War Stories of the ER

I always had to check the pockets of my scrubs before I put them in the laundry.  Inevitably I would leave a roll of tape or IV tubing in my scrubs, especially on a busy night shift.  By 7:00 am, you're thinking more about your head hitting the pillow than what the hell was in your pockets when you make the sleepy drive back home in the morning.  

Your brain gets numb after dealing with 8 trauma alerts in a 12 hour shift.  The trauma surgeon is the juggler in charge.  It's their job to mitigate and assess risk, prioritizing the most critical from the least.  Not to mention performing mentally demanding surgery on top of that, at 3:30 in the morning and they've only had 6 hours sleep in the past 36.  Trauma surgeons are fucking crazy.  They have one of the most mentally and potentially emotionally stressful jobs, and work anywhere from 60 to 100 hours a week.  They don't do it for the money, but the adrenalin and passion for what they do.  But after being up for 48 hours straight, it becomes a grind like anything else.  

They dedicate at least 12 years of their life, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, to do a job that pays 26 times less than your average corporate CEO.   Consequently nurses and all other medical staff really don't get paid what they're worth.  Six of the trauma alerts are from a bad car accident.  The other two are gunshot wounds, one self inflicted and the other probably gang or drug related. To give you some perspective, the trauma bay is designed to handle two trauma patients at a time.  I can handle four in a pinch.  To accommodate 8, you start cannibalizing normal rooms and converting them into trauma rooms.  The rest of the emergency room comes to a grinding halt as critical patients require double or triple the staff to monitor and stabilize.  It was times like these that the team you worked with became close to you.  You had to learn to anticipate their moves, react and work as a team under conditions that were less than ideal and where time was short.  

An an EMT, part of my job was to anticipate the equipment and setup the docs would need to handle for whatever comes through the door, often with little more than 20 minutes notice.  In many ways it operated very much like a little platoon.  The trauma surgeon gives the orders, the nurses and medical technicians carry them out,  the social workers, x-ray technicians, and respiratory teams all had to maneuver around each other and the patient at just the right time to get the job done.  The trauma surgeon decides who is the most critical and needs to go to imaging first (usually CT scan), or if they're really fucked up (they're going to die in the next 30 minutes without surgical intervention), they go straight to the operation room.  In cases where we're handling eight trauma alerts at once, it becomes a cacophony of organized chaos.  Trauma doctors love that shit, but I suppose that's what makes them good at their job.  

Patients that would come in got assigned a number on something called the Glasgows scale.  Any number less than 12 and it's a good bet at least one of them will need a chest tube because they have a punctured lung and it needs to be drained before they drown in their own blood.  Trauma surgeons could be picky on the size of the chest tube they preferred and each one had their preference.  It was our job to learn the little preferences of each surgeon, some preferred big chest tubes while others preferred smaller, some liked to get a CAT scan first, while others preferred just a chest x-ray before going to surgery.  When they say medicine is an art, this is what they mean.  Medicine is an art in very much the same way Sun Tzu calls war an art.  In emergency medicine, your enemy is death and it's your job to outmaneuver the various ways death can take the patient until they're stabilized.

 
I always found a strange sense of purpose in knowing that the only thing keeping someone from crossing into the arms of death was some idiot like me, getting paid $12 an hour to repeatedly squeeze a rubber bag of air into someone's lungs, because all the available mechanized respirators are in use because the hospital budget got slashed last fiscal quarter.  Great, here I am stuck in a room with the suicide guy, pumping air into his lungs that he tried to deprive himself of only hours before, waiting for a respirator to be freed up from another floor.  The trauma surgeon decided he was brain dead from the mechanism of injury alone (a bullet to the brain), and we were just keeping him alive until next of kin could be notified.  It's difficult not to become emotionally jaded after doing this job for years, and the medical staff had their own unique black sense of humor that I came to embrace. We would pass around emails entitled "Suicide: Doing it Right the First Time" listing the various ways one could end their life using good sound medical techniques that were by comparison, far easier and much less painful than using something as sloppy as a gun. Medical staff all have one thing in common: they're mostly overworked, underpaid and have finite resources.  Suicide attempts would inevitably earn the scorn of medical staff who had to delegate precious resources to someone who didn't even want to be alive.  The first dozen suicide patients you take care of, you have sympathy and empathy still left in the tank.  When that number goes over 100, you start wondering if you're just wasting your time.  Which is the perfect opportunity for a poop joke

  This might seem abhorrently inappropriate, but dark humor is a common way to cope in otherwise fucked up situations, and it's probably the norm in every emergency department.  

