Consider the queerness of handshaking.  Why do businessmen shake hands?  Why do athletes on the pitch shake hands?   Why do friends and acquaintances shake hands?   Is it a formality?   If so, why is it a formality?  When two men “shake on it” or “seal the deal” why is it taken seriously?  In other words, why is the grasping of hands and the subsequent shaking of those entwined hands taken to mean anything?  Consider that a handshake, accepted or refused, can have serious consequences.

It will do no good to say, “well, I don’t shake hands.  I’m an ‘A-hand-shaker’.  I don’t believe in handshaking!”  You may not find handshaking important or significant, but most men do, and that is puzzling to some of us.

* * *

One explanation for handshaking, lets call it the “A-hand-shaker” position, might be that handshaking is a primitive act, and the result of primitive thinking.  Perhaps people who shake hands believe that an invisible substance resides in the palm of the hand.  They believe that at the joining of palms the aforementioned substance creates a seal that binds the two shakers together.  Such a view might explain why a handshake is sometimes called “sealing the deal” – some people believe shaking seals things.

The A-hand-shaker position certainly describes a primitive practice.  A simple anatomical study of the hand will show that there is no ghostly substance inside the hand.  The hand can be explained by muscles, bones, blood, veins, and nerve endings.  When you “shake-hands” no deals are being sealed.  The only thing that happens when you “shake on it” is a physical movement, nothing more, nothing less.

* * *

But is not the A-hand-shaker position itself primitive?*  The A-hand-shaker misses the point of handshaking.  When two people “shake on it” they do not fail to understand the science of the hand.   The anatomy and physiology of the hand is irrelevant to understanding handshakes.  The meaning and purpose of a handshake can’t be captured by “science”.

* * *

What the A-Hand-Shaker does with handshakes, Htichens (et al.) do with religion.  By trying to understand religion, “scientifically”, they distort religion, because religion doesn’t attempt to do what science does.  Religious belief is not a scientific account of anything – and, most importantly, its believers never claimed that it was.  It is a lack of philosophical charity (or maybe sophistication, and perhaps imagination) that leads to the Hitchens (et al.) conclusion.

To call religious belief primitive because the Roman or Seminole places a kinsman over a dying relative, or because some tribes performed a rain dance (these were the examples used in part 1a), is as nonsensical as calling a businessman primitive because he shakes hands with a business partner.

Consider the rain-dance.  Wittgestein, in his Remarks on Frazer’s :”Golden Bough”,  noted how odd it was that some tribes only danced when they saw the rains coming.  Why, if they believed the dance caused the rain, didn’t they dance during the dry season?   Why didn’t they dance when they needed the rain most?  Because they knew, like us, that dancing doesn’t cause rain.   They didn’t do a rain-dance to cause rain – as if it were a primitive science – rather, they did the rain dance, perhaps, in celebration of the rain.

What is primitive is not religious belief.  What is primitive is thinking religious belief is primitive science.

* * *

A few more things:  The attempt to undermine a practice by showing how it arose has a name, the genetic fallacy.  If everything I wrote above is wrong, Hitchens’ claim would remain fallacious.

Also, the Hitchens claim assumes a great deal of ignorance on the part of ancient people; people whose lives depended on knowing how to read the seasons, till the ground, and hunt.  They were certainly not ignorant of the relationship between cause and effect in the natural world.

What this also shows is that perhaps not all things can be understood in terms of materialism and causation.  Perhaps there is more to the world than the reality of material and mechanistic movement.

* * *

*The handshaking analogy was first discussed by M.O’ C. Drury in The Danger of Words, and again by D.Z. Phillips in The Hermeneutics of Contemplation.

Other Studies:

Why boys pick Bob over Barbie – Children are genetically programmed say scientists

Male nature objectifies the female body.

Psychologists report that a gender gap in spatial skills starts in infancy.

Men and women have different brains

Women still view Sex as more than physical

Young people are more open than old people to atheism, but we don’t find atheism growing. As people mature, they come to understand the importance of things that seemed trivial or puzzling.  They see connections that were obscure to them.  They acquire depth, perspective, and balance.  They become less idealistic and more realistic. They come to value such things as orderliness, stability, security, and tradition – Keith Burgess-Jackson

Why do some see God while others do not?  Can you do justice to this question while remaining charitable (i.e. without insulting the intelligence and character of the theist or atheist)?

