In Bethlehem Palestine there is a church that is built on the site where legend has it Jesus was born. The church it jointly controlled by the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox branches of Christianity. There are strict rules about the ownership and responsibility for particular sections of the church. For instance, in the altar grotto designated as the actual spot of Jesus’ birth, there are fifteen oil lamps for illumination. Six belong to the Greeks, five to the Armenians, and four to the Romans.

The main floor in the basilica is also divided among the three groups. I mention this detail because this past January when the Greek and Armenian Orthodox priests were preparing the basilica for the Orthodox celebration of Christmas one of the priests strayed into an area that was not his. In very short order a brawl broke out between the Armenian and Greek priests who began pounding each other with fists and brooms. The riot got so bad that someone called the police who stepped in to finally separate the broom wielding disputants. What is sadly amusing about this episode is the identity of those police who restored peace among the sparring priests. It was none other than that body known the world over for law and order—the PLO.

I had a professor in college who was a staunch existentialist and had nothing positive to say about religions. She thought they were nothing but a source of continuing and unnecessary friction and violence between human beings. She believed, much like Christopher Hitchens does now, that religion should be consigned to the scrapheap of consciousness. Considering the trouble religion causes such criticisms cannot simply be dismissed.

I heard Christopher Hitchens speak at a public lecture this past June and his critique of religion seemed to me to be unnecessarily and, I thought ironically, scathing—one could say even vicious. So, for instance, he described Mother Teresa as a liar and a fraud who bilked the unwitting out of millions of dollars. Because of such intemperate comments it is common for those who till in the field of religion to point out that Hitchens creates a straw figure, a caricature of religion, which he then can rather easily demolish. And it is certainly the case that he does not exhibit much depth in his understanding of the role that religion plays in normal human consciousness. He got, I thought, altogether too much enjoyment out of playing the bad boy. And ultimately vicious attacks on religion for its being vicious are not persuasive.

Still, why is there so much cross border suspicion and violence between religions that individually preach peace and righteousness? Why do the separate priests of the Prince of Peace end up whapping each other with brooms in an incredibly meaningful dispute over who gets to sweep which square foot of floor space?

It is first important for us to realize that part of the reason why it is relatively easy for us to imagine that Greek and Armenian Orthodox priests should be able to avoid broom melees is because we do not have a dog in that hunt. It is easier for us to shake our heads at their dispute because it is not our dispute. It is quite likely the case that some Republicans and Democrats in Texas exhibit a kind of loyalty that causes as much cross party ill will and hard feeling as does religion in a church in Bethlehem. We all love, perhaps a little too much, associating with people we imagine share our political perspectives. We all indulge in the guilty pleasure, even when we imagine we should not, of laughing at the foibles of the opposition. We are all pretty good at demonstrating why the best arguments are always on our side of the aisle. And this behavior is not isolated to the arenas of politics or religion. The more you look the more you see that relationships shaped by many different kinds of competing loyalties create community within a loyalty and suspicion of others who are presumed to not share that loyalty. Think about how belonging to a generation can easily create a sense of comradery among those who are roughly the same age and a corresponding belief that those of another generation “just don’t get it!” Or consider that when professionals or tradespeople get together they among other things indulge in hoots and hollers about how the civilians “just don’t get it.” Cyclists and bikers don’t get each other, Hispanics and Anglos don’t get each other, Brazilians and Mexicans don’t get each other, etc. etc., ad infinitum ad nauseam.

In short, we are all accomplices in a web of many different kinds of loyalties. Why are such loyalties so common—what’s going on here?

A neuro-scientist recently proposed the following thought experiment. Stretch tightly a piece of fabric over the open end of a five gallon bucket. Give a dozen participants boxes of ping pong balls and ask them to throw them at the fabric, as often as they like and as many as they like. And they can do so from anywhere in the room. This experiment also involves one more participant whose job is to stare intently at the fabric—and only at the fabric. The only things this observer may note are the indentations in the fabric that each ball makes. The important part of the observer’s job, however, is to decide, only by looking at the indentations in the fabric, who threw the balls, and whether they were stationary, moving toward or away from the bucket. And extra points would be awarded to an observer who could also tell from the indentations which ball tossers were agitated, happy, or bored.

Now you’d think—who could pull of that stunt? Looking at the bumps in the fabric could yield all that information? Impossible! But the point the scientist was making is that in fact all of us, with hearing, perform this magic trick every waking moment. Substitute the fabric with your eardrum. Each sound that comes through the ear canal makes a tiny little indentation in the eardrum and through the magic of that little bump, we can distinguish different speakers, their location, and make a great many educated guesses about their emotional states.

Of course, it’s not the ear drum alone that makes all these calculations. The vibrations are coded through the auditory nerve where they enter the ping pong ball indentation central processing unit otherwise known as your brain. There reside the encoded memories of what others sound like and what the words or sounds they are making probably mean. Of course, you are not aware of all the sounds your brain is processing. It has already “decided” that much of what you are hearing is meaningless background noise and is not worthy of your attention.