The Night

That night still haunts me.  She walked into my room and demanded she be allowed to get into my bed.  I told her she needed to go back to her own bed and stop being so mad.  When she refused, I locked the door to my room and hid inside.  She yelled my name for a while and pounded on the door.  Then I heard a noise like she fell.  I came out of my room and noticed she was laying on the floor, her eyes closed.  I went over and asked if she was okay.  She didn't answer.  I grabbed my phone and said I was calling 911. She suddenly opened her eyes and said "No, don't call them."  I propped her up and told her to get back in bed, and she did.  I went back into my room and closed the door.  Over the next three hours, she would bang on my door and yell my name to let her in.  I yelled back "get back in bed and go to sleep!"  Eventually, she stopped banging on my door and yelling died down to a plea of "Brian, please help me" before I heard silence.  Those were her last words.

  

Maryssa had a long battle with depression and alcohol.  She had lived with me for only three months, but she told me that she spent most of her adult life in a state of depression and cycle of alcohol abuse as the only thing that worked for her.  Depression was something that we both shared and we talked about a lot, but hers was of a type that would not relent for a moment.  In Maryssa's world, depression was the default mental state, a perpetual mental storm that you could see in her eyes, churning constantly as she suffered silently.  The days the clouds would lift were few and far between, but when they did, you could see her inner beauty shining bright as a full moon in the clear night sky.  She was a beautiful person, and everyone she came into contact with knew that immediately when she talked to them.  The disease had prevented her from seeing that about herself as it slowly consumed who she was until only pain and frustration remained. 

Maryssa and I shared our frustrations with the meaningless cruelties of life.  We shared the lack of belief that any one thing or anyone was in control of how much suffering was in the world.  We talked about how when you read the pages of history, millions of people have been born without the faintest hope of ever having a better life.  From the concentration camps of Auschwitz, to the modern wars of today where countless children and adults aspire to nothing more than the stability and sweet release of death when daily life becomes unbearably hard and miserable, for whatever reason.    

For Maryssa, staus quo, much less joy wasn't possible for very long.  I remember walking on the beach with her on a beautiful warm afternoon, there was a sea breeze we and we were walking across the beach to the lighthouse.  I was concerned about her depression and I wanted to show her life could be beautiful.  

In moments like these you wouldn't see the smile.  I don't think she found the outside world very interesting anymore. Maryssa got the most joy from making sure others were happy. She told me about her friends who were going through rough times and she tried to cheer them up.  I think in a weird way she was trying to compensate for what she couldn't do herself. This is how I knew Maryssa was someone worth loving and it's why I tried to save her.  

Sometimes love is not enough, or at least the love I had for her wasn't enough. But the truth is many other people loved and tried to love her.  There was a deep part of Maryssa who wanted that love. She just couldn't find a way to receive it and connect it with who she was in the end.  That's what depression does.  I had a very misplaced belief that I could convince her life was worth living where psychiatrists had failed.   Where her family and professional help had failed, I thought I was going to succeed. Only in retrospect do I realize how ignorant and foolish this thought was.  Only in this moment do I realize I was in love with her more than I admitted to myself in that moment.  But I knew one thing for sure. I was going to try my god damn hardest to keep her alive. 

Even though I am not religious, I can see why being religious is the norm rather than the exception.  Our own awareness of the fragility of life, and the knowledge and fear that our lives can end at any point presents a clear and present danger to immediate survival.  It is an existential problem that must be dealt with at some point, or it becomes a feedback loop of anxiety and worry that can lead to suicide.  Nietzsche neatly summed up this fear in a sentence: 

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

I could imagine the very first of humans must have struggled with their own meaning and what it all meant, and why they were able to think of such questions as they stared into night, with only their camp fire to keep the wolves at bay.  Like fighting a war on two fronts, the existential internal darkness of the question of "why?" is always there, waiting like an internal predator watching its prey for any sign of weakness.  I think those who struggle with depression (at least from my own experience) have a louder than average voice of doubt and existential fear that our lives don't really matter.  But I think this fear exists in everyone to some degree and we all have different coping mechanisms for how to deal with it.   

I don't know and I don't think anyone can know, but I think this is the reason we began telling stories. Stories provide continuity and provide a deep connection to the foundations of those who came before us, holding some degree of wisdom for how to wrestle with these types of questions for which there are no clear answers.  It's so much easier to believe from a very early age that we were created by a loving maker, or at least an all knowing one, and that everything is working out exactly as it should.  While I admit that this is always a logical possibility that some greater force or intelligence explains all this, for many of us who are limited by the faculties of reason and standards of evidence of what our own internal feelings say about the world and the people in it, this story fails to deliver on both a practical and emotional level. 

