The terrible repercussions of Hurricane Katrina are being felt all over the Gulf Coast and hundreds of thousands of people are scrambling to recover something of their normal lives. Like death itself such a hurricane was long ago predicted and I would argue that everyone, at some level, came to expect this cataclysm. New Orleans, after all, is below sea level and only the thinnest scrap of swampland separates it from the Gulf. The levy system was understood to be a makeshift solution to the water surrounding the area, and a solution well in need of improvement. Is such a subliminal threat not a source of the fascination with hedonistic enjoyment that characterizes this unique place? The culture of New Orleans--with its voodoo, skeletons, and manic sense of fun--is a culture that fully recognizes the dark side of life.

Shortly before visiting New Orleans for the first time in April, I had the luck of coming across an hour long program regarding these very issues on NPR. Among other things covered, commentators mentioned how a hurricane that came in just the right direction across the Gulf would obliterate New Orleans. I cannot express my shock in seeing the reality of this prediction occur just a few months later.

What Katrina exemplifies is the natural decay and distaster that encloses each human life and sometimes will intersect a life in sudden, terrible bursts. Human life, despite our best intentions and thoughtful preparations, is completely at the mercy of nature since we ourselves are just tiny parts of the greater ecosystem of life on this planet. In Brain & Belief, I argue that the awareness of this fact, an awareness of the contingent nature of existence, lies behind a great deal of human effort and is perhaps the most important source of religion. Religion is the last refuge of meaning and control after all other actions have failed. I can assure you that many a conversation is being had, right now, by those victims in the Gulf about God and 'why this happened.' Some are expressing their thanks for being saved, many others are mumbling angrily 'why me?' and 'why here?' The true answer is that there is no why and there is no personality or intention behind this event. God is not punishing or testing us in such disasters. The periodicity of disaster is unpredictable but certain in its occurrence from time to time. If it happens to you, it is your bad luck, if it happens to me, it is mine. And, at some point in the future, the bad luck will belong to everyone when the expected meteor or planetary detritus comes swooping our way from across the galaxy and slams into the planet or when the poles shift or when the right kind of bacteria decides to proliferate using our bodies as its preferred host. Our time is limited both personally and collectively and the predictions of whys and whens becomes an exercise in futility.

The point of this is not naysaying or nihilistic but a description of the 'way things are.' The presence of this mighty hurricane and its consequences is just a timely example for addressing the point. Our job now is to accept the reality of such distasters, present and future, and do our best to move on in spite of them. As Epictetus and the other Stoics discovered long ago, our control does not extend to encompass all that much when you get right down to it. What we can control is our reaction to events. We can choose to move on with fortitude. We can recognize that anger is not appropriate. We can recognize that certain reactions are appropriate, others inappropriate. This is what we're doing as a nation, this is our only choice as human beings. Neither prayer nor ecological domination will prevent disasters but the proper mindset will assist us in living in a world of contingency.

Following is a complete chapter from Brain & Belief on this topic.

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Chapter 17—Contingency: The Sting of Death

Our language and our culture are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids.
—Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, & Solidarity[i]

Death is sometimes acceptable in the very aged as it finally switches off a dimming lamp. It is more difficult when it swoops down upon a life bright with energy, in the midst of its projects, to snuff out its fire. In these losses, death reveals to us the central horror of life—contingency.

The conclusion of all postmodern thought, contingency teaches that nothing is ‘supposed’ to be. A marked tendency of thinking, well-represented in ancient philosophy, is the notion that everything aims towards an end. This notion goes by the name of teleology. If you think teleologically then you assume that nature strives for completion and the supremely meaningful integration of all things. One has only to read the Catholic priest, Teilhard de Chardin, to recognize the intensity with which even the scientifically literate may grasp for the lost hope of teleology. Contingency opposes this humanizing doctrine and remains the most challenging philosophic issue in our time and in times to come. No grand plan works itself out in the cosmos, neither human nor human-like intentions pull strings behind the veil of our ignorance.

