The Midichlorians Made Me Do It: Can Microbes Explain Religion?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/10/do-midichlorians-make-you-religious.html

A wild new paper draws on ‘Star Wars’ to speculate about whether microbes might cause religious behavior—the latest in a long history of scientific attempts to pathologize belief.

For close to two thousand years, Christians have been taking Holy Communion. They’ve gone to war over the details of its theological nature. Mormons sip from cups of water, Catholics from chalices of wine. A few denominations dispense with it altogether. It’s no exaggeration to say that individuals have taken part in the ritual billions of times.

What motivates those individuals to take communion? Do they want to feel closer to God, or just please their mothers? Are they anxious about entering heaven, or anxious, as teenagers, just to try a little wine? Do they enjoy the aesthetics of the experience? Do they feel pressured to participate by people more powerful than they are? Are they trying to affirm their membership in a club? To signal some kind of purity? To stand next to a distant crush while waiting in line? To fulfill a habit, with no real sense of intention at all?

Or—so much simpler!—is it just the microbes in their stomachs pushing them to go perform a ritual?

That, more or less, is the suggestion of a paper published last month in the online journal Biology Direct. Written by Alexander Panchin and two colleagues associated with Moscow’s Institute for Information Transmission Problems, “Midichlorians – the biomeme hypothesis” suggests that the impulse behind some religious rituals could be driven by mind-altering parasites. Looking for chances to spread, these hypothetical microbes push their human hosts to do seemingly irrational things—like, say, share a cup of wine en masse, or dunk themselves in the Ganges, or gather themselves from all corners of the earth in order to kiss the same wall, stone, or icon.

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