Matthew Alper’s The God Part of the Brain argues humans are genetically wired for spirituality, citing universal religious practices and neurotransmitter studies like those linking the amygdala to reduced fear during prayer. Critics question whether this implies divine creation or just a coping mechanism, with callers debating free will, cultural relativism (e.g., Yahweh vs. Zeus), and ethical dilemmas like "bad programming" in sociopaths or punishments for predicted criminals. Alper rejects supernatural explanations, calling religious miracles invalid, but acknowledges that 85% of scientists—including Einstein—align faith with natural processes. His theory challenges traditional views on belief while raising provocative questions about morality, punishment, and the limits of human programming. [Automatically generated summary]
Major Eddie is capable of driving an audience totally insane Matthew Albert him.
So that'll be coming up in the next hour news.
You know, whatever you think of Matthew and his, you know, God part of the brain theories, I'm afraid that there's been substantial evidence on his side.
I mean, really substantial evidence.
Lately, there have been a couple of media explosions about the God gene and stuff like that.
You're going to want to hear about because it really does verify what he says.
Whether you like it or not, and I know not, is the case in many cases.
But that doesn't mean it may not be true.
Therefore, it bears examination, which is what we do on this program.
Looking at the world, never a pleasant process.
Baghdad usually leads the hit parade.
Gunmen ambushed a bus carrying unarmed Iraqis to work at a USMO dump near Tikrit on Sunday, killing 17, raising the toll from three days of intensified and bloody insurgent attacks to 70 now Iraqi dead and dozens wounded.
The attacks focused in Baghdad and several cities to the north appeared to be aimed at scaring off those who cooperate with us, the U.S. military, whether police, National Guard, Kurdish militias, or ordinary people out looking for a paycheck.
So, you know, it looks like the number of attacks in Iraq is increasing, not decreasing.
Not to say we can't eventually get it, but I'm wondering how we're ever going to get out of Iraq.
How are we going to do it?
Of course, for me, it was Vietnam, and you saw many of you.
Many of you didn't.
Maybe that's a problem.
You didn't see what happened in Vietnam.
Maybe there's too many young people out there who don't remember Vietnam.
But, you know, there really are, at least to me, there are many, many, many parallels between the situation presently in Iraq and Vietnam.
Many.
You know, the Vietnamization, the Iraqization of the war, turning it over to the Iraqi police and the Iraqi military.
And you might recall how long the South Vietnamese force landed, lasted rather, after we left.
It was, you know, almost as we were going.
So how are we ever going to get out of there?
If GOP leaders would allow a vote on post-September 11th legislation overhauling the nation's intelligence community, it would easily pass.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say it.
In fact, a top Republican scolded opponents who worry the Pentagon might lose some of its authority, saying national security is far more important than turf battles.
There was a global intelligence failure.
We can't have a status quo.
We've got to change that, according to Senator Powell Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Well, I don't know what's more important than turf wars.
I laughed when I first read this story.
I knew it wasn't going to get passed.
I knew the little fiefdoms and kingdoms ensconced in our lettered agencies are very powerful.
And they all picked up the phone and said, you want to do what?
In a series of dramatic steps capped Sunday by a high-profile prisoner slop, Israel and Egypt are moving rapidly to improve relations, seizing the opportunity for a Middle East peace presented by Yazer Arafat's demise.
A year ago, just one year ago, Egypt's president dismissed Israeli prime minister as incapable of making peace.
Today, on the other hand, he calls Ariel Sharon the region's best chance for an end to hostilities.
The change in attitude is also apparent in Syria and across the Gulf as Arab nations signal, well, now they're ready to work with Sharon, a man they long have described as a butcher.
So, attitudes are certainly changing from butcher to our best chance for peace.
Oh, this apparently has been decided to be not a good idea.
The French police on Sunday ended their practice of hiding plastic explosives and air passenger luggage to train bomb-sniffing dogs.
All this after one bag apparently got lost, and boy, it's really lost, too.
They don't know where it went.
Maybe ending up on a flight out of Paris to Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle airport, the luggage that police used Friday for the exercise, hadn't turned up anywhere yet.
Three flights that arrived in L.A. and New York were searched, but not a.
So in other words, they put plastique explosives in suitcases, the real plastique, I guess, huh?
And then it ends up on some airplane going on and internet.
And moreover, they lost the luggage.
The price of crude oil edged upward, something you don't want to hear, right?
In Asia on Monday, but stayed below the US $43 a mark for the barrel threshold as concerns over petroleum supply continued to ease less than three weeks before the critical onset of the Northern Hemisphere winter.
It's coming.
Winter's coming, all right.
In a moment, the rest of the news and the rest of the article, I didn't get a chance to, I just couldn't help but dive into this article last night called Scientists Debating Blending Species.
This is a real winner of an article in the Washington Post and something you definitely should hear.
You know, I wish there was a way that everybody out there could vote.
You know, and that I could see, you know, as they do during NFL football, when they've got a decision to make, they let the audience vote.
You know, they're wasting, what, 90 seconds or more.
And so they let the audience vote, and it comes rolling in, thousands of them.
That'd be a really cool thing.
If I did have such a thing, I'd have you vote right now on this.
Is this a good idea or not?
Maybe not.
And I subtitle it.
It's called Scientists Debate Blending Species.
And I subtitled it.
You saw what?
You saw what?
Now, I get calls here all the time.
Hey, Art, I saw this little thing about four feet high, and it looked like, you know, something between a dog, and it had human features, Art.
You know, things like that, right?
All right.
The following article, this article is from the Washington Post.
Listen carefully, please.
In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.
In Nevada, my state, sheep, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.
In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their little mousy skulls.
These are not outcasts from the island of Dr. Moreau, the 96 novel by H.G. Wells, that'd be 1896, in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human.
These are real creations of real scientists today.
The biologists call them chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail.
They're products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses.
Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch for the first time how human cells and organs mature and interact, not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes, but no, inside the bodies of living creatures.
Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments, but no federal guidelines in place.
An awkward question seems to hover above all that work.
How human must a chimera be before more stringent rules should kick in?
The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying that issue, hopes to make recommendations perhaps by February.
Quote, we need to establish some kind of guideline as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not do.
That's James Batty, chairman of the National Institute of Health's Stem Cell Task Force.
Chimeras, meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in a single body, are not inherently unnatural.
Most twins, for example, carry at least a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb.
Most mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they have born.
Scientists for years have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals.
Feats of genetic engineering that allow those critters to make human proteins like insulin for use as medicine, so that's a good thing.
Chimeras are not as strange and alien as they seem at first blush, said Henry Greeley, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University.
But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside of animals, and it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making human beings.
In those experiments, Greeley told the Academy, there is, quote, a non-trivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity on the animal.
Now, let's listen to that line again.
I think that's a very important line.
In those experiments, Greeley told the Academy, quote, there is a non-trivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity on the animal, end quote.
In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey Platt at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota has created human-pig chimeras by adding human blood forming stem cells to pig fetuses.
The resulting pigs have both pig and human blood in their vessels, and it's not just pig blood cells being swept along with human blood cells.
Some of the cells themselves have merged, merged, creating hybrids.
It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, said Platt, Because he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people.
And they've been wondering if it might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patients' cells.
Now scientists know the risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two cells fuse.
In other experiments led by Ishmael Zajani at the University of Reno, Nevada, well, they've been adding human stem cells to sheep fetuses.
The team now has sheep whose livers are up to 80% human and make all the compounds that human livers make.
So where is this going to end?
And if I were able to run an instant poll out there with thousands responding inside of 90 seconds, I wonder how it would turn out.
