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Religion as a Product of Evolution?

A new book exploring religious behavior has appeared, with a most interesting approach to its explanation. The book is The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009) and it is edited by Jay R. Feierman, M.D., a retired Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. The volume is a collection of essays addressing various dimensions of religious behavior examined from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The various contributions are held together by a basic contention: religious behavior, i.e., “behavior associated with the communicated acceptance of a supernatural claim,” (244) is the product of biological evolution by natural selection in which the structural features of religious behavior either evolved directly by conferring benefit to individuals, or were adapted from something other than religion. A major premise of the work here is that since religious behaviors are observable and there

A Threatening Letter from my Heart Doctor!

The news at the top of the day today is that the health insurance industry, after coddling along with the Obama administration reform efforts, is about to launch a major offensive against healthcare reform – all stops to be pulled out!!! And now, my own heart doctor is threatening me with reductions in service and quality of care. (For those who want to know, there’s nothing wrong with my heart, its arteries and valves. That’s why I have a heart doc – treat me so I don’t have heart problems even though there are “risk factors” in my family tree.) Apparently, along with the health insurance industry, my heart doc and his colleagues (and their professional lobbying organization) are gearing up for a massive effort to oppose healthcare reform, and they’ve asked me as one of their patients to join them. Now I admit, I’m pro-reform in healthcare. So when my cardiologist asks me to lobby the federal government, I’m there! “Quality and accessible healthcare for all,” I say. But

Churches and Social Justice – Types of Churches

I couldn’t tell whether the message on the marquee in front of the church I passed was a sermon title or one of those witty aphorisms intended to be the religious “thought of the day” – a version of populist Gnosticism where the insiders get it and like it, and the outsiders are amused by its pithy piety but quickly forget it–if they bother to read it. But there it was: Christ is our steering wheel, not our spare tire . Now I will confess that I actually pondered this for several minutes, not because I wanted to penetrate to the spiritual truth, the kernel of eternal wisdom embedded in the saying, or because I was smitten by its double-entendre. Rather, I found myself wondering who chose this particular message, why it was selected at this moment, and what it suggested about the church whose marquee it adorned. Pondering these questions reminded me that in my last entry I indicated that I would spend some time in this blog taking a closer look at the types of churches that take up o

Churches and Social Justice - Introduction

During worship one recent Sunday, the pastor encouraged the worshipers to take a few moments following the service to step into the fellowship hall and sign a petition on health care reform to be forwarded to representatives and senators in Washington. This request followed some remarks made by the pastor on the inequalities in health care services and access in our state and the growing number of uninsured individuals. In listening to this part of the worship, I noted three things rather quickly that were seemingly at odds with each other. First, there was clearly an expression of interest in the well-being of others, a concern that is not unbiblical or non-Christian by any means. Second, this articulation of critique and concern for a socioeconomic issue of inequality and the accompanying exhortation to affix a signature were political acts that occurred in the context of Christian worship (as opposed to a business meeting or an informal gathering, or even a newsletter). But thi

Too Old To Live

Scenario #1: Your husband of forty years has been diagnosed with bladder cancer. The doctor reports that the protocol would normally be surgery to remove the tumor, followed by a series of chemotherapy treatments over a period of four months. However, the doctor says, your spouse is ineligible for the treatment because he is sixty-seven years old. Scenario #2: Just at the time your wife is hospitalized following a stroke, you learn that the National Institutes of Health has announced that it is discontinuing funding for research on cerebrovascular disease. Medical staff at the hospital indicate that once your wife is stable, she will be transferred to a nursing facility where she will remain until her death. She will be kept comfortable, but she is ineligible for medical treatment because she is seventy-two years old. Scenario #3: While traveling home by car following a vacation, your spouse begins to complain of severe chest pain. You exit the interstate at the next city and find

Departures and Arrivals

I was born into an American Baptist family to a mother who played the church organ and a father who was a deacon and the church treasurer. Both of their parents had been Baptists, including a maternal grandfather who was a Baptist minister. I was ordained to the American Baptist ministry in my home church, and I have been a member of an American Baptist church from the time I was baptized as a teenager until today–with the exception of a three-year sojourn as a member of a non-Baptist church. The one and only reason for this "change in affiliation" is that my wife and I wanted to be members of a congregation in the community where we lived, and there was no American Baptist church there. After three years, we chose to resume our membership in a new American Baptist congregation when they called a new pastor. If I had been born in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, I would probably be a Muslim. On the other hand, if I had been born in Fukushima, Japan, I might be Shinto or Buddhist, or b

Securing Life: A Costly Matter

These are hard times. People are suffering because of the decisions and actions of others. I’m certain there are people reading this right now whose lives have been altered in some way because of our economic situation. I’m also pretty sure that every one of us has a sense of our future that we didn’t have a couple years ago, a future that we did not anticipate let alone plan for. Economic stress and suffering can be measured. We learn something about the extent of such stress and suffering when we look at the numbers. We feel the impact of the weight of those numbers when our own circumstances are changed because we are now the ones who have lost a job or health care insurance or slipped into home foreclosure. Our stress is increased when we discover that our retirement savings has lost 30% or more of its value. Maybe you yourself have not experienced the shock of one or another of these circumstances, but I’m sure you know someone who has, and that undoubtedly has given you pause

Notre Dame and President Obama

I respect Roman Catholics. I am a Protestant Christian, but truth be told, I respect and honor the rich theological and liturgical traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. I value much of the social teaching of the Catholic church as it is expressed in papal encyclicals and letters that go back centuries. I am instructed by the Catholic church's teachings on human worth and human rights, the dignity of honest labor and the value of families. Each of us can learn something from their teachings on the dangers of capitalism as an economic system and the limits of democracy as a political system. Few are the church traditions that have expressed so outspokenly the moral, social, and theological bases of our interdependence on one another as creatures who share this space so lovingly given by our Creator. When I imagine communities with the longest histories and traditions of the Christian faith, the Roman Catholic Church is one of two that come immediately to mind--the other being t

Talk About Race

Art and politics don’t always converge neatly, unless of course the art is intended to symbolize the embodiment of power and ideology. Take the Statue of Liberty for example. The first Iron Lady, a gift to the U.S. from France as a symbol of independence, stands tall in New York harbor where all who see her can marvel not merely at her majesty, but at the liberty and democracy that she represents. Or take the picture of the shroud-draped Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison, standing on a box, arms outstretched with wires hanging from his hands. A work of art, yes. But one much more repugnant than imaginable because embedded in that work of art is an ideology of unmitigated power, arrogance and superiority. Or take the picture of a young family, a two-income family with two professionals, raising a couple of teenagers who are adolescently crafty and creative, both excited about their future and exhausted at the thought of how much work they will have to put in to achieve it. Here i