into destruc¬
tive action is a constant feature of almost every society when it
achieves sufficient size. As we have discussed in this chapter so far,
there are many characteristics that we can identify, and several
biological processes that may be recruited into a cascade of col¬
lective action.
The essential feature of a mob and a riot is of course the
breaking of regulations—a disorderliness when measured by that
society’s previous set of rules and regulations, in other words a
certain amount of lawlessness or anomie.
The two features of crowd or collective feelings, as identified
by Le Bon, that lead up to the point of anomie are the feeling on
invincibility (the strength of numbers) and the equality (the tern-
porary obliteration of differences in background between mem¬

bers of the crowd). As we have discussed, crowds are more readily
motivated by emotion than by reason; emotional signals thus will
be prominent in a crowd as it develops mob behavior patterns—
hence the prominence of facial expressions signifying emotional
states (particularly anger), body language of aggression (fists
raised, weapons), and of course shouts and cries. A good example
was the shout of mobs during the French revolution when tar¬
geted individuals were hung from lamp-posts, and the cry “A la
lanterne!” was the slogan that acted as the cue. (It is interesting
that the word “slogan” is actually derived from Celtic words
meaning “the cry of a horde of dead.”23) It is also likely, but not
known for certain, that pheromones may play some part in
inciting aggressive collective action.
These factors then amplify the state of arousal of the members
of the crowd, and at some point the crowd identifies a target. There
is much written about the process of targeting, and obviously race
and religion and any features that are instantly recognizable are
ready cues for targeting. (It has to be noted that sometimes cues for
targeting require closer examination, and crowds have been known
to strip potential targets and to exercise considerable powers of dis¬
crimination to ensure that the correct targets have been selected.24)
Very often the target has been the subject of long-standing
antipathy—particularly of racist or religious background—such as
the anti-Semitism endemic in many parts of eastern Europe for
many decades before the first half of the last century.
At some point, then, when the target has been selected and
the collective tendency to anomie reaches a certain point, the
crowd riots. The features that we all recognize instantly are the
speed and intensity of activities. In a riot, nobody stands around
doing nothing. Many authors, including Canetti, have observed
that fire has symbolic value to a mob. Fire represents a complete
and irreversible method of destruction (of people as well as of
property) and has been used throughout history as punishment
by organizations (governments, armies, and religions) as well as

by mobs. Similarly the looting of property (often accompanied by
the sound of breaking glass) also has symbolic value.
For the purpose of this book, that is, examining the impact of
belief on behavior, we need only emphasize the point that ampli¬
fication of group feelings (including beliefs) can on occasion
incite mob activity and riot, and that the same principles that we
have been discussing in this chapter underlie those patterns of
behavior as well. The mob is a crowd intensifying its own activi¬
ties, amplifying its own “blood is up” arousal, and breaking some
of the rules and regulations that had previously been accepted by
the individuals who now make up the crowd. A mob is extremely
powerful, and leaders who know how to recruit, amplify, and
direct the power of the mob—for religious, racist, or other pur¬
poses—are truly fearsome phenomena. They represent and con¬
trol forces of almost unimaginable power.
ROLE MODELING AND THE FAMILY:

DYNAMICS OF THE MINITRIBE?
Finally, in discussing the role of behavior patterns in the social

organization of animals, I would like to discuss a group influence
that is important on a much smaller scale—but which is no less
powerful for that. Most of us grow up within a minitribe with
whose members we spend a great deal of time in the first few
mon ths of our life at least. From the surrounding members of this
minitribe we pick up many important rules of the way the world
is, and many important rules of conduct—more often unspoken
than spoken and more often given by example than by precept—
indicating to us what is acceptable and what is not. That minitribe
is of course the family, and it is the influence of the parents in the
first few months of life that I should like to focus on very briefly.
There is another major influence operating within the family
that has a significant role in coalescing the factors that we have

been discussing (the limbic system, herd glues, crowd behavior,
aggression, and so on). That influence is the presentation to the
infant of the role model of the parent—and it provides a strong
and visible model for the belief systems that develop later on, par¬
ticularly religions and God-based systems of belief.
We are, after all—like many animals—possessed of a great
ability to learn, and a large part of that learning is by mimicry.
Hence, role modeling by our parents has a great influence on the
way we see the natural world, and on what we regard as accept¬
able—or “good”—behavior and what is not.
As has been stated many times in many areas of psychiatry
and psychotherapy—particularly since the pioneer work of
Freud, who based most of his methodology on it—we are all
molded, from the time of our earliest glimmerings of conscious¬
ness, by our parents or parent-substitutes. They draw our map of
the world—whether they mean to or not—and that map or
system gives us a model on which we later base our concepts of
many things, including God.
When you are a baby, your biggest problem is that you do
not have much control over the world or over what happens to
you. If you feel hungry, you cannot simply make yourself a sand¬
wich or take a cookie; the only thing you can do is cry (after all
you have not yet learned to ask for anything in words or signs).
But when you cry, an amazing thing happens. A huge individual
of your own species comes toward you, often smiling, and
depending on its gender and methodology, it may give you a
breast or a bottle. Either way, your needs have been met without
your having to articulate them. Your unspoken wishes have been
miraculously granted.
As you get older, you learn that there are certain things you
may do that will earn you the opposite of rewards. Sometimes the
consequence will be merely the absence of a smile, but on other
occasions it will involve harsh, loud sounds being aimed at you;
in some instances (depending on the political correctness and the

legal system of your community) you may even be slapped.
From your earliest helpless moments then, you become aware
of a vast powerful figure who metes out reward and punishment
in response to (so it appears to you) your merest internal wishes
or thoughts. When you do things that are wrong you receive pun¬
ishment (the “stick”) and you are encouraged to do things that are
accepted as good for which you are rewarded (the “carrot”).
Then, as you grow up and acquire language and start asking
questions about the world, you are told about something your
parents heard from their parents—a God that reads your inner¬
most thoughts and wishes and hands out reward and punish¬
ment. It makes perfect sense to you—and no wonder. Your ear¬
liest experiences from your parents have given you an intuitive
model of being looked after by a caring, benign, powerful figure.
Your parents are your first gods.
Perhaps, therefore, it is no coincidence that God was often
given the sobriquet of Our Father. (Not that the other parent was
totally ignored—most early religions had female goddesses at the
top of the hierarchy, and it is also no coincidence that we speak of
Mother Earth and so on.)
The importance of this connection between parental influence
and preparedness for later belief systems cannot be overstated. The
one thing we all share is the fact that we started out as helpless
babies. We owe the fact that we are alive today to somebody’s actions
in fending for us when we had no power to fend for ourselves.
The image of an eternal father who has powers that we cannot
comprehend—but who will look after us in our own best interests
and administer appropriate carrots and sticks—is imprinted on us
from birth. We can hardly think of any other model for our concept
of a deity. We learned it at our parent’s knee.
HOW STORM CLOUDS GATHER:

A POTENTIAL MODEL OF CONFLICT
With these basic principles of aggression, group cohesion, and

overpopulation in mind, we can discern ways in which conflict
might readily develop. We can-best think about the process by
imagining a group of socially organized nomadic hominids whose
different communities are kept apart from each other by their own
aggression in the Lorenzian sense. Once they have developed tech¬
niques for planting and cultivating crops, they can support much
larger numbers per square mile of land. As they develop other
skills—food production, tool technology, and then building—they
can achieve levels of population that are higher still. Shortly the
communities start having disputes when one group moves from its
home territory to another, or, later, wants to take over new territory.
By the time overpopulation has occurred—perhaps when
there were as few as a couple of thousand humans occupying an
area the size of New York—cerebral rational processes can be
recruited into the conflicts which arise when one coherent group
encounters another.
In very simple terms, it is possible to divide into three main
stages the process by which normal animal aggression becomes
transmuted into overt fighting. The first is the consequence of group
cohesion—the separating of aus” from “them”—a process that can
be termed “them-and-us-ing.” The second is the reinforcement of
the adversarial or antagonistic position—turning the “them” from
people we disagree with into monsters with no redeeming quali¬
ties—a process we can call “monstrifying.” The third stage is the final
common biological pathway—the inbuilt reflex of fight-or-flight by
which the individual is pumped up ready for fighting, and sup¬
presses any inhibiting factors such as doubts or conscience.
Figure 2 is a diagrammatic representation of how these var¬
ious components might be conceptualized as parts of a contin¬
uous process.
Figure 2
1. “THEM-AND-US-ING”
The first stage in “pumping up” for an intergroup conflict is of

course clear identification of the individuals that make up the
“us” and distinguishing them from the others that are thus iden¬
tified as “them.” This process of “them-and-us-ing” is the same
sort of process Le Bon referred to when we spoke of affirmation.
Affirmation—affirming the raison d’etre of the group or crowd—
is the social correlate of cohesion. It is the summation of the rec¬
ognizable reasons by which the individuals of the group have
come together.
As Le Bon states, one of the main features of being in a crowd
is the feeling of power and invincibility that atmosphere bestows.
Whether it is a cause or an effect of the “pumped-up-ness” of the
invincible crowd, the identification of a target for their newfound
power—a “them” that the “us” can react to—is soon called into
action. Identifying a clear “them” actually improves the cohesion
of the “us”: “we” actually come together more closely as a united
group when we have a clear “them” to face.
History offers us thousands of examples. For centuries, mon-

archs and leaders of state have solved their own domestic crises
by declaring war on a neighboring country It is almost a cliche
of political life and works effectively even when the public widely
acknowledges that they realize the ulterior purpose. A foreign
invasion still stirs the hearts ohmost of the populace even when
the press have labeled it a clear Wag the,Dog maneuver (named
after the acutely observed movie in which a fictional president
heads off a potential sex scandal by staging an apparent brief war
against a foreign country).
Even without actual conflict, many political parties have
headed off internal dissent and bickering by uniting the group in
an attack on—or in defense against an attack from—the opposi¬
tion. (The political speech template set out on page 102 would
have a very useful role in uniting any wavering Bellicosians, and
making them feel that they were important and valuable mem¬
bers of the Bellicosian state, even if they had up till then been
feeling somewhat marginalized and ignored.)
Them-and-us-ing is a familiar and often repeated technique
for the simple reason that it works so well. And it works so well,
I suggest, because it activates the deeply ingrained innate mech¬
anisms of group cohesion.
2. MONSTRIFYING
The process of them-and-us-ing provides conditions for conflict

that are, as logicians say, necessary but not sufficient. Part of the
path to carrying out inhumane acts such as the ones I detailed
above (events that we often flatter our species by calling
“inhuman”) is for the perpetrator to persuade himself or herself
that the victim is somehow a lesser type of human being. In fact,
it makes the perpetrated act even simpler for the perpetrator if he
or she can think of the victim as not being human at all. A major
part of that process of rationalizing is to try to think of the
intended victim as totally worthless or totally evil. To do that, you

first have to ignore the patchy mixture of right and wrong of
which we are all composed—you have to persuade yourself that
the intended victim is entirely composed of “wrong” and has no
“right” bits—all vice and no virtue.
That process—of rationalizing the other person into a totally
worthless object—is the essential first step in sharpening the con¬
trast between us (whom we think of as good) and them (whom
we think of as bad).
This is something that we all do, probably every day—and it
increases our tendency to enter into an escalating sequence of
aggressive actions. At a personal level it usually doesn’t matter
very much—we have rows and arguments or contretemps and
they mostly don’t amount to much. Unfortunately when commu¬
nities, political groups, religions, or entire countries do it, it fans
the flames of any chosen issue and may lead to such undesirable
effects as war or genocide.
I call it monstrifying,25 and it is the act of thinking that a
person (or a nation) is either totally good or totally bad, but
cannot possibly be anything in between.
When we monstrify, we seize on one or two aspects of a
person’s behavior (or of a group’s behavior, or a nation’s or what¬
ever) and ignore everything else.
In marriages, this train of thinking leads to “theme rows”
(“You always do that,...” “You never,...” “You’re useless be¬
cause ...”). In politics, it is a standard way of gaining ground on
an opponent or on an opposing party (“You wouldn’t want your
President to be the kind of person who . . .”) implying that if he
has made a mistake in activity X, he must necessarily be use¬
less/dangerous/untrustworthy in every activity from A to Z. In
international affairs, it’s a major factor in racism, persecution,
war, genocide, and a few other of humankind’s problems.
The real trouble with the act of monstrifying is that it is such
a quick and easy solution to immediate problems. When we mon-
strify, we can vent our anger and feel that we are quite justified in
doing so (“Those dyed-in-the-wool bastards deserve exactly
whats coming to them”).
We suppress the features that we previously recognized and
liked or even loved about the other person (because they are now
inconvenient to our purpose) and we amplify in our own con¬
ception the features we dislike or disagree with.
3. GETTING THE BLOOD UP
The main problem with the processes described here—“them-

and-us-ing,” monstrifying, and getting the limbic rage going—is
that the momentum is powerful and deep enough to recruit ordi¬
nary people into performing acts of extraordinary destruction.
There are literally thousands of millions of examples. Every
war, revolution, and riot has seen many examples of an individual
with no previous history of extraordinary courage, rage, or vio¬
lence doing things that were quite out of character. The point is
that within the ordinary character of us all, there is the poten¬
tial—given the appropriate circumstances, of which crowd factors
are a major component—to do extraordinary things, of which
destruction is one.
I want to set out one example in detail because it is so well doc¬
umented and because it demonstrates this point so clearly: how
crowd behavior (doubtless enrolling the limbic system, including
the amygdala) by way of “them-and-us-ing” and monstrifying can
convert the behavior of almost anyone, even those with no previous
experience of aggressive or destructive propensities.
During the start of the French Revolution in 1789, one of the
most significant events was the storming of the famous prison, the
Bastille in Paris, the symbol of the hated Bourbon monarchy and
their government. The event was so significant that it is still cele¬
brated with a national holiday on the fourteenth of July. When the
crowd of revolutionaries took over the Bastille, they seized the gov-
ernor of the prison but did not kill him instantly. They debated the
correct course of action. (By the way, the same process occurred
later when King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were cap¬
tured, at Varennes, absurdly disguised and trying to escape. The
group that seized them debated for some hours about what to do
with them.) In the case of M. de Launay, the governor of the
Bastille, there was a general feeling that since he was the represen¬
tative of the most hated and cruel institution of the government, he
deserved to die, and the crowd debated hanging, beheading, or
tying him to a horse’s tail. Yet nobody actually did anything until in
all the pushing and shoving the governor “accidentally kicked one
of those present. Some one proposed, and his suggestion was at
once received with acclamation by the crowd, that the individual
who had been kicked should cut the governors throat.”26 It turned
out that the person who had been kicked was an out-of-work cook,
and that he had been present at the Bastille more out of curiosity
than anything else. However, he believed that, given “the general
opinion, the action is patriotic and even believes he deserves a
medal for destroying a monster. With a sword that is lent him he
strikes the bared neck, but the weapon being somewhat blunt and
not cutting, he takes from his pocket a small black-handled knife
and (in his capacity of cook he would be experienced in cutting up
meat) successfully effects the operation.”27
The point here is clear, and we all know it whether we wish to
acknowledge it or not. Within a cohesive group—whether it is a
lynch mob or a rioting crowd or an army in a war—an indi¬
vidual’s doubts, choices, and decisions can be overridden (as Mil-
gram’s studies clearly prove). Furthermore, it does not matter
how thoughtful and how carefully considered one’s previous
behavior has been, there is always the danger that one can be
recruited, and one’s rational processes overridden. It is quite dif¬
ficult to counteract the force of a major belief by the power of rea¬
soning (though we shall be talking about that further in chapter
8). As Le Bon put it: “The Middle Ages and the Renaissance pos-
sessed many enlightened men, but not a single man who attained
by reasoning to an appreciation of the childish side of his super¬
stition or who promulgated even a slight doubt as to the misdeeds
of the devil or the necessity of burning sorcerers”28
It seems clear, then, that there are forces at work in molding
our behavior that are difficult to control, inhibit, or counteract by
processes that would, in other circumstances, govern our con¬
duct. In light to current data, it seems that our limbic system is
particularly vulnerable to stimuli of group cohesion—no matter
what our past patterns of behavior and thought. This is why a
cook can become an executioner. When the circumstances are
appropriate—unfortunately for us—we can all be pushed or
pulled into doing extraordinary things as members of a group.
Of all the aspects of collective behavior, perhaps this effect is
the most worrying. The fact that “ordinary” people can be
induced in appropriate circumstances to do extraordinary things
should give us all cause to pause and consider.
During the French Revolution, according to Gabriel Taine,
several thousand prisoners were murdered by a band of about
three hundred revolutionaries, probably incited to do so by
Danton. This group of murderers was clearly a heterogeneous
group: “With the exception of a very small number of profes¬
sional scoundrels it was composed in the main of shopkeepers
and artisans of every trade: bootmakers, locksmiths, hairdressers,
masons, clerks, messengers, etc... . They do not for a moment
regard themselves as criminals.”29
The same was almost certainly true of those who staffed the
concentration camps of Hitler’s Third Reich and participated to a
greater or lesser extent in some of the worst atrocities of human
history. Survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps confirm that
the great majority of the staff were indeed “ordinary” people.30
Some were undoubtedly thugs and sadists but most were unre¬
markable—a fact which makes the lessons of the concentration
camps more chilling rather than less so.
+ + 4~
So let us try and put together—with all the usual cautions—the
biological features of group cohesion and the social processes that
may have evolved from them. Humans are community-based gre¬
garious animals, endowed with natural aggression (as are all ani¬
mals) and also endowed with conscious thought and great powers
of collaboration and cooperation. Like all herds, human herds
depend on a variety of signals to keep them together—including,
at the higher levels, their conscious thoughts and beliefs. These
may provide momentum or precipitating causes for aggression to
lead to destructive conflict when one subgroup-—a herd-within-
a-herd—distinguishes itself from another on the basis of race,
culture, religion, politics, or any other of dozens of possible rea¬
sons. Once started on that road, the group then uses rationaliza¬
tion and conscious thoughts and attitudes to amplify the growing
conflict. That chain or cascade of processes could accurately be
called the “biological-rationalizing cascade,” and it is one way of
conceptualizing the way in which conflicts and wars develop.
The process of group conformation is obviously a powerful
one: it can lead to admirable results such as the building of Salis¬
bury cathedral or Grand Central Station (or Stonehenge come to
that), but the same process is what fueled the atrocities that we
would dearly like to regard as “inhuman.”
Sadly, the findings of modern neuroscience are telling us that
what we appropriately call “crimes against humanity” are actually
a potential side effect of humanity itself—they are unfortunate
attributes of what it means to be human—and they are not
simply rare aberrations.
NOTES
1. Konrad Lorenz, On Agression (London: Methoven, 1976), p. 34

2. Duchess of Marlborough, quoted in A. Storr, Human Aggression
(New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 24.
3. Since pheromones are released in certain types of sweat it may be
•s'<
legitimate to wonder whether certain kinds of activities promote the

transmission of pheromones. I have often wondered whether there was a
pheromonal component to the massed salutes of the Nazis. Perhaps being
in a stadium, bombarded with auditory and visual signals, plus some very
crowd-inciting repetitions and being awash in pheromones may all have
produced a much greater effect than any of these factors on its own.
4. A superb general description of this area written for the lay
reader is Konrad Lorenz’s book On Aggression.
5. A good, if somewhat quirky and idiosyncratic, guide to this
whole area can be found in Robert Ardrey’s classic The Territorial Imper¬
ative. The scientific studies that Ardrey describes are, I think, beyond
dispute, but many of the conclusions that he draws from them and
applies to human behavior are somewhat controversial. I think its is true
to say that many of his views have subsequently turned out to be correct,
but were—and probably still are—somewhat speculative.
6. A detailed but exceptionally readable treatment of the effect of
agriculture on human civilization is Jared Diament’s exceptional book
Guns, Germs and Steel.
7. Perhaps it is worth adding that the history of popular miscon¬
ceptions goes back a little further. The truly brilliant physician, philoso¬
pher and author Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)—whom we would
nowadays call a scientist and skeptic—wrote an examination of
common delusions in 1646 called Pseudoxia Epidemica—or Enquiries
into Very Many Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths. Sometimes
subtitled Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, it details dozens of
illustrations of myths, fables, beliefs, and “old wives’ tales” of the sort
that we would nowadays call “urban legends.”
8. Le Bon subsequently wrote a major work in which almost
everything he had said in The Crowd unfortunately turned out to be
true. Gustav Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War: The First World
War and Its Origins (Rutgers, N.J.: Transaction, 1998).
9. Le Bon, The Crowd, p. 2.

