BREAKING THE SPELL --- RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON by Daniel C. Dennett. Viking, 2006
PREFACE (pxiii-vi)
PART 1 --- OPENING PANDORA'S BOX (p1-93)
1) Breaking which spell? (p3-28)
[1] What's going on? (p3-7)
[2] A working definition of religion (p7-12)
A Tentative Definition of Religion = Social systems whose participants avow a belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is a roundabout, circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion needs a god or gods and also needs room for historical revisions. (p9)
[3] To break or not to break (p12- )
[4] Peering into the abyss (p17-24)
The first spell --- the taboo --- and the second spell --- religion itself --- are bound together in a curious embrace. Part of the strength of the second spell may be the protection it receives from the first spell. (p18)
Up to now in human history, there has been a largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other researchers will leave religion alone, or restrict themselves to a few sidelong glances, since many people got upset at the mere thought of a more intenesive inquiry. I want to know why we should not study all the ins and outs of religion and I want to see good, factually supported reasons, not just an appeal to religious tradition. (p18-19)
[5] Religion as a natural phenomenon (p24-27)
SUMMARY of Chapter 1:
Religions are among the most powerful natural phenomena on the planet, and we need to understand them better if we are to make informed and just political decisions. Although there are risks and discomforts involved, we should brace ourselves and set aside our traditional reluctance to investigate religous phenomena scientifically, so that we can come to understand how and why religions inspire such devotion, and figure out how we should deal with them all in the twenty-first century. (p53)
SUMMARY of Chapter 2:
There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest investigative lights on religion. (p53)
2) Some questions about science (p29-53)
[1] Can science study religion? (p29-34)
[2] Should science study religion? (p34-40)
[3] Might music be bad for you? (p40-44)
[4] Would neglect be more benign? (p44-53)
Breaking the dissection if human body for research taboo and sexual behavior study taboo. Serious importance of the new scientific results about human sexual behavior (p46-48)
Whereas in earlier centuries ignorance was the default condition of most of the human race, and it has taken hundreds of years of scientific inquiry to learn about the wide world, today we are all swimming in a sea of information and misinformation, on every topic, from masturbation to how to build a nuclear weapon to Al Qaeda. As we deplore the attempt by some religious leaders in the Muslim world to keep their girls and women uneducated and uniformed about the world, we can hardly approve of similar embargoes on knowledge in our own Western world. (p49)
SUMMARY of Chapter 2:
Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the ontrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance. (p53)
SUMMARY of Chapter 3:
If we want to know why we value the things we love, we need to delve into the evolutionary history of the planet, uncovering the forces and constaints that have generated the glorious array of things we treasure. Religion is not exempt from this survey, and we can sketch out a variety of promising avenues for further research, while coming to understand how we can achieve a perspective on our own inquiries that all can share, regardless of their different creeds. (p53)
3) Why good things happen (p54-93)
[1] Bringing out the best (p54-56)
[2] Cui bono? (p56-69)
[3] Asking what pays for religion (p69-73)
[4] A Martian's list of theories (p74-93 )
(1) "Sweet-tooth" theories (p82-84)
(2) "Symbiant theories" (p84-85)
(3) Inexclusivity of the Sweet tooth and Symbiont families of theories (p85-93)
SUMMARY of Chapter 3:
Everything we value --- from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion --- we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection. (p93)
SUMMARY of Chapter 4:
Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they must operate. The social and linguistic environment that coevolved with human brains gives human beings powers that no other species enjoys, but also creates problems that folk religions apparently evolved to handle. The apparent extravagance of religious practices can be accounted for in the austere terms of evolutionary biology. (p93)
PART 2 --- THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION (p95-246)
4) The roots of religion (p97-115)
[1] The births of religions (p97-104)
Quote by D'Arcy Thompson = "Everything is what it is because it got that way"
[2] The raw materials of religion (p104-108)
David Hume Quote:
[3] How nature deals with the problem of other minds (p108-114)
SUMMARY of Chapter 4:
Extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking, we can surmise how folk religions emerged without conscious and deliberate design, just as languages emerged, by interdependent processes of biological and cultural evolution. At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute "agency," which is beliefs and desires and other mental states, to anything complicated that moves. (p114)
SUMMARY of Chapter 5:
The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents wherever the action is are the irritants around which the pearls of religion grow. Only the best, most mind-friendly variants propagate, by meeting --- or seeming to meet --- deep psychological and physical needs, and then these are further refined by the incessant pruning of selection processes. (p114-115)
5) Religion, the early days (p116-152)
[1] Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space (p116-125)
[2] Gods as interested parties (p125-131)
[3] Getting the gods to speak to us (p132-135)
[4] Shamans as hypnotists (p135-141)
[5] Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures (p141-151)
SUMMARY of Chapter 5:
The obvious expensiveness of folk religion, a challenge to biology, can be accounted for by hypotheses that are not yet confirmed but testable. Probably the excess population of imaginary agenets generated by the HADD yielded candidates to press into service as decision aids, in divination, or as shaman's accomplices, in health maintenance, for instance. These co-opted or exapted mental contructs were then subjected to extensive design revision under the selective pressure for reproductive prowess. (p151)
SUMMARY of Chapter 6:
As human culture grew and people became more reflective, folk religion became transformed into organized religion; the free-floating "rationales" (explanations) of the earlier designs were supplemented and sometimes replaed by carefully crafted "reasons" (dogmas/doctrines or rules) as religions became domesticated. (p152)
6) The evolution of stewardship (p153-174)
[1] The music of religion (p153-156)
[2] Folk religion as practical know-how (p156-162)
[3] Creeping reflection and the birth of secrecy in religion (p162-167)
[4] The domestication of religions (p167-173)
SUMMARY of Chapter 6:
The transmission of religion has been attended by voluminous revision, often deliberate and foresighted, as people became stewards of the ideas that had entered them, domesticating them. Secrecy, deception, and systematic invulnerability to disconfirmation are some of the features that have emerged, and these have been designed by processes that were sensitive to new answers to the Cui bono? question, as the stewards' motives entered the process. (p173-174)
SUMMARY of Chapter 7:
Why do people join groups? Is this simply a rational decision on their part, or are there relatively mindless forces of "group selection" at work? Though there is much to be said in favor of both of these proposals, they do not exhaust the plausible "models" that attempt to explain our readiness to form lasting allegiances.
7) The invention of team spirit (p175-199)
[1] A path paved with good intentions (p175-179)
[2] The ant colony and the corporation (p179-188)
[3] The growth market in religion (p189-193)
[4] A god you can talk to (p193-198)
SUMMARY of Chapter 7:
The human proclivity for groupishness is less calculated and prudential than it appears in some economic models, but also more complicated than the evolved herding instinct of some animals. What complicates the picture is human language and culture, and the perspective of "memes" permits us to comprehend how the phenomena of human allegiance are influenced by a mixture of free-floating and well-tethered rationales. We can make progress by acknowledging that submission to a religion need not be cast as a deliberate economic decision, while also recognizing the analytic and predictive power of the perspective that views religions as designed systems competing in a dynamic marketplace for adherents with different needs and tastes. (p198-199)
SUMMARY of Chapter 8:
The stewardship of religious ideas creates a powerful phenomenon; namely, "belief in belief!" It radically transforms the content of the underlying beliefs, making rational investigation of them difficult if not impossible.
8) Belief in belief (p200-246)
[1] You better believe it (p200-210)
[2] God as intentional object (p210-217)
[3] The divison of "doxastic labor" (p217-222)
(1) Example of translating a Turkish Doxological statement (p217-218)
(2) E=MC2 is Einstein's famous formula for the relationship of matter and energy, which may be the ultimate talismanic formula (p218-222)
Richard Feynman's famous introducdtory lectures on quantum electrodynamics called QED --- The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. (p219)
[4] The lowest common denominator? (p222-226)
[5] Beliefs designed to be professed (p226-234)
[6] Lessons from Lebanon --- the strange cases of the Druze and Kim Philby (p234-240)
[7] Does God exist? (p240-246)
Voltaire Quote = "If God did not exist, it would be necessary for us to invent Him."[7] Does God exist? (p240-246)
SUMMARY of Chapter 8:
The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to "save" their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves. The result is that even the professors don't really know what they are professing. This makes the goal of either proving or disproving God's existence a quixotic quest --- but also for that very reason not very important. (p246)
SUMMARY of Chapter 9:
The important question is whether religions deserve the continued protection of their adherents. Many people love their religions more than anything else in life. Do their religions deserve this adoration?
