A fun article came out today in the Science Daily. Researchers applied the Stroop Test, a common psychological experiment in which subjects try to name the color of words like “purple” and “red” (see right). The scientists found that the brain activity was different between people who believed in God and those who didn’t.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.

“You could think of this part of the brain like a cortical alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty,” says lead author Inzlicht, who teaches and conducts research at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They’re much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error.”

“Obviously, anxiety can be negative because if you have too much, you’re paralyzed with fear,” he says. “However, it also serves a very useful function in that it alerts us when we’re making mistakes. If you don’t experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behaviour so you don’t make the same mistakes again and again?”

I started to think about why the religious subjects were less affected by their own errors. I imagine that belief in a protecting, benevolent God would be comforting – if you’re used to viewing the world through the lens that “it will all work out in the end” making mistakes won’t upset you.

But I’m also reminded of the words of humanist Edwin H. Wilson [edit: Corliss Lamont]: “This world is all, and enough.” Nontheists don’t believe in the supernatural or in the afterlife. We believe that this is the only life we get, and that it matters. Our behavior matters, our mistakes matter. Contrast that with Hugh Hewitt’s words as related in William Lobdell’s upcoming book Losing My Religion:

“Compared to eternity, we’re on this Earth for less than a blink of an eye. With that perspective, any suffering here is so minimal, and we won’t know why we even have that until we see the Lord. It will all be made clear, Billy, in less than a blink of an eye. I can wait. Heaven will be a wonderful place.”

A sense of calm can certainly be useful and important. But I care about this world and this life. Perhaps it would be a better place if we all took a less lackadaisical approach and started caring about our actions and mistakes.

A recent New York Times article discusses some developments in anthropology that shed light on the complex evolutionary origins of human behavior. Apparently, fundamental insights into human evolution can be gained just by watching how babies and adults interact:

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

The article goes on to discuss how cooperative parenting, such as sharing in the raising of village children, is a human behavior that is both common around the world and also built on social trust. Another key paragraph explains:

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

In other words, during our species’ early formative years, the population density was so low that warfare between populations of humans was highly unlikely. Rather, cooperative behaviors were evolving; women who could leave their children in the care of others for a day could be more effective gatherers, for example. It seems that this cooperation and trust is built into our species today; for example, Dr. Hrdy notes in the article that humans operate with an implicit trust that other members of our species will not harm us as a matter of normal day-to-day behavior.

I’ve long objected to the overuse of the term “human nature.” Not because I doubt that humans have some characteristics that may be so universal as to be ascribed to an inherent human nature, but rather because the term is so often employed to present an incomplete observation in the guise of some sort of universal truth about Homo sapiens sapiens. Think about how often you have heard someone say, “It’s human nature to make war,” or, “we’ll never get rid of greed, it’s human nature,” or “it’s human nature to lie, steal, etc.” It seems to be a prop for pessimism, an excuse to doubt humanity’s potential, a reason to maintain the status quo in light of a fear of change.

The reality is, of course, that whatever nature that humans have inborn in us, or hard-wired, is extraordinarily intricate. Human beings are capable of warfare and destruction, but they are also capable of acts of heroism and compassion. I don’t want to belabor this rather obvious point — that human behavior and its origins are very complex — but it is good to keep that in mind, as one of the most common criticisms that secular humanists receive in the U.S. is that we somehow cannot have any kind of morality because it isn’t anchored in some sort of god or holy text. To someone like me, who was raised in a freethinking household and considers himself to be both a lifelong humanist and a moral person, this criticism is absurd. Just as absurd is the idea that humans have some sort of innate destructiveness that must be checked by the threat of hellfire. Secular humanists know that they have no such original sin and need no such external threat to hold it back. As humans we are already capable of functioning as a society without some invisible eye monitoring our behavior– it is what we evolved to do.

The world is far from a perfect place, and much ugliness persists. The story of this ugliness, of destruction and war, is as complicated as the road that we followed to our big brains and upright gait. But assuming that killing is so inherent in our nature as to be an immutable characteristic is to ignore a huge part of the story, a story that may be simply understood the next time you look upon an infant that is no relation to you but still feel the instinctual urge to protect that child as if it were your own.

When our bus ads ran last year (Why believe in a god?  Just be good for goodness’ sake), we received quite a bit of attention.   I even got to do some TV interviews, one of them on News Channel 8 in Virginia along with a representative of the Archdiocese of Washington.  It went well enough, and I emphasized that the AHA wasn’t forcing their views on anyone; we were just stating our opinion that everyone can be good – even those of us who don’t believe in a god.

A couple weeks ago, I started seeing ads on the metro – by the Archdiocese of Washington.  Yesterday was the first time I had my camera with me.

I’ve often said that except in cases of identity theft, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.  I like their style.  I hope the website is readable, it’s Maybe-Its-God.org.

If nothing else, it amused me to think about how often we were accused of forcing our beliefs upon others with our bus ads, and yet nobody ever makes a fuss about ads like this one.  I don’t feel insulted by the ad at all.

For what it’s worth, in my case, I’m longing for a waffle.  But good guess, Archdiocese of Washington.

I can always tell that we’ve been mentioned on Fox when we start getting a particular style of email.  This one was too good not to share:

Message: The AHA is ‘Stalinistic’ in it’s hatred and almost genocidal tactics against the Boy Scouts of America.

The Boy Scouts have been around for 100 years, and now, these lovers [AHA] of filthy homosexuals, reprehensible atheists and other dregs to society, want to ‘rip it to shreds’ simply because the Boy Scouts of America excludes such undesireables. “HOORAY” for the Boy Scouts for doing the right thing – GOD bless them! “BOO-HOO” for AHA and the ‘dregs’ it panders to! Get over it! You lose!

RS

My goodness!  Do you want to know what “almost genocidal tactics” we employed?  We wrote a letter to then President-Elect Obama.

The letter, which we sent with 18 other nontheistic organizations, asked Obama not to accept the title of honorary president of the Boy Scouts.  As a private organization, they have every right to reject gay or nontheistic members.  They have every right to teach that a belief in God is necessary to become a good citizen.  But Obama doesn’t have to signify that he supports their discriminatory views.

At the moment, it looks like he’ll accept the position.  Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist wrote: “I’m waiting for Obama to be the president I voted for when it comes to social issues. He hasn’t been that person yet.”

I sympathize, but I’m slightly more optimistic (I’ve had my coffee this morning).  I didn’t really expect Obama to refuse, but our letter got media coverage and made sure our point of view was heard.

How ‘Stalinistic’ of us.

In a step towards transparency, the Obama administration has made public nine secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers. They would be shocking if I could still be shocked by the Bush administration’s blatantly unconstitutional claims of power. According to yesterday’s New York Times, the memos

included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants…

The Oct. 23 memorandum also stated that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically”…

Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty said that in addition, the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from domestic law enforcement operations, would pose no obstacle to the use of troops in a domestic fight against terrorism suspects. They reasoned that the troops would be acting in a national security function, not as law enforcers.

The Bush legal team was arguing that the President’s power overrules congressional laws and the bill of rights. Even laws to protect the rights of American citizens on U.S. soil—like the Posse Comitatus Act—can simply be ignored. These legal opinions fly in the face of our most basic founding principles.  Just for fun, contrast the October 23 memo with the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

President Obama, who previously taught law, has pledged to end the constitutional violations.  Even as we make progress, this story in the San Francisco Chronicle was painful to read.  I plan to write about it soon.