Some who see:

Peter Hitchens (Journalist)

Antony Flew (Philosopher)

Anne Rice (Novelist)

Nina Hagen (German singer/songwriter)

Peter Steele (Musician, Type O Negative)

John Nolte (blogger and screenwriter)

The student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the world
-G. K. Chesterton

Myth #1:  Religion is primitive science

Let our myth-smith be Christopher Hitchens.  Hitchens,

the first and the simplest objection to religious belief is that its metaphysical claims are not true.   . . and come from the period that I would describe as the infancy, or the fearful childhood of our species.  When because we have brains that seek for information, and seek for an explanation – brains that even now prefer a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and are bound to do so, and indeed in some ways, are right to seek in this way.  Explanations have to be found for things that seem (?) inexplicable.  And in the absence of crucial information – we didn’t know, we had no way to know, that the earth went around the sun, didn’t know that there was a germ theory that would explain disease, didn’t have any means of knowing that earthquakes were the result of living on the crust of a cooling planet in a rather odd solar system, where most of the planets are either too hot or too cold to support life, and our own is, in large part, too hot or too cold to support it either, and where the remainder lives on a climatic knife edge, and always has.  . . .We didn’t know that matters of this kind, that earthquakes, waves, disasters were not punishments.  It was quite possible to listen to those, and even to believe those, who thought they could explain. (video here)

Hitchens’ narrative has been told by others.   The most persuasive case for this idea is found in the work of  E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, fathers of contemporary anthropology.   Both Tylor and Frazer hypothesized that ancient people, being baffled and terrified by the natural world (e.g. earthquakes, floods, fires, volcanic eruptions, disease, and death), developed a belief in the supernatural to account for the vicissitudes of life.

Specifically, Tylor’s hypothesis was that primitive man conjured up the notion of a soul.  The soul explained the difference between dead and live bodies, and explained dreams (where we seemingly left our bodies).  Primitives then inferred that all objects, not just human bodies, were inhabited by souls.  This view, that all objects are peopled with spirits, Tylor called Animism.   Frazer further hypothesized that mankind had gone through stages of intellectual development.  Animism developed into magic, magic into religion, and religion into science.  Early man, being ignorant of the natural world, was an Animist, believing the world to be peopled by souls.  As man’s understanding of the world increased so did the complexity and accuracy of his theoretical models and methodologies.  Primitive man did the best he could, intellectually and technologically, with what he had.

Following Tylor and Frazer, contemporary intellectuals like Hitchens argue that we now have science, and so, should give up religion, as we gave up animism and magic.  Science, on the Hitchens narrative, has superseded religion.  It does a better job of explaining the natural world.

Consider a few rituals and practices regarded as religious or spiritual, rituals Tylor himself used in support of his hypothesis.  Consider the ancient Roman, who would stand over his dying kinsman, or the Seminole Indian, who would place a child over his dying mother, so that the child (or kinsman) might take-in his mothers’ (or kinsman’s) spirit.

In such cases aren’t we presented with a primitive conception of the soul, and of biology?  The primitive, whether Roman or Seminole, believed some vapor-like substance left the body after death.  By placing a living person over a dying person, they believed they could catch this vapor-like substance (the soul) and contain in within their own bodies.  Certainly, we don’t do such things anymore.  And why, on the Hitchens hypothesis?  Because we know that there are no souls to catch.  We have opened the human body and found no soul.

Consider a practice such as dancing for rain.  We know, now, that rain can’t be conjured by dancing.  Scientists have revealed to us the process of evaporation and condensation.  The more science advances, the more religion recedes.  The more we know of the natural world, the less there is for religion to do.   Religious belief is a primitive science, an inadequate hypothesis, and should be abandoned.

(In part II, I will evaluate this narrative and hypothesis)

The conclusion:

If you want your children to be happy adults and even happy children — and what parent does not? — minimize the excitement in their lives. The more excitement, the less happy they are likely to be.

The premises:

In both adults and children, one can either pursue excitement or pursue happiness, but one cannot do both. If you pursue excitement, you will not attain happiness. If you pursue happiness, you will still experience some moments of excitement, but you will attain happiness only if happiness, not excitement, is your goal.

