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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode no. 528
March 15, 2002
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Coming up, scientists looking for a connection between spiritual experience and the brain.
Dr. MICHAEL PERSINGER (Laurentian University): I think one of the most exciting challenges in science is to find the basis, the empirical basis as to why people experience God phenomenon.
ABERNETHY: And, an Anglican priest, who's also a physicist wins the world's best-known religion prize.
Plus, Liz Curtis Higgs. She's bold, she's brash and her stock and trade is the bad girls of the Bible.
LIZ CURTIS HIGGS (Author and Speaker): We're talking murder, adultery, revenge, deceit, secret babies and seances and incest. Wild women. Maybe that's why I felt so at home.
ABERNETHY: Welcome. I'm Bob Abernethy. It's good to have you with us.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Violence continued to escalate in the Holy Land this week even as political leaders and diplomats stepped up efforts for peace. The conflict moved closer to important religious sites. In biblical Bethlehem, Israeli tanks were positioned near Manger Square, the traditional birthplace of Jesus. And Israeli troops occupied a Lutheran compound. At a 200-year old Catholic church there, a statue of the Virgin Mary was damaged by shrapnel. Religious leaders were among those condemning the new violence. Pope John Paul II offered the Vatican's help in mediating peace. The U.S. Catholic bishops urged more prayer for a just peace and called on both sides to stop attacking civilians.
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, thousands of Jewish students sponsored a rally in support of Israel. American Orthodox Jewish leaders declared this past Wednesday a day of prayer and fasting.
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BOB ABERNETHY: New developments in the priest sexual abuse scandals rocking the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. On Wednesday, the Vatican accepted the resignation of Bishop Anthony J. O'Connell of Palm Beach, Florida, after he admitted to molesting a teen-ager more than 25 years ago. And in the case of John Geoghan, the Archdiocese of Boston announced it had reached a settlement with 86 men and women whom the former priest allegedly abused. The archdiocese says insurance will cover only part of the 15 to $30 million settlement.
Other cases are still pending. And, in an unusually frank special edition, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese admitted the clergy sex abuse scandals have raised serious questions that must be researched and answered. Among them, celibacy for priests, gays in the priesthood and the exclusion of women. The paper did not call for policy changes, but it's rare for Church officials even to raise such issues for discussion.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Here's a question, when a person has a religious experience, what happens within the brain? What kind of changes take place? Science has been looking into this. In one experiment brain scans examined the parts of the brain that are activated during prayer. In another, mystical and religious experiences are simulated by using bursts of electrical impulses. As you might expect, these experiments have created no small amount of controversy. Lucky Severson reports.
LUCKY SEVERSON: As people around the world pray to their God and practice meditation, an increasing number of scientists are probing for a connection between spiritual experiences and the brain. This is Professor Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada.
Dr. MICHAEL PERSINGER (Laurentian University): I think one of the most exciting challenges in science is to find the basis, the empirical basis, to why people experience God phenomenon. Not belief, that's a different source, but the experience of the God phenomenon. That, of course, is tied to the brain itself.
SEVERSON: Dr. Persinger is a neuroscientist who has been conducting experiments with a helmet that pulses tiny bursts of electrical activity into the brain. He says that the pulses can simulate mystical or spiritual experiences.
And at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Andrew Newberg can show, through a brain scan, the parts of the brain that are activated during meditation and also during prayer.
(To Dr. Newberg) What's the significance of all this? What does it mean?
Dr. ANDREW NEWBERG (University of Pennsylvania): Well, what it means is, is that when people actually do these kind of spiritual practices, when people do prayer of meditation, that there are real changes that are going on in their brain.
SEVERSON: The concern of religious believers is that the new research may imply that God is a concept created in our brains rather than a transcendent being quite independent of us.
GRACIA THOMPSON: I felt it would be against God to try to alter or try to change anyone's belief of him.
RAMIRO GARCIA: I cannot conceive of living without the presence of someone greater than ourselves to lean on.
SEVERSON: Dr. Persinger says his experiments can actually induce the sense among his subjects that there's a presence in the room with them.
Dr. PERSINGER: The types of experiences, in our laboratory, when magnetic fields are applied through the brain, are considered spiritual because the person feels as if they are at one with the universe. Very often it's very personal and there may a sensation of quiescence, of a kind of eternal peace, but they know that somehow their sense of self has been changed forever.
Professor JOHN HAUGHT (Georgetown University): This is something that is not entirely new. A lot of people have testified, for example, that under the influence of LSD or cocaine or other stimuli to the chemistry of the brain that certain ideas happened that didn't happen before.
SEVERSON: John Haught is a professor, not of science, but of religion at Georgetown University. He argues that religion encompasses much more than biology, that it means charity and faith and doing good works.
Prof. HAUGHT: I would say that in this recent flurry of news about the brain and religion, what is often left out is that religion means much more than state of mind or ecstatic or mystical mood. It's a commitment over a lifetime to what a person considers to be good.
SEVERSON: Among the scientists in the field, Dr. Persinger is controversial because he has stated in the past his view that religion is a creation of the brain.
Dr. PERSINGER: There are Christians and individuals of other faiths who have come to me, very often hostile at first, pointing out that I'm threatening their belief, accusing me of being an atheist and often worst terms. I'm not trying to remove God as a phenomenon, I'm trying to understand the areas of the brain and the magnetic patterns, the electromagnetic patterns within the brain that produce the experience.
SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg argues that his experiments with meditators and with those who pray does not disprove God.
Dr. NEWBERG: When I take a brain of a nun who has the experience of being in the presence of God, what I can tell you is that this is what's going on in their brain when they have that experience. What I can't tell you, just based on the imaging studies alone, is whether or not they've actually been able to do that, they've actually been in the presence of God. So I think it raises some very interesting issues and questions for us in term -- as scientists and also as philosophers to be able to explore where the true reality lies.
SEVERSON: Dr. Michael Baimes is one of Newberg's subjects, an expert at meditation and stress management.
MICHAEL BAIMES (University of Pennsylvania): It's pretty darn interesting to see that when people do this ancient meditation practice, a predictable change in brain function happens.
SEVERSON: Here's how it works. After the subject has meditated, Dr. Newberg injects them with radioactive dye and then takes pictures of their brain. As they get deeper into their meditative state, the colors depicting brain activity change.
Dr. NEWBERG: Well, when the person went into the meditation, what we see is a dramatic decrease over here in this particular orientation area. And this is that particular part that helps to differentiate the self from objects in the world.
SEVERSON: When we meditate and pray, for instance, the part of the brain that helps us orient ourselves and create a sense of self show less activity, less red. The brain quiets down.
Dr. NEWBERG: What they're perceiving is a sense of being at one with something else, in this case, the idea of being within the presence of God or finding some way of becoming joined or in union with a sense of God.
SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg believes that the brain is engineered to allow spiritual experiences, and Professor Persinger in Canada believes that the brain, over generations, has evolved to what it is today to allow spiritual experiences.
Dr. PERSINGER: People are afraid to die. The sense of dissolution, the tremendous terror of losing the sense of self is incapacitating. So I think somewhere in the development of the human brain there was a kind of cognitive process that allowed people to have a minimal anxiety if they just felt that the self was infinite and lasted forever. And I think that spirituality that comes out of that kind of process has allowed the human being, as a group, as a species, to survive.
SEVERSON: So is it possible that one day science will be able to prove, or disprove, God with a certainty? A goal of science, perhaps, but for many of the faithful, a waste of time.
Mr. BAIMES: The conflict is not between science and religion or science and theology, but it's between two belief systems, the belief system that matter is all there is, and the belief system that there is something in addition to matter.
Dr. NEWBERG: If there is a God it certainly makes sense that the brain is set up this way because it would be silly for us to have some fundamental disconnect with the God that created the brain.
SEVERSON: Like other neuroscientists delving into religion, Professor Persinger has taken some heat for his work. He may be more careful now about what he says, but what he says is that science is not threatening religion.
Dr. PERSINGER: The fact that we can now understand the brain basis to faith simply tells us that we can understand it more effectively. It doesn't make it go away any more than when you can look at the brain when you're seeing a sunset and it's beautiful. It doesn't take the beauty away, it just allows you to understand more about it.
SEVERSON: So, the science continues and the debate, and the question, will the science challenge the faith of the believers, or will it simply add to it? For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Lucky Severson in Washington.
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BOB ABERNETHY: The relationship between science and religion is one of the top interests of the John Templeton Foundation, which has just announced the winner of this year's Templeton Prize of nearly a million dollars. He is the Reverend Doctor John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest, who, for many years, was a distinguished mathematical physicist at Cambridge University in England. Then he switched careers in mid-life and was ordained. He has written extensively on science and religion.
Dr. Polkinghorne joins us now from New York. Welcome and congratulations.
Reverend Doctor JOHN POLKINGHORNE (2002 Templeton Prize Recipient): Thank you very much.
ABERNETHY: Science is so powerful some people assume that sooner or later the study of the material world will explain everything else, including the truths of religion. How do you respond to that?
Dr. POLKINGHORNE: Well, I don't think that's correct. I think science is successful because it only asks certain types of questions, how things happen, instead of only certain types of experience, essentially impersonal experience where you can put things through the experimental tests.
ABERNETHY: You've said you have no problem accepting such ideas as the big bang and evolution, but let me ask you about some other things. We just had a story here about research on the brain. Do you think science will someday explain spiritual experience and prayer?
Dr. POLKINGHORNE: I don't think so. Of course, because we're human beings, because we have bodies, our spiritual experiences will have reflection in the things that go on in our brain, just as our scientific experiences have reflections of things that go on in our brain. But I don't think that explains those experiences and understandings away, either for science or for religion.
ABERNETHY: Since September 11, many Americans have sought explanations for pain and suffering and evil. As a scientist, and as a Christian, how do you explain those things?
Dr. POLKINGHORNE: Well, of course, there are great perplexities about evil and suffering in the world. But I think it helps us to realize that God has brought into being a creation to which God has given the gift of freedom. The world is not God's puppet theater in which God makes everything happen. Species are free to be themselves, to make themselves and to make their own decisions. So, that means that things will happen that are contrary to God's will. I don't think that God willed either the act of a murderer, or the incidence of a cancer, but God will allow both to happen in a world over which He doesn't keep tight and strict control.