PART 3 --- RELIGION TODAY (p247-339)
9) Toward a buyer's guide to religions (p249-277)
[1] For the love of God (p249-258)
[2] The academic smoke screen (p258-131)
Three quotes from The Humanizing Brain, How Religion Works, The Natural History of Religion (p258)
[3] Why does it matter what you believe? (p264-270)
[4] What can your religion do for you? (p270-277)
SUMMARY of Chapter 9:
Before we can ask the question of whether religion is --- all things considered --- a good thing, we must first work through several protective barriers, such as the love barrier, the academic-territoriality barrier, and the loyalty-to-God barrier. Then we can calmly consider the pros and cons of religious allegiance, looking first at the question, "Is religion good for people?"
And the scientific evidence to date on that question is mixed. It does seem to provide some health benefits, for instance, but it is too early to say whether there are other, better ways of delivering these benefits, and too early to say if the side effects outweigh the benefits. (p277)
SUMMARY of Chapter 10:
The more important question, finally, is whether religion is the foundation of morality. Do we get the content of morality from religion, or is it an irreplaceable infrastructure for organizing moral action, or does it provide moral or spiritual strength? Many think the answers are obvious, and positive, but these are questions that need to be re-examined in the light of what we have learned. (p277)
10) Morality and religion (p278-307)
[1] Does religion make us moral? (p278-285)
[2] Is religion what gives meaning to your life? (p286-292)
[3] What can we say about sacred values? (p292-301)
RELIGIOUS RIDDLE = "How is your religion like an uncovered swimming pool? (p298-299)
Sam Harris's "Catch-22" analysis of religious values (p299-300)
[4] Bless my soul --- spirituality and selfishness (p302-307)
SUMMARY of Chapter 10:
The widely prevailing opinion that religion is the bulwark of morality is problematic at best. The idea that heavenly reward is what motivates good people is demeaning and unnecessary. The idea that religion at its best gives meaning to a life is jeopardized by the hypocrisy trap into which we have fallen, which is the idea that religious authority grounds our moral judgments is useless in genuine ecumenical exploration. And the presumed relation between "spirituality" and "moral goodness" is an illusion!(p307)
SUMMARY of Chapter 11:
The research described in this book is just the beginning. Further research is needed, on both the evolutionary history of religion and on its contemporary phenomena, as they appear to be different disciplines. The most pressing questions concern how we should deal with the excesses of religious upbringing and the recruitment of terrorists, but these can only be understood against a background of wider theories of religious conviction and practice. We need to secure our democratic society, the home base for this research, against the subversions of those who would use democracy as a ladder to theocracy and then throw it away. And we need to spread the knowledge that is the fruit of free inquiry. (p307)
11) Now what do we do? (p308-339)
[1] Just a theory (p308-314)
[2] Some avenues to explore --- how can we home in on religious conviction (p314-321)
[3] What shall we tell the children (p321-328)
[4] Toxic "memes" (p328-333)
[5] Patience and politics (p334-339)
APPENDIX A --- The new replicators (p341-357)
APPENDIX B --- Some more questions about science (p359-378)
APPENDIX C --- The bellboy and the lady named tuck (p379-386)
APPENDIX D --- Kim Philby as a real case of "indeterminancy of radical interpretation"
(p387-389)
NOTES (p391-412)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (p413-426)
INDEX (p427-448)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from Book Jacket)
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor, professor of philosophy, and co-director of the Center for Coginitive Studies at Tufts University. His books include Brainstorms, Elbow Room, Consciousness explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Freedom Evolves.
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