The Christian Right Seeks Dominion..

[and-justice-for-all]

...On the Road to Political Power and Theocracy.

http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/sd_theo.html

The past two decades have seen a growing symbiosis between the mass movement of evangelical Christians and the Republican Party. Since the 1968 presidential election, when nearly 10 million Americans voted for segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, the Republicans have worked to broaden the class base of their party downward. That has meant following Wallace's lead in using issues of race, crime, and "morality" to attract white middle and lower middle class voters.

In the mid-1970s and 1980s, Gallup poll surveys showed that one-quarter to one-third of the US population identified itself as "born-again" evangelicals. Most of them have become politically active only since about 1980. Certainly not all are right-wing, but their numbers are large and numbers win elections. In June 1994, a New York Times poll revealed that about 9 percent of a national sample identified themselves as part of the Christian Right.

The handwriting was on the wall for anyone who cared to read. Since 1975, leaders of the Christian Right have built one organization after another, with the avowed purpose of winning state power, i.e. the power to influence, if not dictate, public policy. Leaders of the Christian Right worked hand-in-glove with the Reagan and Bush administrations to wage murderous wars on civilians in Central America and southern Africa. Meanwhile, the North American left cackled along with the rest of the country at the ridiculous TV preacher scandals, which diverted people's attention from the really important players in the Christian Right. While everyone else was laughing, the Christian Right grew into the most formidable mass movement on the political scene today. We will enter the new millennium with the Christian Right in positions of state power.

Exit poll data indicate that about 25 percent of the people who voted in November 1994 were white evangelical Christians. Among these, about two-thirds voted Republican. There was nothing "stealth" about it. The stated agenda of the Christian Right in 1994 was to help deliver the Senate and Congress to the Republicans-and to credibly claim credit for doing just that. Each time around, the Christian Right is doing a better job of getting its people to the polls. In the 1992 presidential election, about 18 percent of the voters were self-identified white evangelicals. The figure for the 1990 midterm election was 15 percent.

The trend began in the late 1970s when the Christian Right registered several million new voters to vote for Ronald Reagan. In 1980, when Reagan won with only 26 percent of the eligible electorate, white evangelical voters accounted for two-thirds of Reagan's ten-point lead over Jimmy Carter. Then in 1984, the Christian Right pulled out all the stops to re-elect Reagan. In 1992, despite Bush's defeat, exit poll data showed that there were only two constituencies consistently loyal to the Republican Party: people with incomes over $200,000 a year, who are few in number, and the Christian Right.

The single most important, though by no means the only, movement organization is the Christian Coalition. The Coalition's Annual Road to Victory conferences draw thousands of hard-core activists for two days of strategizing in Washington, DC. The Coalition claims more than a million members, which is probably a mailing list figure. More importantly, the Coalition, since its founding in 1989, has built 1,700 local chapters in all 50 states. Some chapters hold regular meetings with a couple hundred people. Many of the chapters are headed by women, as are some of the Coalition's state branches. Each chapter includes members of multiple charismatic and Baptist churches, meaning that the outreach capability of the Coalition goes well beyond its own numerical strength, which is phenomenal.

The Coalition's chapters are responsible for distributing voter guides by identifying sympathetic churches and by finding "pro-family" voters on a one-by-one basis. In the 1994 Congressional election, the Coalition sent voter registration packets to 250,000 churches. Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed explained that the voter guides allow candidates and campaigners to bypass "expensive and biased media." On one piece of paper, the Coalition makes a chart showing pictures of the Democratic and Republican candidates for Senate, Governor, and Congressional seats. The chart lists four to six issues phrased as the right sees them-in 1994 they included abortion on demand, homosexuals in the military, banning ownership of legal firearms, voluntary prayer in schools, parental choice in education-along with the words "supports" or "opposes" under each candidate's picture.

Finally, people on the left are talking about emulating the grassroots organizing tactics of the right. This idea is sensible, but one does not create a citizen lobbying apparatus overnight. For years, people in the Christian Right have learned to make their activism a regular habit. Not a week goes by that the movement's TV, radio stations, and scores of organizational newsletters aren't mobilizing people to call and write their elected officials. Here are people who believe in the efficacy of their own small but persistent actions. They believe their individual postcards and phone calls make a difference, and they do. After Clinton proposed allowing openly gay military personnel, Christian Right activists shut down the Congressional switchboard and deluged their representatives with mail. It worked, and it worked again in early 1994 when an amendment that would have required certification of home school teachers was attached to a federal education bill. Within a week, home schooling leader Mike Farris went on two nationally syndicated Christian radio talk shows and revved up the phone trees of his 37,000-member Home School Legal Defense Association. Eight hundred thousand phone calls later, only one member of Congress was willing to vote for the amendment.

