The Spiritual Gene Pool Or Why I’m None Too Happy With Organized Religion And Christianity In Particular.

Note: The following post will be revised serval times over the next day or two. I am still leanring how to fromat within blogspot and I have many links I want to add ot this page but have not yet had the time to include:

Spirituality, a belief in the afterlife, a cosmology of the universe’s creation and what happens after our personal demise, dreamworlds, heaven, gods, goddesses and the religions that describe their deeds and expectations of their created. There’s nary a culture in history or prehistory that we are aware of that did not have a supernatural belief system.

Sure there have been cultures that did not have a word for “god” or concept of a single all powerful creator. A paper here discusses a Mexican indigenous culture, the Huichol, that has no word for God. But even these cultures possessed a concept of the supernatural, in this case a nature based pantheon of deities and ritualistic sacrifice cult.

Obviously atheistic beliefs have existed in small minorities of populations, usually only in those cultures that have developed and/or have access to science and philosophy. But such belief systems are not inherently, in my opinion, non-spiritual. Both atheists and those of far more theistic beliefs are of the same ilk in many ways; the same questions burn in all of us, and even among atheists there are disagreements as to the best answers to these most base of questions regarding the origin of the universe and life, or the nature of consciousness. And this cosmological debate, whether atheists amongst themselves, or between any of the spiritual practices throughout history, provides the diverse characteristics of what I have oft considered to be a “Spiritual Gene Pool.”

I have come to believe that a spiritual gene pool works like a biological gene pool. In other words, increased diversity usually results in a healthier population.

Just as in an animal population a diversity of traits means more likelihood of survival in a changing environment (if you have no hairy elephants, then, when an ice age comes, you have no elephants at all, whereas some hairy and some hairless mean a greater chance for at least part of a species to survive regardless of the environment), I’ve come to believe that a diversity of spiritual practices allows the human population to better adapt to the rapidly changing moral issues that exist among us. With this in mind, I suggest that organized religions dilute the spiritual gene pool and leave us less and less adaptable to moral challenges in an ever more complex world with challenges and decisions that effect not only the individual but vast societies and across many cultures. Economic globalization, the proliferation of nuclear power, gender and sexual orientation issues, etc. all offer enormous shifts and complexity to the “moral environment” and the fact that a greater and greater percentage of the human population participate in fewer and fewer types of religions leaves us less adaptable to these ever increasing changes.

In particular the spread of Christianity, particularly from the old world to the new world over the last 500 years, as well as into Africa, has done more to dilute the spiritual gene pool than any other turn of events in recorded history. Consider that the Romans, as they expanded their empire over centuries, more often than not, allowed the cultures they conquered to continue practicing their religions. This lack of cosmological hegemony proved both useful in preventing constant rebellion by conquered peoples, as well as allowing a bidirectional influence of spiritual and cultural practiced. I think this may have allowed both the dominator, the Romans, and the dominated to continually evolve, rather than one set of spiritual genes being eliminated, and replaced with the dominators genes only. In effect, the Roman method of allowing local spiritual practices to perpetuate themselves and coexist with other practices (occasionally “interbreeding” as well) resulted in a more diverse, not less diverse spiritual gene pool. While I don’t claim, through this example, that as a result, Roman culture was inherently more moral than other cultures (for how can one measure “more” or “less” moral if one necessarily as a social scientist assumes a relative position on morality) it does beg the question, could this particular factor of Roman conquest been a major factor of at least Rome’s political success? In other words, were the Romans successful in dominating economically and militarily, so much of the world, at least in part, because for such a long time they created, knowingly or not, an extremely adaptable and diverse society that could face various crises better than homegenous cultures could?

I propose that a diversity of spiritual practices allows for a more adaptable society than a spiritually homogenous population does, and, by extension, that today’s world has a far less diverse collection of spiritual practices combined with a far more complex moral environment and as a result, we are less capable of solving these problems, that is, adapting to the new landscape.

In proposing such a hypothesis, I can think of at least a couple questions that I need to answer or at least address before even suggesting that the hypothesis could be tested through experimentation.