Is this a good idea or a bad idea?
And does it, could it possibly, I mean, this is, bear in mind, what I just read to you was from the Washington Post.
This is not the behind-the-scenes stuff.
This is not the, well, we're a lab somewhere, you know, way out of the way doing some interesting work kind of reporting.
This is what they're admitting to.
So if you run into something out there on that cold, dark highway that doesn't look quite right, that doesn't look quite totally like any animal you've ever seen or any human you've ever seen, then, well, you might not want to be surprised.
And you might remember this story from the Washington Post.
Let's see.
Here's an interesting story.
The threat from life on Mars.
That's right.
Earth must take precautions to avoid contamination from life forms that must now be presumed, must now be presumed to exist on Mars.
This was a warning from scientists just a few days ago.
Potentially, deadly microorganisms could be returned to Earth on a probe which is being planned to collect samples from the Martian surface.
That's right, we're going to bring it back.
The warning comes after a detailed scientific analysis of data sent back by the roving vehicle opportunity that landed on Mars January 25th.
Jeffrey Cargill of the U.S. Geological Survey said that protection of our own planet from alien forms of life requires the assumption that Martian life exists.
Quote, before proceeding with sample returns or human missions to Mars, we must review measures for planetary biological protection.
End quote.
By the way, I keep track of these things, kind of an interesting story.
A company in Bermuda suddenly lost contact Sunday with a satellite orbiting Earth nearly 23,000 miles, actually a little more out in space.
No, almost 23.
And three dozen Humboldt County residents were suddenly without internet service.
Intelsat, America's 7, the only satellite capable of reaching certain customers in remote areas of this region, abruptly went dark at about 2.30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, said the company.
It just vanished, said Dick Kidder, who owns Alpha Communications in McKinleyville.
Alpha Communications installs equipment for Humboldt County customers of Starband, that's satellite service, a McLean, Virginia company that provides high-speed internet service via satellite to areas where cable, DSL, and other forms of broadband just simply cannot be retrieved.
Starband contracts with Intelsat for space on satellites to provide service, and nobody has any idea what's gone wrong with Intelsat America 7.
In a press statement, Itelsat called the spacecraft a, quote, permanent loss, end quote.
It was either catastrophic power failure or it was hit by a meteor.
Now, you see, this satellite was special because up in Humboldt County, they've got a lot of high trees and mountains and things like that, and they can't point at 30 degrees, which is kind of normal.
This satellite, being out, what, about 22,700 miles, that's a little further out, gave a look angle of, I believe, about 45 degrees.
Yeah, 45 degrees.
So in other words, they could point over the trees and see the satellite.
Well, that special little satellite is history.
A big rock may have gotten it.
You're not going to like this story.
I certainly didn't.
The title is, Is Fair Use in Peril?
The Far-Reaching Intellectual Property Protection Act would deny customers many of the freedoms that all of you take for granted now.
For example, do you like to fast-forward through commercials on TV?
You know, a TV program you've recorded?
How much do you like it?
A lot, you say.
Enough to go to jail if you're caught doing it?
Well, if a new copyright and intellectual property omnibus bill sitting on Congress's desk should pass the way it is now, that may be the choice you will face.
When you reach down to hit that fast forward, when you go to your DVR control and prepare to leap ahead 30 seconds at a time, jumping past those expensively produced commercials, you may be behind bars ready to meet your new life mate.
In a statement last month, Senator McCain stated his opposition to Bill and specifically cited the anti-commercial skipping feature, Saying, quote, Americans have been recording TV shows and fast-forwarding through the commercials for 30 years, he said.
Do we really expect to throw people in jail in 2004 for behavior they've been engaging in for a quarter of a century?
You'd have to put a very large portion of America in jail.
Maybe the theory was that with the old VCRs, you know, you could go, you'd have to fast forward and you would actually, you would see the commercial, and for all I know, maybe it registered on your subconscious.
Even if you didn't get it consciously, maybe that commercial zipping by at seven times or ten times normal speed registered on your subconscious.
And you went out and bought it.
Ah, but the new DVRs have a feature where you just hit a button, it goes 30 seconds at a time, and you don't see anything.
There is nothing that registers, you know, on your subconscious.
So could it be that the new omnimus omnibus bill recognizes that fact?
And soon there will be people peeking in your living room window and just waiting for you to hit that button.
And when you do, the sirens sound, the red lights begin flashing off the walls of your living room, and the TV SWAT guys break your door down, taking you and your remote control off to a new life.
From the high desert in the middle of the night where we do our best business, this is Coast to Coast AF.
So yours is a benign, if not even beneficial, subliminal message.
Whereas others may be, well, God knows what they're suggesting.
unidentified
That's precisely why I said I'm upfront about it.
You see, if I'm telling you I'm giving you something subliminal, then you have nothing to worry about.
People could be producing subliminal messages on any broadcast, on any recording that you buy, on any TV show, on any movie, and they might not be upfront about it.
If I'm telling you upfront there are subliminals, you could check if it's affecting you in a funny kind of way.
Well, here's on behalf of the whole audience, I would like to ask you, obviously in your business, you're going to know or have some idea how much real subliminal stuff, either on broadcasts or CDs or all the media that we all consume, how much is there really in there, sir, the truth?
unidentified
In truth, first of all, just because I'm in the subliminal field, I don't know how many dishonest people there are out there.
But just by hearsay, I would say perhaps up to 1% of people are surreptitiously putting things on there that you're not aware of.
And so if you're watching something and you suddenly get an almost irrepressible urge to do something or consume something or something, then that's what it might be.
unidentified
To do something against what you ordinarily feel like doing.
If you notice that, I would record that.
Or if you already have a recording that you feel might be inducing you to do things that you don't want to do, play the recording for a few minutes, then play it for a few minutes longer and see if it's inducing you anytime you play that recording to have that kind of feeling that you don't want to have.
If it does do that, you have someone who's trying to surreptitiously influence you.
Anyway, so, but you're on the side then of the content providers, basically.
unidentified
You have to, look, if someone's creating software, why should they spend years of their life, maybe working six, seven hours a day, 12, 18 hours a day to create something?
Yes, and my theory about why you'd be okay with that is because you figure fast forwarding, you're still going to see it, and the subliminal message is still going to get through.
Am I right?
unidentified
No, not exactly.
First of all, I'm not in that field, but I know why the TV man, the broadcasters aren't concerned with that.
The reason is because many people, as they're skipping through the commercials, they see something that's interesting.
When you have these new features in TiVo where you could skip through three, four minutes of commercials, the broadcasters don't even have any chance to get their message across and they can't make a penny from their product.
So, you know, in the war between consumers and those who, you know, try to show us the commercials, you feel that a wall has come, and that wall is TiVo, and that wall must come down.
Tear down that wall.
unidentified
And you want to know something?
I have nothing against the consumers.
The consumers are simply using products that are available.
So you feel then that my image of a TiVo cop looking into your window, watching for you to depress that 30-second skip several times so that he can throw you in a federal penitentiary for the rest of your life might be over the top a little?
unidentified
Right.
It's not analogous to what's really applicable, to what we are concerned about, to what we content providers are concerned about.
It's not the consumer aspect.
It's the manufacturers who allow, it's also Kazaz that allow these kind of material to be file shared for free, and we can't make any money for all the effort that we put into making the content.
I mean, there is as big a difference between regular TV and, honest to God, HD TV as there was between black and white and color.
And you will note, the first time you walk into a circuit city or one of those places that specializes in HD, you know, your jaw will go down and hit your chest.
