Our Current Intellectual Overlords Are Much Like Their Ecclesiastical Predecessors

Recently I watched on TV the 2015 film "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2."  The film has a fascinating plot twist near its end (spoilers ahead), although to properly understand the plot twist you have to watch the last part of the film very carefully.  

The movie involves the participation of the hero of the film series (Katniss) in the overthrow of the tyrant Coriolanus Snow, who started the "Hunger Games" rather resembling the games of the old Roman Colosseum.  Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence) works with a rebel leader named Alma Coin to try to achieve the overthrow of the tyrant Snow. A large crowd of rebels surrounds Snow's palace. We see a scene in which what looks like gift packages are dropped from the air, the packages hanging from balloons. Children run towards the gift packages, which then explode, killing many including the sister of Katniss, and leaving Katniss unconscious. 

When Katniss wakes up, she is told the regime of the tyrant Snow has been overthrown. It seems the bombing of the children was so terrible that Snow's men revolted against him. Katniss meets the captured Snow, who says that he did not order the bombing (which did nothing to help him), but that it was instead ordered by the rebel leader Katniss has been working with: Alma Coin. He says Coin ordered the slaughter to whip up sentiment against Snow, to help defeat him. 

Later at a meeting including Katniss we see Alma Coin urging that the horrible Hunger Games be restored, this time using the children of Snow's henchmen as the participants.  In an implausibly quick insight, Katniss seems to realize the sad truth: that the supposedly virtuous Alma Coin is really just another tyrant like Coriolanus Snow, the tyrant she has replaced.  It's a situation that can be described by the old saying, "Meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss." 

The Hunger Games series is fiction, but the situation we see at the end of the film is like a situation that has tragically occurred again and again in history:  a hated regime is replaced by some supposedly superior regime that ends up having most of the faults of the old regime. So, for example, when the ruthless regime of the Russian Czars was replaced with the regime of the Communists, the Russians ended up with a regime as cruel as the regime that had been replaced (and actually far crueler). 

It often happens that a hated political regime is replaced by some new political regime that ends up having most of the same faults as the regime it replaced. It may also happen that an old ideological regime (a reigning structure of belief) gets gradually eclipsed by some new ideological regime that brags about its intellectual virtues, but which ends up having most of the same faults as the old ideological regime it superseded. 

To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

It seems that in today's press the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism has gained ascendancy. Such an ideological regime is centered around four unproven dogmas:  the dogma of the accidental origin of life, the dogma of the  accidental origin of species by so-called “natural selection,” the dogma that  brains are the source of minds or that mind activity is the same thing as brain activity, and the dogma that brains are the storage places of human memories. The average person has heard these claims so many times that he may think of one or more of them as "facts of science," but none of them is a fact. There are actually strong reasons for doubting each one of these dogmas. In particular:

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2024, and no has ever used a microscope to discover any stored memory information in a brain of a human being, even through brain tissue has been examined at resolutions vastly greater than the resolutions sufficient to discover DNA in cells. 
• Many humans (both children and adults) have had half of their brains removed to stop very bad and frequent epileptic seizures, but when such surgery is done, it has little effect on intelligence or memory, with learned knowledge being well preserved. 
• Many humans can remember very well things they learned or experienced 50 years ago, but the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses (claimed to be the storage place of memories) is 1000 times shorter than 50 years (less than two weeks). 
• Humans are able to form new memories instantly, in contradiction to all theories of brain memory storage, which typically postulate "synapse strengthening" that would take at lease quite a few minutes.
• Even though the brain has no physical characteristics that might help allow any such thing as instant memory retrieval (something like an indexing system or a position notation system or coordinate system that might allow stored information to be quickly found), humans are able to retrieve learned information instantly upon hearing some person name or event name or place name, even if they haven't heard such a name in many years.
• Very many humans (as many as 10 percent or 20 percent of the population) report floating out of their bodies, and observing their bodies from above them in space. 
• Inside brains there is very severe noise of several different types that should prevent humans from being able to reliably recall large bodies of information stored in a brain, but it is a fact that many people (such as actors playing the role of Hamlet) can recall very large bodies of textual information with perfect accuracy. 
• There are hundreds of documented cases of people who saw an apparition of someone who died, but who they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the time when the apparition was seen. 
• There are also very many cases of apparitions seen by more than one person at the same time, something we should expect to never or virtually never happen if a mere brain hallucination was causing the sighting of the apparition. 
• Instead of having some vastly greater brain connectivity that might help explain the superiority of the human mind, a study found that brain connectivity is about the same in all mammals; so we have about the brain connectivity of mice. 
• As discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, there is two hundred years of written evidence (often written by very weighty figures such as scientists and doctors) for the reality of clairvoyance, an ability that is not explicable under any theory that minds are created by brains. 
• Quite a few people who have lost  half of their brains due to disease or epilepsy surgery have average or above average intelligence; and the physician John Lorber showed that some people have above-average intelligence despite having the great majority of their brain tissue destroyed by disease. 
• Besides a wealth of narrative evidence that some humans can have ESP (an ability inexplicable as a brain effect), there is abundant robust laboratory experimental evidence for ESP (discussed here, here and here). 
• No one has any credible detailed theory of how a brain could ever store learned information (such as academic information) or episodic memories as neuron states or synapse states; and if such a thing were happening, it would require a whole host of very specialized memory-encoding proteins, which have never been discovered (along with some not-yet-discovered encoding scheme millions of times more complicated than the genetic code discovered around 1950). 
• Brains show no signs of working harder during heavy thinking or memory recall, and brain scan attempts to find signs of such greater activity merely report variations such as half of one per cent, the kind of variations we would expect to get by chance, even if brains don't produce thinking or recall. 
• Because of numerous severe slowing factors such as the cumulative slowing effect of synaptic delays and dendrites, signal transmission in the brain should be way too slow to account for the blazing fast thinking speed of some people able to do mathematical calculations at incredible speeds, and also the instant memory recall humans routinely show. 
• People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories or learned information seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.
• Contrary to the dogma that brains produce minds, ravens with tiny brains can do as well on quite a few mental tasks as apes with large brains; and also tiny mouse lemurs do just as well on quite a few cognitive tests as mammals with brains 200 times larger. 
• As discussed here and here, scientists have very well documented inexplicable physical effects occurring around some people, suggesting they either have powers that cannot be explained in terms of brains and bodies, or are somehow in contact with others who have such powers. 
• There are numerous reasons for suspecting some source of a human soul or spirit outside of the human body, including the sudden unexplained origin of the universe with just the right expansion rate to allow eventual planet formation, the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and laws of nature needed for biological habitability, the origin of life so hard to credibly explain as an accidental chemical event, the extremely hierarchical organization of biological organisms, the great abundance of complex fine-tuned protein molecules in organisms (each seeming to involve a vast mathematical improbability), the great abundance of immensely organized biological forms that are not explained by genomes that merely specify low-level chemical information, and abundant photographic evidence for paranormal effects that seem to suggest some unfathomable intelligence beyond any human understanding (see here and here for examples). 
• People (sometimes called autistic savants) with very serious brain defects sometimes have astonishing powers of memory almost no one else has. 
• Dying people commonly report seeing apparitions of the dead (usually their relatives), as reported here, here, and here; people having near-death experiences very frequently report encountering their deceased relatives; and widows and widowers frequently report voices or apparitions corresponding to their deceased spouses -- all just exactly as we would expect if we have souls that survive death. 
• Many decades ago Leonora Piper was studied at great length for many years by scientists and scholars, and for many years she reported information about deceased people that should have been unknown to her. 
• Human beings have many subtle and refined mental abilities (such as philosophical imagination, artistic creativity, musical ability, and subtle spirituality) that are inexplicable as results of brain evolution, such things having no value in increasing survival or reproduction. 
• Despite more than seventy years of experiments trying to reproduce a natural origin of life from non-life, all such experiments have failed to produce anything living, and have also failed to produce any of the main components of microscopic living things (functional protein molecules). In fact, all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have produced neither the "building blocks" of microscopic life (functional protein molecules, things vastly more organized than mere building blocks) nor the building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life (amino acids). There are multiple reasons why the famed Miller-Urey experiment (producing amino acids) was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions.  
• Claims that we have an explanation for the physical origin of species tend to be made by those who have not paid adequate attention to two supremely important considerations: the matter of functional thresholds and the matter of interdependent components, as I discuss here. 

Once we understand that the four main teachings of Darwinist materialism are belief dogmas rather than scientific facts, we can start to understand how this currently dominant ideological regime  acts today largely as a kind of stealth religion, pretty much as a kind of church-in-all-but-name. Religions have many different forms, only some theistic, and it is possible to reasonably define religion in a way that applies to many diverse systems of belief and dogma. For example, anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Using a definition similar to that of Geertz, I have previously defined a religion as " a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The table below gives some reasons why Darwinist materialism is like Roman Catholicism.