Is this the kind of activity the left could or would emulate? Probably not, because these dramatic incidents do not occur in a vacuum. They are made possible by the day-in-and-day-out organizing the Christian Right does, and they are made possible by the network of institutions the movement has built over several decades. These institutions include a $2.5 billion per year religious broadcasting industry, a slew of independent book publishing companies, dozens of independent regional monthly newspapers, several dozen state-based think tanks that do legislative lobbying, and an array of legal firms devoted exclusively to Christian Right causes.

During the mid-1990s, some left media watchers focused on Rush Limbaugh, an important, though easy target. Limbaugh has millions of listeners and he has played an influential role in the Clinton-bashing of the early 1990s. Limbaugh attracts the left's attention because he allegedly lies with some regularity and because he's a loud-mouthed boor. He fits the image leftists have of people on the right. But to credit the Johnny-come-lately Rush Limbaugh with the mobilization of the right would be like claiming that the demagogic 1930s radio priest Father Charles Coughlin was responsible for the hundreds of pro-fascist organizations that flourished in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Most of what goes on in right-wing broadcasting is not like the Limbaugh show. Limbaugh is a recent phenomenon, and long after his stardom passes, the Christian Right will continue to produce much subtler and effective programming.

It is the coherence of the Christian Right's cultural institutions and ideological message that makes millions of people want to participate. This is a political movement built on the foundation of some very tightly held religious views. We need to understand the religious sentiments of our fellow citizens. For evangelical Christians, one of the most politically relevant tenets is the idea that they are being persecuted by secular society. Sacrifice and martyrdom are essential themes of the Christian faith. Translated into right-wing politics, the theme enables people to claim that queers and other minorities are somehow attacking the dominant culture when they demand equality. We have the most powerful political movement in the country continually claiming to be persecuted by "the left," which the right defines as the Clinton Administration and centrist lobbies like People for the American Way. It is illogical, but the religious persecution theme keeps activists mobilized and enables them to feel comfortable about trying to deprive other people of their civil rights.

Average people active in the Christian Right genuinely feel that the country is going to hell in a hand basket, which is true. The problem is that through a long process of ideological formation most have arrived at a distorted view of their own best interests. They look at the stagnant economy and see "illegal aliens," not runaway capitalism, which they generally support. They look at teenage delinquency and then blame teachers' unions instead of the consumer culture that trains young people to shop and not think.

What people in the Christian Right want is pretty basic. They want laws to outlaw abortion, which they consider a form of infanticide. They want to change the tax code to encourage married mothers to stay home and raise good kids. They want queers to get back in the closet and pretend not to exist. They want high quality schools; they think the public schools are failing not for lack of resources but because kids can't pray or read Genesis in biology class.

The Christian Right wants these and related things so badly that they organized to win the political power necessary to change the direction of public policy. Early on, the Republican Party realized that it could become the majority party by hitching its sails to the evangelical mass movement. For two decades, the Democrats stood idly by, unwilling and unable to respond because Democrats will challenge neither the prerogatives of big business nor the ideological premises that keep people from challenging class, racial, and gender inequality. As the Christian Right continues to march steadily, though less noisily, toward assuming political power, movement leaders are now debating their future as unyielding moral crusaders, as rank-and-file Republicans, or as some combination of both. Opponents of the Christian Right stand to lose if they do not recognize that, while the movement indeed has some wild policy goals, the agenda is supported by millions of people as common as the neighbors next door.

Unfortunately, the real left, battered down by external repression and its own internal foibles, has not responded either. The left has been unidimensionally focused on the atrocities waged at the highest levels of state power, and has been unwilling to recognize that significant numbers of our fellow citizens are decidedly reactionary. In places where fascism has taken hold, it has been through a convergence of state and corporate power with a mass base of reaction. We saw this vividly in Chile in the 1970s. I am not suggesting that our country will face a military coup. In the era of "democracy," from Nicaragua to the former Soviet republics, elections are the primary means through which the right takes power.

While the Christian Right stands to mature in the process of charting its own course, liberal centrist critics of the movement seem to be wearing blinders; they continue to depict politically active evangelicals as "extremists" somehow outside of or not belonging to "mainstream" culture, let alone everyday party politics. Liberal centrists delight in labeling the Christian Right the "radical right," a misnomer if there ever was one. Liberal centrists have an interest in policing the margins of political dissent and analysis so that rotten apples-right and left-can be exposed, while the rules of the system escape scrutiny.

The idea of a radical right full of extremists was first popularized during the 1950s and 1960s when prominent political scientists, in dutiful service to the liberal wing of the Cold War establishment, labeled Senator Joseph McCarthy and his admirers as paranoid "radicals," alien to the American body politic. In reality, McCarthy drew his support from the same Republican faithfuls who had elected President Dwight Eisenhower. Popular right-wing groups like the John Birch Society emerged only in the late 1950s, well after political elites had turned the pursuit of "communist subversion" into a national religion. By then, polite society was keen to depict wild-eyed Birchers as "extremists," even as they played by democratic rules and helped win the Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater. Academia's warnings about "radical right extremism" held influence when the massive Christian right mobilized in the late 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and continuing now, centrist outfits like People for the American Way have promoted a view of dangerous "radical right" Christians as something separate from the US political and economic system itself.

But there is nothing particularly "radical" about most politically active evangelical Christians. To be "radical" is to seize the roots of a problem and to advocate and work for profound social change. The Christian Right, on the contrary, supports existing conditions that effectively maintain inequality between rich and poor, white and black, men and women. The Christian Right supports capitalism in all its forms and effects and seeks to uphold traditional hierarchies between the genders and, less overtly, between races. What is "radical" about a movement that, throughout the 1980s, worked hand-in-glove with the Reagan-Bush White House to wage war on revolutionaries and civilian populations from one end of the globe to the next? Through its close ties with political and economic elites, the Christian Right flourished and, now, has turned its attention against the least powerful in our own country.

Like other political forces before it-such as the civil rights, women's, and environmental movements-the Christian Right is evolving an organizational style geared for success. At the same time, the Christian Coalition's hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists are the same people who harass women's health clinics and spread lies about homosexuality. The right's elite-oriented and mass-based contingents are autonomous but mutually dependent on each other. To call them names like "radicals" or "fascists" will not stop them. To understand them and organize against them just might.

[Taxloss]

1. Have you read Katherine Yurica's stuff?

You should, it's very good.

http://www.yuricareport.com/

[and-justice-for-all]

7. Oh yes, I have read that...

My new goal in life is to bring these Theocractic Nationalist to their knees!

[galloglas]

14. Yurica is the BEST!

The YuricaReport is the best, least biased information around.

Katherine Yurica, and her stalwart mother, are like two little Internet exorcists, trying valiantly to quash what is absolutely the single greatest danger to our Constitution and our American way of life.

And that coming from me, an Election Reform fanatic who believes that the invasion of the Cheat-o-Matics from Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S have total control (if and when exercised) over our elections, is quite a statement.

But, in fact, the far Religious Right (a contradiction in terms since they are actually Christian heretics) has deep ties to the Cheat-o-Matic companies.

The plot to hijack American Democracy was formed by Right Wing GOP money men, together with the (heretical) Christian Right contolled by a group named Dominionists, in the aftermath of "Watergate" and the Nixon resignation.

If you want to know more, also check out Joe Bageant, to be found at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant05252004.html

Googling him should also bring up some pages which will spell out the teeny, tiny fine (but important) differences between Dominionists, Pre-Millenialists, Dispensationalists, and others.

But, it will be a scary lesson.

Also, to read it coming from the Heretical Horse's mouth, find the book "Backwards, Christian Soldiers" (shiver!) by Gary North.

[Palladin]

2. There's nothing in here about the Christian Zionists

or better Zionist christians. These people really believe that they're going to be Raptured - and all the rest of us, and the true Church - are going to Hell. In the meantime, they flatter themselves and their mega-hucksters clean up with their Gospel of Wealth. The so-called President is one of them, a drooling, weepy, irrational True Believer. The so-called Vice President doesn't believe in anything except money and power. Both truly dangerous individuals. The electronic mob of Zionist christians (i.e., Robertson, Hagee, Falwell, Santorum and their untold herds of blank-eyed slack-jawed followers etc etc) is a menace to the Republic also.

