Reason to believe

It feels good to get off the political kick we've all been on for weeks.

Sally and I were talking about what makes a person believe. I've been reading a book called Abducted by Susan Clancy. It's subtitled "Why people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens." The author did some studying of folks who believe, or say they believe, they have been abducted by little gray aliens. The author attributes a lot of the reason they believe this to sleep paralysis, false memories and pop culture, movies and television, planting images in peoples' heads.

Some belief is borne of the brain trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. That opens up a whole area that I don't want to get into because it's just too big. But I told Sally I'd heard an author talk about a book, The God Gene, about being genetically predisposed to believe.

Like the folks who think they've been abducted by aliens and had invasive medical experiments done on them, so do lots of people believe unequivocally in God, religion--at least one they find conforms to their needs--without any real proof that what they are believing in is real. Apparently Sally and I have missed out on that. Neither of us feels the need to believe in any kind of unseen world. I should qualify that by saying we just don't know. Unlike others who are seeking spiritual enlightenment, we just don't bother. We both come from families with that history, too.

Author Clancy is a psychologist with several degrees. In a clinical setting she talked to a lot of people who believed they'd been kidnapped. She asked if they had specific memories of the abduction and many said no, they just knew they'd been abducted. There were feelings they couldn't explain in themselves and when they cast about for reasons they settled on alien abduction. I guess it wouldn't be much different to say they'd been visited by angels, or the Virgin Mary. As she states in the book, she didn't test how religious the abductees were, but thinks that may have relevance.

Susan Clancy might be as close to figuring it out as anyone, but human beings are complicated. It seems everyone has a reason for everything no matter how strange--or alien--it might seem to other people. Often the person with the belief doesn't know why they hold that belief. That's probably where the idea of a gene that determines whether a person is a believer or not would kick in.

I believe, relying on the science of brain research, that people have a genetic predispositon to be a believer or non-believer. It could explain why it's so hard to communicate on that level, and causes people to puzzle over the behavior of others: "Why don't those people believe like we do? Can't they see the truth? It's right in front of them!" I look in the sky, I see lights, and that's what they are to me: lights. You look in the sky and see those same lights and you believe they are people from another planet, that they might be here to take you aboard their spaceship so they can perform hideous experiments. I have unexplained feelings and attribute them to my medication, stress at work, or insomnia, and you might look at those same problems and think they were caused by aliens giving you an anal probe or getting you pregnant with their babies. I see dinosaur bones and think of an earth hundreds of millions of years ago. You look at those same bones and think they were living creatures who were around 6000 years ago when Adam and Eve were setting up housekeeping in the Garden of Eden.

There are a lot of people, most, I'd guess, who'd resist the idea of a gene determining how and what we believe. Even though I can believe there's such a gene I don't believe it's wholly responsible. People just have too many influences and too many choices. There are also peer and family pressures to believe a certain way. To the religious folks It would take God out of the picture to have a gene that tells your brain whether you're religious or not. To them that's completely unacceptable. To the abductees it takes away a notion that why they act the way they do is beyond their control because they're being controlled by an external force.

The latest I heard is that a gene might determine whether you're a political liberal or conservative! I'm sure everyone could have fun with that.

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While we're on the subject of believing, here's a fine cover of the old Tim Hardin song, "Reason to Believe," by Daniel Has Six Strings.