Strange Loops

My grandfather lived a long life, well into his eighties. In his later years, he was caught in the grip of full-blown Parkinson’s dementia, and doctors suspected Alzheimer’s disease. He didn’t recognize people he had known all his life. He generally couldn’t hold a conversation, not even a snippet of one. Toward the end, he simply was not the same Grandpa Bill that I had known as a child. Those more recent memories are perhaps the most vivid, but I try to treasure the older memories as more representative of whom I refer to when I talk about Grandpa Bill.

The funeral was hard, just as it had been for Grandma Deanie (a quick descent following stroke) and just as it would be later for Grandma Etta (Alzheimer’s again). I had to face the reality that I would never see these people again, that all I had left were the memories.

My mom, Bill’s daughter, is an ardent Christian and strongly convinced she will see her dad again in Heaven. Being convinced of that fact doesn’t make everything better for her – she took it all so hard – but it means that she can wait for a time when she’ll be with him again, for eternity, along with all the other relatives who’ve died or will die. I can tell it’s a comforting thought to her, as it is to most everyone who believes in a Heaven.

In the famous song ‘Imagine’, John Lennon asked us to imagine there’s no Heaven – it’s easy if you try, he said. What’s long been more difficulty for me is imagining that there is a Heaven.

How would it work, I wonder? Which Grandpa Bill is in Heaven? The most recent version, with dementia and sadness and confusion? Surely not, if Heaven is the wonderful place it’s supposed to be. So perhaps an earlier instantiation of him? But if a younger Bill is in Heaven, then we’re deprived of the memories and personal development (for better or worse) that happened in all those intervening years. We’re faced with the opposite problem: again it doesn’t feel like the Grandpa Bill I remember from childhood, if he’s just a young man who hasn’t had a fraction of the life experience that older fellow had.
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Back in 1961, Yale researcher Stanley Milgram performed a now-controversial experiment. He recruited people to volunteer in a psychology study supposedly about learning and memory. When they arrived, they were told the setup: a pair of participants were to play two roles, teacher and learner, while the experimenter (a stern man in a lab coat) observed. However, the trick of the experiment was that each participant was always “randomly” assigned to be the teacher, while the second alleged participant, assigned as learner, was in fact always an accomplice to the experiment.

For the experiment, the participant (as teacher) was moved to a separate room from the learner. Through an intercom, the participant was to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who then had to choose matching pairs when quizzed. After incorrect answers, the participant was to flip a switch to shock the learner — a panel at their desk had switches labeled 45 volts increasing up to 450 volts. The participant had watched the learner get strapped in to the shock equipment. The learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition, after which the experimenter authoritatively assured him that there was no danger (again, this was all acted out with the participant thinking the learner was just another volunteer). Back in the test room, the participant received a not-insignificant 45 volt shock to see what it felt like, and then the word-pair testing began.

The teacher read the words, and the learner appeared to be responding, and getting shocked at successively higher levels after each mistake. In fact, there were no real shocks, but a pre-recorded tape played reactions to each shock. As the shock levels went up, the learner feigned increased pain and eventually banged on the wall, complained about his heart condition, and asked to be released. If the participant continued, the learner stopped responding at all.
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The Catholic Church just announced an effort to train hundreds of priests to become exorcists. Apparently, right now “you have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist,” according to the Vatican’s Exorcist in Chief, Father Gabriele Amorth. You know, a proper, trained exorcist, as opposed to some schmuck merely reciting prayers to an archangel (the poor man’s exorcism, according to the Vatican). It’s just more magically powerful if a proper priest does it.

In case you forgot, Father Amorth is the guy who warned against the Harry Potter books because they try to distinguish between good and bad [fictional] magic, whereas he says any magic is a move toward the devil. Any magic, that is, except his own. Magic power words (prayers), magic water, and hand-waving magic gestures used to banish demons during an exorcism — those are okay, because they are done by trained professional magicians (priests).

By the end of 2005, Catholics numbered over 1.1 billion, about one-sixth of the entire world population. We are not talking about a small religious group, but one of the biggest out there. And their official body, representing their god and religion, is still back in the Dark Ages worrying about boogiemen possessing people. Why?

Is it because fear keeps people in the flock, and takes their mind off scandals like wide-spread child rape by church leaders?

If so, it’s a double-edged sword, because such fear makes people irrational, and when you feed into their irrational impulses with talk of magic and demons and other superstitions, you fuel a fire of stupidity that leads to deaths (note some exorcism-related deaths thanks to Wikipedia) and more scandals.