10. Ibid., p. ix.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 130.
13. For example: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that
is accumulated.’' Also: “In crowds the foolish, ignorant and envious per¬
sons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness
and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but
immense strength.” Le Bon, The Crowd, p. 112.
15. Ibid., p. 26.
16. Ibid., p. 22.
17. Ibid., p. 42.
18. Perhaps one of the most telling examples of the danger of emo¬
tion over reason came from Albert Speer, the architect—in the sense of
the designer of buildings and streets—of Hitler’s Third Reich and a very
close member of Hitler’s group. In a television interview some thirty
years later, Speer said that when he had gone to hear Hitler speak for the
first time he expected to hear violent strident demagoguery. Instead, he
found Hitler—in the mid-1930s—to be eloquent and passionate as he
spoke of the love he had for his country and his sadness at its current
state. It was that emotion, so Speer said, that won him over. The
spoonful of honey achieves what a gallon of vinegar will not.
19. The biology underlying this and many other aspects of human
behavior is carefully incorporated into an overall account in Steven
Pinker’s book How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997).
20. Robert A. Baron, Human Agression (New York: Plenum Press,
1977).
21. Ibid., p. 212.
22. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York: Bantam Books, 1980),
p. 112.
23. The Celtic word for a horde of the dead or spirit-multitude is
sluagh and for shout or cry is ghairm. Sluagh-ghairm became “slogan.”
Elias Cannetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Noonday Press, 1984).
24. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: Univer¬
sity of California Press, 2001), p. 347.
25. Bernie Zilbergeld, The New Male Sexuality (New York: Bantam
Books, 1992), p. 453.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 110.
29. Ibid., p. 166.
30. I have spoken to several Holocaust survivors on this point and
it emerges as a consistent and terrifying vidw of all collective acts of
atrocity. Many personal accounts allude to it, though perhaps a good
personal account comes not from a concentration camp but a prison
camp for Air Force personnel. Broadcaster Robert Kee’s experiences in a
stalagluft details this aspect with disarming honesty and perception. In
A Crowd Is Not Company (London: Triad/Panther, 1982) he describes his
astonishment at realizing how similar to him some of his jailers were.
Chapter 6
Constructive Effects
of Communal Belief
T>
JL V.eligions are ideas, and, as Le Bon said, ideas are
things that men will labor for in unison. Humankind, as we
have seen above, is both blessed with powerful aggressive
instincts and collaborative abilities and cursed with pow¬
erful aggressive instincts and collaborative abilities.
Together these have enabled humans to act in groups and to
build Chartres Cathedral but also to conduct the First World
War. In this chapter we will look at some of the forces
involved in the construction and creative side of the equa¬
tion, in the next we will look at the destruction side.
Let us start with a few observations on the clearly visible
benefits of religions to their community, and then move on
to consider the benefits of belief to the individual.
173
BELIEF AND BELONGING:

COMMUNITY AND CONTACT
In all pioneering communities, the first actions of the settlers or

pioneers include prayers and, soon after, the building of a church
or place of worship. There are very few communities anywhere in
the world that do not have a religious or spiritual communal
building specifically constructed and set aside for spiritual use.
The primary value of religious activity is of course the
binding together of the community (as we have emphasized
since the beginning of this book): it helps not only to define
moral codes but also to affirm the individuals as members of the
group. In terms used by psychologists we could generalize this
latter role under the category of “contact”: religious activities
facilitate contact between members of the community. They
bring people together literally as well as psychologically. This is
one of the most important social benefits of being in a specific
place every week (or more) with familiar friends, and joining in
a ceremony by saying words and singing songs that everybody
present knows. The action affirms the existence and coherence of
the group. It feels good (perhaps partly based on the innate gre¬
gariousness of the species). As the Nobel laureate author Elias
Canetti put it: “A man attending a sermon honestly believed that
it was the sermon that mattered to him, and he would have felt
astonished or even indignant had it been explained to him that
the large number of listeners present gave him more satisfaction
than the sermon itself.”1
This particular form of contact—of affirming community—
is readily and immediately intelligible. Whether that is prepro¬
grammed into the human mind or not, and whether it is derived
from an innate or instinctive behavior pattern is not fully known
and is not very important. The point is that the act of gathering
together—affirming membership of the group—is rewarding and
pleasant. Like all factors binding groups in collectives or crowds it
CONSTRUCTIVE EFFECTS 175
increases the sense of what can be achieved and widens the hori¬
zons of the possible.
All the things that identify group members—such as the eso¬
teric words or forms of service—add to the cohesion of the
group. It is no coincidence that every group of settlers built a
church or a temple or a similar sacred building as soon as they
had finished the first round of dwellings.
This, incidentally, is—at present—a noticeable deficiency of non-

theistic groups. So far, it seems that atheist or nontheist groups have
a relatively small number of members compared to the statistical
surveys showing larger numbers of those who do not believe in
God. It seems possible that those who do not believe in God—as
many of them say when asked—are “not joiners,” and simply do
not feel the importance of visible evidence of belonging. It is of
course quite possible that those same people are getting their sense
of belonging rewarded by other activities—joining in activities
related to sports or hobbies and so on—and that a visible commu¬
nity based on a philosophical stance (including a religion) may be
less important to many people than was the case a few decades ago.
Nevertheless the sense of community and contact is something that
is noticeably lacking in nontheist groups.
In any event, we can easily see the social value of the church
or temple or place of worship in the history of many cultures.
Going to a place of worship with a congregation of like-minded
individuals is inherently rewarding—it affirms the individual as a
member of the group. It is a major reward of communal belief.
PRAYER: PROCESS AND OUTCOME
Beliefs do not work because they are true, but

[are] true because they work.
William fames (1842-1910)2
Prayer works. It makes the person who prays feel better, and one
does not need to believe in God to observe those benefits.
Although it has been acknowledged for centuries that acts of
devotion make the believer feel better in many ways, it was only
in the early twentieth century that this effect was separated from
the supposed effects of the object of the devotion, that is, God.
For millennia it had been a tacit assumption that the observable
benefits to the believer caused by a spiritual experience or exercise
were in themselves evidence of the existence of an external spirit.
The first person who methodically but indirectly examined and
questioned that assumption was the nineteenth-century psychol¬
ogist William fames, fames was the first to bring this issue under
public scrutiny. His own starting point was a profoundly religious
one. He was a firm and committed believer in God and started his
examination of the value and function of spiritual experience
partly in response to what he perceived as attacks on religion by
the more free thinking of the young people of his time.
fames, brother of the novelist Henry fames, was perhaps the
first to systematically analyze the role of religion in the workings
of the human mind. He examined religion—relatively dispassion¬
ately—and asked questions about the benefits that religious beliefs
brought to the individual and to the community in which they
were practiced. In his most important work, The Varieties of Reli¬
gious Experience—A Study in Human Nature, published in 1902,
James described and discussed many aspects of spiritual experi¬
ence in terms of the psychological effects on the person who
underwent them. He concluded that there was considerable ben¬
efit, although he also described and discussed many of the con¬
flicts and acts of destruction precipitated by religious doctrinal
differences. James personally believed that the need to believe was
a conscious decision and not an inbuilt drive. Using the full extent
of knowledge and understanding about the human mind that was
available in the early twentieth century, James came to the conclu¬
sion that the act of believing is helpful to us. It works for us, and
that beneficial function is a phenomenon in itself. The fact that a

belief is valuable to millions of people doesn’t necessarily mean
that the object at the center of the belief is proven to exist (as a real
entity), but it does mean that the effect of the belief is real and tan¬
gible. The effect on the behavior of those who hold that belief is an
observable phenomenon. A belief that works is validation of the
effect of that belief, not necessarily evidence supporting the exis¬
tence of the object at the center of that belief. (To paraphrase the
quote often attributed to Voltaire: “If God did not exist, then Man
would still gain from believing that He did.”)
So, if prayer works for the person who prays, what does it do?
The answer in part comes from the field of psychology. In psychiatric
terminology, the act of thinking about a problem in a beneficial way
that reduces the traumatic effect of the problem is called a coping
strategy. It is a form of support that assists in functioning when we
are threatened or even potentially overwhelmed by an event.
Looking at the process—the transaction—that occurs when a
person prays, one could reasonably suggest that the action of
believing in an external deity performs the function of a coping
strategy in the human psyche. It helps the people who do believe
in an external deity (which is the majority) to cope with the world.
Naturally this is not the only function of these types of belief and
we shall discuss inspiration, motivation, and other similar func¬
tions in the following sections of this chapter. However, it may a
valuable perspective to think about the activity of believing in this
way, as a coping strategy—an activity that helps humankind.
This way of considering belief works not only for the indi¬
vidual when he or she gains benefit from the process of believing
and praying, but also on a wider scale. It is possible to think of
religions in general as mechanisms for giving people “ready¬
made” coping strategies to help them cope with the world. There
is an important corollary here—and it has to do with the process
of transformation or transcendence that is the objective of many
religions. As we have already seen (see page 17 and Karen Arm-
strong) some religions make the transcendence of the individual

the main objective of the religious experience. The individual has
to transcend his or her normal everyday worries and obsessions
in order to achieve a calmer sense of unity with all life—tran¬
scendence in fact. One could legitimately say that this process is
the religious counterpart of a working coping strategy. The focus
is not on the existence of the presence of an external divinity, but
on the change of the individual’s psychological state into a more
spiritual frame. Perhaps it is no coincidence that many psy¬
chotherapists use techniques of meditation as instruments for
bringing calm and perspective into their patients’ lives.
These points about the value to the individual of prayer go
some of the way to explaining why prayer helps so effectively. Fur¬
thermore, they also explain why the person who prays feels a benefit
whether the request in the prayer is granted or not. With prayer—as
with many different activities of life—there is a difference between
process and outcome. The process is of benefit whether one of the
outcomes (the granting of the request) occurs or not.
A colleague of mine, a hospital chaplain, aptly said that
praying is like going to your mother when you are a child and you
have grazed your knee. You do not expect your mother to be able
to heal your knee, but the act of going to your mother makes it
easier for you to bear the pain—it gives comfort—and so, in a
very genuine sense, the pain becomes less. This difference—
between process and outcome—is not trivial. As William James
said, beliefs do not work because they are true but are true
because they work. This is even more true of prayer.
“IT’S ALL PART OF THE DIVINE PLAN”:

COPING WITH DISASTER
When catastrophe strikes or a disaster happens, many people feel

that their faith in God helps them through it. We all know of
dozens of such stories—in the newspapers, on television, and in

the experience of our friends and family. The value of personal
faith in coping with reversals of fortune hardly needs underlining,
but I would like to propose that it is part of something deeper. I
would like to suggest that at a deeper level, we all find it a little
easier to cope with catastrophe if we can imagine that it is the part
of some plan. We search for some reason, however far-fetched it
may be, to explain an apparently arbitrary or chance cata¬
strophe—and I suggest that religion is an illustration of this
underlying mechanism.
I would like to describe the incident that first started me
thinking about this topic. It happened sometime in the early
1960s. As a young boy I was shocked and disturbed by a headline
story about a terrible accident that had just occurred at a skating
rink. During an ice show for children at the rink, a gas furnace sit¬
uated under the stands had exploded. The force of the explosion
killed several children and injured many more, and some of them
were flung by the force of the explosion onto the ice. The news¬
paper report—and it made an immediate and very deep impres¬
sion on me—said that some parents, themselves injured and
totally distraught, were seen holding the bodies of their injured or
dead children and were saying, “Its part of the show. It has to be.”
Even as a youngster, I could understand what might make a
parent say something like that. In the face of overwhelming
tragedy, we all look for some meaning. Those parents needed—
for that instant at least—to believe that the catastrophe that had
just occurred was part of some overall plan, however unlikely or
incomprehensible that was, while of course part of their minds
was telling them the exact opposite. (I have always thought, by the
way, that I would react in exactly the same way in a catastrophe
like that, and that I would certainly cling for a moment to that
same desperate belief if it were my child who had been killed.)
That reflex action (perhaps it is an instinct) to believe even
for a moment that a catastrophe is actually part of a design is an
extremely deep and powerful human urge. It is part of the way

our minds cope (even temporarily) with a tragedy so vast that it
would otherwise swamp us totally.
The demonstration of that deep-seated need, in my view, also
goes some way toward explaining why humans are so ready to
believe in an external deity and a divine design for the universe. It
is the same urge at work: to feel that whatever happens, however
grim and however awful, is at least part of a grand scheme of
things. That feeling (or belief) cannot of course reverse the cata¬
strophe or disaster, but it can at least assuage the despair and give
a sense of meaning to what is otherwise a meaningless tragedy.
The apparent randomness of the disaster is an important fea¬
ture. When the victim cannot discern any purpose in the accident
and there is no obvious cause or source to blame, the instinct or
reflex that I am talking about (belief in an overall design or plan)
is often activated. Further evidence of this instinct comes from a
simple phrase that we are all accustomed to. It is no coincidence
that insurance companies still call earthquakes and floods “acts of
God”—by which they mean that these events are beyond human
prediction and protection (and—far more important—are
beyond insurance payouts unless you take out a special policy with
a large premium). The phrase shows how we link unpredictable
natural catastrophes to the implied overall plan of the Creator.
But the phrase “act of God” also embodies another kind of
thought, one that influences the way in which survivors of a dis¬
aster think and talk about it. If a person survives a disaster in
which others have died, it is very common for the survivor to feel
that he or she has been selected or chosen—that there is some
reason or meaning attached to this particular persons survival
and life, that it is part of a grand design.
Stories such as these are also common. For example, in Sep¬
tember 1999, there was a serious road accident involving about
eighty vehicles on a highway near Windsor, Ontario. A great deal
of fuel was spilled and several vehicles caught fire, resulting in the
deaths of seven people. Among the survivors, one woman said that
God had been looking after her in there. “God was with me,” she
said, “He had to be.” The interview with this survivor was shown
on every television news report and repeated in the press the fol¬
lowing day. In the same story it was reported that, tragically, a poor
fourteen-year-old girl had died in that same accident, and that sev¬
eral people had tried to rescue her but were beaten back by the
flames. She had said to them, “Help me, I’m only fourteen.”
The inconsistencies in attitude leap out from that story. Of
course, everyone who read the story was very glad that the
middle-aged woman survived, and was genuinely and deeply sad¬
dened by the tragic death of the young girl. But why call in the
force majeur of a deity? Did the survivor genuinely mean that
there was a God who had looked over that accident and who had
chosen to preserve the life of the woman and to end the life of the
girl? Personally, I doubt it. It is highly unlikely that if the survivor
had been asked a direct question on that point she would have
said, “Yes—I am sure that God intended that poor young girl to
die.” There is no chance that she would have said that, although
that was the implication of her statement.
There are two ways of seeing this kind of selectivity in cata¬
strophes. One way is to accept that there genuinely is a Divine
Plan, that God did indeed intend the young girl to die, and that
we humans are unworthy to understand the final and perfect
objective of that plan. Whatever happens—-according to this
view—we must simply trust the workings of the Divinity. The
overall design is inscrutable, inaccessible, mysterious, totally
occult or perhaps revealed to a very few, but nevertheless true
believers do (and must) believe in it.
The opposing view is just as simple and intelligible. It is this:
the survivor’s claim of Divine Protection is no more than—and no
less than—a perfectly normal reaction to horror. It is socially
acceptable (which is why stories like these are on the news all the
time) and it is a natural, inbuilt coping strategy that we all use in
the face of overwhelming catastrophe. It gives us all, when we sur¬

vive a tragedy, a sense of meaning. That sense of meaning is not an
actual reality, but it is a way that we can look at the catastrophe and
lessen its devastating effect on us. (“I survived because I was meant
to. I don’t know why—but perhaps I’ll find out eventually.”)
That social mechanism is so normal and so common that one
very rarely hears or reads anything different. In fact, I know of
only one event where the survivor had the courage to stress the
arbitrary and random nature of the disaster. It happened in Aus¬
tralia at a skiing resort in the mountains where an unsuspected
and undetected flow of water from a thaw had loosened part of a
mountain. A sudden mudslide swept down and obliterated a
hotel, killing over a dozen people. Rescuers did not expect to find
any survivors in the part of the hotel that was crushed, but after
two days they heard noises. They located and managed to rescue
a man named Stewart Driver whose young wife had been killed in
the accident. He attributed his survival purely to the laws of
physics: it just happened that the part of the hotel that collapsed
didn’t happen to kill him. I have never read of anyone who said
anything like that. In my view, it shows a fortitude and courage of
exceptional depth. To survive physically in those circumstances is
in itself remarkable, to lose your wife in the same accident is
tragic, but to be able to call upon that personal resource and to
maintain a genuinely philosophical attitude is astonishing.
To clear up any possible misunderstanding, I am not saying
that the woman in the highway accident was “wrong” or that
Stewart Driver was “right.” That is not the point. The point is that
when confronted with a disaster, most people seek an explanation
that involves a plan or design for the universe—only a few people
such as Stewart Driver can face arbitrary events without taking
that sort of refuge. The really significant difference between the
two incidents is the intellectual fortitude and courage shown by
the person who saw the tragedy unfold.
''NOTHING MAKES SENSE OTHERWISE”: COPING

WITH THE UNKNOWN
Perhaps I can introduce the next benefit of communal belief—

dealing with the intellectual vacuum of the unknown—with a
personal illustration. A few years ago while I was filming a
sequence for a TV series in California, I became involved in an
after-dinner debate with a woman from San Diego. She became
very vehement about the existence of God, and at one point she
said firmly, “Of course God exists. It’s the only way to make sense
of everything. If God didn’t exist, I couldn’t understand how the
universe could work!”
At that point the debate degenerated somewhat, and I
pointed out that she might not understand how a telephone
worked (she said she didn’t) and went on to say that the mere fact
of a person being mystified by a telephone was not in itself proof
that God existed, nor was her mystification by the universe.
I am mystified by the universe, too, but, like most nontheists,
I acknowledge the fact that my mystification might say more
about the limitations of my own brain and state of knowledge
than it says about a divine creator.
That woman’s argument, though, is often used as a proof of
theism: if scientists cannot explain the workings of the cosmos,
then that is proof that God exists, because only He can know it all.
As with so many theological issues, this is a debate that
cannot be resolved by factual data. Those with a theist belief
assert that the entire mysterious cosmos is the creation of an
intelligence so much greater than our own that we cannot com¬
prehend its magnitude or its plan.
The opposing view is this: whether there is such an intelli¬
gence or not, there is clearly a human predilection for dealing
with the unknown by labeling it “God,” which then makes us feel
that we know it (or partly know it). The evidence supporting this
assertion, say the nontheists, includes the observation that
humans are clearly more comfortable in grappling with the

unknown when it bears a familiar label and we can then ascribe
certain properties to it. It is one way in which the human mind
works. To put the sequence of events in order, it goes like this:
having personified that unknownness, those who believe in that
external God may now imagine that it/he/she—in return—knows
them. The believers are in effect saying: <cWe believe in a some-
thing that watches over us and we believe that that particular
something has a special reason for looking after us. Or at least for
looking after those of us who have a personal relationship with
it—as opposed to those others, the unbelievers, who merely and
mistakenly regard the unknown as The unknown.’ ”
The words “mystery” and “miracle” and “wonder” are expres¬
sions of our own level of comfort with what we don’t know. I do
not know precisely how the human brain evolved, but that does
not mean that it’s a miracle and that natural selection or human
genetics are false. What we decide to label as “unknown” and what
we choose to label as “a miracle” or “the mind of God at work” say
much more about our own level of comfort with what we do not
know than they say about the presence of a God. The level at
which you choose to say “This is unimaginable” says a lot about
the compass of your imagination.
But there is no doubt that the image of an omniscient
omnipotent God is of great comfort. As has been said often, the
concept of God is wonderfully consoling when you find yourself
in a threatening and mysterious place. There was a saying during
the First World War that there were no atheists in foxholes—we
all tend to call out familiar names when we are frightened in the
dark. Everyone feels a little uneasy when confronting unanswer¬
able questions: owning up to that discomfort is one way of
dealing with the discomfort; saying “There is an answer but only
God knows it” is another.
PROMISES, PROMISES
FUTURE JOY: GOLD AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW
Some authorities in the past have compared religious faith to buying

an insurance policy in which the premiums are paid by regular acts
of devotion and observance, and the policy promises a large and
totally intangible payout after the insured person has died.
It may well be that, as the old saying has it, the promises of
eternal salvation and life offered by religion are no more than a
promise of “pie in the sky when you die” This aspect of belief in
an external deity is extremely important. What I have been talking
about is the function of religious belief as a coping strategy, sup¬
porting the believer in facing various aspects of the world—but
the “promises” aspect is totally different. In fact, the allures and
promises ostensibly made by external deities are multifaceted.
“THE ROAD MAP TO HEAVEN”:

THE ALLURE OF INFALLIBLE RULES
While I was making a television series in West Virginia, we visited

a strange sect of Christians in a very small impoverished town
called Jolo. At the Sunday church services, the preachers and wor¬
shippers would dance holding live rattlesnakes and copperheads
in their hands. They believed that dancing with potentially lethal
snakes was a test of their faith. There is a single verse of the Gospel
According to St. Mark which can interpreted (at a stretch) as a
promise of immunity from harm—although it was almost cer¬
tainly meant as a statement about the metaphorical power of faith
to overcome adversity, rather than as a literal statement. (The rel¬
evant text is from Mark 16:17: “And these signs shall follow them
that believe: in my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak
with new tongues. They shall take up serpents and if they drink
any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.”)
As part of their service, as a sort of workup to the snake

dance, the preacher got more and more frenetic (as did the con¬
gregation), asking them to put all their faith in the Lord. At one
point he waved the Bible above his head, then brandished it at the
congregation and yelled, “This is the only book you’ll ever need!
It’s got everything in it, right here! This book is a road map to the
Kingdom of Heaven!” His message and his emotion were quite
sincere—he really meant just that, and the congregation agreed.
Many people genuinely believe that if they do everything the
Bible says, their place in Heaven is guaranteed. The Bible offers
them the complete book of the rules of life: every question
answered, all paths and options mapped out for them. It is the
only book they will ever need.
This particular allure of a strong theist belief is enormously
attractive—because basically life is perplexing, and everyone
wants clear and comprehensible answers. We all hanker after a set
of clear and unequivocal rules and guidelines that we can obey
and that will solve all the problems and conflicts and ambiguities
of real life. It is (in some ways) a rather attractive prospect: no
more decisions, no more dilemmas, just a pure and simple Code
of Behavior. Perhaps the neatest phrasing of the pure-and-sub-
lime-orderliness lifestyle came in a novel about the young King
Arthur by T. H. White. In The Once and Future King, the young
Arthur has several magical metamorphoses (performed by
Merlin) in which he tries out the lifestyles of various animals.
When he becomes an ant, he experiences as a member of a large
ant colony the extremes of order, regulation, and robotic obedi¬
ence. The cornerstone maxim of the ants was expressed in a
simple statement of pure and blind obedience: everything that is
not forbidden is compulsory. That is perhaps an extreme example
of the desire to have rules and regulations covering every aspect
of existence—but I suspect that there are some people who would
quite welcome it.
THE ALLURE OF IMMORTALITY
Of course we all know the fact that every life (at least every phys¬
ical life) ends in a death. Nevertheless, the knowledge of our own
mortality and inevitable death is extremely uncomfortable. It
could be regarded—in our more philosophical moments—as an
unpleasant but inescapable feature of consciousness. Probably
shortly after the human species evolved consciousness (i.e., after
we developed a sense of awareness of ourselves and of the world
around us) we realized that life is circumscribed. Every human
life—no matter how worthwhile, exalted, productive, creative,
philanthropic or brilliant—ends in that persons death. As a cur¬
rent aphorism puts it so accurately, “despite all the miracles and
breakthroughs of modern medicine, the death rate will always
remain exactly the same—precisely one death per person.”
So, we human beings are aware of our own mortality
(although it is quite possible that we are not the only species on
earth that is so endowed—some zoologists suggest that elephants
mulling over their forbears’ bones might be aware of the reality of
their relatives’ death). But whether we are the exclusive owners of
this knowledge or not, we don’t like it. The inevitability of our
own death is never a pleasant subject to contemplate.
In fact, as it turns out, the great majority of humankind over
the last few millennia have found the knowledge of mortality
basically unacceptable, and have always quested for something
more than—and something more permanent than—this exces¬
sively brief life span.
So—I contend—it is possible that humans invented the con¬
cept of immortality to help them deal with the dread of dying.
And, as we can all see, it works. There is no doubt that it is com¬
forting to think of a continuity between the living and the dead
that survives and transcends death. For people to be united with
their children, relatives, and loved ones after death makes the
prospect of death obviously less dreaded and awful. The thought
that one might “carry on” in some form or other, using one’s
mind or some other aspect of one’s personality in some way—this
is genuinely a consummation devoutly to be wished. (Although
Shakespeare had Hamlet use that phrase, including the word
“devoutly,” in a different context, it applies very well to this one.)
Of course, nobody actually knows whether there is a life after
death or not. Those who believe in it say that it has been so stated
in the Bible (or the holy book of their religion), that stories of
people ascending to heaven are legion and that stories of people
seeing visions of the deceased are so frequent that they number
many millions. “And,” the argument goes, “so many millions of
people cannot be wrong.”
The opposing argument does not deny any of these state¬
ments. Those who do not believe in an afterlife simply observe
that the desire for immortality is an unfathomably deep urge—so
deep and powerful and primal that it can best be considered as a
basic component of the human psyche. As such—if it is actually
a fundamental component of the human mind—it is not sur¬
prising that most humans believe it. To believe in an afterlife, the
nonbelievers say, is so powerful an instinct that the millions (or
rather billions) who believe it are not proving that they are right;
they are merely proving that they are human.
This is not a debate that can be settled by factual data. Stories
of people coming back after death and having met relatives and
friends in the afterlife can never (in the current state of knowl¬
edge) be proven or substantiated. They cannot be proven as facts
demonstrable to an objective third party in the same way in which,
say, the presence of oil underground, the height of Mount Everest,
or the existence of the pi-meson atomic particle can be proven. In
fact, as we saw in chapter 4, even the feeling that one has had an
experience of an afterlife complete with visions of a white light
and perhaps feelings of meeting others can be produced by stim¬
ulation of a certain part of the limbic system. So—the nonbe¬
lievers maintain—it might not be the brain seeing something (an
afterlife) that actually exists; it might be the way the brain

responds physiologically to certain types of near disasters.
To some extent, whether or not an afterlife actually exists, or
in what way it exists, is not the point—and is certainly beyond the
remit of this book. The important point is that the concept of an
afterlife—just like the concept of a God—serves several impor¬
tant functions in helping humans cope with the world, and in
coping with the fact of death in particular.
What I am saying is that being aware of our own mortality is
an awkward but inevitable side-effect of having acquired con¬
sciousness. It is undoubtedly an unfair trick of nature to saddle
conscious sentient beings with this deep insult to our intellect—
the knowledge that our own life is brief and will inevitably end—
but it’s the way in which evolution has turned out. And—seen in
the context of the different forms of life on this planet—it may
still be preferable to possess consciousness and to suffer the dis¬
comfort of the knowledge of mortality, than to exist like a bump
on a log with no consciousness at all.
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard proposed that the
awareness and fear of dying is so fundamental to human nature
that it underlies most human beliefs and ways of behaving. If he
is right, and if the many observers of the functions of religion are
right, too, then there is a lot to be gained from a belief in an after¬
life. Perhaps—to paraphrase the phrase so commonly used—the
reward is not a guarantee of life eternal, but is at least a way of
dealing with the fear of death.
THE ALLURE OF PERFECT JUSTICE
Another value of belief in a deity is the concept of ultimate jus¬

tice—that somewhere there is a being that can discern the gen¬
uinely right from the genuinely wrong and who will mete out
reward and punishment appropriately.
In Greek theater in ancient times (for example, Sophocles and
the pre-Christian playwrights), human tragedies and catastrophes

were often resolved by an innovative theatrical device. What hap¬
pened was that a deity-figure was lowered by a stage-machine (a sort
of crane) into the play, and the deity pronounced from his/her/its
chariot/throne/device the solution to all the problems. Whereupon
the mortals marveled, the characters in the play all accepted the
divine dicta and the theater-goers all went home happy.
That dramatic convention in the final act of the play was
called in later Latin translation the deus ex machina (the god
from the machine). It made sense to the ancient Greek theatrical
audiences and (to some extent) it makes sense now—as evi¬
denced by a vast number of novels, fables, and of course the cul¬
ture of Hollywood movies.
The important point here is that the communality of human
experience—the deus ex machina, angels, Satan, and so on—are
all immediately intelligible to us because they all buy into the
same system of human thinking. They are all signs (or symptoms,
if you like) of the way we like to think about the world. We like—
and instinctively move toward—salvation figures that sort out the
good (which they reward) from the bad (which they punish). We
like to think about things that way—it was popular back then,
and it’s still popular today.
This is not surprising. Clearly we all share an urge to see our
problems sorted out by a force (or a being) greater than ourselves.
It is quite likely that the deus ex machina was the antecedent of
the medieval view of Judgment Day and of the souls of the dead
being assigned to heaven or hell depending on the quality of their
life on earth. Furthermore, it is equally likely that the divine ver¬
dicts spoken by the deus from his (or perhaps her) machina would
reflect the values of that society at that particular time. The same
is true of the tales told of Judgment Day. Justice may be perceived
to be perfect—but the exact vision of perfection is always defined
in the terms of contemporary social values, and usually includes
the visionary’s view of perfect revenge on his enemies. A good
example of this, by the way, is Dante’s Inferno. Dante was a highly

political animal, and with his various machinations he incurred
the wrath of several big-time politicos who had him exiled.
Accordingly, some of his enemies appear in his Inferno where they
turn up in some of the more pernicious circles of Hell, suffering
many kinds of nasty and extreme punishments. If one took
Inferno literally, one would think that Satan was closely following
the agenda of the very serious Dante Alighieri.
But to return to the main theme, the desire for something out¬
side ourselves that will sort out all of our problems is a major feature
of most religious systems. Whether it contains ingredients of revenge
and score-settling or not, the vision of perfect justice is clearly an
important part of the function of religious belief for the believer.
THE ALLURE OF WISH FULFILLMENT
Every single one of us has a wishlist. There is nobody who

would—in all honesty—answer the question “What do you really
wish for?” with a shrug and “Nothing—honestly. I’ve got it all.
Thanks for asking.”
The relationship between the concept of God and that of wish
fulfillment has always been close. In fact, the desire to have one’s
wishes granted is the direct descendent of intercessionary prayer.
There is no difference in format between anyone asking for their
wished to be fulfilled at, for example, the TV evangelical meetings
seen every Sunday and the ancient “we give you food, now give us
turtles” mentioned by Frazer (see page 35). Perhaps this material
and “gimme” aspect of some prayer was best satirized in the
famous fanis Joplin song “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes
Benz!” (The lyric’s next line mentions that her friends all drive
Porsches and that she must make amends; the song closes with
Janis Joplin asking the Lord to buy the next round of drinks.)
At a more general and more serious level, wish fulfillment
extends beyond the immediate desire for a new car or a round of
drinks. Underlying the immediate and material yearnings are more

deep-seated desires for an omnipotent and benign ultimate
guardian. Perhaps, as has been said before, the ultimate wish is for
salvation. Perhaps what we all long for is someone—a power greater
than we can understand—to rescue us, to sort out our problems,
and to reward our essential goodness with wish fulfillment.
When you start thinking about the wish-fulfillment aspect of

human belief, it is easy to see common themes running through
many different kinds of myths and legends. Perhaps the most
obvious example is in the Santa Claus fable. The concept of Santa
Claus contains many of the central elements—reward for the
people (children) who have behaved well, lack of reward (e.g., a
lump of coal) for those who have not, magical powers in the
awarding of the gifts (visiting all children in one night), and so
on. The fact that there may possibly have been a genuine Niklaus
who made anonymous donations to some impoverished women
by dropping money down their chimney (and that he may have
been canonized because of that) adds to the blurring of the
dividing line between myth and religion.
Clearly, invoking supernatural powers of any description is
given additional momentum by the very human desire to have
our wishes fulfilled.
But there is more to the act of praying than simply hoping
that a Saint Niklaus will drop coins down your chimney—the
action of framing a prayer has psychological effects of its own, as
we discussed above.
OTHER BENEFITS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
There are of course many other benefits that accrue from religious
and spiritual beliefs, and some of these are sometimes taken as fac¬
tual proof of the existence of God or of a supernatural intelligence.
I would like to propose that these undoubted benefits are not

proof of any extrahuman forces, but—in addition to being won¬
derful—simply illustrate how little we understand of human cre¬
ativity. To put it simply: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is
absolutely wonderful and it shows what humans are capable of,
but it is not in itself proof of the existence of God, or of angels or
of Adam and Eve.
INSPIRATION
To a lot of people it is obvious that some acts of creativity (usu¬

ally in art—particularly in painting, sculpture, religious music,
and literature—but sometimes in other disciplines) are astound¬
ing and so far beyond normal human capabilities (apparently)
that they can only have originated from a divine source. The
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, so the argument goes, is so magnifi¬
cent and a work of such inspired genius that it cannot be the work
of a human alone; it must prove that a divinity exists.
Of course, like many of the issues that I have discussed so far
in this book, there can be no absolute proof or disproof. However,
it has often been said (and there is more than a grain of truth in
it) that God has all the best tunes (and, one might add, some of
the best paintings, sculptures, poetry, and literature).
Those who have strong theist beliefs feel that the acts of cre¬
ativity that emanate from artists when inspired by God are so far
beyond the realm of ordinary human talent that they are proof of
an external source of energy—an inspiration. The flaw in the
logic here is simply that we have no real idea what the limits of
human creativity are. To label an extraordinary act of genius as
“divine” is no more than saying, “I don’t know how he did that.”
People in the fourteenth century said it of Dante, in the seven¬
teenth century of Shakespeare, then of Mozart and Einstein, and
now of Stephen Hawking. The fact that we do not know where the
ideas and visions come from does not prove that they are of
extrahuman origin—but it does say something about our recog¬

nition of our own limitations.
The nontheist view is that humankind is a biological popula¬
tion and that in any biological populations there are a few people at
either end of the spectrum. While most of us are bunched fairly
close together in the “average” group for creativity, as with height,
weight, IQ, and other factors, there are always the outlying individ¬
uals. In any population there are always a few people at the edges of
the bell curve—people who are very tall, very short, very heavy, very
light, very intelligent, very stupid, very creative, or very uncreative.
In fact, we now have some evidence identifying this type of
person—and once again it is related to the temporal lobes. In a
study involving over eight hundred subjects, Persinger and
Makarec found that there was a group of people who scored high
results on questions related to hearing an external voice—in other
words, hearing a muse was a property shared by a small group of
the population. You may only get one Michelangelo every few
centuries but that is a simple statement of statistics.
Furthermore, this view goes, people can only excel and be
seen as geniuses within the context of the creative activities of
their times. Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling with images
of angels, God, Adam, and so on because that is what the times
demanded. He was commissioned by the pope who wanted some¬
thing that would astonish the people. Michelangelo was a genius
and he painted—in his genius way—what people expected a
painting to look like, only much, much better. But it was still
within the mores of the times—if Michelangelo had had a vision
of what van Gogh would be painting a few centuries later and had
done the Sistine ceiling in a repeating pattern of sunflowers, say,
the pope wouldn’t have given him any more commissions. As the
author Gore Vidal once said in a television debate, Michelangelo
was basically a closet Hellenist (i.e., a pagan) who used his genius
to paint divine and religious subjects because that was the pre¬
vailing market at the time.
So, the fact that images of God and theist themes have been
the focus or content of so many works of art is simply a statement
of the way geniuses express their extraordinary talents. It is the
contemporary expression of extraordinary talent—not neces¬
sarily proof of an external source for the inspiration. The genius
is the artists genius, but the content is dictated by the times and
the market in which the artist lives. Biology predicts that there
will always be geniuses born, but only very occasionally.
ATTRIBUTES OF THE SOUL
In many theistic philosophies, the belief in God is linked to

human attributes such as love, appreciation of beauty, a sense of
nature and the universe, and other aspects of the “soul” (in all
senses of that word). By the same token, many theists believe that
atheists must not only, by definition, be “soulless,” but must also
necessarily be incapable of human emotions and of the apprecia¬
tion of the intangible aspects of human existence. The atheist
philosophical position is portrayed stereotypically as that of a
person ruled entirely and exclusively by reason, and devoid of
human understanding. Belief in God, so the argument goes, gives
you the depth and the dimensional attributes of a soul.
The opposing view is simple: there is no connection between
religious views on the one hand and understanding and experi¬
encing human emotions on the other. They may both be very
important in the makeup of an individual but they have nothing
to do with each other. Supporting evidence is close at hand—this
is a simple matter of everyday observation. We all know people
who have deep religious beliefs but who are, in general, extremely
unemotional and are frequently insensitive to their own feelings
and those of others (I call that “emotionally colorblind”) and who
have great or even insuperable difficulty in discussing matters of
the heart.
On the other hand we all know examples of the opposite.
There are quite a few goodhearted and sensitive nontheists (Eve

met a lot of them, so I know what Tm talking about) who have no
difficulty understanding and experiencing love, doubt, artistic
genius, natural wonder, awe, and (I use the word rarely!) ecstasy
A sense of beauty, love, awe for nature and great art are not
the exclusive properties of theists. In fact, the opposite is more
often true. People who do not have insight into their own emo¬
tions are quite likely to be destructive and often may be insensi¬
tive to the emotions of others. The major point here is simple
(and not very controversial). Even though, throughout history
(and in the present) many artistic and inspirational achievements
have been linked with a belief in an external deity, it is not true
that you have to hold such a belief in order to experience the same
emotions and (if your talents lie in that direction) create works of
artistic merit.
The disproof of the “nontheists-are-emotionless-robots” idea
can only exist at a personal level. If you know a few people who
are nontheists but who clearly do possess an understanding of
human emotion (theirs and other peoples), beauty, awe, and all
the other important sensitivities, then you know that the “emo¬
tionless robots” idea is fallacious.
SOCIAL FUNCTIONS DERIVED FROM BELIEFS
So far, then, we have been discussing the function of belief in

terms of coping—coping with disasters, coping with deprivation
and suffering, and coping with the fear of death, to name a few.
However, after beliefs have been shared by a large number of
people, social interactions based on those beliefs begin to have a
function of their own. Social customs based on a belief acquire
their own individual and intrinsic life and values.
For example, take the simple phrase “Bless you.” All of us are
accustomed to the idea of saying, “Bless you!” when somebody
sneezes. Originally (so it is said) this custom grew up from a belief

in the Middle Ages that when a person sneezes their body is tem¬
porarily susceptible to possession by a demon or devil. So, to pre¬
vent the demon taking advantage and sneaking into the sneezer’s
body at a weak moment, a friend says, “God bless you!” (now usu¬
ally contracted into “Bless you!”). Upon hearing this, it is
assumed, the demon realizes that the advantage has been lost,
shrugs, and mutters “Some other time, perhaps” to itself and
slinks back to Hades.
Most of the people who say, “Bless you!” have no idea of the
origin of the custom. Presumably in the Middle Ages it was
regarded as an act of great altruism and importance; now it is
merely a symbolic phrase, indicating the politeness of the blesser
and a socialized concern for the blessee.
But—and this is the point about all interpersonal acts that
have acquired their own significance—it now has its own func¬
tion. It is now an audible expression of goodwill: a once-signifi-
cant religion-based custom has now been overlaid and repur¬
posed as a minor social grace.
The same is true of any form of belief, whether it was origi¬
nally religious or not: it can acquire a social function of its own.
Even superstitions such as throwing salt over your shoulder if you
spill some at table can become a simple social custom or grace. An
excellent example is Halloween. For the last two decades or so it
has become a highly popular secular festival with its own rites,
traditions, and observances. The kids get excited, dressed up and
made up, get to mingle with many more other kids than usual,
and get large amounts of free candy. The parents probably feel a
bit embarrassed, but get to give candies to the neighbors’ kids or
visit houses they wouldn’t see usually. For a few hours, most of the
community is involved in a festival that most people understand
(a bit), and adopt a defined role that is clearly expected by the rest
of the community. And (usually) everyone has a good time. It has
a socially cohesive value to which its original purpose is totally
irrelevant. The participating adults might be vaguely aware that

the annual festival of Halloween was originally based on the
ancient ceremony of the druids called Hallowmas, or Allhallows
Eve. It was thought that on this night the souls of the dead went
flying about, and could only be kept at bay by lighting fires (later
lanterns) and loudly celebrating. In our era, of course, the long-
distant classical religious purpose of the ritual is immaterial.
The important point with all these originally religious rituals
is that the custom derived from the ritual acquires its own func¬
tion and value—and the truth of the origin of that custom (e.g.,
a druidal night of the dead, or saying “Bless you” to ward off
demonic possession) need not detract from the current validity of
the custom itself. If everyone in a community uses something as
a coping strategy in a widely accepted social transaction, that
custom will acquire value as a social coping strategy. Whether the
original idea or belief is true or untrue does not matter—the
social value of a custom depends on its utilization. The way a cur¬
rency is used determines its real worth.
A TAXONOMY OF BELIEF
Thus far we have been discussing belief—its origins, functions,

and values—as if it were a single entity, a single activity of the
human brain. It has always been widely accepted that, in everyday
usage, the word “belief” is not subdivided: a person either believes
in something or does not, or is in an agnostic (“not knowing”)
state which may perhaps transform into belief or disbelief at a
later date. In general, the word is used to describe a mental
activity that is almost like a switch—it is either in the “on” posi¬
tion or the “off” position.
This polarization implicit in the single-sense monolithic def¬
inition of the word “belief” might be part of the problem. For,
when we start to think about the activity of believing, there are
clearly many ways and levels in which we use the word. To lump
together all those different activities and to equate every form of
belief with every other form might be part of the creation of mis¬
understanding and conflict.
What follows is a very rough and simplistic taxonomy of be¬
lief—an attempt to subdivide beliefs into different categories which
will, I hope, make intuitive sense to the reader. It is to be hoped that
these categories or subtypes of belief will be recognizable, and that
therefore it will be possible to think of belief not as a single
homogenous activity, but as a multifarious group of functions—as
varied as the group of actions that we call “thoughts” or “emotions.”
1. Complete or total belief: The person holds the belief totally and
unshakably. The belief is a central part of the persons outlook on
the world—a change in that belief would produce a change in the
personality and the behavior of that individual. The belief goes
“all the way down” and is maintained by the person despite any
lack of factual data or in the face of any contradictory data. Most
religious and spiritual beliefs are of this type and degree, and
many religious people would describe their own personal belief in
their God as complete and total.
Perhaps the most important attribute of total belief is that the
belief imbues, informs, and influences all aspects of the persons life.
What distinguishes people who are what we would all call “truly
religious” is the consistency of their actions. People who feel that
their lives are dedicated in total to, for example, Jesus or Buddha, lay
out specific thoughts and actions for themselves in every circum¬
stance. They feel that their response to any stimulus is modified by
their belief. It is the breadth and totality of the belief that is so
important. Often, such people live in particular ways and lifestyles,
and on an individual basis they would disclaim and disown any of
the destructive actions of their religions, such as religious wars.
This type or extent of belief is so integral to the personality
and the life of the person that it would not be possible to take it
away without destroying that persons personality.3 The believer

would be a totally different person without the belief.
2. Partial belief: The person has a part of their mind that is ready
and capable of believing in the object, but most of the time the
individual does not hold that belief as part of their daily life. It is
there, but it is not a feature of their normal worldview, and could
perhaps be altered or shed without affecting the person. They have
moments or experiences when they do believe these things, but at
other times they do not hold to that belief firmly. In general, this
is the more common type of religious belief. Large numbers of
people do believe, for example, in God, but freely admit that this
belief does not influence much of their daily activities. They would
not state that their God is a living presence, for example.
Many people who would label themselves as agnostic—not
knowing—about an external God would say that their belief was
potential or partial. The do not have complete or total belief,
but—if you’ll forgive the grammar—they “do not not-believe.”
3. Contextual belief: There are many things that large numbers of

people believe in to a very slight extent, and only in circumstances
where the outcome is consistent with their own views and plans.
A good example is astrology (others include numerology, palm
reading, Tarot cards, and the use of the I-Ching in the Western
world). These are all activities that most people do not take as
gospel or as undeniable truth, but will note and remember for a
while. If events turn out as predicted, the person might well
ascribe some magic properties to their star sign, or the numerical
sum of the letters of their name, or whatever. On the other hand,
most people would not be upset if they had a good day when their
astrology prediction said they would have a bad one. Nor is this
type of slight belief challenged if every person born under the
sign of Aries does not have the same financial reverses and emo¬
tional boosts on the same day.
Many people, for example, feel that they do partly believe in

