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GOD defiles Reason: It's hard to tell if that's a yes or a no.

Sorry about that. A lot of times, yes or no just doesn't cut it.

I don't think Dennett gives an explicit answer on this one. What he seems to be saying is that any suggestion that the sacred element in religion (and every religion that I know of claims a sacred element -- it's a defining feature, it seems)... ahem, that any suggestion that the sacred element in religion must be respected by researchers is nothing but a smoke screen "designed" -- either intentionally or memetically -- to shield religion from scrutiny. That, at least, is how I understood it.

The important question, though, is what that assumption entails for actual research. In other words, if we accept Dennett's premise on this count, how does it effect the conduct of research which Dennett is so vigorously advocating? What do people who espouse this perspective actually do when they're studying a religion?

One way to look at it is this: some religions have sacred sites, to which only confirmed adherents are admitted. Mecca, for example, is Muslim's only -- so much so that Spike Lee had to hire and all Muslim crew to film segments of "Malcolm X" there. Dennett's "smoke screen" view might serve as justification for stepping over that taboo, but I think the results of that would be disastrous.

Another way to look at it -- and this is more to the point of what I was saying earlier: if Dennett dismisses "the sacred" as a way of diverting attention, then he's bound to dismiss it altogether. If, as I've suggested, the concept of the sacred is fundamental to religion, then by excluding it from consideration Dennett would be limiting his research to only what is peripheral to religion. It would be like demanding that we research HIV, but that we restrict ourselves to the symptoms and not do any research on the virus itself.

I sometimes wonder if you aren't using smoke screens yourself -- not only in your responses to me, but in your criticisms of Dennett.

Not me. The memes in my head, maybe, but not me.

I know you could just as easily switch over and argue my points far better than I could.

I could tell you what I thought the strong points of your perspective were, but I'm really not the sort of person that can effectively argue something I don't believe.

You know goddamn well that there's a whole hell of a lot more to religion and religious beliefs today than love.

That isn't what I meant to imply. What I'm saying is that every religion, every religion, is organized around something it thinks is sacred or divine. In this particular example it was love, but it could just as well be justice, or transcendence, or just a particular conception of God. For Kierkegaard, love was the cornerstone of Christianity, and even if it doesn't hold true for all Christians, Kierkegaard was sincere enough that I don't really doubt that, in his mind, love was the one big organizing feature of the Christian God, Christianity as a practice, and the whole damn universe when you came down to it. And the priests of Solomonic Israel probably thought the whole of existence hinged on divine justice. For all I know, the Pythagoreans might have truly believed that this particular mathematical proportion really was divine, the key to all existence, and a transcendent basis for morality. What is sacred to any given religion varies according to the context and content of the religion, so don't be mislead by the example I gave -- the point is that every religion has something that is sacred. And the question that still remains to be answered is, what is a researcher adhering to scientific method to do with that central, fundamental claim?

Since my last example caused some problems, let's take a new on. The Pythagoreans gave us a lot of ideas that have been very useful in secular mathematics, but the historical fact is that Pythagoreanism was a religious cult. And one of the claims they made was that the Golden Mean, as it was called, was sacred. Now the mean is just a proportion, one that turns up a lot in nature, and it's useful as an example because a mathematical formula is susceptible to testing: that's how you end up with a mathematical proof. So you can, perhaps, test the claim that the Golden Mean shows up so much in nature because it has certain features which make it structurally stable, but how do you test the claim that it's sacred? There's nothing to measure, nothing to quantify, no substance which can be acted upon.

Dennett supposes that this is an evolved feature which protects religious claims from skepticism. I'd say that a modified form of that is correct -- ie. that religions which have had the misfortune to take as their sacred object something which can be tested and disproved are more likely to lose the gamble when they submit to the desire to prove the truth of their religion. But I don't think that's why all religions form around some conception of the sacred or divine. But I digress.

Sacred -- what the hell does "sacred" mean anyway? It's not really anything that exists outside the human mind, is it?

Neither are love, morality, consciousness, music or creativity, for that matter, but we don't take their cultural basis as sufficient reason to jettison any of those.

They have sentimental value. They're almost sacred -- to me.

Okay, that's a good place to draw a dinstinction. By analogy, we often take sacred to mean something like "very valuable". Dennett gives a few examples of things he takes to be sacred, but it isn't clear if he means sacred in the same way that Judaism takes the Ark of the Covenant to be sacred, or simply very valuable. If we're talking about the sacred thing at the center of your religion, then we're talking about something which your view of the entire world hinges upon. The litmus test may well be imagining what it would mean to you if the sacred thing were destroyed or proven to be illusory. Would the world seem to unravel around you if your grandmother's paintings were destroyed in a fire? I don't mean to diminish the importance of something with real sentimental value. You'd be upset; it might even throw you into depression -- I'd feel much the same if certain objects of sentimental value were destroyed. But it wouldn't have quite the same effect -- not the same kind of effect -- as having something as central as the basis of a deeply felt religion destroyed.

When I read about or imagine what it must have done to the Israelites and Judeans to have the Temple destroyed, the thought is genuinely appalling. Not because I condone or share their belief, but because I have some inkling of what it means to have the whole world supported by a particular pivot, and to have that pivot rattled to its core. To put it into perspective, imagine what it would do to you if, in one fell swoop, someone managed to undermine your belief in your own reason. Imagine that you were forced to second guess every action you had taken because you could no longer be certain that it was as moral as you once believed, that the meaning of events in your past and your hope for events in the future were all called into question, that the significance of your relationships could all be plausibly dismissed.

Not everything categorized as sacred has that kind of importance, but just about every religion offers one thing or concept which, for true believers, is the hinge upon which the whole world swings.

I think it can be shown that it's not the objects that are "sacred," but rather it's the human mind mentally placing some sort of emotional attachment to those objects.

Give me a method, something compatible with scientific method. My claim here is that scientific method explicitly restricts itself from dealing with the sort of claim embodied by sacrality, but I'm open to suggestions as to how it could test that claim.

So what's the science that I'm talking about here? Psychology? Can it be combined with cognitive science or neurobiology? How do those sciences fit into evolutionary biology?

All of the mind sciences can look at the phenomenon of thought functionally -- this is what happens in the body before, during and after thought; this are potential interruptions to those process; these are ways of simulating, maybe even provoking those processes -- but it looks to me as though they are methodologically incapable of dealing with meaning or with ultimate questions of the correspondence between reality and conception. What I mean by that is, cognitice sciences can show what goes wrong when the mind makes an obvious mistake in cognizing something perceived: the researcher holds up a pencil and the patient calls it a lighter. But that's applicable only when the researcher herself can accurately identify the thing being cognized. So a researcher can only say that a patient has misidentified a sacred object if the researcher has already verified whether the object is or is not sacred.

It's even plausible that the congitive sciences could demonstrate how the idea of holiness is cognized in the first place, but that would demonstrate absolutely nothing about its correspondence to reality. We are, after all, capable of conceiving of infinity and nothing without ever actually being able to directly perceive either.