We're not children anymore.

In short, there are those of us who cannot live their life based on what we know, or think is not true.  Survival depends very much on the individual's ability to psychologically persevere in the face of hardship and absolute horror at what this world can throw at you.

For those of us who create and give our own lives meaning, this is an ongoing process that never really stops.  We are a bit like sharks, always moving forward as a matter of survival, swimming through oceans of baited hooks just to process the oxygen of meaning. Even when unencumbered by mental illness, this is not an easy task. Just keep breathing.  

Severe mental illness makes mental breathing impossible.  It is no different than a disease that robs your ability to process oxygen.  In the case of depression, it lessens or entirely robs your ability to feel satisfaction, joy, love and happiness when you should.  Even though mental illness has been around for probably as long as people, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of its effective treatment or even knowing what's really going on in the mind of someone who is in the deepest pit of depression. Modern psychiatry, even at its best, can be entirely ineffective in the most severe cases. The hardest part is when when you watch someone slowly suffer, knowing that nothing in the known world can change what they're feeling, and knowing there's nothing you can do to help them. 

What do you do when you've exhausted the options of mental health facilities, family, friends and finally telling the person to leave because it's too painful?  Nobody likes to talk about incurable mental illness because on some level, a part of us believes we might fall into the same mental trap they have, if only by being around them.  Conventional wisdom is not far off the mark here, as modern studies have shown that who we are and how we feel is a function of the people we surround ourselves with.  When someone is constantly depressed, that impacts everyone around them negatively, especially over increasingly longer periods of time.  They might become intolerable to live with, and the non-affected have to begin bargaining with themselves over how much they're willing to put up with until their loved one gets better.  The sad truth is for many, there is no end in sight and they may not ever get better.  The stigma that families and friends have to face is what to do with loved ones for whom all conventional and possibly non-conventional therapy has failed, and the only recourse is to let them go. 

The hardest part of letting someone go is knowing that maybe 5, 10, or 100 years from now, we could have cured them with a pill or with a routine procedure.  I keep thinking of how frustrated people must have been 200 years ago, when their loved ones might have developed an infection from a common wound.  Instead of taking some antibiotics and getting better, they had to sit there and wait for their husband, wife or child, and watch their loved ones slowly watch them as they faded into the the embrace of death.     

You can blame the gods.  You can blame Man. Or you can blame nature. My money is on the completely impersonal nature of the universe and its lack of giving a shit.  Sometimes shit just happens and there's no good answer to the question of why, other than a purely mechanical and entirely meaningless chain of events happened a long time ago that led to the current situation.  This is the same explanation that would serve if an asteroid took us out tomorrow.  There are some things we have completely no control over. 

Rest in peace, Maryssa.  You were loved.  

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

The purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. 

Reverse Engineering Truth Models

I always found it a bit odd that most articles and arguments I read do not come with a disclaimer or transparency statement regarding the philosophical baggage the author is dragging into a debate.   Claims of truth, in whatever I was reading, often ignore or sidestep the question of how the author is gleaning the truth in general.  What biases and philosophical baggage is the author packing into their assertions?  When a politician makes a claim regarding the economy, I immediately want to know where they're coming from so I can evaluate not just their specific truth claim, but the process by which they're making their claim. 

Trying to answer questions like these involves reading between the proverbial lines, and trying to discern things like the intent and meaning of the author strictly by their use of language.  It's often a tricky proposition.  There are always philosophical caveats when claiming to understand anything with a reasonable degree of certainty when reading into the context of language.  

The exercise of trying to extract or read into the words of a story can be very much like a cross between psychoanalysis and trying to predict the future by reading tea leaves.  Dead authors who never commented on the intent of their work would probably find the academic field is especially rife with all kinds of wild speculations regarding their "real" intent, as post doctoral students crank out thousands of pages into literary journals, publishing their carefully cultivated theories, or be doomed to perish in the wasteland of academic and professional impotence.  

Some academics might object that I'm using an economic and materialistic literary lense to evaluate and summarily write off a large portion of what they see as a legitimate invesitgation and analysis of the truth that makes up the bedrock of most arts and science departments.  The short answer is yes, I am.  While I agree that literary theories can sometimes yield useful intuition pumps, they fall drastically short in providing useful epistemic models in their attempts to discover the multitude of hidden true meanings within the same fucking text, that has been analyzed and deconstructed a thousand times, in a thousand different ways.  