the ghosts or in spirits, or that contact can be made with people
who have died.
These kinds of beliefs provide (apart from entertainment and
amusement) a socially acceptable and useful rationale for certain
types of conflicts (and attractions) as well as a useful method of
resolution (“I knew we’d have this fight—Capricorns and Leos
always disagree about risk-taking.”). The important attribute of a
slight belief is that it exists only in the narrow confines of the con¬
text for which it is devised. As in the above example, a person is
unlikely to believe that every single action of their life is imbued
with Capricorn-ness and ought to be conducted with that guiding
principle in mind. Similarly, a belief in ghosts or spooks is
unlikely to be a prominent feature of a person’s outlook on a
sunny day in a crowd, but more likely to be prominent in a creaky
house at night. Many childhood beliefs—as I shall discuss next—
are contextual.
4. Beliefs of childhood: Childhood is different. There are many

fables and myths which we tell our children and which act as
moral guides. Most of them have to do with reward and punish¬
ment, and they have always been acceptable methods of
explaining to children what is socially acceptable or creditable
behavior and what is not. Figures such as Santa Claus, the Easter
Bunny, and even the Tooth Fairy are valuable ways of teaching
children how to behave well (e.g., Santa Claus knows when you’ve
been “naughty or nice,” or “be brave about losing that tooth”).
Most childhood beliefs, in the modern era, are contextual. We
do not expect children to be watching for the Easter Bunny, the
Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus at any time other than in the appro¬
priate context.
These types of beliefs are also accompanied with very definite
social conventions about the appropriateness of these beliefs in
different age groups. Adults expect their children to take the belief
literally when they are young, but would be surprised if, say, a
thirty-year-old man still believed in the Tooth Fairy Despite
movies such as Miracle on 34th Street, a sincere belief by an adult
in the reality and actual existence of Santa Claus would be
regarded with suspicion. You might even want to hospitalize (for
psychiatric support) a forty year old who stridently maintains a
literal belief Santa Claus, but we would not recommend the same
treatment for a five year old.
5. Beliefs of small minorities: Some beliefs are held very sincerely

by small numbers of people who are not necessarily part of the
same community, and whose only link is the belief. A typical
example of this is the belief held by many hundreds of people that
they have been abducted by aliens and have had experiments
done on them in alien spaceships. Some of these people have
quite marked social difficulties and problems in their own
lifestyles (although some do not), and often the alien abduction
includes a form of social praise (“you have been selected”). Some¬
times the subjects say that they have been subjected to sexual
experiments. These beliefs are always deeply held, and sometimes
reinforced in self-help groups. The individuals who hold these
beliefs are accustomed to being called “crazy” or “deluded” by
people who do not share the beliefs.
Perhaps certain religions that have very small numbers of
adherents fit into this category also—although they often tend to
live in a single community. For example, the Dukhobors are a small
band whose religion includes the practices of nudity and arson
(usually of farm buildings). They are accustomed to both social iso¬
lation and having their acts of arson treated as criminal actions.
6. Superstitions: Then there are superstitions. Most of us have a

few of them, but what do we mean by the word?
When we throw spilled salt over our left shoulder, or walk
around a ladder—instead of under it, even when we can see
clearly that there is nobody on the ladder to drop something on

us—what are we thinking of?
Most people would not connect their own superstitious feel¬
ings with any religious experience. They seem to belong to dif¬
ferent compartments of the mind. Superstitions are things we go
along with “because you never know” or “because there’s no sense
in taking a chance” or “because I always feels more comfortable
when I do” or “because everybody does that—it’s normal” or
“because it’s a habit” or “just because.” Nobody would imagine
that God would punish them for walking under a ladder, but that
trouble would come from “fate” or “destiny” or (if we are being
more literary) “the Furies” or simply “the odds.”
In other words, behind superstitions there is a belief in some
form of indefinable, ineffable force that needs to be placated and
propitiated. We all know what we mean by “superstition” but, at
the same time, we acknowledge that we do not know in what
form our punishment for disobedience will arrive. We know that
when we are behaving superstitiously we are trying to propitiate
“something out there,” but it isn’t religion.
Superstition is a difficult type of belief to categorize. In all
likelihood the origins of superstitions are in animism—that is,
belief in the consciousness of all life and all objects. We know that
animism was one of the earliest common beliefs of human soci¬
eties, and it is very likely that there are remaining vestiges of this
deep-seated attitude around (and within) us today. As Trotter
pointed out, anything that we do as a member of the herd would
not be a conscious and rational choice or decision—it would feel
like a vague sense of comfort if we go along with it, and like a
vague discomfort if we don’t. Superstitions would fit the bill very
nicely as herd instincts derived from animism.
Everybody would draw a clear line between superstitions and
religion. Even so, from a nontheist point of view, it is possible to
see both superstitions and religion as manifestations of the same
animistic belief system. If you happen to believe that there is no
external deity and no external intelligence controlling human

affairs, then both the “casual” superstitions and the organized
religions are part of the same system of belief.
This is an issue that is far from trivial. Currently, we use the word
“believe” as if every belief was equivalent in all respects to every
other. But if the categorization that Eve set out above makes intu¬
itive sense to you, then the word “belief” has several different
shades of meaning for you. Belief in Santa Claus is not the same
type of belief as belief in Jesus. The word belief has many different
meanings, and it is most unfortunate and confusing that we use
the same word to describe without qualifying it all of these dif¬
ferent believing activities.
Being aware of the varying degrees of belief may be the first—
and essential—step in avoiding dogmatism and conflict over dif¬
ferences in belief.
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE UNCHANGEABLE
At this point—having discussed the origins and forms of belief in

a controlling deity and the many benefits that accrue to the
believer—we should pause to consider how that image of God (or
gods) has changed over the course of time. And how that change
or evolution in the concept of a god reflects the society in which
it arises.
There is no doubt that the image, role and definition of
“God” has changed constantly over the centuries and it is legiti¬
mate to ask why this happened. Has God himself/herself/itself
changed, or is this process simply a matter of the organized reli¬
gions bowing to the demands and perceptions of the populace? In
other words, is this change anything to do with the external deity
or deities itself (or themselves) or is it purely a matter of the mat¬
uration and development of our own minds and understanding?
A few millennia ago, everyone was content with a figure such as
the God of Abraham, the protector and guide of a tribe of nomads

wandering along the Sinai peninsula. A few thousand years later we
need a concept of a cosmic intelligence that controls the entire uni¬
verse many billions of light years across. So is this a matter of human
sophistication or is there an element of divine evolution?
I would like to suggest that in our reflex quest to explain the
inexplicable and to find a “because” for every “why,” the concept
of God started out as a repository for the things we didn’t under¬
stand (“the God of the gaps”). Over the centuries, humankind
understood more and more of the previously unknowable. The
unknowable became a smaller area (even though it is still pretty
big), and as it shrank, the number of phenomena that needed the
cover of the image of a God steadily shrank, too.
To some extent, the history of the world’s religions fits this
hypothesis quite well. It is worth looking at a few points in the
evolution of humankind’s religions to cast some light here.
For example, the God of Israel, known by the name Yahweh—
the single God of the Jewish and Christian religions—did not
emerge without a struggle among other deities. The details are
lucidly set out in Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. She describes
how the early Israelites believed that Yahweh/God was one among
a council of deities, and won out against stiff competition:
Yahweh did not seem to transcend the older deities in a

peaceful natural manner. He had to fight it out. Thus, in Psalm
Eighty-two we see him making a play for the leadership of the
Divine Assembly that had played such an important role in
both Babylonian and Canaanite myth:
Yahweh takes his stand in the Council of El

to deliver judgments among the gods.
“No more mockery of justice

no more favoring the wicked!
Let the weak and the orphan have justice,
be fair to the wretched and the destitute,

rescue the weak and needy
save them from the clutches of the wicked”4
On a personal note, I have to admit that this came as a complete

surprise. Before I read Karen Armstrong’s book I had supposed
that, before belief in one God became widespread, most peoples
had simply worshiped several gods. I imagined that the concept of
one God won over the other belief systems because the people who
believed in one God gained the upper hand on the Sinai peninsula.
In other words, I had assumed that the religious domination of
Yahweh/God was due to the political and geographical domina¬
tion—on earth, as it were—by the people who happened to believe
in him. I had always imagined that if, for example, the followers of
Baal had been better equipped, armed, and organized than anyone
else, Baalism would have become the dominant religion.
What Karen Armstrong describes—in great and fascinating
detail—is that the people who believed in Yahweh/God believed
that He had won his own political (if I may use that word) victory
in the heavens, in the Council of El. Eventually, they believed, it
happened that there was only one God because he had shown
himself to be the best. The struggle, the victory, and the domi¬
nance was not between the followers of God and the peoples who
believed in other deities, but between Yahweh /God and the other
deities themselves. Yahweh/God emerged as the winner not
because His followers won, but because He won.
This is just one example of the way in which the objects of
belief—gods—have evolved according to the legends of their var¬
ious adherents. It is equally fascinating to read of the evolution of
the name Allah—another clear example of the evolution of belief.
Here Karen Armstrong summarizes some of the prophet
Mohammed’s reflections during his retreat to a small cave near
the top of Mount Hira during Ramadan in the year 610:
Like many of the Arabs, Muhammad had come to believe that

al-Lah, the High God of the ancient Arabian pantheon whose
name simply meant “the God,” was identical to the God wor¬
shiped by the Jews and the Christians. He also believed that
only a prophet of this God could solve the problems of his
people, but he never believed for one moment that he was
going to be that prophet. Indeed the Arabs were unhappily
aware that al-Lah had never sent them a prophet or a scripture
of their own, even thought they had his shrine in their midst
from time immemorial.”5
THE MATURATION OF EXPLANATION
So things have changed: what does that tell us?

There are several possible conclusions that can be drawn
from the evolution of images of God. One possible conclusion is
that human understanding of the deity was initially poor and
vague, and now has improved and become more sophisticated.
God has not changed—according to this viewpoint—but our
understanding has.
Supporters of this view frequently point to analogies in other
areas—such as our understanding of the brain. Thousands of
years ago people did not even believe that the act of thinking went
on in the brain. They thought it went on in the heart and that the
brain did nothing but cool the blood. As empirical observations
accumulated, this was abandoned, but it was accepted as a fact
that the brain was populated with spirit forces. Then along came
Rene des Cartes (or Descartes as he is known now). His idea was
that the brain was like a system of pipes or conduits conducting
vital forces along them. After the invention of electricity, it
became possible to envision brain function as a complex system
or network of electric wires. A few important advances later and
we are able to think of the brain as a computer system, with sub¬
systems changing the state of other systems. This allows us to con¬
ceptualize a model of how our brains might, for example, recog-
nize patterns, be sensitive to certain kinds of visual stimuli, and so

on. The human brain had not altered over those centuries—but
our ability to explain and describe it had.
Those who believe in the existence of an external God feel that
the evolution of religious expression is comparable to this process:
the phenomenon at the center has not altered, but the humans
observing it have become more adept at conceptualizing it.
The opposite conclusion is equally compelling—that the evo¬
lution of religions is a straightforward reflection of the expansion
of human knowledge causing shrinkage of superstition. A few
millennia ago, as I said above, humans did not know anything at
all about the universe: they were frightened by it and invented the
concept of God or gods to help them face that fear. As more and
more became known about the universe, less and less needed to
be laid at Gods door for explanation. Thus—the argument
goes—the shrinkage of the religious realm reflects nothing more
than the growth of our factual knowledge.
Of course there is no definitive and correct answer to this—
and there can never be one. Theists believe that human under¬
standing of the eternal God has always been incomplete, and that
the change in the concept of God is simply due to our own matu¬
ration and the increased sophistication of our understanding. Non-
theists believe that, in its entirety, the concept of God is a human
creation reflecting humankind’s fear of the unknown (among other
things) and, as more of the previously unknown universe is under¬
stood, the role of the concept of God shrinks. Since, as I said in the
introduction, the act of believing is by definition something that
extends beyond the range of proven facts and data, this discussion
of the unknown can never be factually settled.
Yet even though the facts will never be settled, the psychological
effects and functions of belief can be examined in further detail.
THE NATURAL EVOLUTION OF COPING STRATEGIES
There are ways in which this can all be put together. In many
respects, as I said earlier, religious beliefs serve the function of a
coping strategy—they assist the possessor to adapt to difficulties,
stresses, and anxieties. It would therefore be reasonable to look at
the benefits of religious beliefs to a society or community and
compare them to the benefits of coping strategies in an individual
person, as that person grows and matures.
Here arises an interesting comparison. In any individual,
coping strategies that help the person at an early stage of devel¬
opment may later be abandoned or totally reconstructed later on.
That is what usually happens to many coping strategies-—they
change as the individual grows and matures. In the history of each
of us as individuals, the things that helped us cope when we were
children (dolls, security blankets, nightlights, and so on) usually
evolve into more and more abstract strategies in our minds. Even¬
tually, simply the memory or image of a childhood object may
give us comfort instead of the object itself. Hence, as we grow
older we need fewer of the concrete objects of our childhood, and
more and more sophisticated concepts to help us cope. A physical
object that we use in a coping strategy and later abandon is called
a transitional object.
A comparable process has been going on, and is still going on,
with religious beliefs on the much larger scale of humankind as a
species. If the history of humankind can be compared in some
ways to the maturation of an individual (in other words, if one
could compare the process of civilization to the process of the
growth and maturation of an individual), then the concept of a
God may be comparable to the function of a transitional object.
It works in the same way as a childhood teddy bear or a security
blanket. It is something that is perpetually by your side early in
life and gives you comfort during periods of stress and change.
Then it becomes subjected to change itself—as the individual
learns new coping strategies and becomes more independent of

the transitional object.
The evolving role of religion in society (from a monolithic
state of everyone-believing-the-same-thing-ism to the current
individual and highly personal belief system) may be analogous
to that changing function of a transitional object. The evolution
of the figure of God from a heavenly omnipotent man-shaped
giant-in-the-sky to a more abstract and personal motive force or
essence may perhaps be compared to the natural evolution of a
coping strategy and to the way that we, as individuals, use a tran¬
sitional object for a time.
BELIEF AS A UNIQUELY HUMAN ACTIVITY
In this chapter we have been looking at some of the benefits that

a set of beliefs provide to the believer. Most of the points that I
have raised are simply intuitive—you know that belief does this
for the believer simply by thinking about it. The traits that I have
discussed in this chapter are of course not the only ones (we shall
discuss a few of the others in chapter 7). But there are deep feel¬
ings and sensations that come from a clear and belief which are
much more difficult to tabulate and categorize.
For example, a strong religious belief may give the believer
not only a sense of divine destiny and justice, but also a deep sense
of personal calm and tranquility. The great majority of believers
find the act of reflecting on the object of their belief—be it God
or some other entity, external or internal—genuinely and deeply
pleasurable; in many cases, the sense of pleasure and fulfillment is
deeper than with any other activity. In fact, in several religions,
that is the entire point of communication with God. In many reli¬
gions, the act of prayer is viewed entirely as a method of changing
the praying person s attitude and feelings. If the person achieves
that sense of deep calm and tranquility, then the prayer—and
hence the religion—is working. So the tendency to hold a firm

belief in something is not only deeply ingrained, it is also deeply
rewarding and satisfying.
We can draw some other conclusions from this material, too.
First (as Campbell and Frazer both illustrated so brilliantly), there
are obvious parallels and similarities between the myths and leg¬
ends which express the beliefs of different communities and cul¬
tures. Many themes are common in the religious stories of many
different countries and presumably evolved separately and inde¬
pendently.
Even more significantly, concepts and images of God have
undergone change and evolution over time. This change, as we
have seen, can be compared to the change in coping strategies that
occur in a person during growth and maturation, and to that
extent, the function of religions may be seen as analogous to tran¬
sitional objects in an individuals growth and maturation.
Finally, we can see that there are ways in which beliefs in var¬
ious objects or people differ one from another. This activity that
we call “believing” is not a simple on-or-off function. There are
various degrees of it: there are different intensities, different
modes, methods and ways of believing.
There is perhaps one theme that underlies so many of these
beneficial effects that accrue to the believer from the act of
believing. Perhaps the most important of these combines justice
and victory over death, adversity, and persecution—it is the deep
longing that all humans share to be rescued. It is the strong hope
that we all have for salvation and a savior. We all (or almost all)
want to be rescued, and so we personify that hope, initially as a
fable or a fairy tale and later as a myth or legend. Some commen¬
tators believe that this is where religious beliefs originate. In fact,
the continuity between those two processes—the expression of
hope in myth or fable on the one hand, and religious belief on the
other—was set out clearly by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with
a Thousand Faces, when he wrote:
It is obvious that the infantile fantasies, which we all cherish

still in the unconscious, play continually into myth, fairy tale
and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible
being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the
images and seems to be remembering something already
known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings
come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort
to go beyond.6
Campbell expresses a clear and important thought here—empha¬

sizing the values of myth as well as the potential dangers. First he
observes that fairy tales and myths are part of a continuum that
embraces religion, that they “play continually into” the teachings
of church. Second, he sees the value and the comfort of those
images—which we seem to recognize and have already known—
up to a certain point. Beyond that point they become an obstacle
to our understanding and coping if the concept becomes too
rigidly bound up in the symbol.
NOTES
1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: The Noonday Press,
1998), p. 21.
2. William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience
and much else besides, was a psychologist who studied the role and
function of religion and religious ideas as part of the human mind. He
clearly had very strong theistic ideas himself, yet his whole attitude was
dispassionate and objective. All of his writings are centered on the theme
of this quotation, although the particular phrasing of it comes not from
himself but from an entry about him in Chambers Biographical Dictio¬
nary, ed. J. O. Thorne and T. C. Collocott (Edinburgh: W 8c R Cham¬
bers, 1974). It epitomizes everything that James said about the phenom¬
enology of religious experience.
3. This is one of the central themes of the plays of Henrik Ibsen—
there is a central core of every person’s being that if destroyed will pro-
duce collapse of the person. Another work that speaks to this theme—
the centrality of certain types of belief to the meaning of the person’s
life—is Hector Berlioz’s opera “Dialogue of the Carmelites” in which a
community of nuns face death in the French Revolution.
4. Translation of the verse is by John Bowker, The Religious Imagi¬
nation and the Sense of God (Oxford, 1978). Quoted in Karen Armstong,
A History of God (London: Heinemann, 1993).
5. Armstrong, A History of God, p. 212.
6. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 177.
Chapter 7
Destructive Effects
of Communal Belief
The Dogma in the Manger
RELIGION AND AGGRESSION: A CLOSE