Contingency means ‘purposeless’ or ‘random;’ it contrasts with ‘by design’ or ‘Providence.’ Whether a particular species of owl dies out, whether a supernova flashes, or whether democracy becomes the standard government of all peoples—no ‘greater power’ and no ‘higher authority’ intends anything of the sort. The things to which we attach our sacred meanings have no necessity. The real pang of this philosophy comes from this: no matter who you are—be you rich or poor, green-eyed or brown-eyed, famous or unknown—no matter the individual merits of your character, you may die today, you may die in the very next moment. Nothing precludes your imminent death. Considering this, one may conclude that all human effort and all culture emerged as methods of contingency avoidance, of “terror management.”[ii] The science of medicine, for instance, consistently expands its boundaries to wrest more and more control from disease and disintegration. As medicine improves, the sheer ‘luck’ (another synonym for contingency) of one’s genetics and the random threats from one’s environment become less and less controlling over life. So also do governments and police forces attempt to wrap people together and provide them a meaningful structure of protection and opportunity. Criminals are chained, wars avoided, and overall civic safety improved. Governments protect people from contingencies in other ways as well. In a more ruthless time, depending on the luck of your birth, you might enter the world absolutely destitute with no chance of opportunity. Alternately, you might be born into tremendous power and for no good reason lord it over thousands of lives. Democracy and socialistic economics try to minimize the inconsistencies of birth so that justice and equality become more universal. Nature, however, uses no such logic. One person is born strong and intelligent, another weak and mentally disabled; one into a family of cuddling and laughter, another into a family of abuse and neglect. As humans extend our knowledge and power, we desperately wash over the most blatant of these contingencies. But no matter how ingenious our methods or expansive our knowledge, we will always—at the end of days—pass into oblivion.

Contingency has been most aggressively tackled by religion. Using an imaginative framework, religious doctrines take the contingent and wholly deny it, claiming everything inhuman to be part of God’s mystery. Religion is the sanctification of teleology, the assertion that all things exist by Providence. And against that champion of contingency, death? For the religious, death is no end, but a transition; justice not blind, but karmically harmonized over the eons (beyond the sight of our mortal eyes, that is). Much as religions have worked to annul the rights of contingency, they have, at last, failed. Nothing could prevent us from maturing, even if slowly. And all know from the experience of adolescence that maturation often comes in spurts, and painful ones at that.

Like a powerful medicine, contingency goes down bitterly. People find this concept so difficult because all of our thinking is founded on its opposite: we live through principles of meaningful order, reason-driven changes, and carefully planned, fully ‘mapped-out’ sets of actions. Of course, all such organization refers to human-directed activities—the manner in which we communicate to one another, structure our social groups, and comprehend our natural environment. When we look into a mindless puddle of contingent facts—like a pile of spaghetti strands that have landed atop one another—we instinctively begin to draw the strands apart in an attempt to discover their underlying pattern (provided we’re not driven by the more pressing instinct of hunger at the moment). Why did they fall just so? What does it mean? In like fashion, priests and oracles have utilized the guts of animals, the leaves of plants, and the pattern of fallen sticks to foresee the future. Using such tricks the inherent destiny of life could be prematurely glimpsed. The idea of an uncertain future, one that pays no mind to particular individuals or nations, has never been an acceptable philosophy.

Before all mysteries large and small we experience the peculiarly human rapture of wonder. The more terrible the vastness, the more aroused our organizing intellect becomes. Our brain, like other erogenous parts of our body, engorges itself with blood before a naked mystery. We sense an impossible puzzle but still the whisper teases: “seek and ye shall find.” The same teasing whisper drives all the great endeavors of humanity—the ceaseless quest for knowledge, the breakneck pursuit of meaning in love and relationships, and the expression of bittersweet finitude in art. Humans live, eat, and breathe meaning. The notion of ‘meaninglessness’ cannot be fathomed except as some shadowy opposition to our core sense of meaning. We vaguely begin to understand contingency when we create a vacuum by avoiding meaningful things and activities; this unnatural state is a difficult one to keep up, though, so strong is our organizing instinct, so ubiquitous our shared webs of meaning.