There are many other good reasons we must look critically at carefullly preeened truth models that can only exist when we tacitly agree to accepting a certain level of philosophical bullshit in discourse.  There is a staggering range and depth of philosophically broken truth models available for purchase, as societies become increasingly more complex and interconnected, the bullshit gets deeper.  

Psychologists and sociologists might classify most of the highly specialzed academic truth models as part of the normal range of mental schemas, that have simply been engineered, tweaked, socially elevated and peer reviewed to the status of literary and philosophical theories that generate the requisite amount of bullshit.   

In journalism, you're taught to temper your biases and to keep a story balanced by incorporating different viewpoints of the same set of facts, often by citing multiple sources. The idea behind this approach rests upon the agreed assumption that the truth of a story is independent of the interpretation of the story itself.  It incorporates elements of third party verification to ensure the story can hold up to future scrutiny, and to standards of evaluation that we agree are meaningful. Standards like logical consistency and evidential support that have proven to be accurate in forming the knowledge base by which we literally bet our lives and societies on.  Much like in politics, in philosophy, voting with your feet and experiencing the results is the only useful way of evaluating the efficacy of our belief systems.

Whenever you read an article, or evaluate an assertion or argument that claims to support X, there is often an epistemic pattern that can be identified in how these claims are made.    

From what I've observed, most claims of truth in public discourse fall into at least one of the following schemas that dominate public discourse.  With the broader acceptance of psychological compartmentalization, an often confusing multitude of schemas counterintuitively exist in the same individual/discourse, depending on how and when they're applied.  The complexties and sublties of individual and social psychology play a large role into how these schemas develop and get expressed.   

They can either give rise to nuanced and carefully thought out worldviews, or more often than not, end up a confusing mess of contradiction and disingenuous assertions.  It is important that the author defines the epistemic boundaries to which their claim of truth is being made, in proportion to the scope of the assertion.  In short, extraordinary claims do not just require extraordinary evidence, but must also be coherent with the rest of what we know.   

Truth Parrots 

Truth parroting is a name I've given to those who interpret and believe almost everything they read and hear by another authority. These schemas cause individuals to parrot back information to others with little to no individual analysis. Thoughts of checking alternative sources or committing any resources to fact checking or alternative lines of thinking don't enter into the truth equation.  Post hoc reasoning (after the fact) is pretty ubiquitous because it's easy (read: lazy).  They help create the circle jerks and echo chambers of whoever or whatever is weaving the narrative that's already been accepted as true.  Correct easy answers are emphasized, questioning the questions or the authority who defines the questions is strongly discouraged using this model.      

Examples:  

Your crazy nextdoor neighboor who is always trying to convince you Obama is a secret Muslim, or Jesus is the only way to salvation. Or your other crazy neighboor who is trying to convince you all corporations are all out to kill you and vaccinations cause autism.      

Truth Trolls

Truth trolls are a growing demographic, mostly as a result of a post-religious world where disenfranchised believers are left with a bad taste their mouth from being disillusioned. They see all claims of truth as equally meaningless, and all information exists in a kind of solipsistic mind fuck where you can choose your own adventure after you've become disillusioned.  This group is a recently growing cultural phenomena that has moved into void where religion used to occupy.  The guiding principle is the truth isn't something you'll ever have access to anyhow.  The question of meaning is all that really exists, and that's up you and you alone to determine what that is.  Correct answers are completely dependent upon your "personal reality", and questioning the questions or authority of the narrative is zealously encouraged, often to the point of absurdity.

Examples: Political pundits, entertainers, comics, academic writers, existentialists.       

Truth Police      

This group falls into this category are mostly employed and paid to analyze and deliver whatever information they're given under certain rules of engagement.  They create the narrative by which we get our media and provide the authoritative mindset by which information ought to be interpreted and processed.  It is their job to disseminate and inform the public in a way that's socially acceptable and codified by rules of conduct according to the ontological baggage they're bringing to the table. They invoke authority when convenient, but can delve into the abstract design space of philosophy when confronted by academics with varying degrees of success.

Examples:  TV and news journalists, religious leaders, heads of state, scientists and some philosophers.

Truth Miners

Truth mining is a term that describes the process by which one determines the truth status of a possibile truth within the design space.  The design space is simply the mathematical representation of all possible truths compared to the potential number of possible falsehoods. That is, we assume the set number of false claims vastly outnumber the set of actual truths that correspond and desribe reality, which we test to the point of pragmatic ubiquitous consistency via independent confirmation.

