In a cogent and highly readable analysis, Dr. Ray traces the contagion course of religion as it enters the lives of countless individuals, beginning in childhood and infecting their behavior, professions, sex lives, and virtually ever aspect of living. And Dr. Ray knows whereof he speaks, for he is the child of fundamentalist, evangelical parents, who frequently took their young son to Bible thumping religious revival meetings.

“At the time that my parents began taking me to hear ministers, I was just old enough to understand the words that they preached at us,” said Dr. Ray. “From those experiences, I learned who was good and who was bad: people of other religions or of no religions were sinners who would wind up in Hell. Such teachings infected my young mind and had a profound effect on my life, at least until I outgrew my impressionable teenage years and was sufficiently determined to think for myself. The degrees that I earned in religion and psychology immeasurably helped me to see through prejudice, myth, and superstition. My situation is not uncommon, but my book is. And I believe that people who want to think intelligently and rationally about religion, whether they are believers or non-believers, will find my book a useful resource.”

The God Virus carefully details the practical consequences of fundamentalist religious beliefs, infecting personalities, families, and cultures. It deals with the superstitions of religion propagated by clerics who, for example, told congregants that cancer and other diseases were the results of sinful living. As science became more sophisticated and was able to explain the causes of past diseases, such as the Black plague, religious figures had to back off their initial pronouncements. Such a paradigm continued as researchers discovered the non-divine causes of yellow fever, polio, small pox, pneumonia, tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, influenza, etc. Such discoveries, unfortunately, did not prevent religious leaders from condemning evolution, homosexuality, aspects of astronomy, anthropology, psychology, and even economics. Blind belief in the righteousness of one’s beliefs has caused fundamentalist Christian leaders to claim that that the attacks of 9/11 were caused by the sinful behavior of Americans. Such a pronouncement was not different in intent or origin from fundamentalist Muslim clerics who declared that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God as a punishment to America.

Dr. Ray, as a resident of Kansas, has seen first hand how fundamentalist religious beliefs have a negative effect on education, for it was in his state that members of boards of education wanted to ban the teaching of evolution and substitute the teaching of creationism, which propounded that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

As Dr. Ray has written, “Religion seems to inject itself into schools, courts, legislatures, presidential politics, and local school boards, detracting from rational conversation about real-world problems, such as science, education, economics, economic development, disaster relief, and war.’

Dr. Frank Schaeffer, the celebrated author of Crazy for God, wrote: “I am a religious person, a churchgoer. Nevertheless, this one-of-a-kind book [The God Virus] is a vital reminder of the fact that we think objectively at what religion does to us.”

And Earl Doherty, author of the best-selling book, The Jesus Puzzle, wrote: “Dr. Ray’s approach is non-confrontational. He advocates understanding and tolerance. He gets inside the American fundamentalist movement in ways which show that such entities have a collective life of their own, functioning as large-scale organisms which their individual members may not themselves understand or be aware of.”

Whether you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic, you will find The God Virus an exciting and challenging experience, especially if you are not frightened or timid about being a being a rational, thoughtful, and compassionate human being. One has nothing to lose but the mental chains of superstition and intolerance that can keep one in a perpetual state of fear.

“By writing The God Virus,” stated Dr. Ray, “I have attempted to inoculate my readers against a viral infection that results in terminal ignorance and fear.” Many grateful readers agree.

The Orthodox Jews have a name for this: Emunas Chachomim – faith in the wise ones, the sages. Whatever my rabbi says is sacred. There is no doubt he is right. If something later appears to be wrong, look for the reasons elsewhere, not in the words themselves. It’s important to emphasize again that this is how they feel. And this is based on Biblical text itself: “…and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they shall teach thee.” (Deuteronomy, chapter 17, verse 10). This is indeed a closed loop: God says I should listen to my rabbi, which in turn teaches me that everything God says is right!

There are a couple of other issues, worth mentioning on this complex road of forming one’s way of life.

Yehoshua Bar-Yosef wrote the book ‘A Heretic Despite Himself’, which tells a long and colorful story of the road from Orthodox Judaism to the secular world. In the beginning of the story, our hero keeps participating in monthly gatherings with his male friends, away from their wives (for a good religious reason, you know). Their dancing ritual together – producing that high feeling – is described as far better than having sex.

People searching for their “identity” also seek a group of which to be part. We usually enjoy Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ when we’re too young to fully understand what’s going on (The king is naked! The king is naked!). Yet the message is clear and true: The power of the crowd is real. It both pressures and strengthens. The pressure is in the sense that we hate to appear different than the others. As for strengthening – have you ever participated in an event, where a large group of people with a similar ideology were performing some ritual together? Whether in political or religious context, one gets rather emotional in this “I encourage you and you encourage me” situation, and things seem as if they must be truer than ever.