RELATIONSHIP OR COINCIDENCE?
Et is quite clear from even the briefest look at human his-

tory that, from its beginnings, religions have often been
close to the source of considerable strife and divisiveness. In
this chapter we will unpick some of the strands of those
troubles, and see how humankind’s abilities to behave
aggressively and violently are so easily amplified and esca¬
lated by religious beliefs; that is, how religion is an issue that
so readily helps the storm clouds break.
As the title implies, this chapter focuses solely on the
problems created by theist beliefs. I am not, of course, sug¬
gesting that all belief in a God must inevitably and neces¬
sarily lead to strife and aggression, but I am stressing the fact
that since the beginnings of recorded history that is what
has happened. Religion has frequently been used as a justi-
214
DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS 215
fication or a rationale for violence and strife, and—as we saw in

chapter 4—there are some suggestions from the neurosciences as
to why this should be.
If the history of our species had been different—if religious
differences had generated no more violence and killing than, say,
differing tastes in poetry or in cooking1—then only a few people
would be concerned with it at all (and I would not bother writing
a book on the subject). It is because religious beliefs have such a
war-torn history that this book is focusing on the connection
between God and good in the first place.
So let us look at a few of the features of religious belief which
make it more likely that conflicts will lead to aggression. In other
words, let us examine some of the aspects of religious belief and
experience—as opposed to other types of belief and experience—
that increase the tendency to escalate differences in belief into acts
of aggression and destruction.
RATIONALIZING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT
What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are

often extremely irrational attempts to justify our
instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
DIVINE ENDS JUSTIFYING MORTAL MEANS
So far we have established that our species evolved with an active

and powerful limbic system, and subsequently developed an
extraordinary and capable neocortex (“new brain,” i.e., the two
cerebral hemispheres) with which it became able to perform
complex processes of rational thought, belief, experience, esthetic
choice, and all the other wonders of the human mind.
Unfortunately, one of the side effects, so to speak, of rational
thought is that is can be employed to justify or rationalize an

action which has origins that might be rooted in instinctive
aggression. In other words, an individual might be prompted to
perform a certain act—of aggression, for example—by drives that
originate in biological aggression and territorial possession, and
which are then amplified in crowd behaviors by mechanisms
including the limbic system. That individual might then employ
the neocortex to provide a rational or apparently logical justifica¬
tion for that aggressive act. We might—as the epigram above
from Huxley implies—use our rational neocortical brain to jus¬
tify a limbic emotion that has been amplified or instigated by our
being a member of a crowd, responding to a stimulus that a single
individual might possibly ignore.
Perhaps the foremost of these potential rationalizations is the
principle that the ends justify the means. Of all the logical ratio¬
nales used to buttress religious aggression, this is by far the most
powerful, the most enduring, and the most—to use Le Bons
word—contagious. If the objective of the conflict is to rectify
something in the Kingdom of Heaven and to achieve something
that will last for all eternity, then the temporary human mortal
side effects pale into insignificance by comparison. There can be
no greater “ends” than the commands of God and eternal life.
It is obvious to all of us that many people are so attached to
their own set of religious beliefs that they are quite ready to die
for them and—far more significantly—as we saw in chapter 4, to
kill for them. The central rationale is not difficult to see: it is a
matter of how the believer weighs the costs compared to the ben¬
efits. To the earnest believer, the very considerable benefits asso¬
ciated with the goal (the ends) greatly outweigh the apparently
trivial costs associated with the endeavor (the means).
In religious rituals, that principle can be clearly seen in many
examples. One example from the nineteenth century was
recorded by Frazer, who noted that in some tribes around the
Bering Strait, if the hunting was bad, it was a custom for the
hunter to kill a small child, dry the body, and carry it in a bag. It
was believed that this provided the hunter with the extrasharp
sight that young children were thought to have. We would feel
revulsion at the thought of the ends (i.e., feeding the rest of the
community) justifying those means (the murder of an infant),
but that community regarded it as unfortunate but necessary.
On the larger scale of communities fighting other communi¬
ties, this rationalization has been in evidence for centuries. His¬
tory is littered with trails of devastation caused when one group
of people feels that it is justified in killing another for the sake of
their concept of eternal or divine values.
Conflicts that have been started or continued by religious
violence make up an almost endless list. Here are just a few exam¬
ples: the Crusades; the Spanish Inquisition; the persecution of the
Huguenots; the Manichean schism; dozens of wars between
Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and Christians (of which
Mulucca in the Spice Islands is an example that is going on right
now), and Hindus and Muslims (for example, in the partition of
India), and civilian slaughter on religious grounds on the largest
scale yet known, that of more than six million people, mostly
Jews, in Hitler’s Third Reich.
You can probably think of many other examples—but I
would like to pick just a very small but well-documented episode
in order to illustrate some of the barbaric actions that can be
rationalized or justified on religious grounds. It concerns a tiny
and long-forgotten religious war in the sixteenth century. It is
valuable for two reasons: First, it took place five hundred years
ago, which reduces the immediacy and so may allow us to be a
little more objective about the events. Second, the barbarity is put
into even sharper perspective because the outcome—the survival
of the condemned group (in this case Protestants in and around
Valois in the Tyrol part of what is now Austria) as an independent
people—was regarded as totally inconceivable by the pope at the
time. Yet, following their survival of several more massacres over
the following century,2 their continued existence was later

accepted as a routine matter of course.
The story is ancient—but it could just as easily be contempo¬
rary and could be happening now in some parts of the world. In
the sixteenth century the Waldensians, a people of the Protestant
religion living in the area of Piedmont in the valleys of Valois,
were condemned by the pope. Here is an example of what soldiers
of the Dukes of Piedmont and Savoy did to the Waldensians—as
reported by a writer from that region:
There is no town in Piedmont where some of our brethren

have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt alive at
Susa; Hippolite Rossierso at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octoge¬
narian, at Sarcene; Vilemin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di
Meano; Hugo Chiambs of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn
from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like
manner had his entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat
thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was
buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdelena Fauno underwent the
same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand
and foot and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at
Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the
wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
Fenile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for
having praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sul¬
phurous matches which had been forced into his flesh under
the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips and all
over the body, and then lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth
filled with gunpowder which, being lighted, blew his head to
pieces; Sara Rostignol was slit open from the legs to the bosom
and left to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna
Charbonnier was impaled and carried thus on a pike from San
Giovanni to La Torre.3
With the unfair advantage of hindsight and the perspective of his¬

tory, we can feel both horrified and mystified by this description.
What could have allowed the people that did these things (who
were human beings, as were their victims) to have burned eighty-
year-old men alive, to have tortured and murdered women, and
to have torn a mans tongue out for praising God? There are a
large number of factors that comprise the answer, but two broad
categories (as we have been discussing in this book so far) can be
seen clearly. First, people confuse the format of a religion with its
objective, and second, people do things in crowds that they would
regard as unthinkable in more tranquil moments.
The first issue is the one that has been raised several times:
there is a very significant difference between religious obser¬
vances and religious experience. The accessories, so to speak, of
religious observance—the words of prayers, the music, the
chants, the beautiful building, the light, the incense, the ceremo¬
nial and ritual clothing—all of these are there to induce a change,
a transcendence, in the individual. If they assist in performing
that task, they are doing their job. If they do not achieve their
objective, then there is no point in fighting over them—and there
is certainly no value in massacring thousands of Waldensians for
the good of that particular cause. The binding-together effect of
religion is a reflection of the power of the change in the indi¬
vidual’s emotional and spiritual state. When many members of
the same community achieve the same transcendence together,
the religion is fulfilling its promise of binding the community
together. When it does not, it merely produces another casus belli,
another reason (along with territorial possession, greed, sexual
aggression, and countless others) for people to fight. This is
undoubtedly what Carl Jung meant when he characterized reli¬
gion as the greatest single obstacle to religious experience.
The second category of causes for these acts of destructive
cruelty is the way we behave in crowds. As we saw in chapter 5,
what we can term the collective mind is produced by subjugation
of individual doubts, uncertainties, and morals, and the mood of
the crowd induces a sense of power and invincibility that, acting
on the instinct to cooperate that Milgram identified, can culmi¬

nate in these actions. As we have seen, religion, for many reasons,
is a particularly favored path, and a particularly short fuse to
explosion. It was the ostensible rationale that allowed people to
torture other humans on the rack or to crush them to death
slowly under rocks for being guilty of, for example, worshipping
the same God in a slightly different way.
Although the example of the Waldensians that I set out
above—now nearly five hundred years old—might seem com¬
fortably in the past, and although we all might think “it can’t
happen nowadays,” it is, of course, going on now. Not only are
ostensibly religious conflicts continuing in the Middle East, in
Northern Ireland, in the Spice Islands, in Bosnia and Kosovo, and
in many other places on a national level, they are also going on at
an individual level. While I was preparing this section of the book,
for example, a horrific example was reported from Masshad in
Iran. There a series of sixteen prostitutes had been strangled, and
police arrested a suspect. The suspect, a married man aged thirty-
nine, said that he would have continued killing prostitutes had he
not been caught. His words were: “I killed the women for the sake
of God.... I wanted to clean the holy city.”4
At the level of biological language, one could say that it starts
with the foundations of herd instincts, natural aggression, and
gross overpopulation. All of these can be amplified by factors
operating at the more sophisticated (“neocortical”) level of
rational thought, and these include the process of rationalization,
commonly driven by the deeply held belief that the means are jus¬
tified by the ends. Perhaps now is a good time to start looking at
what those “means” have done in their own right, and perhaps we
should seriously consider the value of the supposed “ends” that
are believed to justify them.
THE HELL OF HELL
If our attitude to heaven and God’s goals for us can affect the way
we behave in our lives, so can our attitude to Hell and what will
happen if we offend.
The concept of Hell as a physical entity and place is, to some
extent, partly outmoded. The idea that there is a physical place
wherein those who have sinned and transgressed in life are
imprisoned and tortured for all eternity has held sway for a very
long time.
After all, we are now in the beginning of the twenty-first cen¬
tury, and in the Catholic religion the pope finally defined Hell as
a mental state (and not an actual place) only in the year 1999.
Until 1999, it was the official view of the Catholic church that
there was a place where souls were sent in retribution for unfor¬
givable—mortal—sins during life.
Of course, in true Jungian style, we can now regard that con¬
cept as the projection of our all-too-human ideas of punishment
and justice onto our image of an eternal realm. Perhaps, if we gen¬
uinely believe that Hell no longer exists, we may even experience a
feeling of regret for all those hundreds of thousands of people who
died in the Middle Ages and the centuries after because of their
“wrong” thinking about heaven, hell, sin, and transgression.
Perhaps. But in many areas of the world, despite the pope’s
declaration of 1999, the image of a place called Hell has not been
completely abolished. Hell (or its equivalent, including the sen¬
tence of eternal damnation) is still regarded by many people as a
clear and established principle. It is what happens to your soul if
you put yourself beyond the pale of God’s forgiveness. And if the
idea still has a little bit of currency with some people, then it clearly
is still a problem created by theism, and it “ups the ante” when it
comes to justifying acts of aggression in terms of divine ends.5
“BEING CHOSEN”:
THE ALLURE OF DIVINE SELECTION
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

H. G. Wells
Another danger inherent in this process of rationalizing religious

conflict is that for centuries, many people have used their concept
of a deity as justification in general, as though God had given
them a carte blanche excusing them from any consequences of
any of their actions. There have always been individuals who have
come to believe that they personally have been selected by their
God and have been Chosen. This, they believe, provides adequate
justification for any of the actions that they deem necessary.
In history, there are many communities and individuals who
have made this claim, and then used their belief to justify their
actions. Curiously, one of the most powerful and moving descrip¬
tions of this process was written over 150 years ago, and it was a
work of fiction, not a psychological treatise. It was published in
1824 by a Scottish writer, James Hogg. Most of his writings are
rather mundane pieces in poetry and prose about the aspects of
daily life in rural and urban Scotland—in fact, his sobriquet was
“The Ettrick Shepherd.” But in amongst all the rather average
material, he wrote an extraordinarily powerful novel, The Confes¬
sions of a Justified Sinner.
The plot would be a good one for a Hollywood movie today:
it details the rise and rapid fall of Robert Wringhim (ne Colwan),
the son of an ordinary—or so it seems—couple. His parents
become utterly convinced that they have been chosen by God.
God’s choice is revealed to them in a vision, and from that
moment on they become convinced that they can—literally—do
no wrong. When Colwan is about twelve, a further divine revela¬
tion informs his parents that he is now the fifth member of this
chosen band. James Hogg is quite dispassionate about this, and
never tells the reader that the deity appears to have been excep¬
tionally eclectic in selecting all the members of this particular
group of Chosen from one single family.
From the moment of his being Chosen, Robert feels justified in
whatever he does, and his life nose-dives. He moves rapidly down
the scale of crime and depravity, justifying each of his selfish and
destructive acts as the passionate actions of a saint trying to change
the world. Eventually he kills his half-brother. After that, he has an
epiphany in which he sees the error of his ways and he commits sui¬
cide. (The manuscript in which he documents all of the above is
supposedly discovered many years later in his grave.)
It is not really known how Confessions of a Justified Sinner (or
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic, as it was origi¬
nally titled) was received at the time it was published. My guess is
that it was regarded as rather naughty, bordering on heretical, by
the establishment but probably was not judged to be a genuine
threat to organized religion—which, as things turned out, was true.
However, in that book, Hogg wrote—as far as I can tell—the
first novel that protested the dangers of self-righteousness and
religious superiority.6
PROBLEMS WITH CULTS
As I said in the opening pages, the exact frontier between a reli¬

gion and a cult is always difficult to define. Predominantly that
definition depends on the wider social attitude to the religious
views of the particular group and the size of its congregation. As
many historians and theologians have pointed out, for many years
after the death of Jesus, what we now call Christianity was
regarded as a cult. What we now term cults are groups with a
characteristic intensity of cohesion and subservience to the lead¬
ership. In some cases, cults appear to be tightly held together with
what we would regard as dysfunctional ties. Many of them have
conditions of membership that require followers to give all their
worldly goods and money to the leadership, for example. In a few

others, techniques that we can justifiably term “brainwashing” are
used persistently. In others, there may even be physical abuse and
sexual abuse, and also threats that potential absconders will be
severely punished. There are many cases of young people having
left a cult and requiring deprogramming to restore their normal
psychological functioning.
Of course, not all cults are based on religion. But, for all the
reasons detailed in the above sections, religion provides a ready
and powerful catalyst and cohesive force for a cult. The immen¬
sity of the rewards (eternal life) and the enormity of the punish¬
ment (eternal damnation) taken together with a charismatic
leader makes a cult potentially very damaging.
One of the most well-known tragedies of recent times is per¬
haps an important illustration. It concerns the Peoples Temple,
initially of San Francisco, which ended in a mass suicide and
murder in 1978.
The members of the Peoples Temple followed their leader
Reverend Jim Jones to Guyana in 1977. They settled in Jonestown,
Guyana, where life was clearly hard, and often brutal. In addition,
there is proof that they often submitted to acts of sadism and
sexual aggression from their leader Jones, who claimed that he
was the dual embodiment of Lenin and Christ. He had his fol¬
lowers make out all their personal possessions to him. The mem¬
bers of the cult were forced to work hard during the day, as well
as having to listen to diatribes from Jones which lasted up to six
hours. He instituted a brutal system of punishment (including
immersing children in a well as punishment for misbehavior) and
sexual exploitation (Jones boasted that he had had sex with four¬
teen of his followers in one day).
As is well known, in November 1978, on the final day of a
congressional visit, a group of cult members murdered Rep. Leo
Ryan and some of his entourage before the entire group com¬
mitted suicide, resulting in at least 779 deaths in total.7
We can legitimately call their pattern of behavior—including

the murders and suicides—the result of brainwashing and coer¬
cion. But there is more to it than that. As we saw in chapter 5,
humans are clearly predisposed to cooperate and (as in the Mil-
gram data) to obey even if this involves causing other people to
suffer. As we have seen in this chapter, religious thinking can be
readily and easily perverted to reinforce cult formation, and to
maintain order and cohesion with a cult. Cults can of course be
extremely dangerous, but—and this is even more dangerous—we
all have an inbuilt susceptibility which makes the job of cult lead¬
ership much easier.
RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES ARE DIFFERENT
Let me stress once again the main point about the role of religious
differences in generating conflict. In the process of rationalizing
these instincts, all kinds of differences may be called into use, but
religious differences (because the “ends” are vastly more signifi¬
cant than the “means”) are particularly well placed. To put it
simply, every group can find things about itself that set it apart
from other groups (from skin color to fashion accessories) but
religious differences are different from other differences. They are
potentially more dangerous because their implications are per¬
ceived to be so much more significant—hence, they have a higher
potential for causing explosions.
People differ about all sorts of ideas, and some of them may
readily lead to violence—political views are a good example. But
in many other areas of thoughts and ideas, we can accept differ¬
ences of opinion without turning lethal in the defense of our
viewpoint. In science, for example, groups of people have never
been massacred because they believed in phlogiston, for example
(or didn’t), or believed in the inheritance of acquired characteris¬
tics, or some other erroneous cul-de-sac of scientific theory. It is
true that Galileo was punished (by the burning of his books and
of the hand that wrote them) because he believed that the earth
moved around the sun and not the other way round. But he was
punished not by a group of scientists who disagreed with his
hypothesis, but by the Catholic church. Interestingly, as he put his
hand—as was ordered—into the flames, he is reputed to have
muttered, “E puor se muove” (Even so, it moves). He was referring
to the planet earth, and of course he was right.
By and large, though, disputes about scientific ideas between
scientists do not lead to violence and wars. They lead to letters in
journals, publications, debates, and books, but rarely (if ever) to
physical aggression. Religious beliefs—which may be just as fer¬
vent—often do lead to physical aggression, and in this book so far
we have looked at some of the reasons for that, including the “I-
would-kill-in-GodVname” propensity inherent in some people s
right temporal lobe.
This chapter and the one before it have illustrated both the ben¬
efits and the drawbacks of religious beliefs. One may legitimately ask
whether we could do better. Given the abilities of religious thought
to sustain and inspire both important collaborative acts of creation
and creativity, and also to sustain acts of mass destruction, can we
do any better? Are there any steps that we can take, or any thought
processes we can utilize, to reduce or prevent religion-based
destruction? This will be the theme of the next chapter.
NOTES
1. Very occasionally—and only in fiction—culinary tastes may

actually led to war. In Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift describes the reli¬
gious (his adjective!) war between the two kingdoms of Lilliput and Ble-
fescu which was prompted by the knotty decision as to which end of a
boiled egg was the correct end to open first. Of course this is a ludicrous
issue to go to war over, as I and the millions of other right-minded Little
Enders would agree (and perhaps we would after all be prepared to kill
any remaining Big Enders if they dared to oppose our views).
2. The massacres in Piedmont continued for more than a century,

and John Milton (1608-1674) wrote his cry of outrage, the poem “On
the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” which included the specific detail of the
butchery by the “bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d mother with infant down
the rocks,” Milton, Dragon Book of Verse (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952), p. 202,
3. A. Berard, Lyon: Les Vaudois (Storck, 1892). Quoted in William
James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898).
4. (Toronto) Globe and Mail, 27 July 2001.
5. For reasons of space in this book, I am not going to spend more
time on the discussion of hell. An excellent comprehensive and readable
overview of the history of Hell is The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels
(New York: Random House, 1995).
6. I am aware that other readers see a completely different meaning
in the novel. Some literary scholars say that the real point of the story is
that Colwin killed his half-brother, and that this is a statement about
conflict with one’s alter ego. Personally, I see it as a much more powerful
statement about the dangers of divinely inspired arrogance, which
means that one must interpret both the existence and the murder of the
half-brother as literal truths, rather than purely metaphorical symbols.
Given the very urbane—and rather dull—nature of the rest of Hogg’s
writings, I think that my view is more likely to be correct, and that it
better reflects the author’s intentions in writing the novel.
7. D. W. Riddle, The Martyrs in Collective Behavior, eds. R. H.
Turner and L. M. Killian (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987).
Part Three
Can We Do Better?
229
Chapter 8
Alternative
Gold Standards
LAWS AND ORDERLINESS
T hroughout history one persons religion has often

been another persons slavery. Many authors, includ¬
ing Frazer and Campbell, highlight the development of
myths, legends, belief systems, and religions as humankind s
attempt to understand the natural order of the world, and to
reproduce on earth a system of order as it is assumed to exist
in the divine realm. As Campbell points out, there is a defi¬
nite universality to the theme “on earth as it is in Heaven.”1
This has led to two different types of problems—the first
type occurring within one community, and the second
occurring when one community encounters another.
The first type of problem is caused when, in a vision of
the desired orderliness, one class or category of people are
designated as slaves or servants and their own rights and
freedoms are viewed as inferior to the ruling classes, or are
absent altogether. Of course, many communities have
231
evolved along those lines, and many times in history they have
reinforced their vision of the “natural” order of things with theo¬
logical reasoning (“You are a slave and always will be because that
is the gods’ wish”). As political systems of greater subtlety and
sophistication evolved, the same reasoning was employed in most
civilizations over many centuries. The central point is that if the
political system is perceived as the earthly model of the celestial
order, then change or even negotiation, are extremely difficult.
The unity of church and state make any modification of state laws
a potentially theological issue. Many historians would say that an
uprising as violent as the French Revolution was made necessary
partly because the Bourbon monarchy, the state, and the Catholic
Church were so closely allied in France at that time.
It is also worth stressing that those philosophers (political
and otherwise) who have opposed the secular power of the
church have not necessarily proposed anything better. A good
example is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the
latter part of his life he became bitterly opposed to all aspects of
the Christian church and was increasingly venomous right up to
his final mental breakdown. However, what he proposed did not
include much in the way of equity, democracy, or personal free¬
doms. He thought that the world contained a few selected
“supermen,” individuals whose qualities of thought, ethics, moral
decisions, and conduct were indisputably above those of the
masses. In some respects, his vision of the Ubermensch/super-
man was very similar to Carlyle’s vision of the hero. His supermen
were not priests, but they were—in his view—the ruling class,
predestined by birth and mental prowess. Merely opposing the
political power and oppression of the church does not necessarily
identify a proponent of democracy or human rights.
These, then are the dangers inherent in a moral code that sub¬
jugates a class (or caste) of the population. A country or geo¬
graphical area or a set of linked areas (such as an empire) might
install a system of laws based on a set of religious beliefs, and
ALTERNATIVE GOLD STANDARDS 233
these may include the subjugation of one particular caste or class

or ethnic group—and by the very nature of the theological foun¬
dation of those laws, modification may be extremely difficult.
The second problem can occur when one community with its
own religious order and its own idea of “order on earth as it is in
heaven” encounters another community with a totally different
vision of the divine plan—including their God’s plan for human
societies and the God-based rules of conduct. When two groups
or communities clash, if each believes that their own system of
order is the one ordained by God—and that it is therefore the
only true system—there is little room for negotiation. Conflict, as
we discussed in chapter 5, is highly likely to escalate, and some
form of destruction is possible or even probable. Revealed truths,
emanating from divine forces, leave the adherents of those reli¬
gions very little choice.
So, the question at the center of this chapter is whether there
are any alternatives—whether codes of behavior can be based on
anything other than religious beliefs. Let us start the considera¬
tion of this issue with a proposition.
“SUPPOSE THAT WE ARE ON OUR OWN .. ”
For a moment let us try to envision what a worldview would be

like if there were no external God ruling from above. Perhaps it is
worth summarizing the data that have been presented in the pre¬
ceding chapters to provide a foundation for that exercise. It is
quite clear that, from our very beginnings, humans have always
employed myths, legends, and beliefs as mechanisms of concep¬
tualizing and coping with the world around us. From their early
mythologies, human communities gradually defined and refined
their concepts of supreme beings, and imputed edicts and moral
codes to the wishes of those gods or God. As we have seen, those
God-given codes of behavior and depictions of what “ought” to
be have, for the most part, been very helpful to the process of civ¬
ilization. Commandments and laws gave human societies a “fast
track” to collaborative, constructive, and creative behavior. They
allowed individuals to understand some basic but complex rules
of conduct quickly and easily. They facilitated the construction of
Stonehenge. Unfortunately, those same principles and codes also
led occasionally to major aggression and destruction, and some¬
times incited or culminated in the slaughter of, literally, billions of
people over the last few millennia. They facilitated the organized
destruction of the First World War.
In our present era, we can now see some of the reasons for
both of these. We now know that the human brain is—unfortu¬
nately or fortunately—set up so that experiences of God and spir¬
ituality occur relatively easily. We also know that those individuals
who are most religious have a higher than average propensity to
kill in God’s name. This, too, would not necessarily be a major
problem except that humans are also hardwired to join with each
other in activities, and some of those activities may sometimes be
destructive. The psychology of crowd behavior is still largely a
closed book to us, but we do we know that crowds can on occa¬
sions be stirred into mass acts of destruction. Furthermore there
is some early evidence implicating not only species-specific visual
and auditory signals, but also various other systems including the
limbic system and perhaps some pheromones in facilitating the
coherence of a crowd, and in recruiting emotional factors into
behavior and action. Taken all together, these early and isolated
fragments of evidence might begin to explain some episodes in
the bloody history of our species.
If all of this is true—as it is—then one is prompted to ask this
central question. If the concept of a God—whether such a being
exists or not—is associated not only with benefit but occasionally
with disaster, are there any alternatives? Are there any other cri¬
teria by which we can judge our behavior—other than by “God
wishes it so” or “God forbids it”? This will be the focus of this
chapter. Then in the next chapter we will ask whether—if there