Human thought strives for pattern. Even when we perceive patternless phenomena—a patch of clouds in the sky or the noise of static on the radio—we begin to tease out images, seeing faces in the clouds, and we structure the randomness, hearing whispered sentences in the radio static. Contingency, then, defines a totally foreign, ‘inhuman’ concept. A random or meaningless act proceeds without ‘mind.’ Given that we experience everything through mind, even the passions of the so-called ‘heart,’ the idea of something being meaningless opposes our every intuition. Our brain-mediated organs of perception, far from recording the environment with objective fidelity, only perceive those things for which the brain is primed and ‘accepts.’ Thus does physiology give birth to the divide in our mentality that we label the conscious and the unconscious. In contrast to the meaning-constrained methods that we employ, the methods of nature proceed heartlessly from the grinding probabilities of random variation. In proposing evolution as the mechanism by which all things creaturely and substantial have come into being, Darwin deified the random.

Many claim that the sense of contingency has grown, and continues to grow, as mythology recedes and objective, scientific thought fastens itself upon our perceptions of the world. Something about the scientific worldview amplifies the perception of contingency. Perhaps, in attributing to cold processes what had previously been explained in terms of a human-like God, we see our natural surroundings with more clarity—in all their inhuman glory.

One of the first individuals of the modern era to recognize contingency was the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A child prodigy, Pascal attracted fame for his mathematical and scientific insight. Among other things, he discovered and explained the principles of the vacuum. For much of his short life he struggled to reconcile the sheer logic of math with the Christian religion. When he was 32, Pascal underwent a mystical experience that forever settled this debate for him. He fell back onto his traditional religious upbringing with abandon. But his precocious brain continued to entertain dark thoughts. The contemplation of what seemed to him a godless, inhuman universe made him cringe. The clash between the all-meaningful religious construct and the essentially meaningless scientific one aided him in discovering the vacuum of meaning, contingency: “Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand? What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for choosing this number rather than another…”[iii] Pascal had stumbled onto a horrifying series of insights that taught him that all the little accidents of life, those to which we generally attribute no significance, also lie at the heart of personal existence. An orderless series of accidents confirms us in one body, and one identity, rather than another. Just as Pascal was born preternaturally intelligent, he might as easily have been born with Down’s Syndrome or deaf—and for no particular reason. Of course, any such alteration, originating in the tiniest accident as his chromosomes tumbled into place in the womb of his mother, would forever have changed the nature and type of life he led and we’d have no reason to discuss his life and thoughts. So does science threaten our comfort, our ‘at-homeness’ in the universe, teaching that even as we perceive a lack of meaning in nature, so would nature overlook our own significance. We are, in a most horrifying insight, utterly replaceable—our individual existences as ephemeral and unnecessary as a flea’s. In a darker moment, Pascal—otherwise a very religious man—wrote: “…at the end a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever.”[iv]

With Pascal began modernity’s biting awareness of contingency. But the felt reality of contingency was not Pascal’s doing. Contingency is a vacuum that exists around all things human when a notion of God, or divine order, gets expunged.

The consummate philosopher of contingency, who would redefine man within this vacuum of meaning, is Friedrich Nietzsche. In describing the ‘death of God’ in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes an allegory out of the ascendancy of science:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this Earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God. Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[v]

As Nietzsche poetically describes, ‘after God’ one feels disoriented. When the traditional constructs of meaning dissolve, one loses all bearings: “Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?” Contingency, the lack of felt necessity, of rule, of order, is the true sting of death. Just as the contingency of the world creates horror in the face of death, so is death the archangel of contingency. Death, the scraping dread of life’s certain end, does more than anything to show us that the grand vision and patterns of life are fleeting and inessential.

In his autobiography, Speak Memory, the twentieth century writer Vladimir Nabokov reflects the spirit of the time and perceives contingency all about him. He begins: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”[vi] For Nabokov, as for every feeling person, contingency insults the meaningful:

I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.[vii]

Here Nabokov identifies birth to be as much of an assault on meaning as death. Birth—the miraculous act of appearing out of nothing and growing into self-consciousness—makes as strong an argument for life’s contingency as annihilation. How can a soul honestly believe that he is born on some summer day, August 21, at some particular location, Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a precise time, 4:43pm, but will never die? If, as the immortality ideologies assure us, the individual soul exists as the very essence of God and shall, upon death, proceed to some higher plane wherein it shall live forever, then a birthday is a magnificent thing indeed! Every birthday, in this context, is the birthday—the birth of an immortal being, the one and only birth of an undying spirit who shall outlive every star and eclipse the mortal universe. In this context, all the accidents of personality and character—the lagging self-esteem from the club foot, the bitter resentment of poverty and neglect—become deified. As the essence of the personality these idiosyncrasies shall never die. We must be careful to note, as absurd a doctrine as this appears, so does the real one, the mortal human round. Again, Nabokov expresses as much with poignancy:

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. … When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. … I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.[viii]

Developing “an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence,” the sentient human cannot fail to perceive the strangeness of his position. In appreciating all things sophisticated and subtle, man mocks the accidents of his foundation. By conceiving something as lofty as human love and compassion, mankind seems an island amid a sea without edge. In respect to this, the existential philosophers discussed the absurdity of human existence. However, by pointing out its absurdity, these thinkers, like Jean-Paul Sartre, sound ever more absurd: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”[ix]

Why absurd? Existentialism’s preoccupation with absurdity—the modern gloom that rise like bruises after a bout with contingency—simply mismeasures the human condition. Just as one wouldn’t, as Descartes illustrated, try to measure the substance of mind (read brain properties) using rulers or scales, so one shouldn’t perceive the meaning of a human life against a background of cosmic immensity. Unfortunately, we have made such poor measuring practices a habit, thanks to our acceptance of immortality ideologies. Were the octopus to consider his world using the framework of an opossum’s life, it would seem absurd. Were a pygmy to judge his culture using a Swede’s perspective, it would seem absurd. And if a mortal human animal imagines his life against that of an immortal sky god, then it naturally seems absurd and meaningless. The modern perception of contingency and its dismal reflection on meaninglessness are just the growing pains a child experiences as he develops into his adult frame and leaves the comforts of the crib.

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[i] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 16.
[ii] Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequeneces of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R.F. Baumeister (ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189-212). New York: Springer-Verlag.
[iii] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1958), p. 61. <208>
[iv] Pascal, p. 61. <210>
[v] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181. <125>
[vi] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 19.
[vii] Nabokov, p. 20.
[viii] Nabokov, p. 296-297.
[ix] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964), p. 133.

In Brain & Belief I had some favorable things to say about Ritalin. I gave a sort of ‘pharmaceutically correct’ version of its present usage when, in fact, I am uncertain that its use in either children or adults is fully justified. Ritalin, like many other drugs in our ordained pharmacopeia, is less drug than sociological nail. So in questioning the drug I am necessarily questioning social structure.

With Ritalin and its use as a treatment for ADHD I think we face a sociological problem more than a clearly biological one. The sociological problem we face is that of standardization. Our industrial ethics, in which ‘quality control’ has become an unconscious mantra, prescribe a commonness to any product or commodity. A thing is to be standardized, fixed, and kept within certain performance parameters. This is extremely important for things like engine blocks and Swiss timepieces but probably not the best model for a human being. Yet, more than ever, we have come to regulate human development, indicating what is appropriate for all people, all of the time. Nothing could be so dangerous to the entire human experiment than an acceptance of an industrial ethic for the development and fruition of the species.

I find it very sad to think that the present human population is many times larger than any population in the past (and probably greater now, than the sum of all human populations from the beginning of our species to around 1500 AD) and enjoys a quality of life on average that is much higher than what elites could enjoy until the Modern era yet, at the same time, perhaps the most uncreative and least free of all human populations. Thinking of my own cohort—those brought up in affluence, highly educated, utterly free compared to almost any group before the present—it is outrageous to think how narrowly both I and all of my friends live. Controlled by a sort of ‘inner warden’ we work very regular hours, in predictable professions, enjoy accepted means of entertainment and pleasure, and generally benumb ourselves from the vastness of the possible human experience.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, to become an adventurer, an itinerant monk, or a social revolutionary implied genuine risks to one’s person. Starvation awaited those who could not generate some wealth for themselves, death awaited those who might penetrate a little known jungle or attempt an interaction with an exotic group of people, and prison or hanging was sure to be the monarch’s response to someone who might suggest an alternative lifestyle, religion, or political structure. These were dangerous endeavors! Nowadays, anyone I know, anyone of my friends, could easily set out to points unknown, lose all of his money and either secure some service via a credit card or a money wire. Anyone I know could go on the streets without an item besides his clothes and be pretty sure he could get a meal at a homeless shelter or through the panhandled winnings of other’s charity. Anyone I know could live with three women (or men), or start a commune, or profess a new faith, or start an incendiary political newspaper and absolutely no harm would come to him from governmental authorities. Now, out of all the hundreds of people I know, either well or casually, out of all my intellectual, highly-educated friends, out of all my acquaintances for whom—practically speaking—anything is possible, is there a single monk, political revolutionary, mendicant philosopher or sage? No. A simple no. If I lived in Athens during the classical age I could count numerous cases of each of these categories (and more!). If I lived in Paris during the 19th century I could assure myself of such relationships. If I lived, basically, at any other time and place besides now, I might find lots and lots of examples of truly creative people living truly alternative lifestyles. Yet I do not live in these places and times. I live in the present, a rich and powerful present, a present that should be identified with limitless numbers of creative types experimenting with wholly new ways of understanding themselves and the world. But the present is not this way. In the present, among other things, a child who cannot sit still through his math class is recommended medication so that he might better attend to his teacher’s mind-numbing formulas.

