Excerpts From The Diary of An Obsessive Compulsive:
There are exactly two books that I can remember not finishing in my life. This from a guy who has read the Bible cover to cover, the Koran three times in three different translations (it's shorter than the Bible, but my Arabic is still confined basically to the alphabet) and the collected works of Aeschylus,Sophocles,Euripides, Shakespeare,George Orwell, and -yes- Edgar Allan Poe. Many authors are still on the list. Reading the collected works of Marx and Engels up to the end of 1848 may count as a "quit", but, trust me, I'll get back to it. Honest. Reading Capital to the end counts as a "plus" in my scorecard even though I read it with an expectation that was totally fulfilled; that Marx deserved little of his his historical following.
Anyways, the two books were1) 'Against Reductionism' which supposedly gave forth an "alternative view" of biology which was so full of nonsense that I quit about 1/3rd of the way through. It did NOTHING but spin words against the legitimate enterprise of biology, words that were- AT BEST- lies and were usually meaningless. My early introduction to "post-modernism" before it became fashionable. The second was 2)the Rig Veda. This may be under the category of the 'Collected Works of Marx and Engels' in that it is moldering in a corner on the main floor until the time I can get through "one more" hymn to Agni. The Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana were much better reads from Hinduism. I actually loved the Ramayana. Watch out for monkeys.
All that being said my continued project to detail on this blog my reading of 'Breaking the Spell' is taking on the aspect of "slogging through" that I had during my reading of either the Bible or Marx. The book promised a "evolutionary psychology" view of religion, but it is rapidly turning into a simple apology for atheism, with the evolutionary aspect shoved well into the background. I've almost finished the book, but I doubt the wisdom of continuing to chronicle it chapter by chapter, even though I've bookmarked it for same.
But occasionally you may find gems in the worst trashpile. The gem that I recently found is the legal concept of "attractive nuisance". This is the concept in law that compels you to do things like fence your swimming pool and remove the doors from your discarded refrigerator. It's like "due care and attention" in traffic law. The assumption is that you have a "responsibility" to safeguard your property from actions on the part of other parties-such as children- that may lead to their injury IF such actions are "reasonable" despite whatever likelihood of injury may result. It's an interesting argument in law about what is "reasonable" and what lengths you have to go to to prevent injury. Each case may be unique.
It's ALSO interesting if we step outside of law into the realm of simple morality that law is supposed to represent. Anarchists have always criticized "the law" for representing either "class interests" or "the interests of power", but more rational exponents of the anarchist ideal recognize that there is a substratum of "civilized behavior" that is at least partially represented by "the law" that we cannot do without. The argument is over HOW MUCH of this restraint has to be "written down" by communities that replace the state and how much can be left to "human nature". In evolutionary biology the problem is framed in terms of "altruistic punishment", a mechanism that any cooperative society can't exist without. (blog "altruistic punishment" for references).
In terms of this blog, for those who may be naive to it, I will OFTEN criticize some VERY evil trends in modern anarchism. This is in the light of the author of 'Breaking the Spell' who puts the onus on the adherents of a religion to SAFEGUARD naive adherents from harm. The "nuisance" is "attractive", but it is NOT as "attractive" as the lure of say Islamic fundamentalism. The simple counting of half-ass "eco-terrorists" who "go rat" when they are caught in the USA in recent years shows JUST HOW SHALLOW A CERTAIN ANARCHISM IS AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR RELIGION. This is despite their megalomaniac claims to "greater knowledge and insight". The claim is more than falsified by the record of its adherents "discovering reality" under far less pressure than the adherents of other ideological systems.
No amount of pseudo-intellectual word spinning will eliminate this FACT. For myself I promise NO "great revelations". Neither do I promise the romance of "revolution", let alone the disgusting "romance" of taking revenge against an uncaring society that you feel superior to. My own personal anarchism is rooted in a simple belief that decentralism and personal power-such as workers' control- are better ways for a society to govern itself. I have faith in the continued efforts of ordinary people to form cooperatives and to challenge government decisions AND to organize in general. I believe that my faith is backed up by biological facts just like I believe that the tactics of "wandering riots" is NOT backed up by such facts. It may actually nowadays be a matter of manipulation of those who want to create cults for their own benefit. That's MY anarchism.
In any case that's where I stand today,
Molly

More on 'Breaking The Spell'
Dennett begins Chapter 2.4 of his book with a number of quotations including one that follows'
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"
- Jesus of Nazareth in John 8:32
As may be guessed from such an opening the author continues his argument here as to the value of scientifically investigating religion. He notes that the opposite case has two presuppositions:
1)"that religion provides net benefits to humankind" and
2)"that these benefits would be unlikely to survive such an investigation"
Neither of these propositions is a certain fact, and the author goes further in stating that,
"There is really no way of showing the first point without actually engaging in the investigation".
The author spends the rest of this chapter arguing for the value of his study, arguing with various "stage opponents" including the fundamentalists and evangelists of his home country who have little purchase elsewhere.
Better to pass on to the rest of the book.