First, the people who think that they're putting out the streetlights with psychic powers or because maybe they've been abducted or something like that.
When I was a kid, and we used to go toilet papering in the neighborhood, the particular street that we used to go down, we used to run down the road in a car first with a big spotlight and spotlight all the streetlights, and it would put out all the lights on the street and make the whole street dark.
It was I don't know about flocking, but there may be good reason to worry about the behavior of some animals, including whales, dolphins, birds.
You know, they're all behaving in a rather unsettling way.
And when you put that together with what's going on, you know, North Pole, South Pole, ozone layers, various layers, there is a disturbance in the force, sir.
There's no question about it.
unidentified
And one little bit of synchronicity, too.
I took a trip 1994, 95, 94 had to have been, trip over to the coast of California and up to Oregon.
And we were traveling to the Redwoods, and it was rainy season, it's spring break time, and the rain was just hammering the coast.
And I was kind of falling asleep at the wheel and turned on the radio in about Coos Bay, Oregon.
And about the time I turned on the radio, your voice comes on and says, new discovery 200 miles off the coast of Coos Bay, Oregon, an underwater volcano.
Why is it that we're having this stuff jammed down and thrown on network TV with the icons on the side that tells you what you're watching, what you're listening to, or whatever?
Man, I was watching Fox the other day, and you're wanting to watch a football game, and they've got a bar going across the top with all kinds of running stats of other games and scores and like that.
And now they've got a bar going across the bottom, too.
unidentified
And you've got to watch a football game in between.
Exactly.
And I spent way too much time trying to get this off my computer, let alone get it off my TV.
Well, imagine if they eliminate all the little next buttons and the 30-second buttons and the skip over this and that fast-forward buttons, and you have to watch.
You have to watch the commercials.
unidentified
And I guess the software engineers wouldn't have anything to do.
But on the other hand, on the other hand, the man who called, who's a content provider, well, you know, I mean, the other hand is those commercials pay for those TV shows.
You know, high production values and all the rest costs a lot of money.
unidentified
As a subscriber to any satellite network or a cable network, don't we also pay for those?
When you hold me in your arms so tight Let me know everything's alright I'm hooked on a feeling I'm high on believing That you'll end up with me It's as sweet as
candy It's taste, it's on my mind Girl, you got me thirsty For another cup of wine Got a bunch from you, girl But I don't need a cure I just stay up back then If I can for sure
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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Matthew Alper was born and raised in New York City.
That'll be readily apparent to you.
He was educated, though, at Vassar and North London University, where he acquired degrees in philosophy of science.
After finishing school, Matthew spent extensive time living abroad in Europe, Africa, and Asia, where he studied comparative world cultures, religion, and history.
After teaching high school history, Matthew went on to become a screenwriter and then to write his seminal work, The God Part of the Brain.
Since then, Matthew has lectured at various universities on the topic of cognitive science and philosophy.
He's also been written up in the Washington Post and appeared on NBC.
He is indeed one of the most hated guests I have.
And if you listen for just a little while, and loved, I might add, by some, if you listen for just a little while, you will certainly see why.
Quite a few surprises coming tonight.
And I must say, I'm sure to the dismay of many, there is now work and very solid scientific word coming out that Matthew has been right all along.
Okay, well, the God part of the brain, basically, it's a theory suggesting that humans are hardwired to believe in some form of a spiritual reality.
I started with the premise that the fact that every culture, no matter how isolated, has believed in some form of a spiritual reality would suggest that we're wired this way.
Similar to the way all cats meow or all dogs bark or all human cultures speak a language, usually is indicative that there's a part of the brain that generates this type of behavior.
That would extend even to the remote tribes, Matthew, that, I don't know, have rituals where they have to kill somebody and drink their blood or something like that.
Right, well, I mean, there have been cannibalistic tribes, but really the common thread is the fact that every culture, even those most isolated that they've, you know, even in the last century uncovered in the rainforests and parts of Asia that hadn't had exposure really for tens of thousands of years to other cultures,
always believe in some type of spiritual reality, pray to supernatural deities, bury their dead or at least dispose of their deceased with some ritual that anticipates sending that person's spirit to some other realm, to a spiritual realm.
anyway let's finish up with this is so you look what you're suggesting is there is something in our brains perhaps genetically do you think that genetically it's part of our genetic blueprint.
If there are these regions in the brain, then it must be part of our genetic blueprint as well.
Thus suggesting that these parts of the brain emerged, again, if we're going to go stick with evolutionary theory, that they emerged as with every other part of us through the process of natural selection.
And I believe you've told me in the past that you think that the reason that this is now part of our genetic code is the primal deep fear of death, of our own mortality.
In other words, there's got to be something, otherwise half of us would go mad considering the end of our own consciousness.
As I came up, as I discovered this notion that it does exist cross-culturally and that it's likely we're wired this way, and then as more evidence came out, different neurophysiological experiments, which we've discussed in the past, again, validating this notion, I had to come up with an idea as to why we would have evolved this, why nature would have selected this adaptation in us.
It must serve some purpose to help the preservation of the species.
So I looked at our species, said, well, what makes us unique from all the other animals that we would have this?
Besides the fact that we are the musical animal, the mathematical animal, the linguistic animal, we're also the only self-conscious animal, the only animal that possesses self-conscious awareness.
In experiments done on different species to see to what extent they do possess self-conscious awareness, it was shown, for instance, just even self-recognition, like using a mirror, that the only animals that, and they didn't have it instinctually, but they could be trained in time,
if left in a cage with a mirror in it, that chimpanzees, our closest descendants, would eventually figure out that their reflection, after first thinking it was an antagonist, another chimp, in time they came to realize that it was themselves and actually would use the mirror like as a tool.
So they would like open their mouths and like pick things out of their teeth using their reflection.
They're the only other animal besides humans who have this capacity for self-recognition, for incipient self-awareness.
Well, he might be dazzled by the image of movement in his reflection, but it's unlikely that, for instance, if you put something on the cat's head, that he'll look in the mirror and then use his or her paw to knock that thing off.
So having said that humans are the first creature to really possess an advanced sense of self-conscious awareness, I believe that even though this made us the most powerful species on Earth, because it allowed us the power of self-modification.
So for instance, if it gets cold out, let's say we get hit with another ice age, we don't have to wait millions of years to develop a thicker coat of fur.
We can say, I am cold, and we can sew ourselves one.
So we have this advanced capacity for self-modification.
However, the drawback of that was once we became aware of the fact that we exist, we became equally aware of the fact that one day we won't.
And that empirically, we know that's true as a fact, that living things die, they decease.
So with that knowledge, the anxiety created by this awareness of death, of inevitable death, that not only is it inevitable, but that it can come at any given moment.
We just know that it will come.
We don't know when.
The anxiety of living with that awareness, the perpetual mortal crisis that we suffered, forced the selection of a cognitive modification, a new region in the brain that compels us to believe that there's something else out there.
And whether we call them gods, ghosts, this is a very good question then, Matthew.
I've been at terms a long time with my own mortality.
I'm comfortable with it.
You know, maybe I'd have a foxhole conversion.
Who knows?
But I mean, basically, I am really pretty comfortable with it.
And there are many people like that around the world who are pretty comfortable with it, fully understand they're going to die, and they're not particularly frightened or unnerved or stressed by that fact.
I used to consider myself an agnostic, but with all the evidence verifying my initial theories, I'm more and more convinced that what I'm suggesting is the case, therefore leaving me to believe that chances are there is no spiritual reality,
there is no God, there are no spirits, there is no soul, there's no ghost in the machine, and that basically we are material products, and that when the brain ceases to exist, so does consciousness, and that will be the end.