1. Couldn’t the spread of Christianity be considered a prime example of survival of the fittest? That is, if Christianity weren’t best adapted, how could it possibly come to dominate?
   a. One possible conclusion: My theory is bunk, and spiritual practices are not Darwinian and do not come to dominate a population according to similar laws as survival of the fittest.
   b. The Spread of Christianity is more akin to the spread of Dwarfism in a small population. In other words, Dogmatic Monotheism is some sort of recessive gene that usually only pops up once in a while but somehow, due to a set of specific circumstances became widespread in the current population. In Biological evolution, such a set of circumstances involves a small isolated population with a high number of fertile members possessing the recessive gene and then interbreeding resulting in a predominance of the recessive gene over time. This is difficult to apply conceptually to the whole population of the planet, unless we abandon the notion that humans are alone in the universe and instead we look at this planet as a small island in the vast population of the universe. Then indeed, a rapidly spreading but potentially maladaptable spiritual trait such a Dogmatic Monotheism centered around a specific deity could be considered a type of allopatric speciation, and over time a genetic drift of sorts is going to lead us to an extremely homogenous spiritual evolution
   i. Of course the problem with such a hypothesis is that it is untestable in that we have no alien population to compare ourselves against, or no opportunity to view, say, one part of the population that has become homogenous spiritually and another part which is far more diverse and witness how they adapt to similar moral challenges.
   ii. In the interest of playing Devil’s Advocate, it might be interesting to try to find a parallel. Maybe we could look at political schemes within democracies. For instance, the two-party system of the US, is nearly homogenous, with only two dominating political philosophies (whose differences are, arguably, minimal and abrely diverse, more akin to “what color of hair” rather than hairy vs. hairless) vs. the multi-party (diverse) parliaments of Europe which have to build consensuses between many often contradicting philosophies on various social issues in order to reach a majority decision. In Europe, the diversity and requisite consensus building results in very different approaches between the Europe and US on issues of taxation, the governing of property and natural resources and the funding of higher education and health care.
2. Is there really any way to test such a hypothesis? Can we, though a multidisciplinary approach, using the four fields of anthropology (archaeology, socio-cultural, linguistic and physical), history, philosophy, theology, and environmental and geological sciences, look at the different ways that different societies deal with similar problems and in any way define what a “moral” crises or conflict really is as well as hierarchically evaluate the success of various cultures facing such conflicts while determining to what affect if any, spiritual practices, and the diversity of them amongst various populations, played a role in these populations adapting to the conflicts?
   a. Are there examples throughout history of say widespread environmental shifts affecting a wide number of societies, where we can both accurately measure the success how well various cultures survived the shift as well as have access to information on the types of spiritual practices that existed among the various population affected?

Ultimately, what I wonder, is, if Christianity had not wiped out the many smaller, localized, clan based, and indigenous spiritual practices of pagan Europe, North and South American cosmologies, African pantheons, etc. what might the world look like today? For example:

1. What might the discourse on homosexuality look like? Many Native American tribes had a culturally accepted and oft revered third gender status for homosexuals. And the notion that “traditional” marriage exists is all but absurd given the near infinite ways people have “coupled” over the millennia and of the vast varied versions of culturally sanctioned mating – many of these traditions now all but lost.
2. Welfare and childcare: How many different clan based methods of child rearing have been all but rejected in the mainstream and legal landscapes of the Western modern world, while at the same time, particularly in poor inner city environments, extended clans, similar in many ways to egalitarian and indigenous social structures rarely found elsewhere in the first world today (cousins and brothers and aunts and uncles who are not always blood related but fulfill similar roles and are accepted as such) often evolve due to the necessity of mutual cooperation in order to face economic hardships as well as insure and improve the survival and rearing of children.

This question of a Spiritual Gene Pool is one that has dogged me for several years, and this essay offers a glimpse into the questions that I have developed, and more specifically, a preliminary outline on how one might go about answering some of these questions. While it will not be at the center of either my MA or PhD papers while I’m at Chicago, I have a hunch that the research questions I do develop there (more on those at a later date), will, in some part, be influenced by these questions and conversely my research at Chicago, may offer me some insight on how to better explore these questions. Perhaps someday, when grey(er) and semi-retired, I may come back to these questions as an eccentric professor and write a book or three bout these things, to be honest, the aforementioned pirate story is not just a story of a broken heart but of a man with this same burning question, a man, who takes his wealth and skills as a navigator and confronts the slave trade, the inquisition, and colonialism, for fear that the Church and Europe in the 16th century are wiping out people, cultures and traditions that are both irreplaceable and necessary for the ongoing health of humanity.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’m bored out of my mind on weekends down here at the golf course.