THE BIG SHIFT

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

This brief overview of the concept of “religion” is meant for people who are interested in how it “works” in human life.  Sci-fi writers almost always have understood it as a process rather than isolated systems that assert that they are “true” or the “only way.”  In some ways, anthropology -- the science of humans -- is the key to all fiction.

First of all, religion itself is a composite of several categories: ritual and artistic expression, morality, theory of existence, guide for human arrangements (mostly fitting to the physical ecology through material culture, economics, science, hierarchy and war).  Different cultures organize these categories in different ways.

Most people feel that the earliest sign of religion in the sense of ritual was the strewing of flowers in graves among the neanderthal peoples.  The closest to this practice in other species is the phenomenon of elephants covering dead bodies of their comrades with branches.

There has always been science of a kind (an accumulation of information about how things work) from the very beginning, as in hunting.  Only ten thousand years ago humans moved to agriculture and settlements, which allowed the development of math, writing, and an accumulation and sharing of knowledge by specialized persons.  Religion was quick to claim all that, including dedicated property.  In the specialization of roles, they relied heavily on mysteries and secrets, but in the best of situations they provided a framework for practical daily living plus an “ultimate” goal, such as achieving immortality,  participating in life itself, attaining privileged status, contributing to their human community, or reaching an internal sense of the Holy.  Often there was special attention to death.  Or sex and birth.

All of this was built on a mammalian substrate of physical function, including the brain and its management of the body.  Evolution, defined as persistence through survival of individuals and groups, has only recently reached the point of being able to observe itself on a cellular.  New technology has taught us how much beyond our senses there is a cosmos and a molecular elemental structure to existence, but also it has taught us how our senses deliver information to our brains and how it is processed, censored, elaborated, and resolved into identity which is shared and embedded in human relationships.  Bits of the brain, evolved before there was such a thing as a human being, still control our actions regardless of our beliefs.

Exploring these interrelationships and speculating with vivid illustrations what would happen, if there were changes in the actual body or in the culture-sphere that includes religion, is the work of science fiction.

ALL RELIGION IS ROOTED IN LAND 

If the land is desert where the skies are wide and crammed with stars, the religion will focus on that as well as the practices that are necessary for desert survival.  The metaphors of the texts, the management of birth and death, the over all moral “style” will be those necessary for survival in the desert.  That means chieftains, polygamy, abstinence, control, and rivalries among tribes.  In a coastal warm-climate place where there is plenty of food, there are likely to be elaborate arts and religious mechanisms for distributing plenty or even destroying some of it, as in the Pacific Northwest ceremonies of breaking and throwing away “coppers,” sheets of embossed metal, sometimes of great beauty.

BUT ALSO BY HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

For a religion to form protocols in one ecology and then move to another, is very problematic.  Those that are more detached from the land and dependent on human relationships are more likely to make the transition -- as the Christians who depend on the father-mother-son nucleus -- but even they are now being challenged by the social deconstruction of families caused by economic shortfalls.  It has been suggested that the new patriarch is simply the government -- issuing the checks and making the rules, even providing the habitation -- so that the essential family is simply mother and children with no place for a father.  Insemination is random, childbirth is unclaimed, and yet the inseminator can be identified even if he was introduced via a turkey baster or through violent rape -- without anyone being able to explain what that means in terms of the male role.  Males without families are often males without any religious patterns in their lives, vulnerable to substance abuse, crime, and depression.  Young males -- no longer children but not yet adults -- are in limbo, accumulating incredible amounts of information without enough sorting mechanisms.  In their drive to find an anchor point they might attach to young women, to their own mothers, to powerful men, to religious leaders, to military contexts, and to exo-cultures.  The most interesting ones are the more daring ones, signaling their status on the boundary by exotic ornamentation and secret signals.

But then comes the news that gender is not diadic, that in fact it is not two separated biological states but rather a continuum, dumb-bells shaped with bulges on each end instead of the middle, and that it is not immutable -- one can change gender.  One can combine two genders.  One can, in fact, have two genomes in one body.  The gender-controlling protein template can be XY as standard, or XXY or XYY or XXYY or XX but never YY.  The more we know, the more confusion there is, but also the more scope for science fiction as we speculate on what that might mean.  Might evolution develop what amounts to a three-gendered system of human being?  Will it necessarily be tied to birth?  Could it be voluntary the way transgender people are today, or might it be a new stage of growth?  What organs might evolve?

RELIGION IS LIKE LANGUAGE

On the one hand it could be designed consciously, like Mr. Spock’s Vulcan or Esperanto, but more commonly it grows in response to the need to say something.  It has points of reference -- nouns and verbs -- plus an internal structure, a grammar, which also responds to the way the people in question think the world is shaped.  There is no need for an Inuit to talk about a tree and no need for a Tahitian to talk about an igloo.  But the underlying concepts might be shared -- things like shelter or awe, the meaning level of experience and emotional response.  They just won’t be attached to the same nouns and verbs.