Dear Art, I spent so many years ironing all contradictions in my soon-to-be-released book out, The Truth About Love, that it is so annoying that I stay up all night trying to get through to Matthew Alpert to just ask one simple little question.
Since you, sir, Matthew, are an exception to your own theory.
That is to say, you're an atheist.
How do you explain that your theory can be valid and hold this glaring exception?
Evolutionary adaptation is there to serve us, not fool us.
My explanation is that basically for every physiological trait we possess, we fall into a bell curve.
So we can take something basic like height.
If you do a survey of the height of any population, you'll find that most the bulge of the bell curve, the majority of that population will fall into what we could call average height.
And on the tapering extremes of that bell curve, we'll have a few people who are excessively tall and others who are excessively short.
We could apply that to a cognitive ability, such as musicality.
Most of us possess, fall into the bulge of the bell curve and have average musical capability.
But on the extremes, there are some people born with an overdeveloped musical ability, genetically so, like a Mozart or savants, people who at five years old are playing Beethoven just by ear.
People who are otherwise what we're called idiot savants, people who otherwise can't tie their own shoelaces.
But again, if you play them a piece of Mozart, they can sit by the instrument and play it in perfect time.
Whereas on the other extreme, you have people who are born tone deaf with an underdeveloped musical capacity.
So, if indeed we are wired for spirituality and it's generated from a region in the brain, it would then follow that though the majority, the bulge of the human bell curve, has an average capacity to sense a spiritual reality,
to pray to a God, to believe in an afterlife, on the extremes of the bell curve, given the nature of genetic variants, that we're all a little different from one another, on the tapering extremes, on one end we'll have the zealots, those born with an overdeveloped religious preoccupation, and on the other extreme, those who, almost just as there are some people born musically tone deaf, we could say there are those born spiritually tone deaf.
They just do not think about these things.
They don't even have the capacity no more than my cat does.
Some humans are really just, you know, again, spiritually tone deaf, spiritually incapable or retarded, if you will.
I even experimented with various psychedelics, trying to see if maybe they would push me on through to the other side, as many cultures have used these substances as part of religious ritual to induce a spiritual experience.
And after having explored all these different venues, I didn't come up with anything definitive.
I couldn't say that, yes, I now know God.
I know for a fact that there's one out there.
So then I began studying the various sciences, saying, well, maybe science, which has uncovered so many truths and told us so much about the universe that we didn't previously know, maybe somewhere there'd be an answer there.
So I studied physics and biology and basically went through all the sciences.
And it wasn't until I had studied world cultures and then came upon the science of what's called sociobiology, something created by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner up in Harvard named Edward O. Wilson, a brilliant man who came up with a book, who wrote a book called Sociobiology, who was the first to really study different species and find that every behavior that was universal had a genetic component.
And I just took that a step further and said, well, if that's the case, then how about the fact that every culture has religion, has gods?
And it went from there.
So I think it was my capacity for reason that eventually outweighed my perhaps initial spiritual inclinations.
But in terms of the firmness of your atheistic belief, you're pretty hardcore.
What would happen to you, and how would you handle it if you suddenly met God?
I mean, you tried the psychedelics, everything else under the sun.
If you suddenly had an undeniable religious experience, I don't know, your couch began to glow and it talked to you and said it was God and you just knew it all to be true.
I mean, if you really had an experience, you wouldn't go check yourself in.
Listen, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Matthew Alper is my guest.
I'm Art Bell, and this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
Roaring through the nighttime.
unidentified
All right, and it's coming home.
We gotta get right back to where we started going.
Nothing's good, nothing's strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started going.
Do you remember that day?
That's what you were saying.
When you first came my way, I said no one could take your praise.
And if you get hurt, you'll...
...you're so sorry.
Be inside the sand, the smell of the touch, the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak leaves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again, or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, to lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing, and memory, And there is hope, and they use them to help us to fight.
Right, right back to the song, take this place, on this trip, just call me.
Right, right back to the song, take my place, I'm going to sing, it's for free.
wanna take a ride?
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I'll just tell you the basic storyline of the market.
I sent my book out four years ago to a bunch of well-known scientists for endorsement, most of which gave me endorsements.
One of them was Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize winner I told you about, who wrote me a wonderful letter which now appears in the front of my book as one of the reviews.
And I give you credit for being probably the first person out there to give me an audience to express these ideas.
And your listeners in 98 who got to hear me speak were five years ahead of the curb of now Time Magazine's cover story who are printing this as if it's new information.
So in the Time, certainly in the Time magazine story, because of your exposure here and your book endorsed by many colleagues, signed by the colleagues, they gave you lots of credit in there, I'm sure.
And as a matter of fact, there are phrases from my book used in that article.
And just what we were discussing earlier about why are they atheists, one of the things they open their article with is that why is it that some of us believe and others are spiritually tone deaf?
I mean, they use my language.
The whole article basically is a reiteration of my book.
But now all of the PhDs and fancy academics are basically picking my bones and taking credit for all of my thoughts.
All the stuff about like awareness of death, hardwired.
So what happened was one of these well-known academics who I sent the book to, a day after he read it, this was four years ago, he wrote an article online about his groundbreaking new theory about humans being wired to believe in God.
He just took my book and rewrote it into an article online and called it his theory because he's a big shot and he's a PhD and an MD and he very smugly claimed all of this stuff as his own.
And now it took him four years to basically reprocess my book.
Whereas I go into my book, I talk about the difference between spirituality and religiosity.
He has a chapter, the difference between spirituality and religiousness.
So he changed a prefix or a suffix here and there, and therefore blocking my capacity to sue for plagiarism.
And that's what's going on right now.
And because it was then published by Doubleday that, you know, his book, Time Magazine therefore assumed he must be the creator of these ideas.
And if you read the article, you'd basically be rereading what we've spoken about now for the last almost, you know, six years.
Yeah, well, I kind of figured that it would be my luck that I'll be famous posthumously, which is unfortunate, but...
Yeah, mostly for me.
But, you know, such is life, and in time, I think it'll eventually come out what's happened.
And I'm still pushing to see what avenues I can take to get it out there.
And if any of you listeners out there have contacts with the media and would love a great story about idea theft, and I have all the emails to prove everything that I would say, come and get me.
And they sort of basically separated those who were atheists to those who expressed being very spiritual based on a questionnaire.
Then what they did was they studied the people, they studied the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain that they're finding are related to spiritual experience.
And then they went and they looked at the genetic makeup of these two different groups of people and found that in some people there are genes that are linked to basically the secretion of these neurotransmitters that compel us to have these thoughts.
So there's the genetic link to the neurophysiological, to the neurotransmitters.
Just like, you know, I mean to say glowing spot, just like we could say, you know, someone who is a musical savant, a brilliant musician, has a glowing spot in their musical part of the brain.
And what they've done is taken people in the midst of meditation and prayer, and just as they reach that peak experience where they feel in touch with God, a connection with a higher power, they turn on the MRI machine, and they found that no matter what culture you're from,
no matter what God you pray to, when you do pray and you feel that contact, whether it's with Allah or Jesus or Buddha or whoever your God of choices, that the same regions in the brain become activated or deactivated.
So for instance, if we break down the symptoms of, let's say, a spiritual experience, one of them being a feeling of serenity, of tranquility, that's attributed now to if we meditate or pray, the brain's amygdala, which is a part of what's called the limbic system, and it's a part of the limbic system is responsible for all emotions, including anxiety and fear.
And that's what the amygdala is responsible for, anxiety and fear response.