Of course, this sort of thing is not confined to Catholics. Many Muslims believe in possession by jinn (genies, invisible spirits made of smokeless fire). Scientologists work to exorcise possession by Body Thetans. But it’s especially popular among Evangelical Christians (a “big business”, estimated at around 500 such ministries in 2006).

A couple years back, I had a friend in the army. He told me stories about how himself and his Evangelical comrades in the barracks were involved not just in a war against another country, but in a real war against evil demons. This was apparently common belief among a large proportion of the barracks personnel, who claimed to experience the literal presence of demons involved in such shenanigans as opening and closing doors at night and moving objects around. No doubt more nefarious things would have occured were it not for the “strength in Christ” shared by these army guys. The same friend also told me once of an exorcism “successfully performed” on a member of his church, right down the street from where I lived at the time. The practice is not just for the rare group of nutcases; it’s surprisingly common (often hidden under the less conspicuous label “deliverance ministries” by Evangelicals).

The sad thing is that many of the victims of exorcism (note: victims of the practice itself, not victims of possession) have historically been people with some sort of real disorder (schizophrenia, epilepsy, Tourette’s, depression). Unfortunately, this faux treatment can keep them from getting real help (when it doesn’t directly threaten their lives, that is).

Maybe some people just need magic. The world is big and complex and scary, and believing in magic is an easy way to simplify everything. But it’s too bad that such a belief in magic can hurt innocent victims too.

A survey from Pew (Sep 2007) reported on Americans’ opinions of various religions.

Basically, most people (76%) tend to have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics, more than half (53-60%) like Evangelical Christians, Mormons and Muslim Americans, though non-American Muslims are viewed unfavorably by about a third of Americans.

But then we see down at the bottom that – what a shock – atheists are the most disliked group. Only about a third of Americans have a favorable opinion while more than half have an unfavorable opinion of atheists. They’re much more disliked than Muslims, despite all the extreme Christians and nationalists media-blitzing on the dangers of Islam lately.

It seems Americans just don’t like atheists. (Note: it doesn’t ask for their opinion of atheism, the belief, but atheists, the people). Not a surprise I guess, given:

• a 2007 Gallop poll showed that more than half of Americans would refuse to vote for an otherwise well-qualified atheist as president (a similar Newsweek poll has the number at 62%). We’re more likely to see someone female, black, Jewish, Mormon, gay, etc.
• a 2006 study Univ of Minnesota study found atheists to be the most mistrusted minority among Americans (even more than homosexuals, Muslims, etc., and we’ve seen how backwards people can be about those subjects).
• a number of states’ constitutions only extend protection from religious discrimination to those who acknowledge a deity; also, many states’ constitutions still bar atheists from public office or testifying as a witness in court. (Thankfully most of these wouldn’t stand up to federal constitutional scrutiny).
• negative popular opinion: for example, in Tampa Bay half of the city council walked out of their meeting because an atheist had been invited to give the invocation.
• in child custody cases, religious parents are preferentially chosen over non-believer parents (under the assumption that a religious education is in the child’s best interests).
• these has never been a known atheist representative in Congress. (The first African-American in the House was in 1870; the first woman in the House was in 1916; the first known gay Congressperson was in 1972, after coming out in 1983).
• common claims of atheists being immoral or criminal…despite the fact that atheists make up less than 1% of the prison population (i.e. underrepresented in crime).
• treatment by public figures: for example, the elder Pres Bush said in 1988 “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” His son has been as bad (the same guy who claimed that God told him to go to war with Iraq). Note we’ve never had a non-Christian president, certainly not an atheist.
• media coverage is generally antagonistic: see example CNN video on Youtube)
• countless personal anecdotes of jobs lost, students assaulted, families harassed, etc. when people find out someone is an atheist. Such harassment isn’t as well-recognized or well-published as some other discrimination because beliefs are not as overt as, say, skin color, but out-atheists can face as much or more persecution than out-homosexuals.

I could go on, but then it’s easy to find a similar list of discrimination against many groups (even majority religious groups still get discriminated against in some instances). Odd to think, though, that at the end of the day the atheists may have the hardest hill to climb, given that they’re the most disliked and mistrusted group in the U.S. right now. Thankfully we’ve come a long way in accepting peoples’ differences in this country, but we’ve got a long way to go yet.