Having a clear and well-defined goal fits well in this picture – just ask any successful high-tech startup manager. If you know exactly what you want to achieve and how you’re going to be rewarded at the end, you are also liable to share that feeling of “I am right”.

Another issue has to do with Newton’s first law of inertia. In addition to our being programmed to follow what we absorb as kids, we start implementing another program in our brain when we grow up – the program that makes it difficult for us to change things. Again, we are programmed to preserve our perception of the world, as we grow older. And yet again, another characteristic of ours is that we think we do a good job in examining the alternatives and choosing constantly.

This is somewhat correlated with what’s known as the Touchy-Feely Syndrome – the tendency for people to overvalue things they have touched or selected personally. This characteristic of ours is often a good reason for why investors stay with an investment for too long.

By the time many people dare to really think about altering their way of life, they have already established their position in the society around them. By then it might be very difficult to change the day-to-day behavior – What you wear, how you speak and where you live – even if perhaps you now secretly believe in completely different things.

Sometimes you unknowingly lie to yourself, only in order not to change things. You may even invent some intellectual excuses to explain why you’re right (“Doctors don’t know anything”, “Praying is proven to physiologically help”, “The king is not actually naked”). You must prove to yourself you haven’t been wasted all these years in vain. Other times you don’t bother lying to yourself any more, and knowingly decide not to change things. It’s a fact that there are people raised in a religious atmosphere since childhood, who are not religious anymore by any definition you may think of, except for their external appearance and surroundings.

George Orwell wrote ‘Shooting an Elephant’ in 1950. This story about life in Burma became quite famous. So did Orwell’s description of the man who grew to do what he was expected to do: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

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“It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.” – Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

The workers of San Diego’s Wild Animal Park were facing a strange kind of problem. While promoting the California condor breeding program, they reached a point in time when they were about to see some newly hatched chicks. However, they had to take precautions so that the chicks would not see them. They actually used some puppets to hide their hands, in order to fool the chicks.

Raising animals in captivity introduces a whole new set of problems, some of which are surprising. It appears that many kinds of chicks and cubs tend to imprint whatever they see after they are born and follow it around from then on. They interpret it as their mother, and interestingly, evolution has programmed them to follow their mother and mimic lots of her behaviors.

Humans – so it seems – are also extremely open to imprint things they see around them when they’re young. Families who have migrated from one country to another have often encountered another related syndrome: It appears that their small children have picked up the new language miraculously, to such an extent that they switch spontaneously to speaking it. They sometimes even do it in the presence of their parents, who barely understand the new sounds. They seem to do it especially when they’re excited or upset.

We largely absorb our understanding of the world around us from the way we are brought up. We are built to do so. In spite of what we may think, we have little control over this process. Have you noticed how in an Islamic environment, most people grow to be Muslims, while in a Christian environment, people somehow grow to worship the Trinity? The very same person would argue passionately about totally different things, if they had spent their childhood among others.

From the moment we are formed until we are full grown, our perception of this world changes from almost zero to everything we know, or think we know. Generally speaking, this dramatic change may be contributed to two sources only. One of them is found in our genes and the way we have evolved – for example: No one taught us how to suck milk as infants, or how to hold objects tightly with our little baby hands. The other source of our knowledge is in everything we see, hear, smell, feel and taste – whether this data comes from still objects, plants, animals or other people around us. This is what we grow up with, and is eventually the major source of information for us that turns into the abstract contents of these little boxes in the top of our heads.

And what do we see, hear, smell, feel and taste in this modern world of the 21st century? From the moment we start hearing stories, we learn about God, the Bible, miracles and saviors, monsters and witches, vampires and aliens. From the time we start seeing pictures and signs, we see the artistic comforting face of Jesus Christ, the glaring eyes of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and/or copies of the New Testament in every Western hotel room. It would take a really strong personality to put some solid sense into this stream of confusing emotional input.

The following famous joke illustrates the spirit of things:

A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales.

“Whales can’t swallow people,” the teacher said. “Even though they are large mammals, their throats are very small.”

“But Jonah was swallowed by a whale,” the little girl replied.

“That just can’t be,” the teacher said. “It’s physically impossible.”

“When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah,” said the little girl.

The teacher looked down at her, smiled and asked, “What if Jonah went to hell?”

The little girl replied, “Then you ask him.”

You see, the little girl in the joke is merely you and I. We are programmed to act in certain ways and follow what we are repeatedly told. It is a human characteristic to consider things shown to us when we are young as true. It is another human characteristic to think we control this process and choose our truths. In fact we largely don’t.

