Author: Andrew Sullivan

Christof Koch describes a classic 2008 study that investigated the brains of Buddhist monks:

The cognitive scientists fitted skullcaps with 128 electroencephalographic (EEG) electrodes to the heads of eight long-term Buddhist practitioners and 10 student volunteers. The former were asked to attain a state of “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion” (a form of meditation that does not focus on a single object and is sometimes referred to as “pure compassion”), whereas the volunteers thought about somebody he or she deeply cared about and then tried to generalize these feelings to all sentient beings.

The onset of meditation in the monks coincided with an increase in high-frequency EEG electrical activity in the so-called gamma band (spanning 25 to 42 oscillations a second), which was synchronized across the frontal and parietal cortices. Such activity is thought to be the hallmark of highly active and spatially dispersed groups of neurons, typically associated with focusing attention. Indeed, gamma activity in these monks is the largest seen in nonpathological conditions and 30 times greater than in the novices. The more years the monks had been practicing meditation, the stronger the (normalized) power in the gamma band.

More important, even when the monks were not meditating, but simply quietly resting, their baseline brain activity was distinct from that of the students. That is, these techniques, practiced by Buddhists for millennia to quiet, focus and expand the mind—the interior aspect of the brain—had changed the brain that is the exterior aspect of the mind. And the more training they had, the bigger the effect.

In a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, delivered to the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City, Marilynne Robinson concludes with these thoughts on Jesus’ teachings:

The Gospel gives us a scene in which a legal scholar is disputing with a self-taught carpenter about a point of law. A bright fellow, he must have thought, interesting enough to spar with a little. He’s attracting crowds, and that can be dangerous. If I give him a question we specialists have struggled with, I might take him down a peg. No harm in that.

The writers of the Gospels take this carpenter to have been, in fact, the epitome of holiness, the Word made flesh, the universal judge. The lawyer is debating the law with God Himself, whose own commandments are at issue. This makes the scene most remarkable. But it is remarkable for nothing more than for the fact that Jesus, the Christ of Luke’s Gospel, is an ordinary man. On a landscape where prophets have appeared he is taken by some people to be one more prophet. Others have no opinion, or take no notice. But, in light of the utterly singular Presence the writer we call Luke understood him to be, there is the greatest significance in the fact that he really is one of us. He might have been the man lying injured by the side of the road, and he might have been the Samaritan who took him up. His wounds would have bled, his voice and his hands would have comforted, just as theirs did, just as ours do. The deep holiness with which human life is invested, which is so great that the Christ could take on true humanity without the least diminishment of his holiness, should tell us who we are and whom we are among, and why it is that the love of neighbor is “like unto” the love of God.

(Image: Parable of the Good Samaritan by Jan Wijnants, 1670, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Hat tip: Wesley Hill)

Responding to the much-discussed recent study that parsed the various types of atheists, Herb Silverman spots the categories that were left out:

My biggest disappointment about the study is that it left out the largest category: closeted atheists. They are the elephants in the room and the ones most likely to change the culture by coming out. However, many of them feel they have good reasons not to, including potential ostracism from family and friends as well as loss of income or employment. Another unmentioned category is what I call functional atheists, those who may or may not have vague supernatural beliefs that play no practical role in their lives. They live as if there is no god, just as all atheists do.
An atheist is simply someone without a belief in any deities. But disbelief in gods doesn’t describe individual atheists any more than disbelief in the divinity of Muhammad, Krishna, and Zeus describes individual Christians. Everybody disbelieves in some gods; atheists just disbelieve in more gods than theists do.

Previous Dish coverage of Silverman’s thoughts on atheism here.

William T. Cavanaugh argues against the notion that religion is uniquely or especially prone to violence:

The crucial point is this: people devote themselves to all sorts of things. People treat all sorts of things as their religion. With regard to the question of violence, people kill and die for all sorts of things; there is no good reason to suppose that people are more inclined to kill for a god than for a flag, for a nation, for freedom, for free markets, for the socialist revolution, for access to oil and so on. In certain contexts, ideologies of jihad or the sacrificial atonement of Christ can lend themselves to violence. In other contexts, belief in the free market or in Greater Russia or in the United States as worldwide liberator is what releases killing energies. If the biblical critique of idolatry is on the mark, there is no essential difference between the two, between religious and secular causes. There is no religious/secular distinction in the Bible. In the Middle Ages, the religious/secular distinction was a distinction between two types of clergy; it meant nothing like what we mean by it now. The way we now use the religious/secular binary is a modern, Western invention; it does not simply respond to the nature of things.

His broader point:

The idea that religion causes violence, in other words, can be used to blind us in the West to our own forms of fanaticism and violence. When we label our own devotions as secular, we tend to treat them as if they were not the subject of violence at all.

We are endlessly fascinated by the violence supposedly hardwired into Iran’s Shiite Islam; we prefer not to dwell on the Shah’s 26-year reign of U.S.-supported secularist terror. We remember that the ayatollahs imposed an Islamic dress code when the Shah was ousted in 1979; we forget that the first shah imposed a secular dress code in 1924.

It must be repeated—though it should go without saying—that nothing justifies the violence done in the name of Islam or any other faith. My point is simply that nothing justifies violence done in the name of secular faiths either, and that there is no essential difference between the two kinds of faith. Both are based on pre-rational narratives of belonging and deliverance. A sound approach to violence avoids making sweeping statements about religion, as if we knew what that was, and adopts a more empirical, case by case approach, on a level playing field between religious and secular ideologies and practices. Wahhabist Islam will not escape scrutiny in examining the Chechen conflict, but neither will secular, Russian nationalism. Forms of evangelical Christianity may be relevant to American military adventures abroad, but more so are secular, Enlightenment forms of salvation narrative that fly under the dangerously ambiguous banner of “freedom.”

Comparing what remains of his faith to “an indignant old man…wheeled into life support for a death that lingers,” the Red State Mystic ruminates over belief and doubt:

Crises of faith are supposed to lead you back to sureness: either to a reinforced belief or towards a triumphantly faithful Atheism. The latter says you must disavow those tactile experiences of the Divine. You were fooling yourself, you must say, clutching a closet’s darkness. Doubt becomes just another form of belief as the unsure questions are packed away with the rest of the dead old man’s stuff in the attic. I believe in my doubts. I have doubts about my doubts.

I still let the old man linger. I listen to his ragged breaths, slow heartbeat. If there is such a thing as resurrection, that is Christ’s business—not mine. But, I cannot look away. Doubt and belief, ecstasy and lingering pain are one around this bed. I don’t have to make sense of my life. I don’t have to make it fit your understanding or even understand it myself. I just bear witness to what I see, what I feel. I feel nothing. I am nothing. I am everything. I spill over into the world. Let’s just get this over with.

If your days last long on this earth, you will find yourself saying words that would have been abhorrent to you years before. Nasty, vile words suddenly taste sweet to your lips. Snatching the me’s out of time, I could lay them end to end and watch them argue. I have lived long enough to hold every opinion. I’ve discovered the only thing I hate is myself.

“To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers,” – Ernest Hemingway in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

(Hat tip: Maria Popova)