are any alternatives—those of us who want to try and behave dif¬
ferently can achieve that aim. Whether we believe in a God or not,
is it possible to behave as if we did not have a Supreme Being to
sort out our problems for us? Is it possible to behave as if much
of the destiny of our species is in our hands alone, and not in the
control of a higher power? These issues are uncomfortable
because they demand that we question the validity of concepts
and of patterns of belief and behavior that have been accepted as
the norm for many centuries. If we wish to behave as if we were
on our own in the control of human affairs, then we are going
against the tide of most of human history to date. This may not
be simple or comfortable.
A CONSIDERATION OF CONSIDERATION
Around the world, the vast majority of people believe, at present,

that it is simply not possible to behave decently—to be “good”—
without a strong belief in God, and without observing obedience
to the precepts, laws, and commandments set down in the rele¬
vant holy writings.
The focus of this chapter is therefore to resolve the following
question: Given the troubled and troubling history of the many
religions embraced by various peoples over the last few millennia,
are there any other—non-God-given—moral codes that could
act as a guide to human conduct?
And the first point to make is one that is perhaps obvious:
human behavior changes extremely slowly and gradually. In fact,
if it changes at all, it changes imperceptibly, and so even if every¬
thing in this book and in all the research work by the anthropol¬
ogists, neuroscientists, and psychologists is totally correct, it may
make no visible difference to human events for a long time. Nev¬
ertheless, human behavior does change and evolve, and the time
is now ripe for a consideration of whether we can alter the effects

of our instinctual urges and drives on our behavior.
Second, as we have seen both in the prehistory of our species,
and more particularly in the behavior of crowds, belief has a
major impact on behavior. Hence, changes in the way large num¬
bers of people think about an issue, and changes in the beliefs
they hold about those issues, may ultimately produce steady
change in human behavior. Perhaps it is.overoptimistic to say that
we learn from experience—we have a long history of repeating
the same errors on many occasions—but some things seem to
change. For example, a crisis in the Balkans in 1914 (after a gesta¬
tion of at least four years) resulted in World War One. A similar
series of crises in the Balkans in the 1990s led to many things, but
an international all-out war was not one of them. It will never be
known how much of the resolution of the 1990s crises was due to
changes in political support in many countries, but it is at least
possible that popular support for war was much less in the 1990s
and this may—perhaps—have had a moderating effect.
THE NEED FOR INSIGHT IN OUR OUTLOOK
For these reasons, then, it now seems to be high time for us to

think about separating our beliefs from our behavior, and trying
to assess the results of our various activities (both the creative
ones and the destructive ones) on their own merits, instead of by
the beliefs that they originally intended to further.
We have evolved as a socially orientated animal, profoundly
influenced by the people around us and capable of tremendous
achievements (both positive and negative) in the furtherance of
our beliefs. Over the course of our history so far, our beliefs have
very often centered around the supernatural. In itself, this is not a
problem. The problems begin when we regulate our activities—
our behavior—in accordance with those beliefs. This is when
supernatural ideas incite or produce destruction on earth.
What we require to help us is an understanding of the moti¬

vating forces that prompt us toward acts of destruction. We need
insight in our outlook, and in the following sections of this
chapter, I set out a few guidelines and practical tips that may assist
in this. They are based on a basic understanding—both biological
and social—of human nature (a cliche used as shorthand to mean
“those behavior patterns that have always been and still are closely
associated with the human species”).
In fact, one can make a good case that any analysis of human
behavior without an understanding of human nature—stating
“what ought to be” without understanding why human affairs are
“what they are”—is fatally flawed. It is easy for a philosopher to
cogitate in abstract, and then to proscribe many of humankind’s
follies, and to prescribe better or even ideal codes of conduct.
However, unless there is a basic insight into the sources of human
behavior (into the origins of conflict, for example, and both the
deep seated and the ostensible reasons for our behavior), the
resulting work will be purposeless. This—in my view—is the
problem with philosophers such as Nietzsche (see above). Simply
describing and then justifying the ideal state of human society,
without an understanding of the forces that are involved in
“undesirable” behavior patterns will not advance our state.
USING THE EMPATHIC RESPONSE TO GAIN INSIGHT
So if we are searching for alternatives to God-given morality, one

might start by saying, “We cannot all agree on what is good, but
we can start by agreeing to avoid something that is totally bad (of
which the two world wars are examples).” In other words, in
trying to decide the meaning of “being good”—ill-defined as it
is—we might begin by moving away from things that are un¬
equivocally bad. That process requires insight into the forces driv¬
ing one’s own behavior—something that is quite difficult to
achieve at the best of times, and even more difficult at times of
conflict and when ones “blood is up” (see chapter 5). Neverthe¬
less, seeking insight into one’s own motives is a reasonable and
worthwhile objective, even if we do not fully achieve it some of
the time.
The central principles are twofold: first, to be aware of the
forces moulding one’s own behavior, and second to try and be
aware of the consequences of our actions, not simply of the
motives behind them.
This is not easy, but some of the techniques that help to create
insight—awareness of one’s own motives—are set out in many
self-help books.2 Basically the principle technique is what is
known in psychotherapy as “the empathic response.”3 The em-
pathic response is a technique of acknowledging an emotion
when it crops up, and using the existence of an emotion as a guide
to the origin of that emotion. There are therefore three steps
involved in the empathic response: (a) identify the emotion, (b)
identify the cause or the source of the emotion (why the person is
feeling that way), and (c) make a response that shows that you
have made the connection between (a) and (b).
To make the use of the empathic response to one’s own emo¬
tion easier, it may be helpful to have a set of principles which act
as an aide-memoire. I have reproduced in table 1 ten core princi¬
ples which basically summarize the nontheist or atheist basis for
trying to maintain “good” (i.e., nondestructive) behavior. These
“top ten” points are simply a way of grounding codes for behavior
on the possibility—as discussed above—that there is no divine
entity standing by to save us from extinction. I set them out here
simply because it is quite difficult to hold the main areas that we
have discussed so far in focus, and we often require something
that is a little catchy to remind us of what we are trying to do.
This top ten list is really no more than a summary of the
issues that we have been talking about so far, and it offers a step¬
wise progression for those people who feel that they do not
believe in the concept of an external God-the-architect-and-con-
troller but are unsure of what to replace it with to guide morals.

As you will see, the items are not based on any God-given statutes
or precepts. Instead, they are entirely founded on the strengths
and the weaknesses of human behavior: the basic idea is to rein¬
force the former and discourage the latter.
At first glance, you will see that there is a good deal in
common between these core beliefs and some of the central prin¬
ciples of many of the religions of the world. Among these areas of
overlap, the most important is the seventh item: the principle of
consideration or awareness of the consequences of ones actions.
Superficially, that might appear as if it is simply a restatement of
the Golden Rule (“treat others as you would wish to be treated
yourself”) but there is a very significant difference.
The Golden Rule is a wonderful principle, and if it were an
inviolable guideline for human conduct, we would have much less
trouble on this planet. However, it is too easily misinterpreted,
and then misused. Many people employ the Golden Rule as a jus¬
tification for aggressive behavior (“I will strike at this person
because that is exactly what I would expect if I was doing some¬
thing as stupid/aggressive/dangerous/mean as he is doing”).
The principle of “a consideration of consideration” is dif¬
ferent because you are actually asking yourself, “What will happen
if I do this now? What will the consequences of my action be?” By
and large if you can manage to ask yourself these questions before
taking the action, you are more than halfway to avoiding an esca¬
lation of aggression.
A basic feature of human life is that we have all suffered
slights and insults—even abuse—in the past, and we all have a
tendency to regard our past experience as a justification for doing
the same to other people (“the wheel continues to turn”). Our
expectations are—subconsciously and consciously—colored by
the kind of treatment we have previously received. And that
(unfortunately) provides us with a ready justification of aggres¬
sive and destructive behavior. Under the Golden Rule you often
project your own expectations onto the other person. If, on the
other hand, you are guided by the principle of consideration of
consequences, then you will try to anticipate the resulting effect
on the other person (ignoring—if need be—the way you would
respond if it was you). Therein lies the important difference.
Of course, people at times of conflict and anger will ignore all
principles that they accept at other times, and as we saw in chapter
5, this is even more likely to occur when they are in groups and
crowds. Nevertheless, articulating these principles to oneself may
help, and may perhaps turn back ones course of behavior when
beginning to get angry—as opposed to when one is already
enraged—at a time when one can still see the options available.
Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind about
these principles is the fact that they are a set of observations about
human behavior—they do not have their foundation in revela¬
tion or dogma. They are more to do with “this is the way we are”
than a proclamation of “this is the way God ordained us to be.”
TABLE 1
1. The human species has evolved as—and remains as —
part of nature.
Humankind is no more than—and no less than—a part of

nature: like all living organisms, humans have a life that is
limited in duration and scope.
2. Human consciousness is a function of the activity of the

human brain.
Being aware of the rest of nature—and of the universe—and

of its own place within it, is a characteristic of humankinds
mental functioning that is perhaps unique and certainly
wonderful. Nevertheless consciousness is another aspect of

natural life, and not a force or essence instilled into humans
by an outside deity or intelligence. An individuals con¬
sciousness ends when that person dies.
3. Human beings require a system of belief in order to func¬

tion.
So far, most belief systems have revolved around the idea of

an external God or gods; however, the same need to believe
can be equally served by alternative systems of philosophy.
4. Nontheists believe that in all its forms the supernatural is

a myth.
Believing in an external God is a uniquely human activity.

While it has undoubtedly produced some advantages for
humankind it has also been a source of considerable divisive¬
ness and strife. Nontheists or atheists are people who do not
believe in the idea of a Divine Architect or Regulator who has
constructed the universe and controls human affairs, and they
reject religions based on dogma, revelation, or mysticism.
5. The human species is capable of achieving a great deal

using its resources of collaboration and creativity. The
results of these endeavors often benefit our species and
planet, but we are also capable of using the same abilities
in acts of destruction and cruelty.
The human species has always carried out acts of great ben¬
efit, but also acts of great destruction. The human species is
innately capable of both of these—and that the potential for
destruction is part of the human repertoire. Acts of mass
aggression, killing and war are a result of tendencies built
into human behavior and are not simply the result of a few
abnormal and aberrant individuals. As a species we can
clearly do many good things, but we need to be aware that
we are capable of the opposite.
6. The rules of human conduct have not been set or preor¬

dained by any deity or external intelligence.
Clearly, no single religion has been able to show that it has

exclusive access to the secret of peaceful and cooperative
coexistence of life on earth. There is much merit in the idea
that there is no such thing as an extrinsic set of rules
imposed on us from outside humankind that should be gov¬
erning all of human behavior.
7. Individuals who are aware of the consequences of their

actions on other individual on the community; and on
the species are likely to behave in a more considerate,
more reasonable, and more ethical way.
Striving for the greater good and worth of the human

species is not an exclusive property of theism. It is a human
activity that can exist just as well without a belief in a deity
as it can with it. Nontheists can be—and often are—ethical
and moral people.
8. Equality of opportunity should be a fundamental prin¬

ciple of human conduct.
Equality of opportunity should be supported for all people

no matter what their nation, ethnic background, gender,
sexual orientation, or any aspect of their beliefs.
9. Life on earth is relatively fragile and requires care and

attention to continue.
There is nothing guaranteeing our species against all causes

of potential extinction. Our own activities may threaten our
existence, and we need to be aware of this in organizing and
regulating what we do.
10. Humankind’s destiny is not predetermined—much of it

lies in our own control.
There is hope. But it’s up to us to look after each other and

ourselves.
Additional Guideline: If you have children, do your best to

like them.
Many of humankinds woes seem to stem from children abused

and disliked by their parents or caregivers as they grew up. The
world will not be perfect if every child is not only loved but also
liked, however, it will probably be a lot more stable.
NEOCORTICAL STORM WARNINGS OF

LIMBIC HURRICANES
THE TRUE NATURE OF HUMAN NATURE
Thus far we’ve established the fact that human behavior is pro¬
foundly influenced by deep-seated urges or drives (which may be
called—or may partly be identified with—instincts), and which
operate below the level of conscious and voluntary action. There is
also unequivocal evidence that the basic design of the brain facili¬
tates spiritual experience and the feeling or perception of a non-
human intelligence, the experience of a God or gods. While these

two series of observations do not, in any way, account for all of
human behavior and history, equally there is no doubt that they
have had, and continue to have, a profound and major influence.
There is also no doubt that all humans possess an ability that
we term consciousness, which brings with it the capacity to per¬
form series of mental activities and functions that we term con¬
scious thought and free will.
The question now confronting us is both simple to ask and
complex to answer: Is there anything we can do by utilizing our
conscious rational thought processes to counteract or at least mit¬
igate the destructive effects of some of our deep-seated drives or
urges? In essence, of course, this question is a central part of the
answer to the question in the title of this book.
The whole issue revolves around knowing what factors and
attributes are immutably built into the structure of human nature.
This issue is both simple to frame and almost impossible to
resolve—at least with our present knowledge. It goes to the heart, so
to speak, of the human heart: How much of what we feel and do is
preprogrammed into our behavior patterns, and how much, if any,
of it can be overridden, changed, or restrained by conscious voli¬
tion? It is, after all, highly likely that we have evolved as a successful
species in part because of our limbic system. This system within our
brains—with some associated structures and mechanisms—gives
us our aggression (and helped us space ourselves out across inhab¬
itable land) and courage (to overcome pain and fear when aroused).
Without a neurological system to provide these characteristics, the
human species might perhaps have found a niche for itself, perhaps
as some kind of egg-stealer or scavenger, or we might—and this is
an imaginable possibility—have become extinct. That we did not
disappear may in part be attributable to the kind of neurological
organization of which the limbic system is a feature.
Continuing to evolve and survive, humans developed the
complex neurological structures that we now call the cerebral
cortex or neocortex (the new brain). This structure endows the

organism with a group of neurological functions, among which
we include rational thought and consciousness. These functions
have of course led to a slow and steady process occurring among
most human communities that we call civilization.
Unfortunately, as a species, we still have a strong and efficient
limbic system, which is, under appropriate circumstances,
capable of putting us into a state of rage.
It is known—as we have discussed in chapter 4—that the
limbic system can be stimulated in several ways, and that when it
is stimulated in certain ways, the individual undergoes a spiritual
or religious experience which may, in some cases, override
rational processes and ignore the data of the senses.
None of the above would present much of a problem if we had
not overpopulated the habitable areas of the planet and were not
living at population densities which are probably a hundred thou¬
sand times (or more) too high. Because we can—in general—do
very little without bumping into or confronting our neighbors and
because we are predominantly a gregarious and social animal, the
limbic system, which gave our antecedents such survival advan¬
tages, may sometimes give rise to disadvantages. We have an
unfortunate tendency to fly into a rage—a limbic rage—which is
designed to override conscious and rational thoughts and fears.
This is one of the main problems with human behavior.
So, can we do any better than we are doing at present?
“BE AWARE, BE WARY, AND BEWARE”
It is of course possible—as the more pessimistic among us

insist—that nothing can be done to change human behavior, and
that we will always remain an intelligent species that is unfortu¬
nately prone to fits of aggression and internecine destruction,
some of which might even threaten the survival of the species.
However, it is also possible that minuscule and imperceptible
changes in human organization can occur without necessarily

requiring a single identifiable revolutionary moment. One of the
factors involved in any process of change in human behavior is a
change in thinking. It is possible that the process of thinking
about and discussing issues to do with, for example, deep and
subconscious influences on our behavior may change our attitude
to our own behavior and that of others. It is unlikely to be a rapid
or even perceptible change, but it may happen nonetheless. If we
are aware of some of the reasons that cause religious intolerance,
for example, to be a precipitating factor of rage, we may be able to
recognize it in ourselves and others. Socially, we may find that the
earlier stages building up to conflict are—in the widest sense of
the phrase—“less socially acceptable” and perhaps, in some cases,
easier to counteract. We may, for example, change our attitude to
the qualities that we admire most and promote among leaders. A
hundred or more years ago, it was accepted without question that
the military or the clergy were the two most highly esteemed and
admired professional (or vocational) choices. Recently that has
changed slightly, and simply choosing a military career does not
produce the social esteem seen in, for example, a Prussian officer
150 years ago. Attitudes change. The attributes that a society
values and places above others have always been subject to mod¬
ification with the passage of time, and the way individuals think
about major issues and topics can ultimately affect the way an
entire society or culture behaves.
Perhaps one of the most useful analogies here is one of
Michael Persingers. He compares the awareness of subconscious
influences to the awareness of bad weather. Early human com¬
munities in coastal areas were regularly hit and severely damaged
by hurricanes. As time went by, we learned to predict imminent
hurricanes and to recognize early signs of hurricane-bearing
weather. Being able to predict a hurricane did not of course affect
the hurricane itself—but it did affect our way of coping with it,
and it reduced the damage that the storm did.
The same might be possible of the deleterious effects of our

limbic system and its allied mechanisms. We may, for example,
decide consciously and rationally that certain patterns of
behavior are without merit and are to be avoided. If we know, as
a matter of proven fact, that those patterns of behavior are more
likely to occur when certain factors come into play—operating
below the level of conscious cognition—then we may become
more wary at any early signs of those factors beginning to act. We
may decide, for example, that religious motives should be rejected
as reasons for aggression, intolerance, or killing, and we may
decide to give less social credibility and status to those members
of religious organizations who espouse them.
At a personal level, there are things you can do to try and be
aware of your own deeper motives. We may not be able to prevent
limbic storms, but we can certainly learn to recognize the early
signs of them, and perhaps to warn others and to take precau¬
tionary measures.
In terms of conscious actions that we can attempt to diminish
the later effects of our anger, we can perhaps summarize a com¬
plex process into three steps:
1. Learn to recognize your own personal warning signs for

when you’re beginning to get into a state of rage.
2. Ask yourself whether the beginnings of this rage include a
process of ccthem-and-us-ing” (see page 126).
3. Ask yourself whether you have started “monstrifying” the
target of your anger (see page 162).
If the answer to questions 2 and 3 is “yes,” then you may be using

your rational and cortical processes to justify something more
deep-seated—and possibly limbic—in origin (even though the
actual casus belli has been recognized by your neocortex). This
process of examining your deepest motives and their effect on
your behavior—which is basically a major technique of psy-
chotherapy—is of course not simple in practice. But it is a way of

“cutting the wire,” as it were, between the bell-push of anger and
the buzzer of aggressive behavior.
Hurricane warnings are, of course, no guarantee that no
damage will be done and nobody will be hurt, but they help. With
advance warning—from the meteorologists as regards our
weather, and from our neocortex as regards our behavior—the
hurricane will still happen, but perhaps less damage will be done
and fewer people will die.
NOTES
1. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, vol. 1 of The Masks of God