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Thus, scientific answers do not provide mental satisfaction for the person asking such questions. He or she needs answers in the sense that he or she seeks relief to this intellectual distress, so to speak. Open questions are bad and instant answers are good. This is like a small boy who hears his father’s complex explanations about their financial situation, but eventually feels compelled to ask again for that expensive toy in the window.

It is important to emphasize the aspects related to the term “nature’s wonders”, as commonly used. It is only natural for us humans to admire things that seem so wonderful and complex – for instance, the anatomy of the eye and its capabilities. Moreover, it would be appropriate to regard with suspicion a person who does not feel a kind of contradiction between such complexity and sophistication on one hand, and the simple laws of physics (as taught in school) on the other hand.

Part of this feeling is refusing to accept that what seems complex to us has been created naturally. This feeling is not based at all on any knowledge about the actual origin of things. It is based on the way our brain is built (or rather, evolved over millions of years).

It’s very difficult for us to perceive long periods of time. We don’t feel what “hundreds of millions of years” really is. Never in our history of evolution have we had any need for such a feeling. We cannot feel very slow development, so it is interpreted in our mind as something faster, which makes it absurd and unacceptable. As if it took three generations for fish to turn into reptiles, and for proto-chimps to become Homo sapiens. As a consequence, we obviously tend to reject such absurdity. Hence, our inability to perceive huge periods of times and enormous distances eventually causes our minds to seek a more comprehensible explanation of some divine intervention, creating things in much shorter times within a much smaller world.

The minds of people like Einstein or Darwin (and for that matter, yours and mine as well) are not essentially different in this respect. However, they managed to distinguish between these subjective feelings and objective facts, based on hard evidence. Indeed it seems absurd that the eye has been shaped by natural selection processes. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Yet, the facts and evidence we have confirm this process. Indeed there are wonderful things in the kingdom of animals and plants, but the wonder is found in the way we look at things, not in the things themselves.

Certain animals (snakes, butterflies and others) have pictures of big eyes imprinted on them. These are usually explained as a mechanism that has evolved to frighten potential predators, meaning those with bigger eyes survived more. Is this the real reason? Probably yes. Can we absolutely prove it? Not in mathematical terms. Can our mind feel this is the reason? Not really. Our mind imagines eye pictures that have been created quickly, thus having no natural explanation. With a bit of logic (exercising control over our natural feelings) we can find natural explanations for many wonderful characteristics of animals and plants.

Scientists do not take advantage of the lack of knowledge of others, as I heard once. Quite the opposite, scientists often fight their own feelings and instincts. They attempt sticking to facts, even if sometimes those facts are not very convenient, even for them as humans.

A somewhat related story has to do with our urge to assign reasons to various events. Our perfect imaginary world includes a cause for every thing that happens. If there’s no obvious cause, we may often invent one that serves our purposes. Many times we do it in our mind without noticing. We sometimes do it even against our will, like a person afraid of the dark, knowing perfectly well that the darkness cannot cause any harm. Reasoning is a basic quality of our world. Why was President Kennedy murdered? Why is this sword lying in the field (Joan of Arc, in case you missed it)? We easily adopt cosmic conspiracies. You know what? There is even a reason for this chapter to reach your eyes.

Analyzing this characteristic of ours, we may find that it has actually evolved over time. Many of our ancestors stood a better chance of surviving if able to assign reasons for events. Ironically so, the same quality we’ve developed due to evolution is now used to deny it. In other words: You refuse to believe that all those feelings of yours are in fact chemical processes, evolved during millions of years? Your refusal to believe so, is in itself a feeling, a chemical process, which has evolved during millions of years.

Following the huge tsunami in December 2004, some Jewish religious authorities (including one of Israel’s chief rabbis) simply knew why the tragedy took place. It was due to God’s anger at the gentiles – the non-Jews – for not keeping the minimal set of laws required from them by God. Those laws are known in the Jewish tradition as the 7 laws of Noah. Chief Muslim authorities, however, knew of a different reason: The tragedy happened because of prostitution and Zionist activity associated with the suffering areas.

For that matter, it was Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach – a major religious leader in Israel of the 20th century – who published the evident religious thoughts about the necessary reason for the Jewish Holocaust: It was a punishment for Jewish bad religious behavior, and following its implementation, the Jewish balance with God has been reset (for now).