I would like you to consider two other interesting facts. The linguist Stephen Pinker estimates that the average highschool graduate knows approximately 60,000 words. He also reports that what we ordinarily think of as basic common sense requires the ability to manipulate something on the order of 10 million separate facts.

So, on an ordinary day our brains are doing an amazing number of computations. It’s organizing sounds and sights, words, making judgments, some consciously, most not. It is a very powerful and exceedingly versatile information gathering, storing, retrieving and using devise. It manages your heart rate, changes it when it thinks it’s wise to do so, changes your rates of perspiration and respiration, etc. etc. etc. Busy, busy, busy.

It is not even necessary to know exactly how the brain manages all this to understand the size and complexity of the tasks it performs every single nanosecond of your life. You forget a name and you get annoyed with your brain. But cut it some slack. It’s got a lot to do and can’t be always bothered by your little demands.

It is estimated, and this is the lowest estimate, that the average human brain has 93 trillion, I said, “trillion,” synapses which are the pathways by which all this information is stored and manipulated. That’s a lot. Now I would like you to contemplate going to your desk this afternoon and discovering that it has 93 trillion post-it notes on the surface. Your job is to find the one with a very important phone number written on it. Your probability of success? None, zero, nada. Even if you piled the post-its three deep you would still need a desk that covered 35,870 square miles, about the size of Indiana. So where exactly in, say Gary, would you begin to look? Yet the human brain manages to pull off this feat on a routine basis. It can because (a) synapses are way loads smaller than post-its and (b) your brain has some extremely robust filing systems that allow it to organize the vast amounts of data it encounters. And one of the most important mental filing systems is religion. It’s not the only one—but it is a very important one.

All of our loyalties, in fact, could be construed as evidence of neurological filing. And if you want an explanation for the agitation and anger that can easily rise up between people of different faiths, just imagine that you had your 93 trillion post-its organized according to categories and ranked in order of importance. One thing your really brain wants to know when it encounters anyone else, could that person mess up my filing system? The brain is understandably anxious and suspicious. While you, on a conscious level, may want to be kind and tolerant, your brain is thinking, “Better safe than sorry.” The slightest whiff of provocation can start major neural alarm bells to fire off, the steel protective doors close shutting off access, and the heavy artillery, or brooms as the case may be, are deployed. “Sweep my floor will you!” Whap! It’s hard to blame the brain for the over-reaction. Hey, its ability to locate anything could be destroyed. It cannot afford to think that some stray sweeping was really only stray sweeping. The consequences of over-reaction are very small while the consequences of under-reaction are very grave. So we over-react—all the time.

As you can see the presence of other people is an immensely complicating factor. If all you had to worry about was your own Indiana sized desk top life might be manageable. But you live with other people and their Indiana sized desk tops. Collectively, right now in this room, we have desk tops that equal the land mass of the United States. Getting all these desk tops to do anything that is even remotely coordinated would seem problematic. But your brain not only has personal file systems, it also has some capacity for “file sharing.”

File sharing between two Indianas is hard but it is required because cooperation between two Indianas is very important for human survival. From this perspective religion is not only an individual’s method of organizing experience, it is also a method of establishing cooperation among people who believe they “share” common files. Another such system is law. And these two mental file sharing systems represent the two major innovations that have occurred in human neurological practice since the Neolithic Revolution took place approximately 12,000 years ago. These two file sharing systems can be compared with a third which is much older, the family filing system, which human beings have been using for at least something on the order of 500,000 years (and many of our loyalties to small group could be construed as modified family systems). As you might imagine given the difference in the ages of these systems, we are much more adept with the family file sharing system than with the legal and more modern religious systems. In terms of evolutionary age, we are still using the beta versions of the law and religion systems. In terms of evolutionary age there are major—major bugs in the law and religious systems.

It is perhaps easier to grasp how these filing systems work as file sharing systems by examining the legal system. So imagine the following simple scenario. If two people driving arrive at a four way stop at the exact same time it is handy to have a law which helps the drivers decide what to do next. Now you could have a law which states. “Drivers must eat an orange.” What’s eating an orange got to do with deciding who goes first? Not much. Your first thought is, “That doesn’t make sense.” But ask yourself, how do you know it doesn’t make sense? Remember, you have 93 trillion synapses so there is a lot of room for a lot of different possibilities. But there is actually a good reason for a belief that eating oranges at stop signs is nonsense. Intuitively you know that the two driver decision is a spatial relations problem, not an eating problem. You know that because a portion of your synaptic wattage is very interested in spatial relations. These are very ancient synaptic patterns, ancient because the ability to make decisions based on accurate estimates of size and distance, left and right, up and down have had tremendous survival value for all creatures for millennia. You rarely notice these synaptic patterns because they are buried deeply in your neurological processing. They are most noticeable when you experience vertigo, a momentary inability to judge where you are in relation to everything else. But the important thing to note here is the way this evolutionary heritage is used to share files. Both drivers separately “know” that each one who arrives at the intersection is likely coping with a spatial relations problem. So while any law could be written the law that would work best would be one that reflects commonly (but individually) held perceptions about the circumstances that the two individuals encounter. In this case both drivers separately “know” the same thing, that the intersection decision is a “left-right” issue. It certainly could be the case that the common knowledge could be a cultural distinction such as, “the one with the higher status” goes first. That device would work in a society in which such details are known but it could be thought of as less universally applicable because the knowledge is particular to that one society. The “left-right” is part of a common human neurological heritage. The point is that some “files” are more readily shared than others.

