The Belief Instinct: Exploring the Science of Spirituality

We’re deeply fascinated by how the human mind makes sense of the world, and religion is one of the primary sensemaking mechanisms humanity has created to explain reality. On the heels of our recent explorations of the relationship between science and religion, the neuroscience of being human and the nature of reality comes The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life — an ambitious new investigation by evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering, exploring one of the most important questions of human existence:

If humans are really natural rather than supernatural beings, what accounts for our beliefs about souls, immortality, a moral ‘eye in the sky’ that judges us, and so forth?”

A leading scholar of religious cognition, Bering — who heads Oxford’s Explaining Religion Project — proposes a powerful new hypothesis for the nature, origin and cognitive function of spirituality. Far from merely regurgitating existing thinking on the subject, he connects dots across different disciplines, ideologies and materials, from neuroscience to Buddhist scriptures to The Wizard of Oz. Blending empirical evidence from seminal research with literary allusions and cultural critique, Bering examines the central tenets of spirituality, from life’s purpose to the notion of afterlife, in a sociotheological context underlines by the rigor of a serious scientists.

Eloquently argued and engagingly written, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life provides a compelling missing link between theory of mind and the need for God.

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Schlimazeltov! A Short Film About Luck in Jewish Culture

The nature of “luck” has fascinated scientists and philosphers alike for centuries. Schlimazeltov! explores the concept of “luck,” or “mazel,” through a tapestry of voices from London’s Jewish community. From global economics to lucky charms to quantum physics, the film blends humor, philosophy and visual poetry for a layered investigation of the ancient sensemaking mechanism that is our belief in the invisible hand of luck.

We live our lives like a piece of embroidery — we see the rough side of it, but there might be a very beautiful side on the other side we can’t see. We only see all the stitching on the wrong side of the fabric.”

People are looking for deterministic things because the world is very confusing. Religion, a lot of times, is about trying to relieve anxieties and fear.”

It all depends on your psychological standpoint, whether you call a thing ‘luck,’ ‘chance’ or ‘fate.’ Luck makes us feel a little bit better, you know — you feel there’s a dice rolling and it could’ve easily rolled a different way and maybe it will in the future; chance creates the impression of a universe in chaos; and fate creates the impression of some big bastard who’s controlling it.”

The documentary, written and directed by Christopher Thoma Allen, was commissioned by the UK Jewish Film Festival and is currently a finalist in the first annual Vimeo Festival Awards.

For more on the tension between superstition, science and religion, see The End of God, the BBC documentary we recently spotlighted.

via NPR Picture Show

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A Rare Look at Haiti: Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen

Breathtaking beauty, voodoo violence, and what the Guggenheim has to do with ritual sacrifices.

Filmmaker Maya Deren is one of the most influential women in art history. Though most famous for her seminal avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren went on to produce a prolific and diverse body of work. In 1946, much thanks to her critical acclaim for Meshes, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which she used to travel to Haiti and film Meditation on Violence — a controversial piece on the rituals of vodoun, which she not only filmed but also participated in, ultimately disregarding the terms of her Guggenheim Fellowship.

After Deren’s death in 1961, footage from the 18,000 rituals she filmed was incorporated in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti — a fascinating posthumous documentary completed in 1985 by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, and his then-wife, Cherel Winett Ito. The film, which explores the tension between beauty and violence in the dancing at the center of vodoun rituals, is now available for free on YouTube, though in poor quality, and we’ve gathered here all six parts. (Though to do Deren’s work justice, we highly recommend the DVD.)

The mesmerizing film is based on Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the book Deren published in 1953 — an absolute cultural treasure we highly recommend. It offers a glimpse of a complex and largely misunderstood culture, even more so after being dragged across the global newsscape in light of the recent tragedy.

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BBC on Science vs. Religion: The End of God?

What falling apples have to do with transcendence, politics and The God Helmet.

Throughout history, humanity has pitted science and religion against each other. In The End of God?: A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, a new BBC4 documentary released immediately after the Pope’s visit to the UK, British historian Thomas Dixon makes a compelling case not only for the parallel existence of both but also for evidence of each in the other.

From the condemnation of Galileo by the Catholic Church in 17th-century Italy to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, Dixon delves into decades worth of original footage from the BBC archives to examine the complex relationship between science and religion, from the political structures that underlie society’s understanding of both to how and why the placebo effect works to the neuroscience underpinnings of the belief in God.

Though the program is no longer available on BBC’s iPlayer and has been yanked from YouTube for copyright violations (bespeaking the tragic Catch-22 of such issues), you can catch it here:

Behind Galileo’s downfall were two questions that are central to the whole story of science and religion: Who owns knowledge, and what makes one source of knowledge more reliable than another?”

In 1987, the highest court in America ruled that teaching creationism was unconstitutional. It violated the required separation of church and state. Creationism was banned from the science curriculum. But despite the ban, creationism hasn’t gone away. Since the 1980’s, polls have found that nearly half of all Americans believe God created humans, just as it says in the Bible.”

Both Newton and Einstein saw a divine beauty in the clarity and order of mathematical laws. Understanding the workings of the universe, they believed, was like looking into the mind of God. But in the last 100 years, this beautiful simplicity has been shattered by an explosion of scientific discovery. And now the divine beauty of the Newtonian clockwork universe and even the classical physics of Einstein have been obscured by bewildering complexity.”

If this subject intrigues you, we highly recommend the deeply compelling God, the Universe and Everything Else by three of the greatest minds of our time: Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Artur C. Clarke.

And for a lighter, more artistic take on the creationism vs. evolution debate, you may enjoy Duelity, a wonderful split-screen animation we featured some time ago exploring both sides of the story in a visually captivating way.

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