Religious thinking is especially fond of assigning reasons to things. We often believe in the reasons we wish to believe in and then feel that we see things we wish to see. People who deeply believe seem to know that if something good happens, it’s because they did what God expected them to do. If something bad happens, it means, of-course, that they didn’t perform as expected. Either way, for them, it’s an internal proof of what should be done, and for the existence of God. Certain creative religious minds may even twist the purpose of this book to be some sort of a weird test by God. People in the early stages of leaving their religion tend to associate their physical problems with their new deeds. Many conclusions are drawn just to calm down the God-seeking mind.

Seeking for a clear beginning and end, longing for a simple reason, it’s no wonder our most popular book (and the text we study as children) starts with the words “In the beginning God created…”

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“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.” – Niels Bohr

“Red is grey and yellow white, but we decide which is right, and which is an illusion.” – ‘Late Lament, Nights in White Satin’, The Moody Blues, Graeme Edge

There is a well-known story about a woman who attended a lecture, and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in five billion years. The woman fainted immediately. After being woken up she was asked whether the reason she fainted had to do with the five billion years mentioned. She replied with a sigh of relief, saying, “Thank God! I thought he said five million years.”

This chapter is a bit different than the others. No, it does not discuss Italian cooking or underwater sex, but it deals less with God and religions, and deals more with ourselves, or rather – the way we grasp the world around us.

Let’s begin this short journey with a small example: We know that all that’s around us, including our own flesh and bones, is made of tiny molecules, which in turn are built from a collection of atoms. And what makes up the atoms? We were told in school that each atom is made of electrons that sort of circle around a nucleus and that all of these particles are extremely small.

Imagine taking a single atom and increasing its size about a trillion times, so it becomes as big as a large concert hall. When we start to travel inside this imaginary huge atom, we’ll find somewhere in the middle a little nucleus, the size of an apple. What about the electrons? Ignoring some physical facts about how difficult it is to actually locate them, they will still be too tiny for us to see in the hall, even smaller than the head of a pin.

We know the world around us is made of atoms. We now also know that most of the volume of this world is occupied by… nothing. When we press our finger against the wall, we actually press lots of emptiness against more emptiness. However, the wall still feels very rigid, doesn’t it? (You just tried it yourself… I saw you!)

Furthermore, imagine our nice brick wall now being heated with intense flames. We know that this causes the tiny molecules of the wall to move faster. However, when we touch the wall now, we don’t feel any movement of the molecules. At least not the way we grew up to understand what “movement” is. What we do feel is a very hot wall.

Where does this feeling of solidness come from? And how come the movement of small particles is translated into the feeling of heat? It is truly amazing how our brain and mind deal with the physical phenomena around us: Different frequencies of light in the real world are perceived by us as different colors in our world. Certain frequencies are felt as cold colors, while others produce warm colors in our mind. Combinations of sound waves with nice mathematic relations are mapped into pleasant chords of music, while not-so-nice relations are taken for discordant harmonies.

In a nutshell, things that we feel about the world around us, as strong as this feeling may be, represent the way our mind was shaped to understand these things, not necessarily what they really are.

Let’s take this concept one step further. Remember our imaginary concert-hall-size atom? Let’s increase it a bit more until all the protons and the electrons become easily visible. What do you think is the shape of an electron? Is it round like a ball? And what is the texture of a proton? Is it soft or hard?

In reality these questions have no immediate meaning. Shape and texture, just like temperature and elasticity, are characteristics of large objects made of many molecules. They simply don’t apply for electrons and protons. At least not in the simple sense we grew up with. And yet, we find it extremely difficult to think of something we know is there as having no specific shape or texture. For our own complete vision of the universe, we must assign in our mind some shape, texture, color, exact location, and speed to any object out there.

This is to say that our mind is very limited. We have the urge to fully understand what everything is composed of, and we’ll never be satisfied because in our perception of the world there could always be something smaller. Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. Those, in turn, are made of quarks and strings… does it ever end? More importantly: Can our mind deal with this question at all?

The need to satisfy our limited mind creates paradoxes and difficult situations for us. We read about the duality of light, being both particles (photons) and energy (waves) at the same time. We may understand the equations, but our mind doesn’t really absorb these facts as a true feeling of what’s around us. Similarly, we find it extremely difficult to deal with death and the loss of a loved one. Our mind can’t accept the fact that someone we know ceases to exist. We manage this loss by completing the picture with the notion of the next world.

Einstein’s theory of relativity produces many more examples that are perhaps easy to calculate, but fall again into this category of “not satisfying our mental wish for completeness”: How can the speed of light always be the same, even if we move towards it or away from it? How can time tick at different rates for persons in different situations (e.g., the twin paradox)? The answer is of-course that the problem lies in the way our mind has been built to interpret the world, and not in the world itself or in our scientific way of understanding it. The problem, if you will, is with us, not with the world around us. The world is complex for our mind.

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