When we meditate or pray, the capillaries literally close up and it gets a decreased blood flow.
So your normal sense of anxiety dissipates, leaving you feeling tranquil, euphoric.
Often it's described a loss of sense of time and space, this sort of almost ethereal sense.
That's attributed to the fact that the brain's parietal lobe, which is where your temporal and biological clock is, that gives you a sense of time and space, basically also shuts down, leaving you feeling spaceless and timeless, sort of one with the universe, one with God.
All right, Matthew, it's a good time for this one.
Karen in Madison, Wisconsin says, Hayar, I've heard Matthew several times, but I've never heard this asked.
Why does he think he's having a part of the brain that when stimulated produces spiritual tendencies?
Why couldn't it be evidence, not that God does not exist, but that he does?
After all, there are other parts of the brain we can stimulate, and they produce colors or sound, but it doesn't make us doubt that wavelengths of light or sound waves exist.
It seems to me that if anything, having a God part of the brain is evidence for a God, why have a receptor with no stimuli?
And it does stand to a certain degree as an anomaly.
There are other parts of the brain that actually compel us toward denial, toward blocking out certain realities.
There are certain parts, for instance, that compel us to have phantom limbs.
So we're actually perceiving things that are not real, but believing them to be real.
So it's not a total anomaly, but for us to have evolved with this particular sensibility does make it unique.
I can't definitively, with all the research in the world, if they come out with all the genetic and neurophysiological evidence out there, and they pretty much already have, I'm not suggesting that any of this is proof positive that there is no God.
And I'm saying that the reason is, as a coping mechanism, that it does have a reason, but, you know, to answer that also, and some people have suggested the same thing, well, maybe if we do have these parts, maybe God put them there.
Maybe this is all part of his master plan, to which...
Well, isn't the genetic code his master plan, or a master plan, whether you think it developed from, you know, millions of years of evolution or from God's hand?
Well, I don't support the notion that there's any master plan, that there's some conscious entity, and that the fact that humans would one day evolve to exist is part of his plan, unless part of his plan is also that one day humans are going to be extinct, which, whether we end up killing ourselves, which is probably going to be the case, or some, you know, I mean, ultimately, we can't live forever.
The sun's going to go out in a billion years.
I mean, there'll be all types of natural catastrophes that ultimately will lead to the, not just the end of the solar system, but the galaxy, etc.
We are actually getting to the point where life extension may soon, with genetic leaps and bounds, move into, well, you might not live forever, but you might live until you have an accident.
True, but I'm saying ultimately the human species is doomed to extinction.
Whether it's from, you know, at some point there will be a natural cause, whether it's in 50 years, or a thousand new years, or if we're as lucky to live, you know, for such a long period, ultimately, like I said, the sun is going to burn out.
Well, I think it's human nature to, again, to anthropomorphize, to believe that what we might just, we could otherwise call the forces of nature, has a conscious experience and has motivations and incentives and, you know, and created us with a reason or a goal.
I believe in nature.
I believe there is no conscious entity that's moving and shaking the universe, that basically this is a phenomena of nature that's beyond our comprehension, and that ultimately there is no, again, conscious entity that's designed us in such a way.
But to go back to the question that this woman asked, if indeed we do possess these parts of the brain and it's being validated through science, one could then ask, if there is a god and he has a master plan, perhaps god put this there.
Almost as a, this is what some people are saying, and I've even heard priests talk about this subject and saying, well, sure, it makes perfect sense.
God put a part of our brain so we would be able to envision him, so we would be aware of his presence and therefore be able to revere him as such.
the one of the reasons is if you look at the history of the different religions because this is not a you know every every belief system we would then say has had these parts of the brain that compelled them to believe these things and I would just have to question the nature of a God that would instill us with a part of the brain that would make us believe him to be a million different things and then compel us to go killing one another to prove that our version is right.
Well, if we're going to, let's say we take, you know, we presume the argument of free will, and we also presume that God has foresight, that he has ultimate knowledge of all things, I wouldn't understand why God would create a creature that he knows will, he's going to give him a capacity that he knows will lead To evil.
So here we've got this all-benevolent being.
Why would he allow for even the possibility of evil?
It either suggests that God's all-powerful but not very good, or at least open to the possibility of creating evil, because if God created everything and there's one evil act that takes place in the universe, whether it's by man or dog, God made that creature, if we're going to go with that argument, which would mean that God has the potential for creating evil.
Or the other possibility is that God is all benevolent and all-good, but not very powerful.
So his intention was to create an all-good creature, and things went off because he doesn't have that much control.
He's a bad mechanic, a bad creator.
But I can't imagine a God that has foresight to knowing what will come, what the consequences of his creation will be, even if he's going to instill what we could call free will.
And then knowing, okay, I know I'm going to give it free will, this creature free will, and that I then know what it's going to do with free will.
That nine out of ten times it's going to use that free will to do evil things.
It is, and it's the Matthew Alper Revival Hour, everybody.
Welcome.
Actually, it's a pretty serious situation.
Matthew Alper, for years, on this program, with the very first publishing, actually, of his book, as I recall, The God Part of the Brain was just, literally, just coming out, barely becoming available when I first had him on the show years ago now.
And here, Awen Dawn says, Art, you know, I'm sick and tired of people plagiarizing people's work.
They do it in archaeology all the time.
I have a very good friend who is a department editor of the New York Times.
Now, I can't promise anything, but, you know, I can drum up some interest in Albert there, perhaps.
And I hope you do.
It's not fair.
All of you have been listening since 98 or earlier, but certainly in 98 when Matthew came on the program.
You know he's right.
Agree or disagree with him, you know he's right.
He's just plain right.
And besides, proper credit is the Christian thing to do.
Matthew, this is a question I've asked many people appearing on my program, and it'd be fun to ask you too since you're an atheist.
If you died and you had a choice upon your death, and the mist clears a little bit, and in one direction there's light, and in the other direction there's darkness beyond what could ever be imagined.
Dark.
I mean, just so dark that it sucks any light away from it.
If we were contacted, If SETI got a hit and we were contacted by an alien race and we began to correspond with them over the light years or whatever, even if maybe they landed, would your expectation?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Real alien contact.
Now, would your expectation be that these alien beings would be worshippers of something?
Well, I would have to assume that any intelligent alien, intelligence incorporating self-conscious awareness, would have to fear non-existence, that it would somehow have to addle a creature to know that one day it's not going to be.
Unless for some reason they've decided to embrace it and look to it as like a positive thing.
But I can't imagine because that would be sort of contrary to self-preservation and that species would end up dying out eventually.
So I would guess that if there are other species or creatures or aliens that have self-conscious awareness, that they must reckon with death on some level.
Kind of makes you wonder how we're going to make out in the war.
I mean, if the amount of religious feeling, the strength of the religious conviction is a measure of how you will do, then we could be in trouble because our opposition certainly believes very strongly.
Well, I believe, first of all, that there's a misnomer in that one needs to be religious to be moral.
I believe that higher moral awareness comes from a different sensibility, a more humanitarian ethic than a religious one, because often it's religions that are telling you go out and kill the infidel or ostracize those who don't share your beliefs or your rituals.
So in many ways, religion sort of fosters discrimination and acts of hostility and unfairness and cruelty.
Well, there are parts of the brain they are now finding that are responsible for the experience of love.
And I remember in one of the prior shows that we did together, you asked me just that.
You said, well, you know, you can't reduce everything.
What about love?
And I even said, I said, you'll see, one day they will use an MRI and they will begin to measure the experience of love.