Ritalin, for many, is a psychic leash. It is one more way for modernity to squelch anything eccentric and creative. It is a way for parents to assure themselves that their children will follow no interesting, and perhaps solitary, path but will develop all the requisite skills to be a dogma-imbibing physician, a money-grubbing attorney, or a number-obsessed CPA. Why, of all times and places, is ours the most predictable, the most boring, the most life annihilating? Why, when the sheer numbers of our species is so high, do we have the most circumscribed patterns for life and for vocations and avocations?

One thing is certain in this era: we must rely on powerfully psychoactive compounds to keep ourselves from going crazy. If we cannot sit still for hours upon hours we must have some kind of problem. If we cannot be obsessed with case law and our financial statements then we must have an attention disorder. If we are direly depressed because our life lacks any creativity or adventure then we possess a genetic fault, a chemical imbalance of the brain. If we snort and smoke everything we can get our hands on to escape the present then we must have a habit-forming personality or are perhaps bipolar. Are we all crazy for believing this?

The human species developed for millennia in a vast range of challenging environments which required every ounce of our creativity and character. But now we have put all of this energy, all of these terawatts of human dynamism, and ramped them down to a circuit-interrupted household safe alternating current of 110 volts, running at 60 cycles. We cannot tolerate the occasional spike nor any alteration in the frequency of conduction. If these things occur we need more circuit breakers and more thickly shielded cable. Perhaps a GFCI outlet. If everything is not wired to code then it must be ripped out.

Now it is not wrong to want our children to be like others. It is painful to be different and it is risky to pursue a profession that may not get for you that sparkling SUV or that predictably stable spouse. But in a world of plenty we either need to start experimenting with more creative social patterns or continue starving in fields of heavy grain, bellies bloated from overconsumption, but blood anemic from lack of nutrients.

Since I published Brain & Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul over a year ago (June 2004), I've wanted to add material, share comments, and open a public forum to discuss the text. So here it is!

To begin, the book has found its audience and I've generally heard good things from readers. The brightest responses were in regards to the third part of the book (my old fraternity brother from Stanford, Jeff Ellingson, was especially laudatory in regards to this section). This is especially gratifying since this is the section which I invested with my most personal ideas. The first section, on the history of the soul, is a review of many excellent scholars who have delineated the history of the soul in one culture or another (cf. Weston LaBarre, E.R. Dodds, Jan Bremmer). The only thing necessary was to bring these ideas together to provide a broader historical scale to the development of the soul in the Western world. The second part serves as a review as well, combining the various findings we have from the neurosciences (biology, psychopharmacolgy, injury studies, etc.) so that a modern conception of the brain and mind could be presented. It was the third part, then, with ideas about the psychology of belief, thanatology, and existential psychology that I found most exciting to write and that I felt had more of my personal stamp on it than the others.

But in spite of good reviews and positive feedback, the backlash has been felt as well. Hardly a month passes that I don't hear from a fundamentalist of some stripe or another rejecting the heretical ideas of the book and proffering me to take Jesus into my heart and get back on the straight and narrow. The following is from a reader who was none too pleased with my writings:

I have just read several lines from your new book and may I say, you are probably one of the loneliest, lost individuals I have ever come across! Why would you want to share such depressing, doom invoking thoughts with any one? Do you not understand the world in which you live is already on the brink of collapse, full of grief stricken people who cling to their faith as the only hope for survival? I can only pray for your soul, of which you deny having, and hope God will see you as a chemically un-balanced person with grandiose thoughts that your damaged brain came up with and forgive you. I feel you may need Prozac, if you really believe your brain is all there is! As they say, Misery needs company and......you are misery personified, my dear fellow.

