Well it's the winter solstice celebration, after all. In
the time when that celebration began, around the Mediterranean, there were no watches and even the clocks (which told the time by how fast a candle burnt down or water dripped out of a reservoir) were pretty inaccurate. Even
so, since the shortest day of the year is 22nd. December, and the shortest evening comes a day or two before that, by 25th December it was beginning to be obvious to the priesthood, who watched carefully for this sort of thing,
that the year was on the turn. They got very good at it, too. In Ireland just north of Dublin, at Newgrange, there still exists a passage grave, dug into the side of a hill, where only at the winter solstice does the sun shine
down the passage and into the depths of the tomb, to tell that heroic old skeleton which once ruled the kingdom of Ireland that in the world he left behind the years are still turning. It must have been very rare in Ireland,
4 300 years ago, that the sun was ever seen on a winter's morning. I suspect that even then the Irish were as hopeful a tribe as they are now at a racecourse or in a confessional.
At the time of the birth of Christ there weren't
any birth certificates or Statistical Departments, nor even a Bethlehem Weekly Gazette with Births Marriages and Deaths. So the birth of a son to a carpenter was not a widely noted event, its date being sadly unknown. It was not
until about 350 Anno Domini that a Pope (wasn't it one of the Gregories?) decided to take over the Roman Saturnalia (a hostile takeover) for the birth of Christ. A good decision.
But not until Victorian times and the influence of
the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas from Germany did Christmas gradually develop into our annual Orgy of the Retail Trade. Nowadays shop-keepers all over the world couldn't manage without it. Trying to buy that annual idiocy (but a pretty
idiocy) , a Christmas Tree, I discovered that the whole shipment had sold out in less than a week. But a new shipment was about to arrive so I should get there quick, the same day it comes on sale.
And I have managed to
find something useful to give the Mistress, a computer with everything, colour, sound, disc brakes, internet, five forward speeds and air-conditioning. No longer will she have to use my old black and white laptop to play bridge and
write her letters. And I have done my bit to keep the shop-keepers from bankruptcy.
But perhaps you remember that, as a keen Darwinian, I have always looked for good evidence that religion, in general, has evolved by Natural
Selection. To do so religion would need to confer a reproductive advantage on those who possess it. The classic scientific method is "Theorem--proof, Theorem--proof".
On the whole the evidence tends to suggest
the opposite of a reproductive advantage, except for the well-known (but less well-practised) Catholic prohibition of Birth Control. Look at the voluntary adoption of chastity of many Religious of many different faiths. An early
Christian sect on the west shore of the Black Sea religiously castrated themselves.
The religious enthusiasts who followed the Reverend Jones to Guyana practised suicide and finally got around to doing it. The absurd Californian
computerised group who, one would suppose, would be far too sophisticated to fall into such arrant nonsense, put on their purple shirts and their fashionable sneakers before killing themselves so that they could join the
happy angels in the space ship following the Hale-Bopp comet.
And those sensible administrators of the Inquisition who reluctantly burnt their many prisoners were only practising advanced Public Health for souls. Their saintly
work might seem to be savage, but in all good faith they were attempting to prevent souls from straying into errors which might lead them into eternal torment. How could anyone think that such actions were wrong? Nevertheless their
burnt products did not enjoy further reproductive success. Their textbook, Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Evildoers, once graced my Cambridge bookshelf.
So what can be the evidence that religion is
beneficial, not to the hypothetical soul, but to the living and potentially reproducing body?
Here it comes, kiddo's, and from no less a source than the American Journal of Psychiatry, 150, 322.
However, my delightfully
argumentative Canadian relations, younger and cleverer than me, now guests at Sharon Hill, suggest that Christmas is not a religious occasion but an excuse for childen and parents to get together in order to argue out their
problems. Children, believing themselves deprived of parental love, may accuse their parents. Parents, unrewarded by filial obedience, may attack their children. A Christmas scene, supposed (at least by me) to be one of
kindness, forgiveness and amity may be an opportunity for the breakup of an extended family.
Well, maybe that's the way they do it in Canada, but I do believe it's different in Barbados. Our own children, now well past
adolescence, seem actually to enjoy our company and we enjoy having them around for as long as two weeks. Though not quite so much as to be willing to pay their air fares. If they invest their own money to come and see us we might
reasonably expect they might make an effort to enjoy. So far, I'm happy to say, it has worked well.
Is this deplorably old-fashioned?
But if the children were to join the religious, castrate themselves, commit suicide, enter
a convent, or in any way preclude the chance of having Leacock grandchildren, I do believe I might feel a trifle argumentative. All right, the American Journal of Psychiatry might say they would live longer and more happily, if
reliably religious, but what the hell would happen to those marvellous genes of mine that I have spent so much strenuous and enjoyable effort trying to preserve, even though preserving them would enable only half of them to
inhabit another body?
So back to the Am. J.Psychiat. They report a study of almost a thousand female twins, mostly Protestant Christians living in the US. They tell us first that the degree of reliable religiosity is strongly
determined by family and environment. Whose child you are and the place you live are the considerations which decide your religious beliefs.
High religious devotion is a strong protective factor against depression, smoking
cigarettes ( Dr. Tony Gale kindly note) and drunkenness.
But the Darwinian evidence I was seeking was that religious people have more surviving children than do the irreligious. The psychiatric paper by K.S.Kendler and his
associates makes no such claim, even though one might suppose that the freedom from depression (and suicide), cigarettes (and lung cancer) and drunkenness (and liver cirrhosis) might be beneficial to the gonads.
Neither,
unfortunately, do the authors even touch upon the non-Darwinian possibilities that more children could be a bad thing for the species, especially in areas of high consumption like the US.
Congratulations to the mostly
irreligious Chinese who are attempting to promote a one-child family. Horrifications to the fundamentalist Islamics who are removing from their adherents all amusements except the pleasures of the Koran and of formal married
copulation.
Perhaps you might say the pleasure is in the game, not in the result. And I might agree.