[TitanicWreck]

4. The Christian Right needs to be reminded Jesus was a pascifist

There are some Christians who remember Jesus was a pascifist, and spent his time feeding the hungry, and healing the sick. People from the local Unitarian Universalst church are heavily involved with programs to feed and clothe the homeless..But such Christians seem to be far and few between..

The radical right I have encountered couldnt give a rat's ass about the poor, oppose federal programs that help the sick and poor, and they crave war...
Plus many of them hate Jews- though they worship a Jewish carpenter as a GOD....

So- WHY do these Republicans worshp Jesus, when they despise everythiing he stood for? (peace, charity,)

Here is somthing fun-next time you find a homophoboic war mongering right wing Chritian that insists America is a 'Christian nation', feign agreement and say its important to strive for peace, feed the hungry and help the sick. Gurenteed they'll look at you as if you have 2 heads..

[Montagnard]

3. They have been working on this for a long time.

There is already many elected officials in the Congress that are on their side.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm


Rousas John Rushdoony
http://www.fortifyingthefamily.com/Tribute_to_Rushdoony.html


http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/cr_intro.html

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html

[MountainLaurel]

5. Book recommendation time

The Hijacking of Jesus by Don Wakefield

[alfredo]

6. Kevin Phillips book "American Theocracy" does a

terrific job of telling the history of the movement and spelling out their strategy and tactics. To better understand them read John Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience." What you have in the Evangelical movement are a bunch of authoritarian personalities leading authoritarian followers.

The scary part is authoritarians are not against using violence to further their aims.

[and-justice-for-all]

8. Scary shit that needs to be brought to the surface.....

I think most of their followers are mezmerized by their leaders, its hypnotic and shamanistic. When people begin to be shakin' from their illusion I think they come to a realization that they have been brought under a vicious spell. I will give most the benefit of a doubt, victems of misrepresentation and black magic:

http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/music.html

RELIGION, HYPNOSIS, AND MUSIC: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection is extraordinarily powerful in its ability to explain details of the world around us: Why do giraffes have long necks? Why is the kiwi flightless? Why do humans have an appendix, five fingers, erector muscles at the base of each hair, and rudimentary muscles with which to wiggle the ears? Why are certain butterflies brightly colored, and why do birds sing?

Answers to these and to thousands of other equally puzzling questions have, from 1859 onward, formed a part of the enduring legacy left by the great British naturalist who by plowing under the "Garden of Eden," completed the work begun by Copernicus when he pulled down the "heavenly firmament."

Although the scientific answers to these and similar questions had been familiar to me since high school days, there were other questions which appeared to me to be unanswerable in Darwinian terms, questions which required many years and much thought before I could reconcile them with Darwin's theory.

Take religion, for instance. If religion is all a pack of lies - a muddle of myths - why would natural selection allow religion to survive? How could natural selection allow behavior that has nothing at all to do with the real world to develop in the first place? Could Survival of the Falsest be a corollary derivable from Survival of the Fittest?

And then there is the puzzle of hypnosis. Why are many people and some animals hypnotizable? Where is the fitness in being susceptible to hypnotic suggestion and manipulation? After having experimented with hypnosis for many years, and after having performed a great variety of experiments with both humans and animals, I was shocked to discover that hypnotizability is not simply a "weakness" in the sense that a person is lacking in physical or mental strength. Many of the most brilliant and physically fit persons I have known have proven to be highly hypnotizable, whereas certain psychotics and mentally retarded individuals have been, for all practical purposes, unhypnotizable.

Without regard to race, sex, or IQ, three out of every five people one meets on the street are hypnotizable. Why would such seeming vulnerability slip through the screen of natural selection and take up residence in the nervous system of the most powerful animal the planet has known?

My third evolutionary puzzle was music. Why should humans have invented music? While music and musical ability are not in any obvious way harmful (and, therefore, not characters likely to be eliminated by Natural selection), neither are these traits obviously useful in the sense that they increase human fitness for survival. Consequently, there would appear to be no good reason for them to have evolved.

Human music is not the equivalent of bird song. It does not function as a means of marking territory, and it is of little more that marginal value in attracting mates. No matter to what height of esthetic triumph Beethoven may transport us with his Ninth Symphony, it is not easy to see any obvious way in which fugues and four-part choruses can have helped us climb the great phylogenetic tree to reach our present perch.

After pondering these three questions for many years, I gradually came to the realization that they were closely interrelated. All three shared a common explanation. All could be explained in terms of what biologists call group fitness.

