Viruses of the Mind

[Borodog]

An oldie but a goody from Richard Dawkins.

This article is over 12 years old, but it amazes me how much of the content is relevent to practically every thread on religion I read on this board (e.g. the thread recently posted about the Trinity). Well worth reading if you haven't, and worth rereading if you have.

[yukoncpa]

Great article. Here's a couple of paragraphs that I liked:

5. The patient may notice that the particular convictions that he holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, do seem to owe a great deal to epidemiology. Why, he may wonder, do I hold this set of convictions rather than that set? Is it because I surveyed all the world's faiths and chose the one whose claims seemed most convincing? Almost certainly not. If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.

6. If the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation may still be epidemiological. To be sure, it is possible that he dispassionately surveyed the world's faiths and chose the most convincing one. But it is statistically more probable that he has been exposed to a particularly potent infective agent --- a John Wesley, a Jim Jones or a St. Paul. Here we are talking about horizontal transmission, as in measles. Before, the epidemiology was that of vertical transmission, as in Huntington's Chorea.

[Borodog]

2 & 3 are just brilliant. Read them and then go read the Trinity thread.

"The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favor skepticism among females (or among recipients of advertising messages generally). The only way for a male (or any advertiser) to authenticate his boast of strength (quality, or whatever is is) is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap --- a handicap that only a genuinely strong (high quality, etc.) male could bear. It may be called the principle of costly authentication. And now to the point. Is it possible that some religious doctrines are favored not in spite of being ridiculous but precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transubstantiation. If you believe that you can believe anything, and (witness the story of Doubting Thomas) these people are trained to see that as a virtue."

[RJT]

From this quote from the link it appears that Dawkins either intentionally misrepresents (I trust not to be the case) or misunderstands (I would hope to be the case) the Church’s teaching on Transubstantiation: “Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation.”

When I say he misunderstands it, I am not being precise. No one understands it. It is by definition a Mystery. It can’t be fully understood. What I mean to express is that he is off the mark on his interpretation/representation of the “concept” of Transubstantiation.

His use of the words “physically transformed” in place of the words “That the consequence of Transubstantiation, as a conversion of the total substance, is the transition of the entire substance of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, is the express doctrine of the Church (Council of Trent, Sess. XIII, can. ii)”* seems to me to be where he goes astray.

If I am correct in my read of his (mis)understanding, then his remarks are nonsense.

RJT


*Catholic Encyclopedia

[yukoncpa]

"the transition of the entire substance of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ'"
This sounds like a physical transformation to me. Where am I wrong?

[Bork]

How has he gone astray?
Wine turning into blood is a physical transformation.

He is saying it still looks like, tastes like, and has all the properties of wine, but nonetheless they claim it has transformed into blood.

Its not a mystery how it became blood, because plainly it hasn't actually become blood.

By the way if you believe that the crackers literally turn into Christ's flesh, and the wine turns into his blood doesn't that mean you are eating Christ. Delicious spicy Christ flesh and blood. God damn cannibals.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
From this quote from the link it appears that Dawkins either intentionally misrepresents (I trust not to be the case) or misunderstands (I would hope to be the case) the Church’s teaching on Transubstantiation: “Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation.”

When I say he misunderstands it, I am not being precise. No one understands it. It is by definition a Mystery. It can’t be fully understood . . .

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you; his point exactly:

"A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that ``mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their insolubility.

Any impulse to solve mysteries could be serious[ly] inimical to the spread of a mind virus. It would not, therefore, be surprising if the idea that ``mysteries are better not solved'' was a favored member of a mutually supporting gang of viruses. Take the ``Mystery of Transubstantiation.'' It is easy and non-mysterious to believe that in some symbolic or metaphorical sense the eucharistic wine turns into the blood of Christ. The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, however, claims far more. The ``whole substance'' of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ; the appearance of wine that remains is ``merely accidental,'' ``inhering in no substance'' (Kenny, 1986, p. 72). Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine ``literally'' turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like ``substance'' and ``literally.'' Redefining words is not a sin, but, if we use words like ``whole substance'' and ``literally'' for this case, what word are we going to use when we really and truly want to say that something did actually happen? As Anthony Kenny observed of his own puzzlement as a young seminarian, ``For all I could tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated....''

Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the ``mystery'' of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery makes everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind well prepared by background infection. Exactly the same trick is performed in the ``mystery'' of the Trinity. Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to strike awe. The ``mystery is a virtue'' idea comes to the aid of the Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of the transubstantiation and the ``three-in-one.'' Again, the belief that ``mystery is a virtue'' has a self-referential ring. As Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery. "

Any nonsensical impossibilities that arise in the course of a particular religion's evolution can conveniently be cast as Mysteries ("Why all the suffering?" "God works in Mysterious ways . . ."), which we are told cannot be understood by definition, so don't even try. Instead, relax, don't think, Believe, and revel in the Mystery.

[RJT]

Dawkins: "A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that ``mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their insolubility.”

Another misunderstanding of the Catholic thought/belief. No one I know thinks of the Mysteries as a good thing or bad thing. Certainly, none revel in their insolubility.

He takes liberties with changing the words used by our Church to his words. In common use of the English language (or whatever language one would be discussing these things) this would appear to be fine. It is in fact not the same expression of the ideas presented by the Church. He uses what seem to be synonyms, but in the context of their meanings are not the same ideas.

I have an analogy in mind to try to express this difference. I will try to formulate it (I don’t have time right now) so that one might better grasp the difference.

In the meantime and in order to confirm that my read on Dawkins here is correct (that he doesn’t grasp the concept of Transubstantiation.), I would be interested in hearing Bluff’s, bigdaddy’s, et al (Peter666 included) views on Dawkins point of view. Notready, even though he does not believe in Transubstantiation, certainly gets the concept behind it. I would like to hear their thoughts on Dawkins here. I could be misunderstanding Dawkins.

RJT

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
Dawkins: "A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that ``mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their insolubility.”

Another misunderstanding of the Catholic thought/belief. No one I know thinks of the Mysteries as a good thing or bad thing. Certainly, none revel in their insolubility.

[/ QUOTE ]

Perhaps, although it certainly often appears that way to me. But I'll concede the point, and simply note that defining Mysteries as impossible to understand, as you yourself did, serves the same purpose, yes?

[Borodog]

To develop the idea more fully, you can easily see the usefulness to a religion to define Mysteries to be inexplicable, since the mind, in accepting inexplicability, ceases to be bothered by inconsistencies, irrationality, illogic, and impossibilities.

I think another related meme is the ability to seamlessly transmute language, so that words that have a plain meaning do not mean what they plainly do, for example that "a conversion of the total substance . . the transition of the entire substance of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ" does not mean "physically transformed." This transformation of language is no less illogical than the underlying belief it relates to, but serves a very important purpose in protecting the suite of mind viruses (the religion) from being detected by the host.