Why Earth is so blowy-uppy (maybe)

After viewing The Root of All Evil, a television series about religion, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker wondered: Supposing…we could inoculate against religion.

Still, [Dawkin's] central point (that the irrational dismissal of logic encouraged by religion often leads to tragically irrational behaviour, such as blowing yourself up on the tube or listening to Christian rock) seems pretty valid from where I'm standing, ie cowering on the sidelines of a fight I didn't pick, and which seems to be escalating out of control. Life on Earth would be simpler and less blowy-uppy if religion didn't drive so many of its followers crazy — so why isn't anyone researching a drug that can cure it?

Brooker immediately backed away from the idea because of the fear of unintended neurologic consequences, mainly, that such inoculation might turn us into "thick, bipedal, cultureless mice."

Okay, so there's always the possibility that the same part of the brain that handles fuzzy spiritual feelings is the same part that handles love and sorrow and pity and joy; the same part that makes us create songs and jokes and books and art and brightly coloured computer games in which an animated weasel collects starfish in a fountain….

My thoughts went off in a different direction, though.

What if different types of religion are "located" in distinct parts of the brain and are more (or less) dependent upon different neurochemicals?

Maybe the neurologic underpinnings for more joyous religions — you know, the ones that don't involve crusades, jihads, inquisitions, stonings, witch-hanging, and burning at the stake — reside in different areas of the cerebral hemispheres and affect serotonin levels differently than the less joyous religions — you know, the ones that do involve crusades, jihads, inquisitions, stonings, witch-hanging, and burning at the stake.

It seems inevitable that over the centuries, the world's major religions have selected out (see: crusades, jihads, inquisitions, stonings, witch-hanging, and burning at the stake) those individuals who just weren't neuro-wired and neuro-juiced in the same way. Now only the excessively hardwired and overjuiced are in power.

Maybe today's religion-based hostilities are really the genetic end-battles between people with out-of-whack parietal and temporal lobes.