Unlike individual fitness - that bundle of qualities which affects the survivability of individual plants or animals - group fitness affects the survivability of small or medium-sized groups of closely related individuals. Such groups often are little more than greatly extended families, and they tend to be genetically quite homogenous.

Whether we like it or not, there was a long time ago when religion was actually a "good" thing. That is to say, religion increased group fitness. Let me try to explain.

In the course of human evolution, the accumulation of genetic mutations proved to be too slow a process for the shaping of the adaptive behaviors needed to cope with environmental changes. That is to say, instinct - behavior largely determined by heredity - was not good enough to give primitive hominids the behavioral repertoires needed in their increasingly complex and confusing world. By means too complicated to discuss here, our ancestors all but abandoned the instinct-driven behavior of their brutish brethren and created, as its substitute, culture.

By means of culture, very complex patterns of behavior can be created. They can be created to deal with infinitely varied environmental challenges, and they can be created quickly. Although we may often bemoan the seeming snail-pace at which our own culture abandons what we now consider maladaptive behaviors, there is no doubt that cultural change is many orders of magnitude faster than genetic change.

Back to religion, How does religion fit into all this talk about tribes and culture? Quite simply. Religion in small groups may be very effective in increasing group cohesion. It may help to mark the boundaries between in-group and out-group, the line between us and them. As Jerry Falwell and the Ayatollah Khomeini have shown, religion deftly applied can convert individually weak little insects into a mighty hoard of army ants. It can fuse individual organisms into a sort of Nietzchean super-organism.

At the tribal stage of human social evolution, religion helped to create group behaviors which enhanced the survival potential of the in-group at the expense of out-groups. Consider the dietary taboos of the so-called Old Testament.

We read in Deut. 14:21, "Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: Thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien." Since a animal dying by itself is likely to be diseased, we shouldn't eat it. Give it - better yet, sell it - to one of THEM. With luck, there may soon be one less of THEM, and our group will have gained a numerical advantage of one more unit!

This truly "old time religion" developed at the end of the last Ice Age, when the tribe was the largest human grouping maintaining any degree of coherence. The religion of the Old Testament is a cultural fossil held over from the Pleistocene Epoch, and it reflects an atmosphere of intense intergroup competition. Petrified like the bones in a paleontologist's cabinet, the greatest ideas of the Ice Age still can be found on display between Genesis and Malachi!

Humans are gregarious creatures. They and their ancestors for a very long time have been herd animals. Like all herd animals, they must be sensitive to the moves and signals of their fellow flock-members. Just as a buffalo defensive stampede would be useless if only one animal stampeded, so too our hominid ancestors had to be able to act in concert against threats from predators and other enemies. To do this, they had to be able to perceive and internalize the desires and motivations of their fellows in the pack. Not yet in possession of language to effect such communication, our ancestors had to be suggestible. In our ancestors, as is generally the case with herd animals today, the emotions and intentions of the leaders of the herd were communicated to the rest of the flock by "body language," and by the power of nonverbal suggestion.

Suggestion, whether verbal or not, is, of course, the foundation of hypnosis.

Hypnotism had been the tool of shamans and medicine men from the very beginning. The ability to be hypnotized, i.e. suggestibility, was part of our heritage as gregarious animals. All the priests had to do was harness it and, therewith, harness the entire tribe at once. Once hypnotized, the entire tribe could be sent out to do battle as though it were a super-organism, as if the individuals were but individual cells in a great body - sharing a common gene pool and governed by a single head.

And battle they did - and still do. "And the Lord said unto him, 'Surely I will be with thee, and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man'." "Kill a commie for Christ!" "Impeach Earl Warren!" "Stop that wicked woman who has expelled our god from the classrooms!"

If my readers think the term "hypnosis" can be applied to religion only in the metaphorical sense, they should hasten to the nearest tabernacular, faith-healing, full-gospel-assembly, fire-baptized, holy-rolling revival meeting. They will see hypnosis in action, replete with people falling on the ground, jerking and twitching and babbling. They will be able to observe how the contagion spreads from the leaders to the followers. They will observe the anesthetic power of hypnosis, as real cripples - not just the shills - throw down their crutches and prance around to the tune of crunching bone-joints.

Make no mistake about it. The hypnosis used by preachers is real hypnosis. The priests were the first to control it, and to this day they and their politician brethren are the most skilled practitioners of the art.