I particularly delight in the Prozac comment since it so nicely entangles ideas of brain and soul which, after all, is the basic theme of Brain & Belief. The staggering idea, that chemicals can affect one's 'soul,' should always be jarring. For in this epiphany we recognize that thousands of years of psychology based on an idea of the soul have, in the space of a century, yielded to notions of chemically influenced brain cells. I always welcome such critical feedback because 1) these responses indicate that people read the book and worry (which is a natural reaction to these ideas, I think) and 2) I find them amusing. I don't 'look down' upon people out to save my soul (which I hope, optimistically, is based on love for others) but I do scoff at the simplicity of the 'magical formula' brand of faith: namely, reciting some species of abracadabra (which is a bastardization of terms used in the Latin Mass by common folk) in order to gain eternal life.

I once fell under the spell of this joyfully simple brand of salvation. I wrote more about this fundamentalist conversion experience on my webpage (A Very Personal Aside), you can read about that here (http://www.johnjmcgraw.com/lost%20books/The_Lost_Books.html). What I see in such formulas is an echo of the loyalty pledges that ancient tyrants required of their subjects. In fact, so much of fundamentalism seems to reside on a foundation of medieval sociology. And the fundamentalist interpretation has lots to build on: Christianity as a whole seems poised on this ancient sociology. Consider a popular title of God--'Lord'--and consider the all-important idea of 'faith.' Faith is a trust in something for which your senses have no testimony. I have spoken with so many 'people of faith' and the unspoken message I've heard is that one places one's loyalty in God and in Jesus and all the challenges against this only serve as opportunity to 'prove' one's faith. I can't recall where in the New Testament it is written, but somewhere it is said that God reproves those he loves most--so that they can better prove their faith in him. Isn't this 'test' reminiscent of the medieval tyrants (or perhaps tyranny in any time and place)? Stalin performed such tests often enough to see who was 'really with him' versus who was only giving lip service. Saddam loved these tests of loyalty as well. And in the loyal subject such tests ingrain a certain psychology, namely a psychology of paranoia. "When am I being tested?!" And perhaps ugliest of all, such an atmosphere engenders the terrible psychology of 'us and them,' the in-groups and the out-groups. Soon enough, everyone who isn't on your side and who doesn't share your faith in all of its specific formulations becomes a challenger. They are part of the team out to trick you and cause you to fail in your test of faith. In many versions of Christianity and Islam the world soon gets divided into the camp of the Lord and the camp of Satan, everyone challenging your belief gets labeled as one of Satan's minions. And this, too, this whole dualistic cosmology with our loyal camp and their infidel camp, seems so indicative of ancient days. In such days loyalty was certainly important. If the other camp won you would likely be crushed. When kingdoms were battled over the losing side had a great deal to lose! Imagine a world in which the Persians beat the Greeks: all of Greek culture might have been changed forever, democracy a vague footnote in the grand history of the Achaemenids. To struggle and fight with all of one's energies was a matter of life and death in those days. To commit treason and fight with the other side was a capital offense. Such sentiments I feel to be an important part of faith systems today. But are they relevant any longer? Are they perhaps destructive now? In a 'global village' (yes, my teeth grind on that one too) is such a psychology downright dangerous? Must not brutal ‘us and them’ perspectives give over to a more diplomatic take (‘we're all in this together’)? I prefer the latter, though I may be one of the more optimistic thinkers who believe that a more united world is indeed possible. But within such a world are powerful camps of dogmatic folks who are damned sure that they are right and anyone disagreeing with them is wrong. So, then, these archaic ideas about souls, about 'The Lord,' and about loyalty (faith) ties in very powerfully with our current political realities and our future as an international community. Such factors are always under the surface in Brain & Belief.

As you can see, tangents will be a common theme on this blog. The flow of a river will give over to eddies and whirlpools in a fluid discussion of these very important issues. A book is no medium for such discourse but a blog is ideal. So let's journey down the river together, like Huck Finn on his raft, and see what we come across, by and by.