More on 'Breaking the Spell'
Gotta love some of the quotes the author uses to introduce his chapters and subchapters. It may be good proof that an education in the 'Humanities' is worthwhile after all. The third section of Chapter 2 is entitled, 'Might Music be Bad for You ?', and one of the the introductory quotes is from Shakespeare ie
"Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies ?"
The author compares the fact that music has been subjected to scientific study and the "magic" and the benefit of music have "survived such study. The author says,
"The comparison of religion to music is particularily useful here, since music is another natural phenomenum that has been ably studied by scholars for hundreds of years but is only just beginning to be the object of the sort of scientific study I am recommending"
Thus the author makes his case for the scientific study of religion by an analogy that may seem a little less painful to some. The author also says,
"I recognize that many people feel about religion the way I feel about music. They may be right. let's find out. That is, let's subject religion to the same sort of scientific enquiry that we have done with tobacco and alcohol (two other things that also make people feel quite good- Molly) and, for that matter, music. Let's find out why people love their religion, and what it's good for."
The author goes on about music,
"Music may be what Marx said religion is: the opiate of the masses, keeping working people in tranquillized subjugation, but it may also be the rallying song of revolution, closing up the ranks and giving heart to all. On this point, music and religion have quite similar profiles. in other regards music looks far less problematic than religion. Over the millenia, music has started a few riots, and charismatic musicians may have sexually abused a shocking number of susceptible young fans, and seduced many others to leave their families (and their wits) behind, but no crusades or jihads have been waged over differences in musical tradition, no pograms have been instituted against the lovers of waltzes or ragas or tangoes. Whole populations haven't been sunjected to obligatory scale-playing or kept in penury to furnish concert halls with the finest acoustics and instruments. No Musciians have had fatwas prounced against them by musical organizations, not even accordianists."
The comparison and contrast is very apt. Music is also , like religion, a biologically based substratum of human evolutionary psychology, but it seems to be a much more benign one. Religion no more deserves to escape scientific inquiry than music does, despite the fears that benefits may be lost.
More later
Molly

More on Breaking the Spell:
Jesus, am I ever way behind on this, but I suppose it's useful to review Chapter 2 of a book when you're on Chapter 7. Anyways...
Subchapter 2 of Chapter 2 is entitled ' Should Science Study Religion ?'. it begins with a quotation from Aesop, the old, "look before you leap". The author begins by advancing five hypotheses about "the future of religion" and goes on to note that foreknowledge is one of the best aspects of our species. He says that,
"In general, knowing more improves your chances of getting what you value...suppose there is a limit on how much knowledge about some about some topic is good for us...It may be, then that some of our major disagreements in the world today are about whether we've reached such a limit....sometimes ignorance is bliss. we need to consider such possibilities carefully".
So on to other arguments. Seems like the author is a a typical philosopher. Never say anything in one sentence that can be expressed in 50 pages.
But, anyways, here are the hypotheses for the future of religion:
1)The Enlightenment is long gone; the creeping "secularization" of modern societies that has been anticipated for two centuries is evaporating before our eyes. Molly's note- this may be similar to the theories of sociologist P.A. Sorokin.
2)Religion is in its death throes; today's outbursts of fervor and fanaticism are but an brief and awkward transition to a truly modern society in which religion plays at most a ceremonial role.
3)Religions transform themselves into institutions unlike anything seen before on the planet: basically creedless associations selling self-help and enabling moral teamwork, using ceremony and tradition to cement relationships and build "long-term fan loyalty". Molly's note- something like the United Church of Canada today.
4)Religion diminishes in prestige and visibility, rather like smoking:it is tolerated, since there are those who say they can't live without it, but it is discouraged, and teaching religion to impressionable young children is frowned upon in most societies and actually outlawed in others. Molly's note- a good metaphor.
5)Judgement day arrives. The blessed ascend bodily into heaven, and the rest are left behind to suffer the agonies of the damned, as the AntiChrist is vanquished. Molly's note- the author has already stated that he is speaking to an American audience, the only country in the world where such an "alternative" is 'known' to large numbers of people and not mocked when it is known.