How do they do it? there are many different ways of inducing a hypnotic state of consciousness, and generally the fakirs use many methods simultaneously. For neurochemical reasons which are still not entirely clear, fasting is a useful means of preconditioning the nervous system to make it more malleable and suggestible. Although lowering of blood sugar probably has much to do with it, it is likely that hormone-like substances known as endogenous opioids are also involved. As the name implies, these chemicals are internally produced opiate-like substances which resemble morphine in their action.

Although Karl Marx was speaking metaphorically when he wrote that "Religion is the opiate of the masses," his words may prove to be literally true as well. There is considerable evidence that hypnosis and "transcendental" meditation can increase the production of certain of these opioids by the brain. The hallucinations so often accompanying religious experiences may very well be a result of opioid intoxication and verbal suggestions implanted by the "guru" guiding the religious "trip."

Another method of inducing hypnosis is long repeated prayer. When people pray for "a sign," they repeat over and over what it is they want to see or hear. Sooner or later, if their nervous systems are even slightly normal, they should be able to generate vivid experiences fulfilling their wishes. Only wealthy men who say god speaks to them are frauds. Poor people who say this are simply self-deluded.

Although we are accustomed to think of prayer as a type of cosmic begging, it is likely that this type of prayer was a late evolutionary development. The original purpose of prayer, I believe, was to induce trance and, thereby, to effect hallucinatory communication with the "spirit world."

Many faith-healing practitioners of hypnosis induce trance-like receptiveness in their prey by physically stunning them. They "lay on hands." Starting with their hands on the crown of the victim's head, they utter their hypnotic suggestions (i.e. "prayers") while gradually moving their hands down the side of the person's head. Finally, when their hands are on the person's neck and ears, they will suddenly put pressure on the nerve-rich cavity behind the ear and on the carotid sinus farther down the neck. This stuns and disorients the victim, and he or she becomes very imprintable. The verbal suggestions of the healer become implanted within as little as two or three seconds.

Of course, this does not always work. If the person being "healed" has a weak cardiovascular system, or if the "healer" presses on the carotid sinus too long, cardiac arrest may result and god cheats the evangelist out of the poor bloke's money. At least one notorious faith healer of our day has given up the practice because of this embarrassing and expensive side-effect. The reader must realize, this method of inducing hypnosis is extremely dangerous, and no competent practitioner will employ it. Only religionists still flirt with it.

But there is a much safer way than nerve-pinching to reduce the faithful to submission: music. Carefully selected hymns can be incredibly powerful tools with which to induce trance. Perhaps the most infamous of these hymns is the one called Just As I Am. By the time Billy Graham and his ilk have brought the crowd to the point of singing this war-horse, the resistance of the audience has already been worn down considerably. And by the time that everyone locks arms and starts singing "I come… I come," only a few can resist the call to rush forth and shoot up on Jesus.

The evolutionary roots of music can be seen very clearly in such phenomena as American Indian war dances and religious chants. Music did not begin with harmony and stringed instruments. It began with rhythm, with monotonously repeated, rhythmic words and sounds. Drumming surely represents the beginning of instrumental music, and to this day the most primitive forms of music emphasize drums. So too, singing grew out of chanting - the rhythmic repetition of magic words and phrases.

How does music relate to evolutionary fitness?

Consider the Indian war dance. The drumming, chanting, and dancing produce a sensory environment suitable for the induction of hypnotic trance. Once all the warriors are hypnotized, they can act in concert (no pun intended) to rush forth and wipe out the genetic competition. They will not know fear; they will not hesitate; and they will give without hesitation their last full measure to the enterprise. Perhaps the most important part of all this is that all will follow orders reflexively, and there will be a minimum of disorder. The competitive advantages of such behavior are obvious.

Thus, music evolved as a means of inducing hypnotic trance. Hypnotic susceptibility, although older than the human species itself, was elaborated by natural selection as a means of increasing intragroup cohesion and as a means of producing highly ordered, efficient competitive behavior at the intergroup level. As cultural transmission of learned behavior replaced genetic transmission of instinctive behavior, religion emerged as the system deciding the ends for which hypnosis would be applied. The actual mythical content of the individual religions probably did not make much difference: Zeus and Yahweh and Baal are all imaginary, and there is no obvious reason to recommend one over another. However the structure of the cultural organizations behind the various deities was of great importance. It is obvious that the wizards who pulled the strings in the temple of Yahweh had a much more effective way of running the land of Oz than did those who hid behind the curtains in the temples of Zeus and Baal!

