How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [70]
WILL SKEPTICISM
HURT YOUR BRAIN?
No, but cynicism will. Skepticism implies open-mindedness and the willingness to suspend judgment until both sides of an argument are considered, and this enhances neural functioning, particularly in the frontal lobes. A cynic, however, is a person who has taken their disbelief to a point of emotional distrust and rejection that borders on hostility toward the other point of view. This “limbic” personality is pessimistic and is so neurologically dangerous it can even shorten your life.
The same holds true when dealing with angry people. It is difficult to do, but if we can show compassion for their underlying suffering and pain, their brains will resonate to our kindness. In fact, research has shown that highly empathic people are more likely to respond to an angry expression by smiling.68 Angry people, however, do not have this ability. In fact, highly aggressive people automatically assume that other people will react to them with anger, and thus they will become even more aggressive, even though no hostility was shown toward them.69
In the battle between two wolves, the one who refuses to fight will often walk away unscathed. And as considerable meditation research has shown, people who maintain a mindful state of acceptance tend to have better relationships with others.70 Thus, when we train ourselves to be empathic, interpersonal animosity declines.71 We will explore this principle in greater depth in Chapters 9 and 10.
I believe that the best manner for dealing with strong fundamentalists is through education and exposure to other ideas. Our research has shown that the more you hear, read, and think about different ideas, the more those ideas take root. Over time, distrust toward those who hold different beliefs begins to decline. This was recently demonstrated on a large scale in California's “Bible Belt.” The Modesto public school system created a mandatory course on world religions for freshman high school students.72 The program was accepted by an advisory council of Modesto's religious leaders, and when the students were tested after taking the course, their general respect for religious liberty increased. The students were less willing to express disrespectful opinions toward other religious members, especially Muslims. In addition, they felt greater comfort with their own religious identity and came away with increased understanding and appreciation of the similarities between major religions.
“NOBLE” IDEOLOGIES
The problem, as we see it, is not religious fundamentalism but authoritarianism and the impulse to impose one's ideals on as many people as possible. In fact, as Philip Zimbardo demonstrated in a famous experiment at Stanford University, it is socially and neurologically dangerous to place oneself in a position of open-ended authority.73 He randomly divided a healthy group of adults into “prisoners” and authoritarian “guards,” then put them into a make-believe prison. All the guards were told to do was maintain discipline and control over the prisoners. In less than twenty-four hours the experiment spun out of control. Prisoners were punished, humiliated, and degraded, and it soon mirrored the same type of behavior that U.S. soldiers doled out at Abu Ghraib, the American military detention prison in Iraq. Zimbardo pointed out that behind every form of religious and political abuse, you'll find “noble ideologies that allow the worst possible destructions, because you could always say, ‘I did it for God.’ “74
Sarah Mancuso, at Oberlin College, also discovered that the ideology itself propels an individual toward violence.75 Ideological rigidity—be it religious or political—leads to less openness