The Nevada Sagebrush

Halloween celebrations prompt question of zombies’ religion

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 10:17 PM

Barry Belmont

Somehow my last two columns have been interpreted as either “too hard” or “too soft” on religion.

Though this was far from my intent, these opinions spawned a rousing debate between me, a guy in a dress and another wearing what I can only hope was some failed attempt at a clown outfit at a let’s-get-wasted house party this past Halloween.

The most interesting question posed was “Can a zombie have a religious belief?”

It’s an interesting enough idea that neatly ties to many of the concepts brought forth in this column so far.

For clarification and simplification, let us define our zombie as human in every respect except that it has no sense of self.

Cannibalism, being kinda dead and an overall lack of cleanliness, though often the funnest parts of zombie discussions, are ultimately irrelevant to this discussion.

Ask just about any proponent of just about any religion and they will claim one of the central tenents of their religion lies in a concept called faith.

Faith is that source of knowledge that inspires some to devote their life’s work to feeding the hungry and others to suicide bombing. Without the intrinsically powerful notion of faith, there would be no religion and therefore not even a remote possibility of the creation of the First Church of the Zombie.

But does a lack of faith tend to make one more scientific in their approach toward understanding?

In other words, is there a fundamental distinction between believing in God and believing in the number six? According to some — including Richard Dawkins, a wonderful popularizer of evolutionary theory and author of “The God Delusion” — there is a huge difference between the two.

However, according to a study conducted by University of California, Los Angeles earlier this year (the first neuroimaging study to compare everyday cognition with religious faith), while the brain does respond to religious and nonreligious ideas quite differently, the actual process of believing or not believing a statement is determined in the same areas of the brain.

This study seems to show that belief is content-independent as both religious and nonreligious people decided the truth or falsity of religious or nonreligious questions in exactly the same way. Participants used a portion of their brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). The VMPFC is best known as that area that governs decisions of judgment based on self-relevance.

And there it is.

Since our zombie, by definition, lacks a sense of self, it must necessarily not have any concept of self-relevance, self-preservation or any other capability to establish a relationship between itself and its environment.

Lacking this central pillar of knowledge — namely the ability to understand one’s role within one’s situation — not only prevents our zombie brethren from religious faith but also keeps them from truly understanding, why they’ll never understand.

From personal experience, I can tell you it is this frustration with the inability to grasp your own sense of self that over time can build to the insatiable desire to consume brains.

Barry Belmont studies biology and mechanical engineering and when not eating brains is busy talking about them. Reach him at perspectives@nevadasagebrush.com.