Unchecked and Unbalanced: Evolution Continues

According to Freud, there are three stages of human understanding. This is wholly demonstrative with all cultures in history. The three stages are superstition, religion and science. One might say that superstition is the same as religion, but it’s clearly not. The belief in God alone is merely superstition. To believe that one must dance in a circle under the sun or the rains won’t come is superstition. So is believing that one must paint a red line down the center of one’s face or else the gods will not look well upon you is only superstition. Superstition becomes religion when certain fables, rituals, morals and values are attached with the original God myth. This combination is what we see today as religion. The third and final stage of human understanding begins when rational thought enters the spectrum, causing either new people to question the faiths of the past, or followers of said faith to question their own beliefs through rational thought.

But what is happening today is that more and more people are being ruled by what could be deemed the new stage of evolution. Over the past four thousand years, people have continued to physically evolve. People have gotten taller, produced less body hair, lost more of their tailbone, less people are born with wisdom teeth, and people are living upwards of three times the life expectancy when compared to even two thousand years ago. But now we’re seeing a great neurological evolution happening. More and more people every year are replacing faith with reason, belief with logic, prayer with scientific medicine, bigotry with tolerance and acceptance, and, most of all, religion with science. America stands dead last in the westernized world in this new stage of evolution, but it still holds a strong and growing 16% percent of people claiming no religious affiliation. In many other westernized countries, the numbers are as large as 67%.

But there is a danger. This danger threatens to halt this new stage of evolution and human understanding. You see, as secular culture begins to take the lead, what its doing is involuntarily radicalizing what is gradually becoming the world’s religious minority. More and more are seeing radical religion as a means of holding on to what they’ve been tricked into believing is their “traditional” values. This happens not because the change they see around them is necessarily negative, but because it’s different and this frightens them. Therefore, they plot harder and harder by the day to attempt to discredit scientific achievements. They make up lies about scientific leaders like Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin. They create elaborate conspiracy theories about inoculations causing Down Syndrome or condoms causing AIDS. They waste tax payer money (to which they do not even contribute) to sue schools and other secular, educational foundations, to try to force them to stop teaching evolution and other scientific discoveries, only to replace them with myths. They help fund children to be sent to unregulated schools where they’re taught myths in place of science. They publicly demonize those who don’t act accordingly to their predisposed agendas. They picket clinics, screaming at innocent people, pushing them, spitting on them, to convince them that they will burn in some magical fire land if they do something responsible in the face of society. They post websites to pass the private information, including addresses and phone numbers, of abortion providers. They shoot people outside clinics, in parks and even in churches. They bomb institutions which are contrary to their fables. They kill, slaughter and maim those who would refute their beliefs or predisposed morality. They even fly planes into sky-scrapers, killing thousands of people. And what’s worse is that their actions become more extreme the more the world moves into this new stage of human understanding.

All of these actions remind me of past atrocities and even past regimes. “Believe in this. I have no proof of this, but believe in it anyway, or else someone, somewhere, at some point will hurt you.” This is basically the root of imperialism. This is the technique that was employed by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol-Pot, the first popes, the Romans, the Churches of England and Spain… Wait a minute, what were those last three? This brings me to my point. The basis for imperialism is the same basis for religion: believe in this, or you will be sorry.

This was best put by a man named Dr. James Luther Adams, when he said, “The Nazis were not going to return home with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the passages of the bible.” He was really on to something there, and as a holocaust survivor and Harvard Ethics professor, he truly knows what he’s talking about.

How do nationalistic imperialism and religion tie together on a mental scale? They do in the same way the conspiracy theories do, which is why both movements have so often employed conspiracy theories for the purpose of recruitment and manipulation with such great success. It all lies in the dominant area of the brain. Or, rather, the dominant hemisphere and lobe. You see, humans until now have generally been controlled by the central lobe of the brain. This lobe is responsible (namely in its right hemisphere) for many things in the body but primarily, emotion and faith, thus, this is the area of the brain that allows for the proverbial leap of faith. A leap of faith, by definition, is the act of either buying into a system, or believing in something without rational evidence (without influence of the left hemisphere or the frontal lobe). Dominance of this part of the brain makes people more susceptible and gullible, and less scrutinous, reasonable or rational.

When I say “leaps of faith,” I’m referring to a number of beliefs. One belief could be that (A) the world is run by a global elite who are all descendent from an alien civilization of lizards who started the central bank in 1913 to fund the poisoning of water supplies with LSD. Another belief would be that (B) the Jews are plotting a grand scheme to take over the country and even the world by campaigning central banks and financial institutions, and must be stopped. Another would be that (C) despite archaeological evidence, the world was created in six days, six thousand years ago; the first man was made from sand and the first woman was made from his rib; they lived in a magical garden full of dinosaurs and talking snakes, the same snake who told the rib-woman to eat from a magical tree, which thusly ended paradise.