Stated differently, the major premise of the design space is the number of possible truths far outnumber actual truths instantiated within the universe or multiverse.  This means any random claim is likely to be false rather than true, given we agree that possibilities and actualities occupy different categorical states of existence.  Sure, it's easy to imagine a unicorn in your mind, but we agree that's an entirely different category of existence when we talk about actual unicorns that exist the same way horses do.  

Examples:  mathematicians, physicists, philosophers

Consilience

It is my assertion that the truth can best be discerned when you take the patterns of historical truth and incorporate this data within contemporary methods which yield a high degree of accuracy given a clear scope.  In short, what is true for the caveperson ought to be true for the post-human in terms of ontological consistency in what we collectively value as true belief. 

This is the meeting point of where abstract thought becomes solidfied into our personal lives and defines who we are.  It is what makes us unique among the other animals in that we can have some degree of conscious control in how we evolve and grow as a species by stipulating the standard by which we determine the truth within the social contract by which we agree to live by, and define the multitude of standards by which we measure the status of all truth claims. 

In short, we have to agree imaginations of the truth and true belief have a useful existential delineation that facilitates understanding across the board.  In more simplistic terms, what we believe is true now is amenable to new information as we progress and learn. When debate and discourse allows for any claim to be accepted as "true" without stating why it's true, we've already agreed to swallow an existential poison pill that blurs the line between false and true belief.  

The consequences of accepting this position are disastrous on the social contract and corrosive to society at large.

Religious Pathogens and Vaccination

There are billions of people who have the very fervent belief that when they die, they will continue to "live on" in the afterlife, rewarded or punished for their deeds. This general belief is actually a very common one that approximately 90% of the world shares. The only thing that keeps most people from acting recklessly on this belief is a combination of instinct (self-preservation) and a more benign irrational belief that they must appease God with various kind acts while they're alive, before they punch their ticket to see God. The reality is anyone who accepts the belief of an afterlife could potentially be a suicidal bomber or terrorist given the right environment to grow in.  I felt the need to address this issue in light of current events where religion is again playing an increasingly destructive role in the world today, especially in our political system.

For all its other positive associations, and all the good things religion has done in service of humanity (religiously inspired artwork and charity), there is a much darker side that has always plagued its history. When it comes to religion, there is an undeniable correlation in its use, and the harm it has helped to perpetuate in the form of social and political violence. The usual reaction to this statement is usually along the lines of "That's not the fault of religion, that's the fault of people!" I would say this view of religious protectionism is not only completely wrong and undeserved, but entirely backwards. All beliefs, be they religious, political, cultural, mathematical, or pop cultural, can be looked at as cultural organisms that literally acquire people, in much the same way a virus infects a host. Seem far fetched?

Asking the question "how beliefs acquire people" actually turns out to be viable model when you compare it to how organisms proliferate based on genetic advantages that have resulted from mutation and natural selection. The only difference being that we're not looking at genes, but ideas or memes, and how they replicate and acquire people over time. It's counter-intuitive approach reveals some startling new discoveries about the nature of beliefs and how they affect us, rather than how we affect them. As individuals, we tend to give far too much credit for the amount "control" we have over our own beliefs. Yet if we did have complete control over how beliefs and cultural conditioning affects us, none of the following would be true:

1. Advertisers spend millions of dollars a year, to get most of us to spend billions on their products. Advertising works.
2. Songs, slogans, and certain words get "stuck" in our head despite our best efforts to not think of them
3. Emotions and thoughts we don't particularly like continue to plague our consciousness, long after the event that caused them has occurred
4. Repeating something over and over tends to reinforce its truth status, even if we know what we're being told is false.
5. Beliefs and experiences we have as children have a long-lasting impact on us as adults, without our explicit knowledge over how they affect us.

All of these examples are cross-culturally true, no matter where you go in the world. And they all point to the fact that individuals are not in complete control of what they think, DESPITE our intuitions to the contrary. It is this realization that is perhaps the most important in de-bugging our minds of pernicious beliefs. The mind is for many people, a mysterious black box not to be opened. Typically, we're not taught why our minds work the way they do. The reality is if we all had a general idea of how the mind processes information, and how beliefs are programmed into us, we'd be much better off in fending off the ones that do us harm.

The fact is most of us have very little in depth knowledge about our own brains work, just like the vast majority of us have only a working knowledge about how our air conditioners, cars and computers work. However, in the case of our own brains, it's even worse. The brain was originally designed to figure out the natural world, and to communicate with other people for our basic survival needs. It wasn't at all designed to figure out how its own processes work, or things like quantum mechanics, the Internet, religion, or a million other things that are relatively new cultural products.

