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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When your life feels out of control, are you more likely to believe in a deity and its grand plan than when you feel in control of your life? A study by Aaron Kay and colleagues (2008) showed just that effect. In fact, if you prime someone to feel out of control — say, by merely asking them to recall a personal experience where they felt out of control — they tend to report a stronger belief in a controlling higher power. Also, when people feel that they lack personal control, they’re more likely to deny randomness and chance in the universe, perceiving their external reality as orderly.

Furthermore, the study showed that priming someone to feel out of control increases their support for and defense of government (especially if they perceive the government as generally benevolent). It’s as if people change their beliefs about the orderliness of the external world based on how they feel inside about their personal level of control. Kay and colleagues label this a “compensatory control mechanism” — when your perception of personal control goes down, perceptions of external control go up to compensate.

To test this general explanation, the researchers asked whether the effect would work in reverse. If you prime people to see an external source of control as chaotic or unjust, will they perceive a higher level of personal control as a result? The researchers had subjects watch a video story about an HIV patient who sought government medical assistance. Participants saw one of two versions of the video: in one version, the government was depicted as effectively helpful; in the other, it was not.
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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.