	Darwinist Materialism	Roman Catholic Church
Physical Bases	University buildings, high schools, natural history museums	Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools
Old Revered Texts	Books of Charles Darwin	The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)
Sacred Dogmas	Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories	The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus
Lower Prestige Workers	High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers	Nuns, deacons
Middle Prestige Workers	PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors	Priests
High Prestige Workers	Tenured professors	Bishops
Highest Prestige Persons	National Academy of Science members, Royal Society members, Nobel Prize winners	Cardinals, the Pope
Arcane Speech	Jargon-filled scientific papers	Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language
Indoctrin-ation Meetings	Biology classes, psychology classes	Sunday sermons, Sunday school
Financial Base	Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone	Billions in old endowments, church property,  Sunday donations, tithes
Rituals	PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations	Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals
Speculations	Abundant	Abundant
Persecution or Libeling of Heretics	Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations, and stereotyping of ideological opponents and witnesses of the paranormal)	Frequent in the past
Censorship	Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments	Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency
Speech Taboos	Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature)	Very many
Miracle Stories	Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves	Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.)
Officials in Fancy Robes?	Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies)	Yes
Despised Deviants	Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences	In previous years, Protestants and gays
Chanting?	Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant	Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks
Art Forms	Materialist science fiction	Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture
Saints	Many science figures whose work is described reverently	Many canonized saints
Catechisms	College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles	Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma
Legends	Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins	Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary
Helper Workers	Unquestioning conformist science journalists	Laymen volunteers
Iconography	Sparse iconography including endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right	Vast iconography

The enormous current success of Darwinist materialism in getting people to believe in its main dogmas comes from a failure of people to perceive that Darwinist materialism is pretty much a kind of stealth religion, basically a kind of church-in-all-but-name that has infiltrated the halls and rooms of our universities.  Once you recognize the strong similarities between Darwinist materialism and an organized religion such as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a kind of "Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain" effect in which we can suddenly see how much bluffing and bluster is going on when unproven belief community dogmas are marketed as scientific facts.

The research communities of scientific academia and the clergy of religions both are what can be called ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some small subset of the population in which some particular belief system is required. The diagram below illustrates how ideological enclaves get new members and keep the enclave committed to its ideology:

An expert existing in some "echo chamber" ideological enclave may be filled with dogmatic overconfidence about some opinion that is popular within his little ideological enclave. He may think something along the lines of: “No doubt it is true, because almost all my peers and teachers agree that it is true.” But the idea may seem senseless to someone who has not been long-conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble. 

Do you want to read some of the "ignored conflicting evidence" depicted at the left of the visual above? Read the posts of this blog and this blog. To read more about the resemblance of biologists to clergy, read my post "Scientists and Clergy Have Much in Common."  

Academia serves as a kind of "Ministry of Materialism" that has quite a few similarities with the structure of organized religions.

The hierarchical structure of Darwinist materialism is depicted below. The structure maintains its dominance because it is funded by gigantic sums that we may call "Darwin dollars" and "materialist money."

In the table above I claim that censorship is common in scientific academia. This conclusion is backed up by a paper "Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda."  We read this:

"A recent national survey of US faculty at four-year colleges and universities found the following: 1) 4 to 11% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for teaching or research; 2) 6 to 36% supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty; 3) 34% had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 4) 25% reported being 'very' or 'extremely' likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 5) 91% reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in publications, meetings,...In a 2023 survey of academics in New Zealand, 53% reported that they were not free to state controversial or unpopular opinions, 48% reported that they were not free to raise differing perspectives or argue against the consensus among their colleagues, and 26% reported that they were not free to engage in the research of their choice."

The paper gives us a great visual, looking like the one below. We see how censorship and bias by peer reviewers and self-censorship by scientists can cause the scientific literature to present a false version of reality, leading us to think that something is true when it is not true. This is just what is happening in the world of neuroscience. Innumerable facts and observations defying the "brains make minds" dogma are excluded from scientific papers, particularly observations of the paranormal. 

In previous centuries, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism were the dominant ideological regimes.  In today's world Darwinist materialism seems to be the dominant ideological regime. But it's a "meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss" situation. Darwinist materialism sold itself as something intellectually superior. In reality it is a dogmatic belief system that suffers from most of the same flaws of the ecclesiastical regimes of thought that preceded it.  But we all love myths with a flavor of "Progress Marches Gloriously Onward." So it's hard for people to realize that our current intellectual overlords have chained us to a tyranny of dogmas as oppressive as those in medieval times. 

That's why the conference scene near the end of "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2" is so implausible. In an instant flash of insight, Katniss seems to realize that the new regime she has served is something with the same glaring defects as the old regime that it superseded. Such an insight comes only after lengthy deep thought and analysis, not in some flash of insight that instantly occurs as an epiphany.  The movie then follows with a semi-final scene that has dramatic impact but fails as a moral example and also by suggesting the misguided and unrealistic idea that regrettable regimes can be overthrown merely by a little muscle action.