And since that time, there's been a number of experiments that have come out that have done just that, reduced the experience of love to neurotransmitters.
There's a woman, Helen Fisher, at Rutgers, and she's one of the chief proponents of these theories, and she's done a lot of the research.
And what she's found are that there are neurotransmitters involved with the bonding experience.
And that, as a matter of fact, there are some people whose brains secrete an excess of these neurotransmitters and have a problem with relationships.
They get overly attached.
They become codependent.
You could have one date with them and they're psychotically involved because their brains are secreting too much of this bonding mechanism neurotransmitter.
Now these same, it's interesting, these same neurotransmitters, they're actually, they're called oxytocin and vasopressin.
And they're the chemistry in the brain of basically of love, of attachment.
And what's interesting is, for instance, if you stimulate a woman's nipples, it will create this release of oxytocin in her brain.
And that will create a bond with whoever is touching her there.
So if she's making love with a man, she's becoming bonded to him, which serves an evolutionary purpose because now she's sort of securing herself a man who's going to help take care of her and her future child.
As I was going to ask, and now you're just leading right to it, whether the sex part of the brain and the love part of the brain are connected or whether they can idle along separately.
Which is why often when people have sexual encounters, they might not know each other's names, but they might wake up having a very strong feeling for that other person.
Yeah, so it's like one of the first things when you deliver a baby, they hand it to the mother and it starts suckling secretes.
Now, also, in giving birth, when a woman's vagina dilates like that, it creates, and during contraction, it also stimulates the release of these chemicals.
She's flooded with oxytocin, the moment of birth.
The first thing, they put the baby in front of the mother, which is a very important moment.
If you took the baby away for a few hours, she'd be missing, the mother would be missing an important part of her maternalizing experience.
So when you put the baby in the woman's lap, she's flooded with oxytocin.
She lays eyes on this child who's otherwise really a stranger to her.
I mean, hypothetically, you could even switch babies and play a practical joke on the mother, and it could be not even her own child.
She will be ultimately bonded.
She will defend that child with her life because of the chemicals surging through her brain.
And sometimes, because the oxytocin causes contractions, sometimes midwives, for instance, if a woman is having a hard time during labor, she will stimulate the woman's nipples to create the release of more oxytocin, which will induce labor.
That's right, because the neurotransmitters involved play on the brain's limbic system, which is called the sort of the lizard part of the brain, because that's when, during the evolution of reptiles, that was when the limbic system began to evolve.
I mean, you look at like a creature like the fish, you know, they don't bond with their children.
They lay a gazillion eggs.
The mother swims away.
A male comes and fertilizes them.
He swims away, and the children are off on their own.
There's no need for that part of the brain for those types of connections.
But lizards were the first to lay eggs and to watch over the eggs and watch over the young.
They're finding that one's capacity to understand right from wrong, to understand the difference between doing something good for another person and doing something selfish or bad to another person is dependent to a large extent on the functioning of specific regions in the brain.
Certain regions that in individuals who there's damage to the brain, to that part of the brain, have a tendency to become sociopathic.
I mean, there are criminals who have killed and killed and killed and killed, even serial killers, who, when they're caught, don't have one iota of remorse or guilt or anything else for what they've done, only feeling poorly that they can't go do more of it.
And on the other extreme of that same curve, you have people walking around, you know, with what we could call like a Woody Allen complex who are guilty all the time, even though they haven't done anything.
One would assume that locating these various portions of the brain that we've been talking about so far, and there are more that we're going to get to, but even guilt, for example, the identification of these locations is eventually going to lead to the ability to manipulate these areas.
Well, that's going to be the future of science, basically.
And that's going to be the moral dilemmas that, you know, the legislators or the scientists or whoever it is that's going to be making these decisions for us of what we're going to accept and what we're not.
Well, let's say we have an incorrigible murderer, somebody that they're not going to respond to classic retraining, reconditioning.
Their brain doesn't have the capacity for them to understand, as you said, remorse or guilt.
Well, we have two options.
We can either, and in a sense, you know, we need to almost, if we're going to begin to look at sociopathy, you know, let's say acts of murder, in terms of rather than looking at it as acts of evil, we're actually going to have to start to look at this as just people who are born with genetic defects.
We almost can't hold it against them.
And in many cases, they start to show symptoms as children.
That's why the FBI has profiles on these serial killers, and they tend to almost invariably follow a few certain symptoms, such as as children, they are often cruel to animals.
They will torture animals.
They have a tendency toward pyromania.
And so, again, these traits are starting to emerge in them as children.
Indeed, so not all of the messages I get are hate-filled.
Karen from Inglewood, Colorado, says, How can anyone not like this guest?
His topics are filled with common sense and logic.
I always enjoy listening to him, and you do a wonderful job of interviewing them, Art.
Thanks for a great show.
So, not all react sharply, but a bit many do.
Now, I suspect when we move into the love part of the brain, the guilt part of the brain, sex part of the brain even, and the yet-to-be-to-called about drug part of the brain, there will not be as many objections as there are to the God part of the brain.
So the fact that it's in our genes, now, it's very interesting that we have this attachment to other substances.
But if you look at the history of basically living things, we basically evolve in conjunction with the environment around us, in conjunction with the other animals.
So animals, for instance, that, you know, that evolve certain types of camouflage.
Often it's in conjunction with the types of trees in their environment or the predators that they're trying to hide from.
So natural selection does not take place in a vacuum.
All species evolve in conjunction with their environment.
Part of our environment are the plants and the other animals that coexist with us.
Some of those plants have chemistry that gives us altered states of awareness.
So whether it's the tendency to produce, to use fermented products that we call alcohol, or different plants that trigger different releases of chemicals in the brain that give us a state of either euphoria or drugs that make us activate us,
that make us hyper, whatever the case, we are born with receptors in our brain that are receptive to these chemicals.
Some people, again, if we go back to that bell curve example, most of us are born with an average tendency toward a desire for those substances, but not in excess,
which is why if we even look at, take America, for instance, I mean, granted, the harder things like heroin and cocaine are illegal, but other than that, we are a nation of junkies, whether it's cigarettes or caffeine or alcohol.
Not half, but a good chunk of our economy is based on substances that are addictive.
And that basically we could call term as drugs that alter our experience.
All right, to some degree, but let's look at environment here for a second, too.
And, you know, you always take these things personally.
I'm in radio.
I've been in radio all of my adult life.
And sitting here with a constant supply of coffee and cigarettes while I do something like a talk program like I'm doing right now, it's absolutely, it's like they're tied together at the hip for me.
So not all of it is genetic.
Some of it surely is environmental as well.
Like with so many other things, I say it's both genetic and environmental.
There's going to be genetic tendencies or predispositions and then environmental enforcement of all that, right?
But the fact that these substances do have a certain effect on the brain, and it has the same effect on no matter what culture you're from, alcohol will make you drunk.
Caffeine will make you wired, etc.
So there are receptors.
We're born with these receptors.
So again, if we look at the, if we take this to the bell curve notion, it would make sense that the majority of our species can handle these substances.
We use them in a moderate, to a moderate degree to help us bear with reality.
Well, let's say, you know, you keep throwing the ball into my lap.
I'll throw it in yours.
Let's say, you know, you were in charge of these things, and someone said, you know, we've discovered the gene for sociopathy.
90% of the criminals that flood our prisons, that, you know, cause the crime rates in America, can be cured by giving them a genetic therapy we've now found that will give balance to their, what would be called the Brodman 10 area in the brain, which a deficiency of leads towards sociopathic behaviors, inability to feel remorse.
