The Doctor Weighs In

By Dov michaeli MD, Ph.D

And now for something completely different:

In an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind, an Israeli professor, Benny Shanon, made an explosive claim that is bound to shake the foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moses was tripping on Mount Sinai . And so were the Israelites, rapturously dancing around the golden calf while the father of the nation was on the mountain.

In case you forgot, Exodus describes the momentous event of God giving the Torah to Moses thus: And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking."

Quoting from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, "the 'perceiving of the voices' has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca . One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds".

Indeed, the good professor is an authority on the subject: “I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations," he says. Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant. Can you beat that for sound, scientific proof?

"Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials," Shanon says. He believes the Israelites used two plants in Sinai and the Negev : one of them is wild rue, a hallucinogen used by the Bedoin to this day. However this plant is not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible.
The acacia tree also has psychedelic properties, Shanon says, which the Israelites could have used. The acacia is mentioned frequently in the Bible, and was the type of wood of which the Ark of the Covenant was made. According to Shanon, he drank a potion prepared from a species of acacia while he was in South America , which caused similar experiences to those produced by the ayahuasca.

Shanon also sees signs of a hallucinogenic vision in the story of the burning bush. "Moses 'looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed,'" Shanon quotes from Exodus 3:2. Time passes differently when under the influence of the plant, he notes. "That's why Moses thought the bush was not consumed. It should have been burned in the time he thought had passed. And in that time, he heard God speaking to him."

Now, acacia is indeed well known to Israeli kids. We used to take the seeds out of the pod, split them in half, spit on them and leave them under the teacher’s desk. What we created was the first “green” stink bomb. An enzyme in the saliva digested a protein in the seed, which in turn cause the release of sulfur dioxide, a gas that gives rotten eggs their characteristic odor. Needless to say, the teacher would be overcome with waves of nausea and escape the classroom. Except that in this chemical warfare, we were finally defeated: one teacher left the room, locked the doors from the outside, and let us “stew in our own juices”. Little did we suspect that this malodorous fruit can give you a religious experience of the highest order. Personally, I experienced only extreme disgust and overwhelming nausea.

Am I being too skeptical?

Maybe. But here is the opinion of Dr. L. Brnd from San Diego .

“A characteristic of psychotropic agents is that they produce disordered thinking, paranoia and hallucinations. There is a stark difference between a visionary and a hallucinator. Crackpot theories arise all the time after taking hallucinogens, Timothy Leary was a pathetic example. However Moses did not hear "tune in, turn on, drop out". Nobody designs, say, a new computer chip after a psychotropic drug-induced vision. And the Ten Commandments do not represent weird disordered thinking, but logical and considered visions for a moral life. If Moses had followed the edicts of hallucinogenic plants, we would to this day be wandering around in circles in the desert inspecting our navels, as this guy is doing. He does acknowledge that he arrived at his unprovable, untestable, illogical "theory" after taking that Amazon plant over 100 times. Well, testability is the difference between philosophy and science, so at least he has the proper audience for this silly junk science.”

A Jerusalem Post reporter summed it up succintly:

Headline should read, "Nutty Professor at Hebrew University on drugs!" Tenure revoked pending psychological evaluation, drug rehabilitation.
Next Headline, "Amy Winehouse, fresh out of rehab, sues Hebrew University over Psychology correspondence course that taught her that mind altering drugs are Kosher."

Last week we looked at the complex interactions of genes, brain circuits, hormones, psychology and culture in forming the mass killer’s persona. But keep in mind, most killers don’t have genetic or anatomical defects that we know about, although some new ones may be discovered in the future.

Obviously then, psychology and culture must be playing a major role in the seemingly unprecedented wave of violence we are experiencing.  Unprecedented? Not quite.

Scriptural violence

Here are a few choice nuggets from the Bible:

• Lot , a pious man living in Sodom, took into his home some traveling strangers who stopped for the night. No sooner than did the men retire for the night, a rumor spread around town that the men were homosexual.
  The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John MartinThe enraged Sodomites assembled in front of Lot ’s house and demanded that he surrender his guests. When he refused, they forced their way in and, well, sodomized them. The first recorded anti-gay crime. But unlike today, the punishment was swift and terrible: God rained fire and brimstone on the town and obliterated it off the face of the earth. Don’t worry about Lot , God warned him to leave immediately.

• Moses, who spoke to God himself, transmitted His injunction to “wipe the Amalekites off the face of the earth”. Who are those terrible Amalekites that deserved what we call today ‘genocide’? They apparently were a nomad tribe in the desert who raided the Israelites as they made their way to the Promised Land. In fact, Moses was denied entry to Canaan, according to a later biblical exegesis, after leading his people in the desert for forty years, because he failed to completely annihilate them.

The story of the concubine in Gibeah: an academic study.

The Concubine of Gibeah 3 by Janet ShafnerThere once was a man and his concubine from the tribe of Ephraim who were traveling in the land Benjamin, another Israelite tribe. As the couple dined in the city of Gibeah , a mob assembled outside and pounded on the door. The mob captured the concubine, then raped and beat her to death. The man collected her corpse the next day and traveled home. The other tribes of Israel were outraged at the crime, assembled an army and razed several Benjaminite cities, killing every man, woman, child and animal they could.

Brad Bushman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the lead author of a study, "When god sanctions killing: effect of scriptural violence on aggression," published in the March issue of Psychological Science (vol. 18, pp. 204-207; 2007).  He had about 500 students read the tale about the tribe of Ephraim in order to study the role of “higher authority” in the propagation of religious violence. For half the students he added another passage:

When the man returned home, his tribe prayed to God and asked what they should do. God commanded the tribe to “take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the Lord”.

