A World of Heathnes

Afterword

Contrary to what you may have heard, God isn’t everywhere.

The only place He reliably hangs out is in the temporal lobes — at least, that’s where Vilayanur Ramashandran found Him when he went looking in the brains of hyper-religious epileptics at UC-San Diego. You’ll never find the Almighty slumming in the parietal cortex, judging by radioisotopes Andrew Newberg tracked through the heads of a meditating Buddhist monk at the University of Pennsylvania. Most spectacularly — and controversially — Michael Persinger of Laurentian University claims to be able to induce religious experiences using a helmet which bathes the brain in precisely-controlled electromagnetic fields.

We begin to understand the mechanism: Rapture is as purely neurological as any other human experience. With that understanding, inevitably, comes the potential for control. Religious belief — that profound, irrational disorder afflicting so many of our species — may actually have a cure.

Of course, a cure is the last thing many would want. Religion has been a kick-ass form of social control for millennia, even absent any understanding of its neurology. It seems likely that these new insights will be used not to free us from the rapture, but to tweak it to maximum effect — to make us even more docile, even more obedient, even less skeptical of our masters than we are now.

Today we’re just taking our first steps down that road — but what if we’d taken them back in the third century, instead of the dawn of the twenty-first? That was the time of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legitimized Christianity after a religious vision promised him victory in battle. It’s not much of a stretch to posit a subsequent expedition to the Holy Land, in search of ancient miracles.

I see a vein of magnetic ore in the Sinai hills. I see it speak to Constantine’s pilgrims as it spoke to Moses, sixteen centuries earlier. I watch it seed a renaissance in neurotheology — inevitably, in all manner of electromagnetic physics — and then I jump forward a thousand years and tell you a story…

It’s an unbelievable gimmick of course, a natural miracle filling in for Persinger’s God Helmet. But given that conceit, the social consequences seem more than plausible; they almost have a ring of inevitability to them. Perhaps, in all these stories about parallel universes, we’ve focused too much on chaos and too little on inertia. Perhaps it doesn’t matter where the butterfly flaps its wings.

Perhaps human nature pulls all timelines back to same endpoint.