Let's say you were the person in charge, you were the legislator, and they said, all you've got to do is sign here, and this will allow scientists from now on, let's say they'll give an injection to pregnant women, and it will make, all it will do, it won't affect people who already don't have a problem, but those who would have had a problem with their Brodman 10 region in the brain that would have led to a high percentage of them being criminal in nature.
And I believe that should be the case, because to a large extent, most people who commit crimes, well, look, you start playing with the whole nature-nurture thing.
Forget most, but there is a percentage of people out there who had no say.
Just like there are some people born with like a heart murmur or some, you know, or diabetes.
We wouldn't call them evil.
We wouldn't hold it against them.
But let's say, for instance, the person born with diabetes can't afford their medication.
So they go out and they steal for it.
And it's just a matter of self-preservation.
They're going to die.
And society isn't affording them assistance.
So would we say they're evil because they're born with a disease?
Well, what if the disease, instead of affecting their pancreas, like with diabetes, affects regions in the brain that we now know control moral behavior, moral decision-making?
Should we call those people evil?
Should we say, I mean, you know, they could have been you or me.
You know, the implication of that, though, is a little unsettling also, because it implies that we're all essentially marionettes, with every string being pulled by the area of our brain that's functioning perfectly normally, but we're all just going through life.
How much say did he have in that he was going to be born to be seven feet tall and have the agility of an eagle?
You know, these are things where we're born with gifts, and some of us are born with deficiencies, and we had no say in that matter.
We had no say into what error we were going to be born, to what culture, whether we were going to be born short, tall, male, female, talented, or, you know, with Down syndrome.
You might as well hold the person with Down syndrome responsible.
In olden days, they did.
They said that the reason they came out in some cultures to this day, the reason they are that way is because they were evil in a prior lifetime.
So they're held accountable for what we now know because of knowledge is just a genetic deficiency, a genetic mutation.
Should we call them evil because maybe they can't, you know, produce for society the way we would like them to?
So I think we need to use these new sciences, these new genetic and neurophysiological sciences, to actually advance a new paradigm, a healthier paradigm, one not based necessarily in like punishment, which the legal system is based in, but in different forms of reprogramming, as you said.
It's called The God Part of the Brain because everything we're discussing, even though I discuss at greatest length the God part of the brain and the religious implications and the philosophical implications of our religiosity, I go into all of this stuff.
And there's a chapter called The Guilt and Morality Function.
And everything from what we've discussed here about love, you know, the reducing of love to neurochemicals to the same with guilt and morality, it's all in my book.
So that tom has already been written, and it's available on Amazon.com as a matter of fact.
As in GodPart of the Brain, not only will they be able to read up on my book, will they be able to order the book, which I will send to them signed, but you will send out autographed copies still.
Autographed copies of the God Part of the Brain.
And as a matter of fact, there's only about 1,000 copies left, and I don't even know if I'm going to reprint again.
So this might be my last stand and the last chance for those people out there to get a copy of this tome.
You know, when you see your ideas on the cover of Time magazine, you know, six years later, sure, it's satisfying.
And then, you know, unfortunately, it's very disheartening when you read the article and you see all of your ideas.
You see basically your life's work being restated by other people saying, and then I had this idea, this brilliant idea that it evolved because of our awareness of death.
And I spoke to the authors of that time article and I said, listen, an injustice has been served here.
And I informed them what happened and how I sent this person my book four years ago.
One of them just stopped returning my phone calls, didn't want to be bothered.
The other one was very smug and just said, you know, you can't claim to have these people have been talking about that death was, you know, it's fear of death that turns people to gods as far back as St. Augustine in the third century.
We're going to go to the phones with Matthew Albert next.
unidentified
Drifting on the sea of heartbreak Trying to get myself ashore for so long Subscribe to the After Dark newsletter online at www.coastocoastam.com.
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Stranger stories.
Wondering where it all went wrong.
For so long.
For so long.
But hold on, hold on, hold on to what you got.
For so long.
For so long.
Before I get off the floor.
Don't let me down.
You're always talking about your crazy nights.
What other days you're going to get in right?
Don't let me down.
Rise on my mind.
I'll tell you what's wrong.
Before I get off the floor.
Don't let me down.
Don't break it down Don't break it down Don't break it down Don't break it down You're looking good just like a snake in your grass One of these days you're gonna break your glass
Don't break it down Don't break it down
talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295 The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222 To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033 from west of the Rockies call 800-618-8255 International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number pressing option 5 and
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one eight hundred five three one nine seven nine seven All those years ago, the guilt part of my brain remembers giving out Matthew Alper's home phone number.
But, you know, I really went through the exercise.
I said, listen, are you really sure you want to do this?
Are you positive you want to do you really want to do this?
I'm going to sign all of the well, Amazon sells used copies, so I can't promise that what they get from Amazon will be signed, but any subsequent orders that I'm going to be getting from them, hopefully from this show, I'm going to be signing all the copies I'm going to be sending to Amazon.
So they can either order it that way, or they can get it through GodPart.com, my book's personal website, Or if they don't have access to a computer, they can send a check for $14.95 to Matthew Alper to Rogue Press, and I'll make this very quick, at 123 7th Avenue, Suite 164, Brooklyn, New York, 11215.
The people who take the time to send me emails either are very congratulatory and thank you for writing this book and it's helped change my life, et cetera, et cetera, to things that I can't repeat on the air without you pissing me out.
If I could just, I wanted to just suggest something before my question, please.
I think that we're addicted to the brain chemistry of thinking, and the brain chemistry doesn't care if an atheist or a Christian, as long as one has a story or a narrator internally dialoguing in their head.
So, Matthew, please.
The story of the boy that was raised in the wild.
Do you think without cultural input, a feral child slash young adult would start religious thinking or religious practices on his own?
Great question.
I think that, like with a lot of behaviors, so for instance, let's use language as an analogy, a lot of the behaviors that we enact are social behaviors in nature and only really emerge when we emerge in groups.
So for instance, no more than a feral child, I believe, would create his own language.
He might have certain grunts that might represent things in his mind that he's hoping to communicate to the wolves, but let's say if he's raised by wolves in this example, but chances are he'll end up utilizing, to the best of his ability, the language of those wolves he's raised by, as opposed to like one day you'll see him writing a book or composing a language.
Chances are he won't.
But if you took a group of individuals, let's say feral, let's say children out of, you know, what was that book, The Flies, Lord of the Flies, you know, children, let's say, stranded on an island, eventually will create a group of them, will tend to create a language, just as they will eventually also probably tend to create a religion.
So one individual isolated feral child probably will not because religiosity and spirituality to a large extent are social in nature.
They seem to emerge as a group dynamic.
Nevertheless, it's very possible that just like that feral child might, unlike the wolves who raise him, he might end up like banging on a piece of wood and coming up with a song or, you know, or he might hum a melody, something foreign to the wolves and something they're not capable of.
In the same way, it's very possible that that feral child might look up at the sky and feel a sense of awe that his nurturing wolf parents won't be able to, and it might even somehow trigger a sensibility that there's like some higher power out there.
But I can't say, and there's no definitive studies that have been done on that because there's so few examples of feral children.
Most of them that were Done and ones that were found, it was at the turn of the 20th century.
So they didn't really study religious behaviors.
They studied language.
They studied sort of, you know, their sense of etiquette.
But it's an excellent question, and it's definitely something that should be looked into.
But I believe that, yes, this is an inherent part.
It's an inherited predisposition.
It will emerge in a group dynamic, an isolated group of even children, per se.
Well, I mean, look, every culture that's isolated at some point were like a feral group.
