15AR20-19

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AR 20:19 - An attempt to "underplay religion's role in violence?"

Apologia Report 20:19 (1,248)

May 27, 2015

In this issue:

EASTERN MYSTICISM - "the media overstates the scientific findings in relation to mindfulness"

ORIGINS - the "rare, even freakish event" must have happened, somehow

RELIGION AND VIOLENCE - where Karen Armstrong's "attempts to underplay religion's role in violence become deeply unconvincing and overtly polemical"

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EASTERN MYSTICISM

"The Rise of Meditation on College Campuses" by Menachem Wecker -- after briefly noting the reasons students were attracted to Duke and Carnegie Mellon, Wecker reports that "The story is the same at schools across the country. The 'student experience,' which often includes binge drinking and raucous parties for undergrads, is for many students as important as getting good grades and a degree." Not so at the American home of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, where there is "a 'strongly' encouraged 10 p.m. curfew."

Nevertheless, "Meditation has quietly taken place on campuses since the 1970s, but it has been spreading on a larger scale in the last five years, says Diana Winston, director of mindfulness education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center <marc.ucla.edu>. ...

"Statistics on mediation are tough to come by. Pew's most recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (2008) <www.goo.gl/1AfVsP> found that 39 percent of adults claim to meditate weekly. (Buddhists self-declared higher rates: 61 percent, as did Jehovah's Witnesses: 72 percent; Mormons: 56 percent; and members of historically black churches: 55 percent.)

"A National Institutes of Health study in 2007 <www.goo.gl/xYWyQ2>, meanwhile, found that 9.4 percent of nearly 25,000 respondents had meditated in the past 12 months, compared to 7.6 percent of respondents in a study five years prior. ...

Catherine Kerr, assistant professor of family medicine and director of translational neuroscience at Brown University's Contemplative Studies Initiative <www.goo.gl/NjrOIP>, says that "Mindful meditation ... is a 'secularized practice' whose origins lie in Buddhism, although it is 'put in a kind of secular framework.' The practice, she says, owes a lot to the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School <umassmed.edu/cfm> who also founded the university's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979.

"The scientific evidence for transcendental meditation - which is based on the spiritual practices of the Hindu leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who died in 2008 - is comparatively weaker, according to Kerr. 'The gold-standard studies are not that strong,' she says, although she notes that many people, including long-term practitioners, report positive results. ...

"That mindless mindfulness, which is more wishful thinking than good science, can be manifest in Huffington Post articles, for example, which 'make it sound as if 100 percent of people who do this practice benefit, and there are no adverse experiences ever. That's just not true,' Kerr says. 'The big issue is that the media overstates the scientific findings in relation to mindfulness.' ...

"Alan Brill <www.goo.gl/NeBJG4>, a rabbi and chairman of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., has noticed a rise in secular meditation and yoga and a decline in religious meditation." Deseret News, Feb 13 '15. <www.goo.gl/Rfq8uN>

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ORIGINS

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane [1] -- yet another example of materialism requiring heroic faith. Kirkus (Apr '15, #2) explains: "An evolutionary biochemist argues that while single-cell life emerged early in Earth's 4-billion-year history, complex life arose only some 2 billion years ago as the result of a rare, even freakish, event. Lane (Evolutionary Biology/Univ. Coll. London) is known as a writer of popular science, but this is a rigorous work that requires close reading and the ability - and willingness - to tackle and comprehend complex technical processes, such as chemiosmotic coupling and the ATP synthase. The rare event was an endosymbiosis between two single-cell prokaryotes, forming a eukaryote, a complex cell. When this happened, mitochondria formed from the cell that was captured inside the host cell and continued to live in the new organism. The acquisition of mitochondria changed everything, greatly expanding the cell's genome and volume. Mitochondria contain genes in their DNA that differ from the genes in the cell nucleus and that mutate much faster than those in the nucleus. This high mutation rate lies behind our aging and certain congenital diseases such as cancer. Mitochondria may even have given rise to sex, which is necessary to maintain the function of genes in large genomes. To aid readers, Lane includes line drawings, diagrams, and black-and-white photographs, many with lengthy captions that also require close attention. A helpful glossary provides definitions of technical terms. The author writes with enthusiasm, generously gives credit to other scientists in his field, and freely acknowledges that some of his ideas may be wrong. Curiously, an epilogue reports that in 2010, Japanese scientists found an organism next to a hydrothermal vent in the Pacific Ocean that suggests that perhaps that rare event of 2 billion years ago recently happened once again. Not necessarily for casual readers, but for the scientifically curious, a challenging book that presents ideas about the most intricate processes that link genes and energy."

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RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

Philip Jenkins (History, Baylor University) includes some interesting criticism in his review of Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, by Karen Armstrong [2]. "To oversimplify Armstrong's argument: states happen, wars happen, and religion blesses them. Religion thus provides a rhetorical framework for warfare—but not, she argues, the motivation. ...

"The scope of Fields of Blood is impressive, including substantial case studies from India, China, and Japan, as well as more obvious examples from Christendom and the Islamic world. Particularly valuable is the book's long historical span, which allows the reader to trace not just the early history of warrior faith in such societies but also its evolution in modern times. ...

"As she argues, religion has become a scapegoat for contemporary explanations of violence, cited most frequently by the historically impaired.

"More controversially, Armstrong's readers will have a hard time arguing for the inherently violent nature of any one faith, a charge that in modern times attaches particularly to Islam. She knows a great deal about Islam and writes at length about some of its uglier modern manifestations, but argues that modern-day extremism must be understood in the context of contemporary social and political strains rather than any supposed toxins in Islam's DNA. Religions develop according to complex historical circumstances, rather than being circumscribed by their founding scriptures.

"If Islam is uniquely conducive to producing acts of terrorism, it is odd that Muslims were such latecomers to the world of 20th-century terrorism, a landscape already thoroughly charted by fascists, nihilists, anarchists, communists, and miscellaneous nationalists. Nationalism, in fact, receives here much of the blame for acts commonly characterized as religious.

"Readers will also learn how all faiths have been thoroughly adept at deploying scriptures to justify mayhem and massacre over the centuries. ...

"I cannot imagine anyone who would fail to find new information or insights in Fields of Blood, which makes nonsense of so many antireligious rants. ...

"It is difficult to blame a particular act on 'religion' when religion was scarcely recognized as a separate sphere of life until at least 1700. If everything is broadly religious, then we cannot single out religious motives for something like the Spanish Inquisition, which should really be understood in terms of political stresses. ...

"In analyzing modern times ... Armstrong protests too much. She tries too hard to explain away the religious character of events and movements that most observers would certainly categorize in religious terms. Repeatedly, she urges us to see the social, economic, and political contexts at work in particular situations, and she is certainly correct to do so. But that wider understanding does not, or should not, allow us to remove the religious context or to see the religious rhetoric and symbolism as mere window dressing. ...

"No, religion is not the sole culprit for contemporary global mayhem. But neither can it be exonerated. ...

"Armstrong scapegoats secular nationalism in very much the same way that other critics blame religion for any and all atrocities. ...

"Armstrong is at her weakest in addressing very recent times, when her attempts to underplay religion's role in violence become deeply unconvincing and overtly polemical. ...

"Fields of Blood has a terrific amount to offer virtually any reader. At times, though, history and polemic become difficult to distinguish." Christian Century, Mar 24 '15. <www.goo.gl/3G9xmb>

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane (Profile, 2015, hardcover, 352 pages) <www.goo.gl/Zd80PR>

2 - Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 2014, hardcover, 528 pages) <www.ow.ly/C1PZQ>

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