In a very real sense the law, driver on the right goes first, works because we intuitively understand that the law fits in with what we know about the rest of the world. We could have an “eat an orange law” but it wouldn’t fit nearly as well. The main point here is that law, as a file sharing system, is not independent of but strongly connected with what we imagine people know about the world in general. It turns out that the more we know about the world, the more we can avoid the extra trouble that would result from a law which requires drivers to “eat an orange.”

The effectiveness of all our synaptic file sharing systems are, in fact very dependent upon our knowledge of the world. So we are driven to know as much about the world as we possibly can. We think we are just unusually curious as far as creatures go. But the reality is that the complexity of our synaptic processing drives us to know things. The need to be able to share files so that we can get our “Indianas” to cooperate greatly enhances our drive to know things about the world. The more confidence we feel about our knowledge, the more we will be able to perform the file sharing trick. The more confidence we feel about our knowledge the more we feel that we can accurately predict what others will do in any given situation.

I have focused on the law file sharing system because when compared to religion, it is relatively simple. Religion is vastly more complicated by the fact that it involves sharing files about what are presumed to be entirely invisible conscious realities. How we go about establishing mutual confidence in shared perceptions about invisible reality is, as you might imagine, very tricky. It is actually, as a neurological reality, a very elegant form of processing, but an explanation of its complexity will have to wait for another time.

For now I would like to close with a few observations. I made an allusion to the fact that as the law and religion file sharing systems are relatively new from an evolutionary perspective, there are apt to be bugs. The major bug in the file sharing systems of both law and religion is the routine overestimation of the dangers that the systems confront. Managing 93 trillion synapses is a very largish job. But the routine suspicion that the whole business could come crashing down at any moment leads all of us to begin with the assumption, until it is proven otherwise, that others just do not “get” us. We jealously guard what we imagine is a very fragile system. We keep our brooms at the ready. Well, maybe it is time to put the brooms down.

Easier said than done. But consider this, I have thus far refrained from mentioning the usual terms that one associates with religion. One might well ask, were is God, or what is most holy, ultimate reality, in all of this? Perhaps you have already glimpsed the answer. For most religions God is typically a feature of a filing system. But what if God or ultimate reality is not a feature of a particular system, but the system itself?

What difference does that point of view make? In essence it changes the nature of our religious task. Instead of protecting the integrity of a particular file so that our notion about God will not be disrupted, we become responsible for protecting the integrity of the sharing system itself. There is concrete way to understand what this might look like. I want you to spend a few moments thinking about the person who is sitting next to you. Right at this very moment he or she is doing the ping pong ball indentation trick, he or she is processing all these words, dealing with all the sounds and sights in this room. And that’s just the immediate surroundings. The person sitting next to you is also probably dealing with several knotty problems, trying to sort out as best he or she can a huge host of conflicting details. All of this work, this Indiana sized work is going on—right next to you. You should be in awe of them, right from the start. Well are you? Shouldn’t you be? It is particularly amazing given how this Indiana sized reality was created and shaped over the course of millennia. It has taken millions of years to get to even the little bit of distance we have covered so far. What part of that story is not a source of astonishment? Is it the supernova explosions creating the heavier elements, the first multi-cellular life forms, amphibians, human beings learning how to sing? Is there anything in this story that is the least little bit boring?

You might have thought there is nothing here to worship, nothing here that would lead us to bow our heads or shout alleluia. Meanwhile we too easily remained trapped within our own consciousness, not realizing how the universe around us reels with wonder. We fret, imagining that God or what is most holy or our ultimate concern, or whatever is fragile. Brooms up!

But we mistakenly believe that the fragility of our files means that the system itself is equally fragile. But the system is very robust once we access it. In this sense, God, or file sharing, is everywhere. Where you ask? Perhaps the most compelling “evidence” for God is, in fact, God’s “invisibility.” That is, in order for us to truly see God, we would have to be able to see “not God.” by which contrast we could then recognize the distinctiveness of what is holy. Yet if God is the system, there is no “not God” to be seen.

The analogy is not quite exact but people probably experience what is holy much like a fish experiences water. And if we were fish, it would seem that one of our most persistent religious or spiritual questions has been, “Where’s the water?” People get agitated because they feel the water is rare and others could destroy what little they know.

Let us learn to instead put down our brooms. It’s just that, well, it’s very hard to swim when your hanging onto a broom. The world around you resounds with what is holy. The person sitting next to is bathed in those waters—you are too. What is God cannot be lost for we all are swimming in the abundance of the miracle of life.