Let's say, you know, maybe two people, an Adam and Eve of a community where whether they were ostracized or there was a food shortage, so maybe they marched a few hundred miles and they migrated.
Maybe it was two people, maybe it was 10 people, but eventually they started a whole new culture, one that never had exposure to other people for maybe another 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 years.
Nevertheless, those people were religious and those people had a language.
So it seems that in isolated groups, these things do emerge.
In an isolated individual, that's never been found.
They never found like a child raised by wolves in the woods who was praying or had built certain shrines.
If we were to suggest that this God part of the brain, which I wish we could just call it the part of the brain, is a coping mechanism for dying, doesn't that suggest that you have had to recognize that you do die to then have to instigate that coping mechanism?
There was a spiritual teacher named Barry Long.
He has a take, May I Speak to You of Death, in the early 90s.
And he states that we created thinking as a way to escape into the past or future once when we recognized that we do die.
So that need to get out of the moment was created upon the moment we realized that we die.
He was just saying in parallel work, it's been suggested that, yes, thinking promulgates eventually understanding your own mortality, which then forces C. Right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Matthew Alper.
It's a phenomena of nature, probably beyond our comprehension, because, again, our comprehension is based in the brain.
The brain is our package of awareness.
And the brain only evolved on Earth to help us cope with earthly situations and earthly survival.
The universe, as we know, is bigger than Earth, but we weren't constructed as such to comprehend that bigger universe.
So, you know, yes, it's very possible that there are other dimensions, and within these other dimensions, that there are even gods per se.
However, in the third dimension, things that can be measured within the physical universe, my take is that it's simply, you know, forces of nature, non-conscious forces of nature.
And if there are metaphysical things that are not just hocus-pocus and myth, and if they're real, then they're a product of the physical operating human brain, not something beyond.
Like, let's say, for instance, yes, somebody had clairvoyance or somebody had telekinetic powers, then certainly those things would be possible without a God.
It would just be some, you know, some part of the human condition, some part of our circuitry that has allowed us to extend our powers beyond our physical reach.
I guess my question would be, how could he take issue with these plagiarists that are taking credit for his work if they simply have a chemical imbalance that's predisposed them to doing this?
You know, shouldn't we just be treating them rather than trying to sue them?
Fine.
Treat them.
Unless right or wrong only exists when it applies to them.
Unfortunately, it's human wiring because it seems like the majority of our species has a propensity towards selfish behavior.
And unfortunately, we're not the most cooperative animal out there, which is why we seem to be tearing ourselves apart limb from limb.
But yes, it's part of the human condition.
And, you know, and I'm stuck here amongst it all.
And yes, it's true.
I'm not claiming that these men are possessed by the evil forces of Satan, but just that whether they are nature or they're nurture, they're just not the nicest people.
So I just wanted to concur with Matthew's feelings on free will.
I don't believe in free will as well.
I believe we're all, everything we do, all the choices we make are results of our biochemical makeup and the way we're brought up.
And also, I wanted to make a comment on labels.
People call themselves atheists.
People call themselves believers.
But I believe the bottom line is that we can only label ourselves as being neutral because we really don't know one way or the other if there's a God or not.
And then I just had a question about Albert Einstein.
Well, I know that different people have a different definition of what a miracle would be.
Some people look at a sunset and say, Wow, that's miraculous.
Maybe not necessarily meaning God waved his magic wand and out came the beautiful red sky.
But as far as obviously, if you're adding a supernatural/slash spiritual component, like miracles out of the Bible or miracles, let's say out of the Greek myths, if one were to believe in those, obviously, you know, I don't believe in those things.
Well, I heard you talk about studying world religion, and you mentioned Buddha.
And I wondered if you'd ever heard of Mahayana Buddhism, which is founded by Nichiren and Daishonen 700 years ago in Japan and teaches to devoting oneself to the mystic law of the universe is the path to enlightenment.
Well, we've got our list of laws, and basically those who have an ongoing tendency to break those laws, who show sociopathic tendencies to disregard the rules that the rest of us are expected to play by, have a problem understanding those rules and engaging by them, might need to be fixed per se.
And by putting them in a cage with others like themselves so they can learn, you know, new tricks of the trade and feed off one another's improper tendencies for them to be working.
If we had an anti-social person who, I don't know, killed somebody's family member, you know, now there is punishment, there is revenge.
Would getting somebody reprogrammed, even if you were absolutely assured they would never do such a thing again, satisfy the need for vengeance, the need for the satisfaction on the part of the victims or the victims' family of some resolution, of some justice dealt?
Well, I mean, if we were truly understanding creatures, it should, because by the same logic, you know, we could pose the question, let's say a child is born, an infant, and we've done a brain scan and we've done a genetic scan, and we know that that person has a 99.9% chance of growing to one day being a criminal.
Yeah, I mean, I might want the moment, but I understand that for the greater good, it's not in the best interest of all of us.
Now, had I had the option, or should I have the option where they said, okay, you know, you can either use the hot poker on this guy or you can push this button and it will re-scramble their brain, but they'll never do this again.
By sticking a hot poker in the person and making them scream, you know, for 20 minutes probably won't accomplish anything, and they'll probably just go on to do the same types of deviant behaviors with even more of a vengeance.
i mean there is that aspect to it a particular it can get pretty dog on serious when you're talking about If somebody kills your life mate, and we're talking about killing them.
And I haven't for myself even resolved the problem of the death penalty.
If it were up to me, I'm not sure whether I would encourage it or not.
But I think ultimately it's probably something I wouldn't, Just because we want to encourage a merciful society, and I don't believe that acts of vengeance really serve any purpose in the end other than a primitive whim, and it just fuels our own rage.
Look, this comes rolling off your lips easily at a moment when your mom or your dad or the closest loved one to you hasn't been murdered in cold blood.
I would actually, there's nothing I would want more.
Maybe to find a soulmate, but other than that, Well, I don't even think I could afford to repay anyone anything, but certainly shake their hand and apologize.
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Well, as a follow-up just to that first question, spiritual knowledge comes from spiritual practice.
So what spiritual practices are you engaged in currently?
Okay, well, I'm just trying to point out that each person's belief system is relative in nature, relative to the culture that we're raised by.
And people from the various cultures who were raised with these various belief systems believe they know their gods as truth with the same conviction.
So the same people who are blowing up our soldiers in Iraq speak of their God knowing him with the same conviction to the extent that they're willing to kill themselves in his name.
Since you've studied religion and with your position on the God part of the brain, what religion do you think most appropriately services the God part of the brain?
Of the religions that you've looked at, what most Well, see, the fact that they all come from that part, they all equally serve it to whatever cultural manifestation they create.
And I was wondering, Matthew, you were speaking before about the cause of the selective agent essentially being our unwillingness to face our own demise.
I was wondering if you had considered the aspect of sexual selection as being maybe something driving the system as well, in that possibly the need for rules for choosing a mate and holding on to a mate.
I believe that the primary impulse behind the selection of the God part of the brain was the fear of death.
But there are other components to it.
Through our religiosity, every culture not just creates gods and a sense of worship and belief that console us, but at the same time, they also give us a sense of community, a sense of purpose.
They bind us through common laws.
So that's almost like the ancillary purpose for the selection of this adaptation.
So it serves other functions, and one of them is exactly what you're pointing to, which is to bond communities, give them purpose, give them laws, etc.
So these things are also extremely important and played a very specific role in the emergence of human religiosity.
Because prior to secular law, every culture was guided by religious law.
And it was usually the shamans who created our laws.
So the two go hand in hand, and that definitely played an important role in the selection of this part of the human condition.