In fact, one of the biggest tricks our mind plays on us is the idea that we know a lot more information than we actually do. In vision studies, the brain "fills in" missing information, creating color and pattern where none actually exist. When a limb is amputated, the brain can still "feel" the limb is actually there, and even feel pain in the missing limb. In eyewitness testimonies, the brain can create memories that are entirely false, often convicting an innocent person as a consequence. Even our own intuitions about the nature of other people can be false, as we can sometimes misplace trust in individuals who have not proven themselves to begin with. The point I'm making here is simple; ignoring how our minds work has real consequences in our everyday lives, and aren't just limited to the realm of academic science. Learning how our own minds can fool ourselves is a very unsettling and offensive prospect to a great deal of people. It contradicts strongly with established traditional religious beliefs about the divinity and perfection of the soul and about God-given free will.

Like the storyteller who weaves a fantastic and fascinating myth that leads the reader to believe in their own superiority or group superiority over another, this ability has led many to prefer a comfortable and culturally reinforced illusion, so long as it has some kind of perceived survival or advantage value. Specifically, the belief that some aspect of ourselves, or the external world, is inherently immune to the rules that apply to everything else is perhaps the most destructive (yet socially acceptable) myth of all time. It is this facet of religion that has exploited individuals to political and cultural ends to take up acts of horrific violence. Political and military forces utterly convinced of their moral righteousness always claim religion for their side. What does this say about the nature of religion itself? What does it say about the religions that exist today and how they affect us? More importantly, how can this information help us prevent the spread of toxic beliefs?

Killing the host has certainly been the traditional way that we (as a species) have handled these kinds of destructive beliefs, but the method of killing the believer to extinguish the belief is about as inhumane and abhorrent as killing everyone who has a trasmissiable disease in order to stop its spread. The crux of the real problem lies at at the belief itself. The moral and truth status that religious beliefs occupy is still one of privilege. Religious beliefs carry a special adaptation that makes them very different and consequently much more dangerous than non-religious beliefs. This is the culturally perceived status of moral infallibility and their culturally regarded status as somehow deserving of unquestioned respect.

In this new "war of ideas", the only way to "win" is by exposing how our own minds can trick us, and consequently learning how other minds can do the same. Getting "under the hood" of mental manipulation, where religion and politics are the main transgressors, is the first step in breaking the spell of indoctrination. The only real solution is education and prevention before the mind becomes infected. The only way to prevent these ideas from taking root in fertile young minds is inoculating them with knowledge. Much like computers are now installed with basic anti-virus software, comparative religion and the history of religion needs to be mainstreamed, required for every school child. Basic information theory needs to be taught, in how the brain processes beliefs. The connections of how all religion becomes boot-strapped to politics and to cultural movements need to be put on full display, as the mind tricks used by politicians and religious leaders must become transparent.

There would likely be quite a bit of resistance to this approach, as this kind of exposure to the inner workings of our mind and to the nature of religious and political beliefs could upset the existing balance of power. Fact of the matter is this knowledge would not only target fanatical harmful religions, it would affect all religions to some extent. The reason Americans are so reluctant to talk about the problems of Islam isn't because they're overly sensitive about being politically correct. It's because they'd have to address the fundamental problems with their own religion to be consistent and fair. Debunking the foundational beliefs of Islam would also be carried over to Christianity, as debunking the irrationality of an afterlife would cure aspects of religious fanaticism on both ends.

A Brief History of Religious Belief

One important point to keep in mind is there is not a single religion today that has remained the same since its inception. All religions, regardless of which one you pick, have evolved over time, some for thousands of years.

They all started off as folk belief, until slowly being cultivated by society into more organized and useful forms. The belief that any particular religion existing today was the first religion to come into being is not a statement of fact, but a belief steeped in religious myth.

Religious writings that pre-date the existence of today’s religions are perhaps the best evidence that literal creation stories that depict a particular religion spontaneously appearing out of nowhere to be pure fiction. We know from studying ancient writings and pictorial depictions that the very first religious beliefs were much simpler and vastly different than the ones we have today. We can also trace the lineages of today's religions and see how they evolved from earlier versions. This exposes the true origin of religious beliefs, how they all started out and slowly changed over time.