Approaching the end of our story, we see that religion, hypnosis, and music are intimately and unexpectedly interrelated in their evolutionary origins. The three originated together, and all three were critically important factors in making us the creatures we are today. All three are "natural" phenomena, and can be reconciled with the theory of evolution as we understand it today.

We must remember, however, that things are not automatically to be adjudged good or desirable simply because they are "natural." To do so is to fall into the "natural law" fallacy so dear to the Catholic Church. To say that something is "natural" implies nothing more than "that's the way things are at the moment." It does not say we have to keep things that way. In many cases we are free to decide to travel "unnatural," newly created paths.

Religion is like the human appendix: although it was functional in our distant ancestors, it is of no use today. Just as the appendix today is a focus of physical disease, so too religion today is a focus of social disease. Although religion was a force accelerating human evolution during the Ice Ages, it is now an atavism of negative value.

Religion still promotes tribal divisions, even though we must recognize that all "tribes" must henceforth work together for a common cause or all shall surely perish together. No single tribe will survive unless all tribes survive. The divisions created by religions must be eliminated.

The disappearance of religion will be as great a tragedy as the disappearance of smallpox. We will all survive its passing without difficulty and without tears.

But what of music and hypnosis? are they also atavisms? Are they now tainted because of their former religious associations? I think not.

Music clearly has emerged from its religious cradle and has transported us all to a realm of human emotion and esthetic fulfillment more "heavenly" than any heaven imagined by the creators of that celestial hunk of real estate!

Music has been set free of its fetters. It may now soar with the human intellect into any esthetic empyrean that intellect may choose to create. The finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony can help us to feel more intensely the universal brotherhood of mankind as we hurtle along on the cosmic journey of this spaceship we call earth.

And what of hypnosis? Is it only a tool of unethical control? Must it be forsworn because Hitler and Jim Jones used it?

Unlike the case concerning music, the answer to this question is not quite as easy to formulate. We cannot deny that even today hypnotic suggestion can be used for evil purposes. But to be forewarned is to be fore-armed. We must always keep in mind that as suggestible creatures we are potentially vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous persons. But we should not forget that many of the features that most deeply define our humanity derive from the same neuronal circuitry that makes us suggestible.

For what are sympathy and empathy, if not elaborations of our suggestibility? Because we are suggestible, because our emotions are contagious, we can walk into the funeral of a total stranger and quickly feel the same sense of grief and loss as the mourners. We can also see a strange child take its first steps in a public park and feel the same excitement and exhilaration as do its parents.

Because we are suggestible, we can feel sympathy. Because we can feel the same pains as our fellow beings, we will not be uncaring of their plight. We will avoid causing pain in others because our suggestible natures make possible the reflection of that pain back upon us. We are happiest when making others happy, and we do not need mythic systems to make us do good and eschew evil: our nervous systems are hard-wired by evolution to help us do that.

Because our individual happiness is so sensitive to the emotional milieu in which we find ourselves, enlightened self-interest is all we need. With that we shall create an ethical system more true to our natures. We shall strive to cast off the irrelevant totems and taboos of our religious past, that we may emerge into a satisfying new world of ethical fulfillment.

Let us not pray.

by Frank R. Zindler
The Probing Mind, October, 1984

[alfredo]

10. I believe that belief is genetic. It helps form hierarchical groups

God came from the question, "who gave you the authority"? As you work up the chain of command, you get to the last person, the one that cannot point to someone in the tribe that cannot point to another higher in the tribe. The smart leader knows that if you take credit you have to take blame. A god or devil comes in handy.

[and-justice-for-all]

9. kick

[NMMNG]

11. They are insidous and incredibly dangerous

It is imperative that they be stopped. Our main weakness is that we don't fight dirty like they do.

[and-justice-for-all]

12. Well, when your weakness is true morals, then it becomes....

..An issue, I can not lie to people for whatever reason. They lie constantly and mislead people all the time; they are immoral people with a hunger for war and prophicidal suicide...its sick.

My new goal is to crush these people.

[NMMNG]

13. It's sad, isn't it?

They scream about how they're working for greater morality in America, then they use methods that are rife with immorality. We keep losing to them because we refuse to stoop to deceit, subversion, fraud and all of the other underhanded tactics they use. The bitter irony.

But I'm with you--I want to crush them. It's a matter of survival.

[and-justice-for-all]

15. Kick