More on 'Breaking the Spell'
Dennett has an interesting stylistic quirk in this book. He ends each chapter with a summary of the chapter and a preview of the next one. The summary and preview for each chapter are often quite different. The preview for Chapter 2, 'Some Questions About Science' reads as follows,
"There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest exploratory lights on religion."
The first subchapter is entitled 'Can Science Study Religion?' . The author tries to answer various objections to this question such as the "non-overlapping magisteria" of Stephen Jay Gould that are true in their own restricted sense but still leave much about religion that is a matter of legitimate scientific study. The author makes a telling point is his sentences,
"One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally unaware of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don't see colours in our peripheral vision....you can prove (it) to yourself by wiggling coloured cards at the edge of your vision- you'll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the colour of the moving thing."
The author goes on to say how while there has been much study of religion in the past almost all of it has suffered from an overwhelming "observer bias" in that those who study the phenomenon are either overly sympathetic or overly critical. This means that we are still very much in ignorance of the scientific questions involved in religious belief. Worse, as he says,
"...people think they already know everything they need to know about religion, and this received wisdom is pretty bland, not provocative enough to inspire either refutation or extension."
Once more we are unaware of our blind spots.

More on 'Breaking the Spell'
The author of this book finishes Chapter 1 'Breaking Which Spell?' with a section entitled 'Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is which he basically lays out the goals/synopsis of the book. Like a good philosopher he goes through a series of meanings of the word natural, and the best that can be said for this is that it shows philosophy at its best in not taking a word or phrase at face value. "Natural" is a very misused word in (especially) North American society today.
A few good quotes from this section:
"Miracle-hunters must be scrupulous scientists or else they are wasting their time- a point long recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, which at least goes through the motions of subjecting the claims of miracles made on behalf of candidates for sainthood to objective scientific investigation"
I think the operative phrase here is "the motions" as standards of the miraculous are often bent for "political reasons" in the process of beatification and canonization. Some saints have a harder time getting recognized that others.
Also, concerning arguments for or against the existence of God, he says,
"I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God's existence, and I doubt that any breakthroughs are in the offing, from either side".
He concludes by saying,
"What is this phenomenon or set of phenomena that means so much to so many people, and why-and how- does it command allegiance and shape so many lives so strongly ?"
This will be the focus of his book. The "why" and "how" of religion rather than its truth or falsity.
Thus ends chapter one.

I'm way behind on my notes on 'Breaking the Spell'. In chapter One the author attempts to refine his definition of "religion", as any good philosopher would. He hedges his definition by putting "belief" in quotation marks. He says that,
"To put it provocatively, religious belief isn't always belief".
His private definitions await elucidation. The author spends most of the remainder of Chapter One justifying his enterprise of subjecting religion to scientific inquiry, and one could be forgiven for seeing the author as being more than slightly arrogant in his assumption that HIS book is so important that it can not only influence the debate in a significant way but can actually "hurt" religious belief. Seems a little overplayed to me.
On page 16 the author contrasts the "belief" of religious people who think that the path to "peace" lies through religion, theirs' in particular but also some sort of synthesis of the major religions of the world (sort of a presumed intelligent application of fashionable New Age fuzziness) with the FACT that nobody knows if such a "path" would deliver any such thing. He also states that atheists share the same sort of unfounded optimism, though he notes that they are more than willing to see their beliefs "examined" (to the point that it "can become quite tedious", as the author says. This contrasts with the usual religious response to resist vigorously any examination of whether their beliefs actually produce good results.
More later...

The quotation from Freud that opens Part 2 of Chapter 1 of 'Breaking the Spell' is as follows:
"Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling "God" some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine."
-Sigmund Freud, The Future Of An Illusion

I'm now reading 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon' by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking, 2006, ISBN 0-670-03472-X). The author also wrote 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' . This book is a philosopher's attempt to study religion in the light of evolutionary biology.
Chapter One, 'Breaking Which Spell ?' introduces the idea of memes by an analogy to the lancet fluke Dicrocelium dendriticum which has an intermediate stage in ants where it "takes over" the ant's brain and "forces" it to crawl to the highest point of blades of grass in order that the ant may be ingested by ruminants such as cattle or sheep which happen to be the next host of this parasite's life cycle. This worm is very much like the memes which the author will be discussing. They are "selfish" in that there is a struggle for existence amongst memes, and the "fittest" survive.
The author next tries to define what he calls "religion", and he notes some of the problems in arriving at a definition. His tentative definition is, "a social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". This sort of definition obviously excludes Zen and some other forms of Buddhism, but it does include most Buddhists and even most Daoists. The author opens this chapter with a quote from Freud's 'The Future of an Illusion'. More on this in the next post.