Before organized religion, folk belief centered around whatever affected the survival of the tribe. Supernatural characteristics were given to things like animals and plants, aspects of nature that were sources of fortune or destruction, and dead ancestors who passed on critical knowledge to the tribe were all worshiped. These were the first religious beliefs that conferred a survival advantage, a very probable reason why religion has become universally pervasive.

Simple paintings that are tens of thousands of years old that pre-date all existing religions do not depict complicated creation stories. You will not find the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, or the story of Genesis painted on any cave wall. The most ancient religious beliefs took place well before the invention of written language. The exact time of birth and the exact identity of the first religious beliefs will probably always remain somewhat of a mystery because the oral history and language it was first written in has long been lost to passage of time.

As culture and language developed, religious beliefs increased in their complexity. The ones that caught on and amassed many followers, created houses of worship and had great influence on early culture and became the great-grandparents of the religions we all know today. No matter your particular religious creed or belief, this is the truth of how all modern religion came to be. History also tells us that shortly after the first religion was born, it began to change and evolve.

New religions are rarely different from their parent religions, starting off as small cults, and differ usually on small doctrinal issues. But these small details, over the course of time, gave rise to entirely new religions. New interpretations of old doctrine and religious texts are largely what create new denominational splits from existing orthodox religions. The relation between religion and political power also cannot be ignored. The two evolved together as religion still has a strong influence in who holds, and wields political power over the people.

For example, the three most prominent religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism all have religious texts written in such a way that where any number of interpretations can be inferred, even within their historical time period. All have dozens, if not hundreds of denominations that all claim special access to the most correct interpretation. Religious institutions have to carry out a very delicate balancing act where they only allow carefully selected contemporary interpretations, while carefully guarding against those which might lead to political and social upheaval.

Anyone who picks up the Bible or Koran with no previous historical knowledge quickly realizes it is by no means an easy read, or obviously relevant to the issues of contemporary life. They have two options to resolve this dilemma. They can go to school and learn to read it within its historical context, (something almost none us has the time or inclination to do) or they can let someone else do it for them. The traditional option has been to rely on pastors, priests, rabbis and mullahs who claim special dominion on matters of religious importance, interpreting religious texts for their followers and instructing people on how to act on their religious beliefs.

When there are two or more mutually exclusive interpretations by religious authorities, it’s racked up to human error depending on which side of the religious fence you sit on. Rarely does the inerrancy of the text itself ever come into question. Religious authorities try and carefully regulate the process of exegesis and control what gets official approval. However, as literacy has become more common, religious translations of holy texts have became ubiquitous. It’s been a losing battle for many organized religions ever since. Existing orthodox interpretations no longer sufficed as the public gained more and more access to the source material. Discontent and political power struggles were inevitable, and many religious schisms were the result.

As church leaders dealt with this loss of power, more flexible religious institutions took their place, trying to preserve the intact status of the religious texts as holy and inerrant. This makes sense in light of when you displace one form of leadership with another; it’s much easier and less costly to fire the management and blame them for screwing up, as opposed to dumping the source material and starting from scratch. Throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater would undermine the complete authority of the religion itself.

However, as the world of business shows us, a company can remain afloat even if their product is defective. It's all about marketing. The same is true of religion. Ultimately, when the product fails to connect with consumers and what you’re selling as inerrant authority falls flat on its face in the light of public scandal and scrutiny, a compromise has to be made. Unquestioned authority among orthodox religions has been trending downwards, while individually driven authority has been on the rise. Nevertheless, this new independent freedom to interpret a holy text in accordance to one's preferences has its own cost. It's lead to an alarmingly high number of new religious strains, some of which are particularly exploitative and caustic to human life and civilized society.

The only solution to this problem lies in addressing the problem of the text itself and in de-mystifying its central claims of inerrancy. In contrast to religious texts, secular texts are openly and consistently exposed to criticism and scrutiny, while their religious counterparts are vehemently sheltered from the same treatment. Why is this necessarily the case? There is an implicit double standard here that is rarely and only briefly addressed in religious doctrine and in the halls of churches, mosques and synagogues. Why is it we can question secular claims on every level of validity, even to the point of absurdity, but we have to accept central religious claims on faith alone? Religious texts and the beliefs based on their authority have a kind of diplomatic immunity conferred onto them, when secular claims enjoy no such benefit.

The explanation for this can be found in the history of religious beliefs, and how culture has colluded in helping to shelter religion from the peering microscope of contemporary rational inquiry. Culture has co-evolved with religion, and for a long time, the success of one meant the success of the other. They have survived together for thousands of years, and many people are highly reluctant to question, much less give up an old cultural saw that at the very least has deep sentimental value. Many would perceive any criticism of their religious beliefs as a personal attack against themselves, and not surprisingly, this kind of aggressive attitude towards religious skepticism is a large creedal chunk of the fastest growing and most dangerous religions today.