The demonstration:

It is excitement that people seek when engaging in any destructive addictive behaviors. Excitement is a major part of what people seek in doing drugs, in having sex with multiple partners, in gambling (from slot machines to risky stock purchases) or in having an extra-marital affair. And even for many criminals, excitement is a major lure of criminal behavior.. . .Today’s young people have the ability to experience excitement more than any generation in history. Outside of school, excitement is available almost 24/7. MTV is exciting (MTV has done far more damage to this generation than has the tobacco industry); video games are exciting; the nearly all-pervasive sexual stimuli are exciting; MySpace (largely a human cesspool) is exciting; getting tattooed is exciting; piercings are exciting; many pictures and videos on the Internet are exciting.. . .many children today would refuse to watch a black and white film — “It’s boring,” they say. They would even refuse to watch many of the greatest color films if they lacked the amount of excitement — usually meaning violence but also frequently meaning foul language and sexual content — that they are now so used to seeing in films. Plot development is “boring”; blowing up people and buildings is exciting.. . .That is why the frequent complaint of “I’m bored” is often a sign of a jaded child, i.e., a child addicted to excitement and therefore incapable of enjoying life when not being excited.. . .Real life, let alone daily life, will seem so boring to them that they will not be able to enjoy it. And more than a few of them will opt for lives of constant excitement, often in ways destructive to themselves and others.

Slash on Guns N’ Roses’ search for a new drummer:

In the back of my mind I thought, “Sure, anybody can play drums.”  Right . . .the three of us thought that finding a replacement would be easy considering that our songs were all pretty straight-ahead 4/4 rock rhythms with a few fancy time changes – how hard could that be?  . . .After a few horrible days of trying to play with uselessly inappropriate candidates, though, we realized the depth of our naivete.  The way a drummer plays involves such a personal feel for the rhythm and inflections on the beat that affect the entire vibe of the song – and the entire band for which he keeps time. (Slash, p. 305)

And then the impact it had on the band:

“Knocking on Heaven’s Door” was also the first song that we could listen to and get an idea of what the band sounded like with our new drummer.  It came out great, but there was a definite difference in the overall feel of the new Guns from the old Guns.  We had lost a little bit of the mayhem and punk rock, that raw chaotic, seat-of-the-pants feel.   Instead we sounded more epic and and solid and huge.  That was a good or a bad thing depending on who you asked. (Slash, p. 311, 312)

Whenever a guitarist (or any other musician) comes to see the light, I love it.  I like Slash.

* * * * *

I’ve been drumming since the age of six.  Most drummers I’ve met don’t hear songs. Rather, they hear drums.   They don’t play with other musicians, they play to other musicians.   Alex Van Halen gets it:

When Ginger Baker asked what the drummer’s role was in a band, he said it was ‘to make the other musicians sound good’. He didn’t mean it as an arrogant statement, but I know now what he meant. You want to fit in with the music. You could be a Buddy Rich, but you can’t do all those things when you’re playing a simple song. You have to play what’s appropriate for the tune. Jeff Porcaro understood that. He knew how to make things move without sticking out as though he was trying to solo (Modern Drummer, March 2008, 66).

Most drummers (the good ones) I’ve met also obsess about such things as tempo and time (among other things). However, such obsessions are misguided. Again, Alex Van Halen gets it:

The idea of trying to create strict metronomic time is nonsense. When you come to a part that needs a moment, you take a breath and slow down. Then you ramp it up and bring up the volume. When I listen to our early records, the time fluctuates, because the music breathes. Instead of having it in a box, it’s an organic thing. Most of it you don’t even notice because you’re caught up in the music (ibid, 70).

I’ve never been a big Van Halen fan, but Alex is an amazing drummer.   Here he is at his best.   Here is my favorite Van Halen tune.

I did too.

How about you?

Here is a good review of the move via John Nolte.

Here are some thoughts about the attraction of vampires:

The vampire myth is all wonky today because at root vampires are anti-Christians and without a fundamental cultural understanding and appreciation for the goods of Christianity, there’s no real understanding of what vampires really are.

Here are some thoughts about the attraction of Twilight’s vampires:

Bella = every teenage girl who is told by EVERYONE that sex/sin is the way to personal flourishing — including her mother, her father, her brothers, and her best friends. She is no where safe from pressure to have sex. Enter Edward.  . . .teenage girls today are desperate for protection from the sexual predators and enablers of sexual predators that surround them. They all want an Edward.