How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [56]
I'm also going to go a step further and argue that authoritarian gods are associated with the oldest, most primitive structures of the brain, whereas a benevolent or mystical God is experienced through the most recently evolved parts of the brain, structures that appear to be unique in human beings. This developmental view, by the way, roughly parallels the cultural evolution of religious traditions throughout the world. For example, the mythological gods of nearly every tribal community had nasty personalities. Zeus was an arrogant bully, Huitzilopochtli—the bloodthirsty god of the Aztecs—needed a steady diet of human sacrifices, killing everyone in her path, and the God of the early Hebrews wiped out nearly every living creature with forty days of rain. But as societies and religions developed, you tend to see the emergence of kinder deities and gods.
In Eastern cultures a similar development can be seen. Hinduism, one of the oldest religions in the world, is filled with every sort of deity imaginable, but as Asian culture evolved, the gods of love dominated the popular literature in India, China, and Japan. Buddhism went a step further, rejecting religious hierarchies, and its evolution showed a gradual movement toward a neutral or mystical spirituality. Of course, you'll still find remnants of hostile deities in the folk religions of the East—for example, the demons portrayed in Tibetan Buddhist art—but they are viewed as metaphorical reflections of our inner weaknesses and faults.
Something happened in the brains of our ancestors that gave us the power to tame this authoritarian God. No one knows exactly when or how it happened, but the neural structures that evolved enhanced our ability to cooperate with others. They gave us the ability to construct language and to consciously think in logical and reasonable ways. Our research shows that they are the same structures stimulated when we meditate and pray, which is what allows us to consciously envision a loving and compassionate God. Without these new neural connections, humans would be limited in their ability to develop an inner moral code or a societal system of ethics.
A hundred thousand years ago the consciousness embedded in our frontal lobes began to dominate human behavior, and this, we believe, is when humanity first developed a primitive conception of God. We formed communities that were partly governed by supernatural beliefs, and we built primitive temples to symbolize the power of these unseen forces of the universe. When we eventually learned to write and sculpt, we carved our deities into the surfaces of the temple walls.
As a species, we have overly active frontal lobes that continue to create, imagine, and rearrange a seemingly endless variety of ways to envision and change the world. As far as we can tell, no other living species has a brain that is capable of manipulating inner and outer worlds.
THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF GOD
Today, our frontal lobes continue to envision spiritual realities, along with new ideas and definitions of God. Archeological records suggest that the earliest public structures were temples, and even the artwork found in prehistoric caves suggests that humans drew pictures of their gods. But different brains, in different parts of the world, create different religious beliefs.
Yet, for most of human history, religion and society were inseparable. Thus, from a cultural perspective, our earliest images of God were inextricably tied to the rules and punishments that dictated social behavior and morality—realms that clearly reflect the authoritarian personality of God. As Albert Einstein noted:
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion