Read Online The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jesse Bering
Tags: Religión, General, Psychology, Spirituality, Personality, Body; Mind & Spirit, Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Religion
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city, the country’s military incursion in Iraq, and “black America” all rolled into one:
Surely God is mad at America. Surely He’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely He’s mad at black America, too. We’re not taking care of ourselves. 1
This comment drew sharp criticism from all sides and eventually led to Nagin’s offering an awkward apology in which he promised to be more sensitive the next time around. But the outrage sparked by the mayor’s pulpit rhetoric wasn’t due to people’s inability to comprehend Nagin’s basic point. Rather, it was just that most people didn’t believe that their God, whom they viewed as being a loving, nonwrathful God, would communicate to us poor human beings in this particular way. As Einstein once allegedly remarked to a friend, “God is slick, but he ain’t mean.” 2
Of course, Nagin was only reinventing the well-treaded fire-and-brimstone wheel in suggesting that our God is a testy and vengeful one. Just a year before he made his political gaffe, other reflective people from all corners of the globe borrowed from the same barrel of explanation and offered commentary on the “real” reason for the Indonesian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Southeast Asia in 2004. (Never mind the sudden shifting of tectonic plates on the Indian Ocean floor.) All similarly saw that catastrophe, too, as a sort of enormous, Vegas-style, blinking marquee meant to convey an unambiguous message to us superficial, fallen, and famously flawed human beings. Here are a few anonymous samples from some online discussion forums just a few days after the tsunami disaster:
As God says, I send things down on you as a warning so that you may ponder and change your ways.
A lot of times, God allows things like this to happen to bring people to their knees before God. It takes something of this magnitude to help them understand there is something bigger that controls this world than themselves.
It might just be God’s way to remind us that He is in charge, that He is God and we need to repent.
The calamity—so distressing for those individually involved—was for humanity as a whole a profoundly moral occurrence, an act of God performed for our benefit.
The important thing to notice with all of these examples, or any case in which a natural event is taken as a sign, omen, or symbol, is the universal common denominator: theory of mind. In analyzing things this way, we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed supernatural agent we have on offer. Consider, however, that without our evolved capacity to reason about unseen mental states, hurricanes and tsunamis would be just what they are for every other animal on earth—really bad storms. That is to say, just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes.
Of course, in reality there probably aren’t any such psychological causes, but our brains don’t mind that. Our theory of mind goes into overdrive, jump-started in the very same way it’s provoked by another person’s unexpected social behavior. It’s a bit like if you went to shake your best friend’s hand and he punched you in the face. It may not be immediately apparent, but there must be some reason for him to have acted in this way. Except here, it’s not other people’s behaviors we’re trying to understand; it’s God’s “behaviors,” or otherwise the universe acting as if it were some vague, intentional agent.
In his book Acts of Meaning (1992), Harvard University psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that we tend to search for meaning whenever others’ behaviors violate our expectations, or
Surely God is mad at America. Surely He’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely He’s mad at black America, too. We’re not taking care of ourselves. 1
This comment drew sharp criticism from all sides and eventually led to Nagin’s offering an awkward apology in which he promised to be more sensitive the next time around. But the outrage sparked by the mayor’s pulpit rhetoric wasn’t due to people’s inability to comprehend Nagin’s basic point. Rather, it was just that most people didn’t believe that their God, whom they viewed as being a loving, nonwrathful God, would communicate to us poor human beings in this particular way. As Einstein once allegedly remarked to a friend, “God is slick, but he ain’t mean.” 2
Of course, Nagin was only reinventing the well-treaded fire-and-brimstone wheel in suggesting that our God is a testy and vengeful one. Just a year before he made his political gaffe, other reflective people from all corners of the globe borrowed from the same barrel of explanation and offered commentary on the “real” reason for the Indonesian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Southeast Asia in 2004. (Never mind the sudden shifting of tectonic plates on the Indian Ocean floor.) All similarly saw that catastrophe, too, as a sort of enormous, Vegas-style, blinking marquee meant to convey an unambiguous message to us superficial, fallen, and famously flawed human beings. Here are a few anonymous samples from some online discussion forums just a few days after the tsunami disaster:
As God says, I send things down on you as a warning so that you may ponder and change your ways.
A lot of times, God allows things like this to happen to bring people to their knees before God. It takes something of this magnitude to help them understand there is something bigger that controls this world than themselves.
It might just be God’s way to remind us that He is in charge, that He is God and we need to repent.
The calamity—so distressing for those individually involved—was for humanity as a whole a profoundly moral occurrence, an act of God performed for our benefit.
The important thing to notice with all of these examples, or any case in which a natural event is taken as a sign, omen, or symbol, is the universal common denominator: theory of mind. In analyzing things this way, we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed supernatural agent we have on offer. Consider, however, that without our evolved capacity to reason about unseen mental states, hurricanes and tsunamis would be just what they are for every other animal on earth—really bad storms. That is to say, just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes.
Of course, in reality there probably aren’t any such psychological causes, but our brains don’t mind that. Our theory of mind goes into overdrive, jump-started in the very same way it’s provoked by another person’s unexpected social behavior. It’s a bit like if you went to shake your best friend’s hand and he punched you in the face. It may not be immediately apparent, but there must be some reason for him to have acted in this way. Except here, it’s not other people’s behaviors we’re trying to understand; it’s God’s “behaviors,” or otherwise the universe acting as if it were some vague, intentional agent.
In his book Acts of Meaning (1992), Harvard University psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that we tend to search for meaning whenever others’ behaviors violate our expectations, or
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