Religion evolves, as does language, so that new generations of speakers find new ways to talk.  They respond to technological innovation, learning to “speak” math or texting.  It’s easier to learn the points of attachment, because they are often matters of sensory perception, than to learn the invisible structuring of their relationships.  A bowl is a bowl in China and in Italy, but the ways of speaking about them are not the same and what one puts in a bowl is bound to be different if the food comes from a different ecology, so a rice bowl is likely to be shaped differently than a pasta bowl.  Still, if one makes a bowl of one’s two cupped hands, it is likely to be understood everywhere that the people have hands.

DOES SCIENCE CONTRADICT RELIGION?

Some say that science IS a new religion, but the truth is that science and religion are enmeshed in each other, one cannot move forward without the other and neither can hold the other back.  The most obvious interface is the scientific study of religion.  Over the past decades the paradigms have evolved quickly.  At first it was like natural science, a matter of botanizing: collecting samples and trying to group by families.  Most recently the idea that God must be somewhere has persuaded the media to call the Higgs boson the “God particle.”  The space age has done serious damage to the idea that there’s a big humanoid in the sky.

My interest is in the brain and how it works.  At first the idea was that there must be a little knob or patch somewhere in the brain that was the connection to “religion,” which actually connects to the idea that religion is about the supernatural and therefore must need a superorgan, a kind of antenna to pick up the signals.  Indeed, running weak electromagnetic current through someone’s temples will cause a percentage of them will have a “spiritual” experience possibly hearing voices.  A whole generation, having watched God “die” before their eyes, has tried to find a chemical that will attune their brains to another world.

SCIENCE FICTION ROOTED IN MYTHS

Two short stories have remained with me for more than fifty years, though I don’t know who wrote them.  Both were based on mythology.  In one story a space sailor went to a planetary brothel where the female who would provide intimacy was wearing a big turban.  Settled in a small private room, she unwound her turban, revealing not snakes but worms and not ordinary worms.  They were electromagnetic, slithery with gel like that used for a sonogram, and they were long and there were a LOT of them.  The sailor was enveloped in ecstasy beyond anything he had ever known.  Finally burnt out, the sailor was absorbed by the tentacles into the Medusa.

The other story was about a beloved woman, a dancer, whose body died.  Scientists kept her brain alive and gave her a new body made of golden bangles, cleverly shaped  in rings which -- fitted together in sequence -- reproduced the woman’s shape.  They were held together by electromagnetic forces.  Eurydice could dance more beautifully than ever before.  I forget what equivalent to “looking back” this futuristic Orpheus couldn’t resist, but her brain, her identity source, died.  Maybe the music stopped.  The golden rings showered to the floor, scattered and chiming.

The best science fiction mixes “hard science” with human truths, like the series of stories about the children who survived an alien spaceship crash.  They appeared to be human, but they could fly and read minds.  Far from being recognized as “above average,” they were resented -- maybe the way science nerds are in high school -- and had to work out strategies for sticking together.

Or there is another beloved scifi story that comes from the Old Testament fantasies about what an angel might be like.  An old lady is washing the dishes and glancing at her backyard through the window over the sink.  An angel crashes, the traditional bare young man with wings.  She rushes out to help him, carrying a mug of warm milk she had made for herself.  This brings the life back into the angel and he is soon well enough to fly off.  Then she realizes that touching him had brought a kind of electrical force into her that has healed her rheumatism.

The metaphors go back and forth: sometimes the idea is Ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth, and sometimes it’s the benzene ring.  There are levels:  science hardware builds the computer, software science writes the programs and algorithms, and the human wetware yearns to go beyond -- tries to capture the unknown, even unsuspected.  The hard science is intriguing: I recall an essay describing the metabolism of green blood, copper-based, that worked on methane instead of oxygen.  I can’t remember the particulars, just that it was so detailed and possible.  But then the implications:  could a red-blooded human love a green-blooded alien?

NEW PARADIGMS FOR BRAIN FUNCTION MEAN NEW PARADIGMS FOR WHAT WE CALL RELIGIOUS

Throw out theism, the big humanoid in the sky.  Throw out institutions, the corporations that grow up around a particular world view.   Throw out history and even art.  What is left?  An ability to sense the holy.  Is it in the perceiver or the perceived or in some transaction between them?  I’m betting on the transaction.

Sensory information comes into the body many ways.  Some organs have their own nexus of nerves that sorts and shapes the information.  Then the nerve impulses begin a journey through various centers that have evolved over the millennia.  The most immediate is the one that decides whether immediate danger is presenting.  Then another place in the brain decides whether to freeze, fight or run like hell.  Even as the decision is being made, the messages are going out to the body to act, and the brain must process which way to run, whether to jump over that branch, and a lot of other muscle, position, and kinetic information.  Only when enough information gets through all the instant reaction do you understand that the big dark shape is not a grizzly bear but your Uncle Fred come to call you for dinner.  Then the extra energy has to drain off in laughter and panting.