Along with many other self-protection mechanisms, it is these kinds of features in religious beliefs that give it its "Teflon" coating of incorrigibility, not allowing it to be scrutinized or held to the same standards that we hold to all other claims, especially to those which have a similar social and moral impact. It's accepted as perfectly okay for religious and political leaders to make their case by invoking religion in their emotionally intuitive, historically inaccurate statements that hold little, if any truth value. So long as they can pluck the heart-strings of the crowd, nobody much cares about the truth of what they're saying. Ironically, non-religious beliefs are held to much more stringent and critical standards.

Religion today still enjoys this type of reality shelter. It doesn't have to appeal to any rigorously tested standards, provide objective physical evidence, or use statistical analysis to support its claims. Religion is somehow exempt from all of these requirements, and this attitude needs to be changed. We are now seeing, once again, the violent end-result of this rational exemption policy in the form of the most virulent and destructive forms of religion.

Religious Evolution and The God Meme

It is important to note that some religions, most recently Catholicism, have engineered ways to partially avoid the conflict between reason and religion. Instead of requiring that a Catholic priest must believe certain claims in the Bible to be literally true, legal language has now been inserted to get around the problem. A Catholic need only profess their belief as true, where it used to be that you either believed it was true or you didn’t. The actual truth of the belief itself has been quietly swept under the carpet, left up to the individual to decide.

This seeming inadequacy is not to be misconstrued as inconsequential or easily dismissed. On the contrary, it is the mark of a successful religion that adapts to new information which contradicts and undercuts previous doctrine. Nowhere is this more demonstrated than in the basic concept of God. If God were an organism, its evolutionary path and rate of mutation would be staggering. Starting from the earliest versions of God, perhaps as the personification of seasonal storms, to highly specific, anthropomorphized disciplinarian father figure who only allows certain people into Heaven, while the rest are sent to Hell, to an enigmatic abstract being that doesn't intervene at all; all of these definitions are covered under the word "god". This simple, yet complex belief has survived far better than any particular religion, if only because the word itself has a fascinating ambiguous quality.

Specifically, how a single word can carry so many meanings to so many people has greatly contributed to its inherent survivability over rigidly held doctrinal beliefs, which lack this kind of flexibility. The belief in God (without the necessarily negative connotation in using the following metaphor) is exponentially superior, but very similar to the HIV virus in how it changes itself every time it replicates. Without losing the pattern that identifies itself as "God", it has this unique ability to change and adapt, to construct itself anew from a person's own pre-existing beliefs, making it truly amazing in the degree of variation that it's capable of exhibiting.

To extend the metaphor, HIV does the same with an individuals own DNA. HIV changes its surface markers every time it replicates in the host body, making it extremely hard to target and identify as a foreign pathogen. The DNA it borrows from the host cell keeps HIV off the immune system's radar. Just like viruses, the basic information packet of God works similarly. It infects the mind of a believer, hijacking and integrating itself into the pre-existing worldview of the host’s own mind, and then begins to replicate itself. One of the shortest words in the English language, yet it conveys an almost infinite number of meanings by its mechanism of infection and replication.

Strains of God range from the incredibly destructive violent genocidal killer who calls for the deaths of all infidels, to more benign strains that code for an amoral supernatural being that is indistinguishable from non-existence. While I don't advocate the elimination of the God meme from culture, (not that it ever could be erradicated), I am for eliminating the more socially destructive strains that only fan the flames of human suffering, and encourage violent self-destructive behavior.

This partly answers the question of the nature of religion itself, and brings us back to the question of how religion affects us today. I think it’s clear that if one strives for the truth and intellectual honesty, beliefs cannot hide behind a veil of ignorance. Either what you believe is true and corresponds to the rest of what we know, including secular bodies of knowledge, or it doesn’t. When something we believe contradicts known fact, we must at the very least question the validity of the belief itself, or reject it entirely.

It is no coincidence that the most destructive religions are also the most fervently entrenched against this position. Even a shred of reasonable doubt in any form for these particular strains of religion would prove fatal. This partly explains why religious and/or political extremists routinely take advantage of the ignorance of children, and execute anyone who holds the slightest dissent from officially sanctioned belief. There is an undeniable correlation between the degree of infallibility one regards for their own religious beliefs, and the degree of violence one is capable of committing in the name of their religion.