(New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 137.
2. Of the ones that are most likely to help develop insight I would
mention two: The Dancer of Anger by Harriet Lerner (New York: Harper
St Row, 1985) and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Coleman (New York:
Bantam, 1995). Although Lerner’s book does not mention the empathic
response by name, she sets out in very readable and accessible form the
techniques of using one’s anger as a guide to finding out what it is that
is making one angry in the first place.
3. I teach communication skills to medical students and oncolo¬
gists, and the empathic response is actually a technique that is directly
teachable.
Conclusion
We Are Only Human
I really do love being alive but when you die

you will just have to accept it.
From an essay entitled
“It Is Jolly Good to Be Alive,”
Matthew Buckman (aged 9 years)
249
V
Chapter 9
The View from Here
TJL. his chapter is somewhat personal, and perhaps that is

unavoidable. I shall try to give an indication of how I came
to my personal philosophy—but before that I need to
explain why that seems to be necessary.
I am a physician, specializing in the treatment of cancer
of the breast and cancer of the ovary. In addition, I teach
communication skills to postgraduates and medical schools
and I also do a lot of writing and broadcasting on medical
subjects. In some of the public discussions about the subject
of this book, I have been asked whether there is not some
fundamental contradiction in being both a physician and an
atheist. Many people find themselves quite surprised by my
nontheist philosophical position, and feel that somehow a
physician caring for another person—in body, mind, and
spirit—must, of necessity, have an implicit belief in God.
Some people feel that there can be no spirituality without
religion, and that the role of a physician is incomplete
251
without a deep-seated spirituality. (Of course I wholeheartedly

agree with the latter point: I genuinely believe that a physicians
role includes spiritual and emotional care. But I happen to believe
that one can be strongly spiritual without God—and it is that
point which some people find difficult to understand at first.)
Furthermore, many people have asked how I arrived at my par¬
ticular sort of belief; in other words, they want to know what it was
that turned me into an atheist. Because those questions are asked so
frequently, I think it is worth my answering them. The answers may
also go some way toward showing that a nontheist worldview is not
only tenable, but is—in practice—every bit as supportive and
helpful in difficult times as is a belief in a supernatural God. For
those reasons, then, I will briefly summarize the way I thought these
issues through, and arrived at an atheist moral philosophy.
I was born Jewish and brought up in Britain in the midst of a
family that was not particularly religious but was perfectly happy
being Jewish. Going to synagogue was not a regular occupation;
we went on special occasions and for particular celebrations such
as marriages and bar mitzvahs. We had wonderful family Passover
ceremonies at home: my father and many of my uncles were
extremely adept at reading the Hebrew service, and my sister, my
cousins, and I would share the traditional honor of asking the five
questions during the ceremony.
Like most Jewish children of my age, we were brought up in
the knowledge of what had happened during the Holocaust. I
went through a period of intense religiosity starting around the
age of twelve or thirteen. It was precipitated—I remember this
very distinctly—by my reading about the Holocaust. I was
absolutely horrified by what I read about the atrocities in the
camps, and I could not think of one good reason why I deserved
to be alive when so many people who were just the same as me had
died in the crudest way. At about this time I began to be aware of
the strong faith that several of my friends and their families had.
Some were Protestant, some Roman Catholic, and some Jewish.
THE VIEW FROM HERE 253
When they talked about their own feelings and about their faith,
the first message I got was how powerful a personal sense of faith
could be in supporting someone through difficult times. To be
honest, I felt envious. I looked at the effect of their faith—the
strength and support they got from it—and I was quite jealous of
the way that it gave them answers when there were problems. Most
important (or so it seemed to me) was that faith clearly gave the
believer a personal sense of a Divine Plan and a feeling that events
fitted into some orderly scheme, however incomprehensible it
seemed to us. Taken together with the idea of a life after death, reli¬
gious faith could clearly make the horrors of the world easier to
bear. So I hankered after the tranquility that a deep faith brings.
As a result, for a period of three or four years, I tried very hard
to believe in the God of the Jewish religion, who could control
things (but clearly hadn’t during the Holocaust—for reasons
unintelligible to us). I tried, and for a time I partly convinced
myself that there was a God, that there was an afterlife, and that
consciousness does not end when you die. But the obvious con¬
trast between what was described in religious teachings and what
was happening all around us quite soon became simply too much
for me to believe. By the age of sixteen or so, I found I just could
not hold all the contradictions inherent in a Divine Plan in my
mind at the same time as the obvious arbitrariness of real life. I
couldn’t see any logic or line connecting the two, or maintain any
form of philosophical consistency in a view of the world that put
a God in control of all human events which seemed to be so obvi¬
ously arbitrary and so often random. By the age of eighteen, I had
abandoned the effort entirely. Life on earth appeared to me to be
mostly a matter of biology, with all the variation and apparent
arbitrariness that this implies.
My experiences as a medical student and then a physician
convinced me of that view even more strongly. Major events in
life often occurred arbitrarily and—in terms of human justice—
totally unfairly. Like all physicians, I saw terrible things happen to
wonderful individuals. I saw young and brave people die and, just
as often, I saw crabby and selfish people survive all kinds of med¬
ical vicissitudes. It was crystal clear to me that there was no con¬
sistent relationship between a persons attitude—including their
religious devotion—and the course of serious diseases.
As I trained as a cancer specialist (a medical oncologist), this
view of the nature of human events became even firmer. Even so,
I found myself perfectly at ease talking about spiritual issues with
many of my patients who had very strong and firm religious
beliefs, and I found that being an atheist did not interfere at all
with my ability to reinforce the patients own coping mechanisms.
In fact during this period, I collaborated in several communica¬
tion and palliative care projects with hospital chaplains and rabbis.
It is often said that there are no atheists in foxholes. I beg to
differ. Admittedly, for me it wasn’t a foxhole in a battlefield during
a world war, but it was an illness called dermatomyositis which
steadily got worse over two years despite treatment and which, in
the view of my doctors, was likely to result in my death. I did not
decide—as a conscious and deliberate choice—to maintain my
atheist view, but 1 found that without any apparent effort of will,
I was still an atheist even though everyone (myself included)
thought I was likely to die. I am not making a big deal about this;
all I am saying is that, as far as I can tell, my atheistic worldview
is deeply ingrained inside me, and was not shaken by the apparent
approach of my own death.
When I recovered from the acute phase of the illness, after
several months of particularly drastic treatment, I found that my
ability to talk with my patients was actually better than it had
been before. Perhaps after experiencing serious illness I ended up
with a slightly better idea of the meaning of suffering. At any rate,
I knew that I had faced gunfire, so to speak, and that my person¬
ality and personal philosophy had not disintegrated.
I now specialize in communication skills, which involves a
great deal of communication in palliative care, the care of the
dying and support of the family I find that I am constantly

involved in the spiritual aspects of those communications, and, if
anything, I think I am more free and better able to help, particu¬
larly with nonjudgmental support, than are many of my theist
colleagues. Personally speaking, I sincerely believe that all of us
have an element inside us that allows us to recognize ethical acts,
other peoples genius, inspiration and the finer qualities that
humans possess. I call that essence “spirituality.” Some other
people choose to call that essence “God.” And with those who use
that particular definition and who do not believe in an external
architect-and-controller, I find myself in close harmony.
Joseph Campbell talked about the element of transcendence
and the sense of oneness which begins to lose meaning the
moment you try to define it. His view, if I have understood it cor¬
rectly—and it is a view that I hold personally—is that every person
can achieve moments of sublimity, and that, for many people, one
of the worlds religions and its myths, legends, and lessons is a
major help as they strive toward those moments. You could almost
compare religions to pictures or images on screens that draw
people toward them, in the hope that ultimately those people will
reach the real essence which is far beyond that picture or screen.
In my view, and in the view of many others—almost certainly
including Joseph Campbell—you can get close to that same
essence by approaching it from many different directions. Reli¬
gion is not the only way. You do not have to take the route marked
“religions” and could take the route marked (for want of a better
word) “atheist” or “nontheist.” It happens that I have decided to
take that latter route, but anyone that takes any other route will
do just as well, provided that they go beyond—provided that they
transcend—the images on the screen, the painting on the mask.
In my view, spirituality (as I prefer to call it) is a state that we
can all aspire to in our very best moments. If somebody needs to
call that experience “God” in order to achieve that transcendent
state, then that is perfectly all right as far as I am concerned. But
if somebody coins the phrase “God,” and then takes literally the
concept of a creator and judge in the sky (instead of regarding it
as teaching tool to lead people toward a truly spiritual or God-
imbued state) and then wishes to start killing people who have a
different view, then that is not all right.
You can call your own finest element “spirituality” or “con¬
science” or “soul” or “humanity” or “God” or whatever you wish, but
the important thing is that it is yours. It is yours to experience and
to treasure and live up to. And you can be good if you recognize it
and try and listen to it. You can get beyond God if you want to.
As regards human potential, however, I have to confess that I
am afraid of crowds. People en masse make me nervous. This has
been part of my attitude to the world as far back as I can
remember. I have always felt very uneasy at any form of mass
behavior; even when audiences clap in unison, I find myself
feeling uneasy and edgy. (I can actually recall instances of that
feeling when I was seven years old.) There is something about
what a crowd can do—that sense of invincibility or immense
strength (as Le Bon described it) and how that strength can sud¬
denly turn nasty—that makes me very wary about any exhibition
of mass emotion or behavior, except laughter (which is why, per¬
haps, for many years I had a part-time career as a comedian).
I must acknowledge the possibility that this aversion to crowd
behavior might be partly innate, perhaps even inherited. In this
book I have been discussing many aspects of human behavior
which might be—totally or in part—innate and preset by inher¬
ited patterns. I have to admit the possibility that attitudes to
crowds might be one of those. There is some evidence (and I do
not know enough to judge its completeness) that whether one
sees a crowd and feels either “Hey, I want to join in!” or “Oh dear,
I want to go somewhere else” is an innate pattern of behavior. If
it is (and I do not know enough to comment on the conclusive¬
ness of the data), then I am of the latter type, and perhaps I am
like that by genetics rather than by choice.
As regards ethical behavior, I have to say that I think of my

own conduct as “work in progress .” On my more pessimistic days,
I feel that I am behaving well only because I lack the courage to
behave badly. On my more optimistic days, I feel that the views I
have been discussing in this book are—roughly speaking—my
own bedrock or foundation. Of course I regard myself as being “on
balance more good than evil.” But, equally, any number of dicta¬
tors—from Attila to Hitler—have probably said exactly the same.
The only clear principle that I have tried consistently to maintain
is to try and keep as much insight as possible in my outlook.
Even that may not achieve very much. In fact, it is possible—
likely, even—that, as individuals, we can achieve very little to
change the tide of history as it swirls around us. It is quite likely that
an Arab citizen of Jerusalem during the Crusades, or a Jewish male
in Auschwitz, or a Muslim woman in Bosnia could have done little
or nothing to change their sad fate or the direction of the conflict
around them. The stoical Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holo¬
caust survivor, put it so well in his book Mans Search for Meaning.
Often events take almost everything away from you—but the one
thing they cannot take away is how you choose to respond to what
is happening to you. Frankl thought like that during his time in
Auschwitz, and if he could think like that in those circumstances, so
can we (or at least we can try). We may not be able to change much
around us, but we can demonstrate our own autonomy to our¬
selves by exercising our choice as to how we will react to what is
happening. Perhaps Frankl was echoing the Greek philosopher
Epictetus who said, “Difficulties are the things that show us who we
are.”1 Not only can we choose how to respond to adversity, but that
choice defines us. It tells us who we are.
To paraphrase the late English writer Douglas Adams, some¬
times individual human beings are powerless to change the events
around them, as a single tea leaf would have been powerless to
alter the outcome of the Boston Tea Party. And yet... and yet. It
was human beings (and no one else), performing nothing more
than acts of human behavior, who started the Crusades, the

Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Rwanda genocide, the
Bosnia strife, and all the others. It was also human beings who
built Stonehenge, Chartres Cathedral, the Great Wall of China,
and created the United Nations. Perhaps, in the last few decades,
we have had a few more Chartres constructions and a few less
Spanish Inquisitions. As was pointed out above (see page 236), a
crisis in the Balkans in 1914 led to the deaths of ten million sol¬
diers. A series of crises in the Balkans in the 1990s led to the deaths
of tens of thousands of humans—but it did not lead to a world
war and greater casualties. Perhaps that was because of genuine
awareness of the possible consequences, perhaps it was because we
already knew what a world war would look like, perhaps it was
because the loss of concentration of power in monarchies made
all-out wars a little more difficult to start. In any event, it is pos¬
sible that, to a very small extent and in a small number of ways, we
are learning a little about how to stem our own destructive tides.
Not much, but a little. Perhaps a few neocortical brakes have been
applied to limbic engines: a few neocortical storm warnings have
alerted some of us to the onset of limbic gales.
At the almost insignificant level of the individual, and as
regards the personal task of maintaining consistency, I freely
admit that keeping insight in your outlook is hard work. When
you do this, you find yourself thinking about things—some of
them very minor—that other people simply accept. You find
yourself thinking about putting one foot in front of the other,
when other people are sprinting and never losing stride.
Presumably the work gets harder the close one gets to death.
I have always accepted the fact that atheists are likely to have a
harder time when they are dying than theists. For me there isn’t
going to be a well-deserved place in a heaven, or an eternal
garden, or a joyous union with my maker. When I die—as my son
Matthew put it so well in the epigram to this chapter—I will just
have to accept it. Based on my experience to date, I think that I
will be able to do that. I am not particularly afraid of dying, nor

actually of suffering and pain. I don’t necessarily look forward to
it (unlike the English conductor Malcolm Sergeant, who said in a
radio interview that he was looking forward to his own death
“immensely,” so strong was his faith in an afterlife). But in my
own case, my feelings about my own death and dying are certainly
not enough to make me consider a belief in a supernatural God
as an option.
So, I live—and will die—an atheist. Most of the rest of the
world is of the opposite view. That doesn’t matter. As humans we
have clearly believed whatever we wish for at least the past
100,000 years. My only cavil with belief in a God—as I have said
so many times during this book—is that it is so closely associated
with destructive acts and slaughter. If it were not, then I would
not be concerned with this whole topic, and I would certainly not
have bothered writing this book in the first place. It is because I
think that our world will be a better place if we all continue to
believe whatever we wish, but behave as if we were the sole
arbiters of our fate, that I started writing this book. If, at the very
least, I have catalyzed your own analysis of this aspect of human
behavior then I shall be quite content.
NOTE
1. Epicetus, Moral Discourses (London: JM Dent Temple Classics,

1899), chap. 24.
Chapter 10
Toward “Better”
RULES AND CODES
s ince we are trying to focus on the regulation of human

conduct, we end up with what we could justifiably call “the
ultimate question.”1 What do we actually mean when we
speak of ethics or morals or by any of the sets of rules that
various communities have put forward to advise and guide
our behavior? What are these highly valued ethical princi¬
ples if so many people can apparently ignore them? What do
these rules and codes really stand for if humans can claim to
be behaving ethically while engaging in a cataclysm such as
the First World War?2 What use are any rules—ethics, inter¬
national treaties, disarmament agreements—if destruction
continues on the scale that we have seen in the twentieth
century? What do the rules mean if they deem acceptable
the shooting deaths of nearly eighty thousand eighteen-
year-old men in a single day and the suffocation in mud of
260
TOWARD “BETTER” 261
thousands of others? Why is that acceptable? And what does it say

of our society as a whole that we are horrified by these acts, but
accept them? What does that tell us about what we mean by the
word “acceptable” and the rules by which we define it?
This point is of great importance—not only historically but
also philosophically and morally. Where do we begin when we
wish to define a concept such as “good” or “evil” or even “accept¬
able”? What qualities of behavior or thought do these words pur¬
port to describe?
Throughout most of our history a large number of moral
codes have been based on the idea that there is such a thing as evil,
which may be manifested in evil behavior and must be punished.
Similarly, rooted in every human community is the idea that there
is a universal quality called “good” which can be identified by
divine precepts (on earth as it is in heaven) and which shall be
rewarded. For millennia, every human community of any size has
more or less accepted this point. There is something called “good”
and there is also another ontological entity called evil, something
that creeps into human affairs and which is totally reprehensible
and is to be condemned. Furthermore, the quality of being good
is more than simply being devoid of evil. That is the way religions
and their attendant codes of behavior have looked at the world of
human affairs.
But there is another possibility. It is possible that those hor¬
rific occurrences which we all condemn came about not because
of the presence of some insidious essence called “evil,” but
because of sequences of choices and decisions that lead to
destructive outcomes (please see note 2 [pp. 268-70]). It is pos¬
sible, in other words, that there is an alternative to the philosoph¬
ical-theological concept of evil: that alternative is the practical
and pragmatic criterion of “destructive” behavior, and of the
behavior that leads to or increases destructiveness. There may be
no lurking external evil waiting to poison human behavior. It may
be simply that the range of human behavior includes—and
always has included—the potential for major destructiveness and

cruelty as well as the potential for great creativity and benefit—
beautiful cathedrals at one end of the scale and horrific wars at
the other.
If we are searching for alternatives to God-given moral codes,
then it would not be unreasonable to consider suspending dis¬
cussion of the essential good or evil of people or deeds, and exam¬
ining—at this more pragmatic practical level—the behavior that
encourages or leads to destruction. After all, if both sides in a cat¬
aclysm claimed that they had God on their side, isn’t a God-given
definition of good or evil a poor choice if we want to avoid sim¬
ilar disasters in the future? Would it not be better to consider the
consequences of any course of action in themselves rather than as
manifestations of Gods wishes?
Of course, this is not a simple issue. In fact, it is one that has
been debated by philosophers, theologians, and moralists for cen¬
turies. Does intrinsic evil (for example, original sin) or intrinsic
good actually exist? Most people believe that both of these things
do exist. But, based on what has been said above, one could argue
that—whether good and evil exist or not—we would be better
advised to be less ambitious in our judgment of human behavior,
and to start with a more simple and practical criterion—that of
destruction. Perhaps we will never define “good” or “evil” in
absolute terms, but we can all recognize certain events as being as
destructive as the world wars, and we can all say, “Those are the
kind of events that we must never condone or allow to occur
again.” In doing that, we acknowledge that humankind clearly
has—as history has shown us countless times—the potential for
almost unlimited creativity and also the potential for cruelty, bar¬
barity, and destruction on a massive scale. It is more useful in
considering codes of conduct to think of these two attributes as
inbuilt capabilities of the human species. We are clearly capable—
as we have seen over the last few millennia—of both construction
and destruction: they are both facts of human life. We may
applaud one and deplore the other, but we still have to accept that
each of us contains the potential for performing both types of
actions. We will achieve far more by recognizing that fact—and
not regarding “evil” either as an extraneous force that invades
from outside to sully humans or as some “original sin” that can be
weeded out of human behavior if we try hard enough.
Our laws—and all our sets of rules and codes—are regula¬
tions that we (or various divisions of our species) agree upon to
help life run a bit more smoothly. It is useful to conceptualize the
rules that guide human behavior—including laws, morals, and
ethics—as resembling a sophisticated set of traffic lights.3 Traffic
lights, like all symbols and warning signs, function to reduce con¬
flicts and misunderstanding only when they are adopted and
agreed upon by a group or a community as symbols representing
a set of rules common to that community. We agree to stop at a
red light because we know that this is a generally accepted regula¬
tion, and that we have chosen specific persons (the police) to
administer socially acceptable punishment to those of us who
ignore or disobey that regulation. At this very simple level, one
can say that countless human societies and cultures have used
God-based or divine systems of ethical traffic lights over the last
few millennia. These systems of ethics have done many things sat¬
isfactorily for our species and for civilization, but they have also
led to conflict on many occasions. The concept of a set of traffic
lights—a code of morals or ethics—without a supernatural God
at their center is worth thinking about.
There is another argument in favor of turning away from a
God-based revelatory system of regulating behavior—and that is
the way in which our instincts and our rational and conscious cen¬
ters have interacted over our history. Looking at the widest pos¬
sible picture of the process of civilization, it is possible to see it as
a series of slow and intermittent gains by rational processes over
instincts. By and large communities have agreed, for example, not
to do things such as theft and murder—of which acts individuals
are certainly capable. Societies have developed and progressed

along a route—albeit in an occasionally wavering and faltering
manner—of proscribing and punishing acts of destruction of
which, clearly, humans are capable. It is because humans, when
living in a community, have a tendency to steal or murder that
societies developed sets of rules to help persuade individuals not
to do those things. In effect the community is saying, aWe all have
a hankering to steal, but we will punish anyone who gives in to that
urge.” Neurologically, one could say that the process of civilization
has always been a slow—and, at times, erratic—process of over¬
riding instincts (involving many mechanisms including the limbic
system) by rational and conscious volition (involving many func¬
tions of the neocortex). When it comes to deriving a source of
moral codes, it might indeed be reasonable to move toward codes
based more firmly on rational thought than on beliefs and revela¬
tions, which are neurologically closer to limbic drives. When it
comes to guiding our species’ behavior, the process of civilization
has generally been marked by a move toward rational thought and
away from instincts, drives, and urges—neocortical beacons to
guide us through limbic gales.
MIGHT WE DO BETTER WITHOUT GOD?
It is possible that we are the only sentient beings who can exert a
major influence on human affairs. It is at least possible that there
is no God—or that there are no gods—watching over us and pre¬
venting us from doing major damage to our species or the planet.
Whether that is a fact or not, it gives us a useful and practical
guideline: it might be a better world if we all believe whatever we
wish, but behave as if there was no suprahuman deity to sort out
our problems for us. If we wish to decrease the chance of more
cataclysms, this line of thought might be a better one to follow
than assuming that some Divine Force or similar entity will
always be there to prevent us from falling over the edge.
This idea need not, by any means, be a cause for alarm,

dismay, or shock. The ideas inherent in most religions still have
great importance and validity for human behavior whether there
is a God or not. Think, for example, of what Jesus said and did—
as recorded in the Bible, and the Gnostic gospels—or of the
thoughts and edicts of Mohammed or Buddha or Moses. There is
no doubt of the value of what each of them said about human
conduct, foibles, and virtues. We can, by dint of effort and
thought, separate the rituals and the symbols which are common
to so many religions from the moral teachings and the values that
they contain. Despite the fact that resurrection legends are
common, or that almost all religions contain a hero that goes out
and meets with supernatural forces, or that eating the body of a
king or savior is a common rebirth rite, these observations do not
negate the meanings of the various religious teachings. Although,
of course, many believers would say, at this moment, that their
particular religion without their particular concept of a God is
meaningless, that may not be an eternal and enduring truth.
With a bit of effort we can try to remember that we are basi¬
cally organisms who have evolved with a brilliant and strong
limbic system which, unfortunately, from time to time gets the
better of our even more brilliant neocortex. Keeping that in mind,
we can perhaps use our rational centers to focus on the true
meanings of the morals and messages of teachers such as Jesus or
Moses, without having to take on the literal truth of an external
God-the-architect-and-controller. If we do that, perhaps we can
partly restrain the idea that the only valid moral codes are the
ones that emanate from God, and that God would be pleased if
we killed in his name. Perhaps by dint of effort, our wonderful
neocortex can help us restrain our limbic system a little, or at least
prevent it from driving us to destructive behavior.
HUMAN QUALITIES
Finally, we can address the despairing cry of those who fear that
life without a God is meaningless and pointless. The answer to
that cry lies in the value and the meaning of life as it is experi¬
enced by people who do not believe that there is a God. Atheists,
like theists, are people who believe strongly in the value of com¬
munal rules and codes and of their importance, but would pro¬
pose that there are alternatives to God-based systems of ethics.
Nontheist philosophies require their adherents to think of human
beings as the sole foundation upon which all codes of behavior
must ultimately rest. At first, this may cause some discomfort
because humans are a very frustrating and rather unpredictable
species. We humans are erratic, talented, magnificent, creative,
brutal, emotional, arbitrary, snitty, loving, cooperative, aggressive
and much else besides. Even so—as humanists believe—we are all
there is when it comes to human behavior. If we do it wrong,
there is nobody to save us.
This is not a cause for despair. The belief that there is no God
to save us—and that we must be self-reliant as a species—does
not mean that our life is meaningless. Not believing in an external
supernatural God-the-architect-and-controller does not imply
that there is no inherent meaning in human affairs. It is easy for
all of us to see the value in human interactions, in what happens
when we make contact constructively and creatively with each
other, in the things we achieve that no other species can. However
frail, fallible, and erratic we are, there is clear and visible meaning
and value in the way we mix with each other, communicate, and
change each other’s minds. Ultimately, that is the only value that
we are left with at the end. But—arguably—it is all we need.
We can all keep those thoughts close at hand. Individually we
may be able to do very little to produce visible changes in the
world around us, least of all, changes in the tide of human events
and in the grand scheme of things. But changes in the way we
think, as a species, do occur, and they occur slowly and gradually.

