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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Speciation of Religion8/14/2007 16:11:14I have been thinking of assembling a project on speciation for some time now. It would be a rather large, cross-disciplinary project of both a scholarly and popular character, perhaps consisting of both a PhD dissertation and a mass-market book (which could also include a documentary, a la Balmer's _Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory_). Big ambitions, eh? The idea first came when I was in an internet cafe in Belize, feeling alienated after a long trip through Central America. I saw an article online from the BBC about new discoveries on the speciation of butterflies: how markings accentuate biological differences and speed up the speciation process. It occurred to me then that perhaps religiosity serves a similar end, to make group outsiders appear less human than, in fact, they really are. This, it seems to me, helps explain the fixation of religious beliefs on sexuality and especially on sexual border-crossings. There are a few places, I later discovered, where the wonderful Erik Erikson makes use of this idea, roughly, calling it "pseudo-speciation" (he credits the term to someone else, I forget whom). It is the tendency in us to see members of other groups as belonging to a different species. Then recently I came across an account of costly-signaling theory (CST) (in an article by Wesley Wildman), an approach to biological game theory that examines the adaptiveness of costly behaviors in a communicative environment. There, Wildman suggests that the costly absurdity of religious beliefs, in a CST analysis, can be seen to serve the purpose of giving the illusion of speciation. The sensation at the heart of this reading is a familiar one: "How can they believe a thing like that? They must be from another planet." The dissertation end of this project would examine these scientific and sociological suggestions alongside some troubling phenomenon, probably some object of feminist critique. I am particularly interested in how these sorts of theories might inform understandings of male-orchestrated sexual oppression and repression, connected to the larger project of the priority of mens' studies in religion. The popular end of the project would be a collection of essays about my own experiences with "the speciation of religions." I have done a great deal of exploring among religions, having been a member and practitioner of several over the years, and an avid visitor of many. These experiences are inevitably as alienating as they are enlightening, and I think my own maleness plays some role in these perceptions as well. The mood, I think, would be one of melancholy: beauty trapped within the confines of illusory speciation; the hope of a common humanity violated by the facts of evolutionary and human history, all playing out in the innocent happenings of this present life.
re:speciation - 8/14/2007 23:14:59
re:a journal - 8/17/2007 09:48:55
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