The students then took part in an exercise designed to measure aggression. About half of the study participants were from Brigham Young University , and almost all of them were religious Mormons. The other half were from the Free University in Amsterdam . Of the Dutch group, only 50% believed in God, and 27% in the Bible (astonishingly high percentages, for Europeans).

But for both groups, regardless whether they lived in the U.S. or the Netherlands , or whether they believed in God or not, the trends were the same:

Those who were told that God had sanctioned the violence against the Israelites were more likely to act aggressively in the subsequent exercise.

What does the study mean?

First, what it doesn’t mean: one cannot conclude that religious people are more aggressive than non-religious people. But it does suggest that people are more prone to aggression when they feel that it is sanctioned by some higher authority, be it God, or his clergy.

Jihadist terrorism and the silence of religious authorities.

One could quote passages from the Bible and the Koran that would make it sound like these were manifestos of some violent cults. In fact, modern religion tries to de-emphasize the violent aspects of the scriptures. The story of the Amalekites was edited out of many versions of modern Hagaddahs, and in others its violent message is softened with an injunction to be charitable to the stranger among us. But with the notable exception of a few courageous Moslem women, there is a deafening silence coming out of the religious community. The feeble voice of moderate Moslem clergy and intellectuals is almost invariably accompanied by their loud protestations of American aggression or Western social permissiveness. Western clergy and intellectuals, being "sensitive" and "politically correct", are not much better—they are experts at diffusing the responsibility: it is not the religion and its leaders that are at fault; it is the “root causes” whatever they are, it is poverty, or Western cultural imperialism, or insensitivity and intolerance toward other cultures. It fell to a Saudi security official to state, after reporting the foiling of a vast Al Qaida plot and the arrest of 172 young jihadists, to add: "unless we change the ideology (of religious extremism), more young people will fall pray to terrorism".

If we ever needed rigorous academic proof that religious authorities can, and sometimes do, propagate aggressive and violent behavior—now we have it in the study by Bushman and his coworkers.

It is time to speak up and tell the unvarnished truth—a culture that justifies violence in the guise of religion is intolerable in the 21^st century. Religious leaders need to raise their voices against this perversity.

The horrific events at Virginia Tech fills every decent human being with a profound sense of sorrow and a feeling of frustration: What can we do about it? When is it all going to end, if ever?

I found myself searching history for answers from the point of view of a scientist.

The history of suppression of  knowledge.

 There have always been  authoritarians, religious fanatics, the State,  charlatans—conspiring to deprive us of the truth so as to perpetuate their hold on power and lucre.

This phenomenon reaches as far back as biblical times; we read about the first set of ‘spies’ Moses sent to scout the land of Canaan. They gave him a truthful report about the harshness of the land and the misery of its inhabitants, a message he did not like. So what did Moses do? He executed them! Turns out they were right--just take a look at the Middle East today. What if he listened to the truth and made bee line to Saudi Arabia, for instance?

Not to be outdone, the Catholic Church had a very effective tool of suppressing the truth—the stake. Poor Galileo, he was given a ‘choice’ of recanting his heretical scientific findings, or burn—not in hell, but right here on earth.

Since then organized religions-- Jewish, Christian and Moslem—have fought a rear guard action to stop the inexorable march of enlightenment. Think of it: would you believe nowadays that the sun revolves around the earth? Or that the earth is flat? Or that the world was created about 5600 years ago? Yet how many people, over the course of history, have been as branded heretics, apostates, and a variety of other epithets, for daring to question, for demanding the truth? How many of them gave their lives for  believing the evidence that debunked the Church's junk science?

Fast forward to 1933-1945, when the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, founded the ‘science’ of the Big Lie. The (evil) genius of his observation was that the bigger the lie the more believable it was; now, just a few decades later, it forms the basis for commercial and state propaganda.

· Consider the tobacco industry’s tactic of funding junk science, of bullying honest scientists, all in the name of mammon.

· Consider an administration that bullies its EPA scientists for trying to tell the truth about air pollution, of an Interior Department that fires its scientists for telling the truth about degradation of the environment, or NASA muzzling its scientists from speaking and publishing data on  global warming. NASA scientists have to get clearance from a political hack for every scholarly paper they present at a scientific meeting; it brings back sad memories of colleagues from the Soviet Empire and China who had had to do get clearance from a political commisar for papers they presented. 

And now: Consider the gun lobby!

The very same tactics:

· Fund bogus, junk science.

· Intimidate scientists who are doing first class science—not just verbally, not just by impugning their scientific credentials and honesty- but with hate mail campaigns, threats of physical harm, and worse.

· Co-opt our political representatives to the point that one of their chief propagandists brags in the Washington Post that if GW Bush is elected, "We'll have ... a president where we work out of their office."

· Muzzle every source of independent, dispassionate inquiry: The CDC (Center for Disease Control), the premiere institute for epidemiological research, had to abandon research on the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. under threat of severe budget cuts.

So what is so hopeful about it?

What is hopeful to me is the historical perspective. I believe that the gun lobby will go the way of the tobacco lobby. I believe that honest and courageous scientists will not be deterred from shedding real light on the problem, intimidation or not. I believe that one day, the nation will wake up to the Big Lie perpetrated on it and will throw the bums out. I fervently hope that the day when the people stand up and say ‘enough is enough’, is not far off.

We will then be able to deal with this self inflicted scourge of gun violence with intelligence and creativity, just as we dealt with other national problems in our history.

Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D.