These are all connected in the sense that they would’ve made for great novels, but also in the sense that people rarely believe in one without the other. If we look at those in order of A, B and C, as I laid out, we can illustrate a great connection. This is that it’s not all that uncommon for people to believe in C without believing in either A or B. However, it is extremely uncommon for people to believe in either A or B without believing in C (C being a general belief in any of the world’s major religions, not only the anecdote I stated before).

Why would they believe in one without the other? All three are radical beliefs with absolutely no evidentiary foundation. They’re, again, not only identical in essence, but also identical in origin: the central (temporal) lobe and right hemisphere of the brain. When a person believes in any one of these, it is a clear indication of temporal lobe and right brained dominance (as is illustrated time and again through studies of brain wave activity and its reactive similarities). This solves the puzzle as to why these beliefs tend to go hand in hand. There are more moderate religionists who may believe in a god, but also challenge many of the tenants of organized religion with rational thought. In my search, I found exactly what I thought I would: These people were merely moderately susceptible to outlandish conspiracy theories, but only those which have a clear, factual and structural foundation, while the outlandish theory was merely the icing on the cake (Alex Jones was a hit for these people). The third group in the human understanding progression (seculars and atheists), tested a clear negative in every research experiment of this type, to the conspiracy theory books and documentaries; showing a consistent skepticism toward the sources of the makers and writers, even often questioning their motivations. This is a clear indicator of frontal lobe, left brained dominance (the more skeptical and logical lobe and hemisphere of the brain).

Another startling find was when I noticed that the part of the brain that is dominant in these religionists, as well as most reactive to conspiracy theories, is also the same part of the brain responsible for schizophrenia, delusion, paranoia and even epilepsy. Looking back, we’ve seen that many exorcisms in history have been performed on epileptics, but apparently, it can be demonstrated, that we can easily say that there was a time when we called epileptics prophets. Post Mortem, we’ve diagnosed many different figures of religious ideation with epilepsy. We can do this because it seems that many of them, the spells they experienced anyway, seem to resemble epilepsy. Joseph Smith was said to have long standing blackouts, sometimes up to three days at a time. Other reports of possession (shaking, foaming at the mouth) as well as constant head aches were attributed to other religious leaders like Muhammad and Joan of Arc. Other symptoms like speech arrest and visual and auditory hallucinations, and lapses of consciousness have also been mentioned in religious texts.

What does this tell us? It tells us that there is a clear and demonstrative difference between religionists and atheists. Could this also be an evolutionary difference?

It is well known that during our stages of evolution, we’ve become more and more prone to logic. We came from animals who scavenged, to using crude tools to pick ants out of trees. This age of invention continued as we started using tools to hunt and eventually build. Along the lines, we harnessed the concept of agriculture, growing fruits, vegetables and grains for survival, which led to the breeding and domestication of animals as a food source. As time continued, our inventions have become more and more complex. The spear became the axe, and eventually became the sword, then the musket, the cannon, the rifle, and eventually, the nuclear missile. Likewise, the wheel became the buggy, then the bike, then the train, then the car and eventually the airplane. This has happened because the more we use the logic centers of our brains, the more developed they become, and the easier it is to grasp more complex concepts. After all, I highly doubt that the man who invented the first wheel could even come close to developing the technology in something as relatively simple as a printing press, let alone, an Apple computer. This is precisely why there has been such a leap since the agricultural revolution. The more complex the technology of the parent generation, the more exponentially developed will be the ability to grasp complexity in the offspring. A point: a child today is more technologically savvy than the man who invented the first super computer only a generation ago.

It is obviously evident that extreme neurological development has happened over the past few thousand years, and it is more evident that this evolution continues today. The more we evolve neurologically, the more logical and rational we become. This is physically evident in each generation’s brain activity, moving ever so gradually and delicately into the left hemisphere and the frontal lobe of the brain. Could this mean that skepticisms like atheism and political independence are simply the next stage of evolution? Well, according to the research: yes.

But as I mentioned before, the more skeptical, agnostic, atheist and secular the world’s culture becomes, the more our world culture pushes religionists and moderates into radicalism. When looking at the three stages, moderates could either be defined as those who never evolved past the first stage of understanding (superstition), as they’re less likely to apply strange rituals or myths to their god or deity in which they believe. However, this makes no sense as they are truly willing to compromise religion in the name of science, realizing that science isn’t some grand conspirator against religion. They still hold their deistic beliefs, but won’t attack science if more contemporary revelations contradict their previously held beliefs. Instead, the evidence points to the conclusion that religious moderates are more of a transitional phase of evolution. They’re sort of the Lucy, connecting the furry beasts with Einstein (also an admitted atheist).

This is demonstrative in matters of conversion. What I said before may have been misleading, it’s not the radicals who are being pushed to radicalism, it is those who already hold a fundamental and literal belief in religion, far beyond moderation. In fact, as a case in point, I’ve never heard of a single moderate who has been converted into a radical system by secular culture. However, I’ve heard of literally dozens of moderates who have converted into secularism since September 11^th. They have been pushed into agnosticism and even atheism by the religious radical right, demonstrating a previous presence of left and frontal brained activity which just needed a final push to weed off the effects of nurture. There are plentiful amounts of tales telling of those who completely skipped the middle step and were pushed from religion into atheism, as is the case with one of the country’s leading atheists. There seems to be not only a trend, but a clear pattern here. It seems very consistent that progress is leading in one direction. Using A, B and C again, I’ll illustrate what I mean (A: Religious, B: Moderate, C: Atheist). We have heard of plenty of cases of person A becoming person B. We have heard plenty of cases of person B becoming person C. We have heard of plenty of cases of person A even going as far to become person C, but never has there been a case of person C becoming person A., except for a schizophrenic who later became infamous in California as the famous Night Stalker. It is an all too rare case as well for person B to become person A. I know of none, personally. Therefore, this clearly establishes a line of progress, and quite possibly another olive branch on the tree of life (evolution).

It is, however, quite possible that we’re seeing two branches forming. As I said, the religious group may be leaving their churches and putting on the rainbow pins and lab coats in refreshing numbers, but what of those who are not? Is it not fair to say that following the lines of the progress of complexity that I just outlined, that the least frontal lobed and left brained parents will produce a like offspring? Especially as it will more than likely be educated outside of the secular school system, and also, the radicalism of the parents will be passed on to the offspring by both nurture as well as nature. Again, we’re talking about the evolution of brain function. One might think that the bloodlines that do not evolve would just cease to exist, but that is not the case. In the past, in more of a “fend for yourself” type of society, the case would have certainly been that those capable of greater brain function would thrive over the incapable. Adaptability, not strength, is the essence of evolution, after all. Those with a higher or more evolved brain functionality would be more likely to survive because of their ability to see patterns and trends, and to build and invent. Trust me, if evolution were about physical strength or even speed, the dinosaurs would still be ruling this planet, and humans would be nothing more than a walking, running and shrieking food source. We likely would have never evolved past Australopithecus. Even something as intellectually simple as basic addition and subtraction is what led to our survival into an agricultural species.

That problem is that we don’t live in the world of survival of the fittest (most adaptive) anymore. In previous epochs, in inventive and agricultural neighbor would not have openly and freely shared his tools, grains or kills with those of other tribes, let alone other species. But in today’s world, person A has full access to all of the benefits of person C’s inventions, all the while declaring war against persons B and C. We must remember that scientific and medical research, autonomy, democracy; these are all inventions of the secular movement and the result of intellectual evolution. We started trying to cure diseases by dancing in circles, then we tried human sacrifice, then we tried praying, then we tried herbs, which led to today’s medical industry. However, those of the first and second parent intellectual species, who still insist that God can cure illness, see a specialist, they take medication and try experimental research; all of these, the advantageous benefits of the evolution of neurological comprehension, and frontal lobed and left brained dominance. Therefore, the parent species has not died off. Rather, they’ve survived because of the benefits of the offspring species. In any other type of evolution or society, the parent species would be relegated to relying on priests or shamans to heal illnesses and afflictions. Unfortunately, seculars, like myself, are not as cold-hearted as we probably should be.

Because of all of this, the parent species has survived. Therefore, we’re actually seeing a split in the evolutionary tree between the frontal lobe dominated and the central lobe dominated.

The human tree is awfully clear when we look at it like this. It starts with the central lobed superstitious, onto their central lobed, but slightly more left-brained and analytical religious offspring. The superstitious eventually either die off from war or poverty, or go into seclusion from the rest of society. Suddenly the branch splits again, forming the new, slightly more skeptical moderate who eventually becomes either deist or theist. Eventually, the moderate and secular split, as the secular (the most analytical and frontal and left brained of the species) is born. This clearly happened sometime in the 1700s in Europe, and eventually spread from there through ideals. All the while, the sectarian religionist continues farther and farther to the right (symbolically), as the moderates continued developing into new branches of atheists. As evolution dictates, somehow and someway, one species will thrive over the other, but in today’s society, this is unlikely to happen.

Or is it? We concluded earlier the similarities between religionists, imperialists, and conspiracy theorists. We saw how both sectarians and imperialists utilize conspiracy theories because the followers of both lines of thought are more susceptible to them because of their right brained and central lobed dominance. They are capable of leaps of faith, which the left-brained and frontal-lobed secular is not. And to be more apt to attempt a leap of faith is to be more likely to believe a foundationless lie. Again, which are the roots of nationalism, imperialism, religion, and for that matter, about 97% of history’s slain human life. It’s been my experience that those who are least likely to believe that there is a beautiful paradise beneath a blazing fire, are least likely to jump into it. But on the other hand, those who want you to believe it, with legions of central-lobed people around, will find it pretty easy to form an army to throw the non-believers into the fire. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But what we cannot allow is for the parent species of evolution to halt the progression and evolution of the species. The offspring species MUST find a way to thrive over the parent.