Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59, and I was in my mid-thirties. In one of our last deep conversations before his 300 meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would “get right with God.” Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago. His mother lived out her life in the Assemblies of God denomination that had recruited them all, while Dad settled into a closely allied form of Evangelical fundamentalism without the speaking-in-tongues bit. As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins. And yet of his six children, three of us, by Evangelical standards, are now slated for eternal torture. We are on the wrong side of a battle being waged on a spiritual plane, a battle in which those who are not on the side of God are agents of evil. If Dad were alive, our lack of belief would grieve him.

Religious belief is one of the most powerful forces in our world. Believers think that it has the power to save us all. Increasingly, doubters fear that the opposite may be true: a tribal mindset, unaccountable to ordinary standards of reason and evidence but armed with state of the art weapons may hasten our extinction. In the United States, religious affiliation is the best predictor of political party alliance. Almost half of Americans insist that humans were created in their present form sometime within the last 7,000 years because the Bible says so. In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shia split over theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us, but that in their minds create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict.

Why is religious belief so widespread and powerful? The traditional Christian answer is: because it’s true, and people who haven’t hardened their hearts against God recognize this when God’s plan of salvation is presented to them.

But the recent explosion of knowledge in cognitive science offers a new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological standpoint but from a practical standpoint. What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs? What does evidence and reason have to do with it? How is it that six devoted Christian kids can turn into three devoted Christian adults and three agnostics?

The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human brain — the more we understand about human information processing — the more we glean bits of insight into the religious mind.

This article is the first in a series of six. Each takes a look at some part of our mental machinery, how it relates to our tendency toward religious belief. The articles will focus on the following questions:

• How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking? Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?
• How do we know what we know? What gives us a feeling of certainty? What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?
• How do conversion experiences work? What makes religious conversion transformative?
• How does our social group influence or even control our religious beliefs? How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?
• Why do missionaries target children? How does religious identity develop in childhood? How is belief in childhood different from belief acquired as an adult?
• What makes beliefs resistant to change? What causes people to lose belief? When are people open to re-examining religious assumptions?

Before looking at these questions, it is helpful to understand why belief is so important in Christianity. For traditional Christians, belief is the heart of the Christian religion. It is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell. In the final analysis, believing that Jesus Christ died as a ‘propitiation’ for your sins is the thing that matters to God. No matter how kind and loving your life may be, no matter that you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what great things you may accomplish in the service of humanity or the world at large — if you believe wrong you are doomed.

This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions. In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on belief. The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to people or natural events like storms, earthquakes, illness, birth and death. But the point of religion wasn’t belief. It was to take care of the gods so that they would take care of you and your community. The word “cult” (Latin cultus, literally care) is related to the word “cultivation.” We talk now about cultivating ground so that it will bear fruit. Non-profits talk about “cultivating donors.” That was what the gods cared about, and so it was the heart of religious practice.

From the beginning, Christianity was different. Jesus worshipers cared tremendously about right belief, or orthodoxy. Bart Ehrman’s book, Lost Christianities, offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus criticized and competed with each other, and one of them won out.

Some of groups (e.g. Ebionites) believed that Jesus was a fully human Jewish messiah and that Jesus worshipers must follow the law. Others (e.g. Marcionites) believed that Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on human likeness. Still others (Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine “Eon” during the years of his ministry — revealing to his followers secret knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane. Others, now known as proto-orthodox or Roman, had ideas about Jesus that lead to the views of Christians today. (“Roman Catholic” means Roman universal.) What all of these groups agreed on was that it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was and what Christianity should be.

This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism. It existed in a rudimentary form in Judaism, but even today Judaism is more concerned with living right than believing right. Christianity’s exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire. Polytheists often are quite agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon. Christians could persuade pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off of the others. Today, in India, for example, Evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god.

Eastern religions don’t share Christianity’s concern with belief. The emphasis is more on practice or “praxis” — spiritual living, self-renunciation, insight or enlightenment — and among ordinary people, a sort of cult or care-taking of the gods like that practiced by ancient pagans. Right belief isn’t what lets you move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain nirvana. Nor is it what gets you the favor of gods.

Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or reproductive strategies, so religions compete for human mind share (market share) in different ways. An emphasis on propagating belief (ie. evangelism) and purity of belief (ie. orthodoxy) is only one of those.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity. Modernist theologians began re-examining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and human history. In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain, and many modernist Christians are more like members of Eastern Religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief. But a backlash emerged in response to modernism. People who proudly called themselves fundamentalists insisted that no one who didn’t hold the traditional beliefs was a real Christian. Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch, and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward emphasis on right belief.

This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square. It is the mindset that sends Christian missionaries out into the world seeking converts in impoverished corners of the planet. It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be distributed in Iraq and has organized to establish control of the American military hierarchy, seeking to create an “army of Christian soldiers.” To understand American Christianity specifically or Western religion more broadly, it is necessary to understand the psychology of belief.

According to news reports, the Pentagon said Monday it no longer includes Bible quotes on daily intelligence briefings it sends to the White House.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he did not know how long the Worldwide Intelligence Update cover sheets quoted from the Bible. Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, who was responsible for including them, retired in August 2003, according to his biography.

For a period in 2003, at least, the daily reports prepared for President George W. Bush carried quotes from the books of Psalms and Ephesians and the epistles of Peter. At the time, the reports focused largely on the war in Iraq.

The Bible quotes apparently aimed to support Bush at a time when soldiers’ deaths in Iraq were on the rise, according to the June issue of GQ magazine. GQ has images of the briefings on its Web site. But they offended at least one Muslim analyst at the Pentagon and worried other employees that the passages were inappropriate.

This week the Supreme Court declined to review a Texas murder case in which a juror brought a Bible into the sentencing process, showing that the Bible recommends death for anyone who kills another person with an iron rod (Numbers 35:16).

Let me say for the record that I’m not against the death penalty, and in this case, it sounds like the defendant fit my criteria, too. I know I’m ruining my liberal credentials here, but I frankly don’t have any moral problem with the jury condemning him to death. However, to do so based on the sanctification of a Bronze Age legal code is somewhat horrifying — especially given the list of other “crimes” that are recommended for capital punishment in the Bible.

The court assures us that even though bringing the Bible into the sentencing was improper, there is no evidence that it swayed the jury. Rest assured that when the Bible and other authorities (like our judicial system) are at odds, we can trust Texas jurors to ignore the Bible and do what is right. Even though half the country believes that God made humans in their present form because the Bible says so — we can count on Texans (school boards excepted) to follow the evidence and the constitution.

All the same, just in case an issue like this should come up in your state, thirty six different offenses in the Bible qualified for capital punishment. Do any of these apply to you?

Cursing Parents

For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.” — Leviticus 20:9

Working weekends

Working on the Sabbath Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.” — Exodus 31:15

Premarital Sex (girls only)

… If, however, this charge is true, that evidence of the young woman’s virginity was not found, then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father’s house and the men of her town shall stone her to death. — Deuteronomy 22:20

Disobedience (boys only)

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.” — Deuteronomy 21:18

Worshipping any god but Yahweh

If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that … hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; …Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die. — Deuteronomy 17:2-5

Witches

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. — Exodus 22: 18

Wizards (epileptics? migraine sufferers? schizophrenics?)

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” — Leviticus 20:27

Loose Daughters of Clergy

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.” — Leviticus 21:9

Girls who are Raped within the City Limits

If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city… But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. — Deuteronomy 22:23-25

Blasphemers

And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” — Leviticus 24:16

Anyone Who Tries to Deconvert Yahweh Worshipers

If anyone secretly entices you — even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend — saying, “Let us go worship other gods,” … you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them.” — Deuteronomy 12:6

Men who Lie With Men

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” — Leviticus 20:13

Adulterers

And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. And the man that lieth with his father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them.” — Leviticus 20: 10-12

So. Are you up for the death penalty?

Just so you know, it could be worse. As I am reminded by people who want me to make nice, this list represents an advancement from mob justice. They are right, and the Levitical Code would a fascinating window into human moral history were it not for the fact that juries in Texas, politicians in Colorado, and clergy in Africa all advocate the death penalty for one person or another on the basis of these texts (murderers, homosexuals, and child witches respectively).

When people put God’s name on Bronze Age documents, and then make those documents a golden calf, they get stuck with Bronze Age moral thinking. Maybe it’s time to take the Bible down off of its pedestal, and acknowledge the obvious human handprints on the texts. Maybe it’s even time to do again what Thomas Jefferson did: cut the book apart, keep the parts that are worth keeping, and leave the rest on the floor in the cutting room of history.