We have to be aware of what we can and cannot do in the short
span and with the limited abilities of our own life.
Clearly, every life ends in death but—equally clearly—death
does not obliterate the meaning of that life. The value and the
meaning of a life reside in the way in which that person has inter¬
acted and changed the people around him or her. Think, for
example, about the people that you have most admired in your
own life—relatives, teachers, or friends. While you are alive you
give them a sort of immortality. And when it is our turn to die, we
achieve that same sort of immortality in the lives of the people we
have touched. If that is the only kind of immortality there is, I am
not disappointed. It gives us all something reasonable to hope for
and aspire to—and it does mean that our daily life has ostensible
purpose and objectives. In answering yes to the question “Can we
be good without God?” it is here that I rest my case.
NOTES
1. With apologies to Douglas Adams.

2. Even though there is probably no worldwide consensus of the
definition of the word “bad” there are many examples of events that
would be universally accepted as totally bad—and I suggest there would
be almost universal agreement on the idea that the First World War was
unequivocally a bad thing. Between August 1914 and November 1918
approximately ten million soldiers died in the war. (The exact number
is still difficult to establish.) By the end of the war, the physical condi¬
tions were ripe—coincidentally—for the influenza pandemic. Starting
with some soldiers in the trenches, the virus was transmitted worldwide
by the transport systems that had been developed to meet the needs of
the war. Large numbers of the world’s population were in relatively poor
states of nutrition and it is asserted by many experts that the death toll
from the 1918 pandemic would not have reached twenty to thirty mil¬
lion had not the war debilitated so much of the population and then
facilitated spread. Of course, an infectious pandemic was not a known

or calculated risk at the start of the war—it was not a factor taken into
account by any of the governments involved—but it was partially a con¬
sequence of the war.
At the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles dealt punitive measures
to Germany. Although the consequences of those conditions are, to some
extent, a matter of debate, there is universal agreement that the resulting
economic state of Germany made it particularly vulnerable to the Wall
Street Crash of 1929. (It is worth contrasting the Treaty of Versailles with
the approach at the end of the Second World War and the way in which
General MacArthur’s strategy for Japan and the Marshall Plan avoided
this kind of perpetuation of grievance and conflict.) In that financial cat¬
astrophe, a large number of loans lodged in Germany were called in, and
the German economy collapsed. In that desperate and apparently hope¬
less atmosphere it was easier for any extremist—Hitler included—to gain
widespread popular support for a campaign (ostensibly) to restore to
Germany the status and dignity that had been taken away. There are
many historians who suggest that in many ways the conditions at the end
of the First World War contributed to the Second World War and there¬
fore to the Holocaust and the many atrocious events associated with that
war. The purpose of setting out these few simplistic points about these
wars is simply to hold up the Great War as an example of what we all
could today agree upon as an example of a series of human events that
we can deem entirely and unequivocally “bad.”
One side-issue needs to be stressed. The example of the Great War
is not being identified here as if it were an example of religion-led
destruction—it was, of course, nothing of the kind. The Great War was
not occasioned by religious differences and although the armies on both
sides had chaplains in them and both sides felt and stated that they had
God on their side, it was never about religion. It is simply and purely an
example of something that is unequivocally bad as anyone could
imagine. It was a period of time during which millions of people were
engaged in something that humans would wish never to repeat, and
would wholeheartedly try to avoid in the future.
We may ask the following pertinent question: what was it about the
Great War that makes it in retrospect so universally dreaded and repug¬
nant? The answer surely lies in its destructiveness and the scale of that
destruction. The individual actions that led to the start of the war and
then perpetuated it were typical of any mixture of human qualities—
good, bad, erratic, and arbitrary. The atmosphere in the decade before
the war was highly charged with nationalism, ambition, feelings of supe¬
riority and antagonism combined with serious and prolonged misjudg-
ments of the capabilities and intentions of others. The different visions
of world order held by various countries and maintained more or less
rigidly by monarchies facilitated the scale of the war. We could postulate
that the limbic systems and herd glues of humankind were working at
full strength, and that large numbers of rational and considered options
were ignored in the heat of the times, and amplified on a large scale by
group and crowd behavior. There was—at the start of the war and in the
first few years of it—an incredible amount of bungling, misinformation,
premature judgment and misunderstanding. Other human qualities—
qualities that are generally regarded as admirable—helped perpetuate it
at that time, and until its end. There was an enormous amount of inge¬
nuity, courage, collaboration, altruism and cooperation among the pro¬
tagonists on both sides. These qualities, in sum, made the scale of the
war possible—it was, in total, a manmade disaster of previously un¬
imaginable depth and extent.
This highlights the important question about the existence of
“intrinsic evil” or even “evil.” If we accept that the Great War was
unequivocally bad, was it the consequence of some extrinsic force called
“evil”? If so, where precisely did the evil lie that led to that war? Were the
leaders of the major countries—Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas as
prime examples—intrinsically evil? Were the generals of the various
armies intrinsically evil? Were the soldiers? Were the members of the
nations, who wanted their own country to be victorious and who sup¬
ported that aim with money and effort, were they evil? Is the important
and repugnant feature of the First World War the “evil” of that war, or is
it the destructiveness, and the realization of the destructive and cruel
actions of which humans are capable?
3. This analogy is one commonly used in ethics and philosophy.
\
Index
Adam and Eve, 193 17, 18, 135, 240-43

Adams, Douglas, 257 ethical, 257
Africa, 25 and insight, 236, 247
agriculture, 26, 52 and the limbic system,
and territoriality, 125 101-106. See also limbic
animism, 29-32, 38-39, 203 system
causality, 30-32 patterns, 119
inexplicable events, 30 See also crowds
Ardrey, Robert, 124, 145 belief, 18-19, 20-24
Territorial Imperative, The, and allure of immortality,
124 187-89
Armstrong, Karen, 47, 177-78 and allure of perfect justice,
History of God, A, 47, 189-91
205-206 and allure of wish fulfill¬
Atilla the Hun, 257 ment, 191-92
Aum Shinrikyo, 92 and belonging, 174-75
constructive effects of com¬
behavior, human, 10, 240-43 munal belief, 173-212
aggression, 144-46 and coping with disaster,
destructive, 261-63 178-84
effect of religious belief on, “acts of God,” 180
271
272 INDEX
and coping with the unknown, See also mythology

183-84, 209-10 Canetti, Elias, 174
defining, 18-19 cargo cults, 55-60
eternal salvation, 185-92 and Christian missionaries, 56,
social functions derived from, 58
196-98 and colonialism, 59-60
taxonomy of, 198-210 during World War II, 58
types of, 199-204 and Europeans, 58
as uniquely human activity, Frum, John, 58-59
210-12 Melanesia, 56
Bible, 186, 188,265 Pacific islands, 56
as code of behavior, 186 and plantations, 56
Deuteronomy (book), 20 Prince Philip (Great Britain), 59
Exodus (book), 20 Tanna, Vanuatu, 58
Leviticus (book), 20 Vailala, New Guinea, 57-59
Mark (book), 185 Carlyle, Thomas, 66-69, 232
New Testament, 80 Divine Plan, 68
Bosnia, 220, 257, 258 hero categories, 67-69
Boston Tea Party, 257 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
brain, human, 10, 207-208 the Heroic in History, 66-69
and belief systems, 23 Universal Truth, 66
and biology, 61 and the Victorian era, 68-69
evolution of, 23, 25-63 cave paintings, Lascaux, 27-28
“kill in God’s name,” 92-96, Chartres Cathedral, 173, 258
226,234 China, 37
“old-fashioned” brain wiring communication
and overcrowding, 144-46 auditory signals, 234
Buckman, Robert, 127 visual signals, 234
Burns, Robert, 67 conflict, 162-68
monstrifying, 164-66
Campbell, Joseph, 27, 31-32, 34, overpopulation as cause, 162,
37, 41, 43, 45, 60, 69-76, 245
211-12,231,255 “them-and-us-ing,” 162-64
Hero with a Thousand Faces, consciousness, evolution of, 17
The, 70-72,211-12 Cromwell, Oliver, 67
Masks of God, The, 48 Crow Indians, 28
Sarah Lawrence College, 70 crowds, 23, 127-39, 219-20
INDEX 273
conformity, 154 EEG, 80

and fear of, 256 Easter Bunny, 201
herd instinct in humans, 137— Egypt, 37
39, 145-46, 154 Osiris, 38-39, 71
and mass behavior, 256 Einstein, Albert, 193
and mass hallucination, 134 emotions, 234
as mobs, 157-59 empathic response, 237-40
overpopulation, 142-46 enfants sauvages, 119
and repetition, 139-42 Epictetus, 257
“suggestibility,” 132-33, 134, epilepsy/seizures, 79-81
135-36 aura, 80
types, 131 Complex Partial Epileptic-Like
Crowe, Russell, 48 Experiences (CPELs), 85, 93
Crusades, 153,217, 257, 258 symptoms, 80
Cuchulainn, 71 tonic-clonic seizure, 79-81
cults, 223-25 See also temporal lobes
brainwashing, 224-25 Europe, 26, 54, 139
early Christianity as, 223-24
F-MRI scan, 86
Dante (Alighieri), 67, 191, 193 family
Inferno, 191 acceptable behaviors, 159-61
Davey, Sir Humphrey, 133 as minitribe, 159-61
death, 32-36 fertility rituals, 36-44, 49
and chimpanzees, 33 and cycles of the moon, 36-38
and elephants, 33, 187 and rebirth, 38. See also death
fear of, 32-36 fight-or-flight reflex, 146-53
“grave goods,” 33 Frankl, Viktor, 257
Land of the Dead, 33-36, 70 Frazer, James, 34, 211, 216-17, 231
rebirth, 36. See also fertility Golden Bough, The, 38, 42, 44
and social animals, 32-34 French Revolution, 129, 158,
Descartes, Rene, 207 166-68,232
Diana, Princess of Wales, 154 Bastille, 153, 166
Dieri, 40 Bourbon monarchs, 166-67,
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 81, 85 232
Idiot, The, 81 and mobs, 167-68
Driver, Stewart, 182 Freud, Sigmund, 49
Frobenius, Leo, 44
274 INDEX
Gage, Phineas, 97-98 territory, 124-27

Galileo, 225-26 visible and audible signals,
Gautama Buddha, 71, 199, 265 118-21, 124
Gilgamesh, 71 See also behavior
Gloor, P., 82
Gnostic gospels, 265 Hawking, Stephen, 193
God/Supreme Being Hell, 221
of Abraham, 205 Heracles, 71
Council of El, 206 heroes, 65-69, 71-72
as Divine Force, 264 epic conflicts, 71
Divine Plan, 181, 253 stages of, 71-72
existence of, 22, 235 Hitler, 217,257
image of, 20-22, 204-208 Hogg, lames, 222-23
of Israel, 205 Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
as powerful and benign parent, The, 222-23
161 Holocaust, 252, 257, 258
as savior, 70-72 Auschwitz, 257
supervening intelligence, 22, Homo sapiens, 25-26
235 Horowitz, S., 82
Yahweh, 205 Hugenots, 217
Golden Rule, 239-40 hunter-gatherers, 26-28, 50-51,
“good” and “evil,” 261-64 125
Great Wall fo China, 258 Huxley, Aldous, 65
groups, 113 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 215
aggression, 114-17
aggression as instinctual India, 37
behavior, 116 Inuit, 70
chemical signals, 121-23, 124 Iran, 220
cohesion, 118
in humans, 126-27 Jackson, Hughlings, 79-81, 85,107
crowd behavior, 113-27 Joan of Arc seizure, 80-81
humans and, 116 James, Henry, 176
imprinting, 118-21 James, William, 31, 175-77
mating, 114-15 Varieties of Religious Experi¬
pheremones, 121, 123, 234 ence—A Study in Human
submission and aggression, Nature, The, 176
115-16 Will to Believe, The, 61
INDEX 275
Japan, 54 as human nature, 243-48

suicide bombers, 54 inhibition of, 96-100
Jaynes, Julian, 100-101 limbic rage, 149, 155, 166-68
Origins of Consciousness in the mirage, 105
Breakdown of the Bicameral neocortex, 243-45, 264, 265
Mindy The, 101 occipital lobes, 102
“right-brain-left-brain,” 100- optical illusions, 10
101 orbito-frontal cortex, 97
Jesus, 43,68,71, 199, 204, 265 pencil trick, 103-105
Johnson, Samuel, 67, 68 prefrontal cortex, 97, 99
Jones, Rev. Jim, 224 prefrontal leukotomy, 98
Guyana, 224 rational, logical process, 136-37
Peoples Temple, 224 Lithuania, 40
Ryan, Rep. Leo, 224 Perkunas (god), 40
Joplin, Janis, 191 Luther, Martin, 67
Judgment Day, 190-91
Jung, Carl, 45,49, 50, 73,219 MRI scan, 86, 98-99
MacKay, Charles, 127-28
Khond, 40, 54 Extraordinary Popular Delusions
Kierkegaard, Soren, 189 and the Madness of Crowds,
King Arthur, 71 127-28
Kosovo, 220 Makarec, Kate, 85
Krishna, 71 Mandans, 40
Manichean schism, 217
Lao-tse, 70 Marlborough, Duchess of, 115
law, 231,263 mass movements, 10
codes and rules, 260-64 Maui, 71
ethics and morals, 260-64 Maya/Aztec, 37, 41, 53, 54
Le Bon, Gustave, 128-42, 173, 256 Mesopotamia, 37
Crowd: A Study of the Popular Middle East, 25, 220
Mind, The, 129 suicide bombers, 54
limbic system, 78, 149, 188, 234, Milgram, experiments of, 151-54,
244-45, 264, 265 220
and behavior, 101-106, 244-48. Minnesota Multiphasic Person¬
See also behavior ality Inventory (MMPI), 85,
cerebral cortex, 97, 136 95-96
hippocampus, 99 Minnitarees, 40
276 INDEX
Miracle on 34th Street, 202 Rabia, 37-38

morals without religion, 233-48 Tuwale, 37-38
Morris, Desmond, 143, 145 Kiwai, 35
Human Zoo, The, 143 West Ceram, 37-38
Moses, 265 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 66, 232, 236
Moyers, Bill, 70 Ubermensch, 66
Power of Myth, The, 70 nomads, 26
See also Campbell, Joseph Northern Ireland, 220
Mozart, 106, 193
Muslims, 206-207 Orinoco, 37
Allah, 206-207
Mohammed, 67, 206, 265 Pawnees, 40-41
Mount Hira, 206 Penfield, Wilder, 82, 85, 107
Ramadan, 206 Persinger, Michael, 83, 85, 93-96,
mythology, 69-72. See also Camp¬ 100, 107, 246
bell, Joseph Persinger helmet, 92
myths/legends, 23, 201-202 Personal Philosophy Inventory
as reality, 72-76 (PPI), 85, 93-96
Peru, 37
Napoleon, 67, 129 Sends, 37
nature versus nurture, 117 phallus, 41
Neanderthals, 25-26, 33-34 Polynesia, 41
Nepal, 66 Monster Eel (god), 41
Himalayas, 66 prayer, 175-78, 211
neuroanatomy, 78-109, 244-45 as coping strategy, 177-78
amygdala, 79, 97-99, 100, 166 and transcendence, 177-78, 255
amygdaloid nucleus, 98 Prometheus, 71
motor cortex, 79 pseudocyesis, 90-91
olfactory bulb, 122
parietal lobes, 82 Quilacare, 44, 53, 55
neurological disorders
aphasia, 79 rage, 147
dysphasia, 79 road rage, 147-48, 149
dyspraxia, 79 See also limbic system; limbic
New Guinea, 34-35 rage
Dema, 42-43, 53 reductionism, 106-107
gods, 37-38 reflexes, conditioned, 155-57
INDEX ill
religion, salvation figures, 190

and aggression, 214-27 Santa Claus, 192, 201, 204
animal spirits, 27 Sergeant, Malcolm, 259
benefits to community, 173-212 sexual urge, 150
conflict, 215-20 Shakespeare, William, 67, 188, 193
defining religion, 19 shamans, 50-52
devotional art, 29 Cajun, 51
divine selection, 222-23 Siberia, 51
early religious beliefs, 25 Sinai peninsula, 205
evolution of, 23, 208 Sistine Chapel, 193, 194
figurines, 28-29 snake handlers
hand silhouettes, 28 of Jolo, W.Va., 185
inspiration, 193-95 Sophocles, 189-90
massacres, 217-20 soul, 34-36
places of worship, 174-75 Spanish Inquisition, 153, 217, 258
religious differences, 225-26 Spice Islands, 220
as source of strife, 214 spirituality, 255-56
ritual and symbol, 45-55 Sri Lanka, 54
conformity, 53-55 Tamil, 54
English maypole dance, 49-50 Stonehenge, 258
Gregorian chant, 45 superstition, 197-98, 202-204
language, 46 Halloween, 197-98
phallus worship, 49
prayer, 47 temporal lobes, 78-96,122,194,226
sacrifice, 54 sensitivity, 83-84
spiritual state, change in, 47 and sensory experiences, 86-92
stimuli, 46-47 case histories, 88-92
Roman Catholic Church, 52, 221, stimulation of, 81-83
226 terrorism
and the monarchy, 232 September 11, 2001, 9
pope, 52 Theseus, 71
Romans, 38 Tinbergen, Niko, 115-16, 123
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67 Tooth Fairy, 201
Rwanda genocide, 258 totemism, 25, 27
Trotter, Wilfred, 137-39, 145, 203
SPECT scan, 86 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
Salem witch trials, 154-55 War, 137
278 INDEX
United Nations, 258 World War I, 55, 129, 137, 139,

173,232, 236, 260, 261
Virgin Mary, 135 Balkans, 236, 258
Progreso, Texas, 135 World War II, 67, 128-29
Voltaire, 68, 177 worship, 64-65
Wotan/Odin (god), 67-68, 71
Wag the Dog, 164
Waldensians, 217-218 Zeus, 71
Wells, H. G., 222 \
White, T. H., 186

Once and Future King, The, 186
Where do our beliefs come from? During prayer or meditation are we
communicating with God? Or does the concept of God originate in our
own minds?
In this wide-ranging book, Dr. Robert Buckman takes us on a journey

through the history of human belief, combining philosophy, theology,
and new scientific research to discover the origins of religious faith and
explore the dilemmas and contradictions of religion in the modern
world.
Buckman also examines the relationship between beliefs and ethics.

Many of us use rules set by our religion to guide our behavior, yet now,
more than ever, religious doctrine can seem out of alignment with our
sense of ethical conduct. If you don’t believe in God, can you still behave
decently and ethically?
This revised and updated edition helps us understand not just why we
believe, but how our beliefs affect our actions and how a code of ethics
can exist without a deity at its center.
Cover Image © 2002 PhotoDisc, Inc
A PENGUIN BOOK ISBN 0 -14 - 305127 - X

Philosophy
PENGUIN
CANADA
143 275
$22.00

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“Buckman’s got it right—

a realistic and positive moral blueprint for being good,

CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?

ROBERT BUCKMAN, M.D., is a cancer specialist and

Published by the Penguin Group

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

Published in this edition, 2004

Copyright © Robert Buckman, 2002

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Ethics. 2. Religion and ethics. I. Title.

BJ1012.B745 2004 170 C2004-904526-1

American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Preface: The Events of September 11, 2001 9

PART ONE: TO BELIEVE IS HUMAN 15

1. Introduction: In the Beginning ... 17

2. The Evolution of Belief 25

3. Worship and Heroes: The Machinery of Belief 64

4. The Neurology of Belief 78

PART TWO: BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR 111

5. The Behavior of Groups 113

6. Constructive Effects of Communal Beliefs 173

7. Destructive Effects of Communal Beliefs:

PART THREE: CAN WE DO BETTER? 229

8. Alternative Gold Standards 231

CONCLUSION: WE ARE ONLY HUMAN 249

9. The View from Here 251

10. Toward “Better” 260

T JL. his book is about the effects of belief on behavior, and

ture of the design and function of a particular part of the human

T JL his book really started when, together with Michael

finding references to arcane and difficult areas, and in helping me

I am also grateful to Don Hill for stories and views; to Wade

T his book is not a debate about the existence of God.

The effects of belief on behavior may of course be admired as

THE WORD “BELIEF” AND

BELIEVING AND BELIEF

For present purposes we may define the act of believing in purely

that is, other functions of the human brain—including cognitive

Another definition is needed at this juncture. The word “religion”

SOME MEANINGS OF THE WORD “GOD”

Perhaps of greater importance than any other definition, how¬

We may refer to this vision of God as an intercessionary “archi-

of mind and spirit that an individual may achieve at a certain

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

orating process, whether the answer to the question in the title of

1. Adherent is of course another word that illustrates the role of re¬

The Evolution of Belief

EARLY RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND TOTEMISM

A soon as humankind was able to perform the

(before the common era). It is possible that there was a period of

humans did not think of themselves as the dominant race—they

with or transforming into an animal, is clear evidence of some

ANIMISM: SPIRITS AND GODS AS

At some point humans became conscious of their own potential

spirits or gods that inhabited every object in the natural world.

as a natural order of things. By thus carrying out ritualized sym¬

FEAR OF THE DEAD

In addition to the concept of causality, perhaps the next major

It is known that elephants have sometimes been seen picking

animal. Neanderthals may have had a concept of a Land of the

The idea of the existence of a Land of the Dead is a fundamental