ABERNETHY: Dr. Polkinghorne, our time is almost up, but I must ask you, what are you going to do with nearly a million dollars?
Dr. POLKINGHORNE: Well, I'm going to use it to -- I hope to support further work in science and religion. It's a very flourishing area at the moment, and there are very talented young people coming to work in the area, doing Ph.D.s and things like that. And I'd like to provide them with some support for post-doctoral work, because that's when I think really fruitful things happen. And that would be in Cambridge, which is a good center for doing these things.
ABERNETHY: Dr. Polkinghorne, many thanks. It's good to talk to you.
Dr. John Polkinghorne, the 2002 winner of the Templeton Prize. Until this year the prize was for progress in religion. Now there's a new name: the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Reality.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Members of Chabad-Lubavitch, a movement within Hassidic Judaism, have launched a year-long centennial celebration of their late Chief Rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Prominent politicians and international dignitaries joined hundreds of Lubavitchers in Washington, D.C., this week to kick off the festivities. They're celebrating the 100th anniversary of Schneerson's birth. Schneerson, whom they call "The Rebbe," died in 1994. He emphasized spiritual awareness and urged the establishment of centers around the world to encourage Jews to be more observant. Some Lubavitchers believe Schneerson was the Messiah.
We'll have more on the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in a special report next week.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christians, wrapped up his six-day pastoral visit to the U.S. after a memorial service at ground zero in New York. Bartholomew and other leaders offered prayers at the site of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed in the September 11 attacks. He has now returned to his headquarters in Istanbul.
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BOB ABERNETHY: The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., has ruled that prisons that deny communion wine to Roman Catholic inmates may be violating prisoners' constitutional rights. Prisoners from Pensacola, Florida, argue that they should be allowed to drink wine during the celebration of the mass, but courts have long allowed the prisons to ban alcohol. The case has been returned to a lower court to determine if drinking communion wine would interfere with prison management.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Now our profile of a popular Christian author and speaker who's built a ministry around the bad girls of the Bible. With humor and outspoken honesty, Liz Curtis Higgs says women today can learn a lot from some of the naughty women of scripture. Kim Lawton spent the day with her.
KIM LAWTON: Author and speaker Liz Curtis Higgs focuses on the seamier side of Scripture.
LIZ CURTIS HIGGS (Author and Speaker): We're talking murder, adultery, revenge, deceit, secret babies and seances and incest. Wild women. Maybe that's why I felt so at home.
LAWTON: Her best-selling books "Bad Girls of the Bible" and its sequel "Really Bad Girls of the Bible" have struck a chord with women across the country who appreciate her unvarnished honesty and her humorous approach to faith.
Ms. HIGGS: Who is this crazy woman?
LAWTON: Liz advocates what she calls girlfriend theology, woman to woman, relating real faith to real struggles.
Ms. HIGGS: I hope you learn lots, are encouraged and laugh often.
LAWTON: She says her credentials for ministry are her own bad-girl days. She calls them her pit years.
Ms. HIGGS: I never do anything half-way. I mean, you know, why just dip in the pit when you can just sink all the way to the bottom?
LAWTON: It was the '70s and Liz had left her small-town Pennsylvania churchgoing background for the world of rock radio. She became a deejay and plunged headfirst into a life of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
Ms. HIGGS: I even prided myself, I think, on being a really bad girl. I decided it was my identity. I decided it was my uniqueness.
LAWTON: Things got so bad, a colleague, shock jock Howard Stern, told her to clean up her act.
Ms. HIGGS: Why I was not arrested I'll never know. It was a gift from God that I didn't end up in jail. It was a gift from God that I didn't end up dead.
LAWTON: As she spiraled downward, Liz took a new rock radio job in Louisville, Kentucky. There, she says, she met some evangelical Christians who told her how she truly could clean up her act.
Ms. HIGGS: They just peeped down the edge of my pit of despair and said, "Liz, we have a better high for you than where you're going now," and of course, I was always up for a better high. Ooh, wow. "Do you smoke, it drink it, toot it, snort it? What do you do to it?" They said, "Well, it's actually you just believe it." "Oh dear. You don't mean God, do you?" "Yes, we do."
LAWTON: Eventually, she says, she committed her life to Jesus.
Ms. HIGGS: It's wonderful now in the new millennium to look back on those years and understand that they were preparation for what I do now, which is encouraging women who also have a past to let go of it, to embrace the grace of God and move on.
LAWTON: Since that time, she's written 15 books, from children's stories to fictional romance to inspirational non-fiction. But her emphasis on the Bible bad girls has really ignited her ministry. When Liz started studying the Bible, she says she was initially put off by some of the role models, such as the Virgin Mary.
Ms. HIGGS: I just couldn't relate. But then I got to Jezebel and I'm like, "Oh, I get this. She's a pushy broad. I get that."
LAWTON: She realized there was something all women could learn from these less-than-perfect women, such as Herodius, the queen who demanded the head of John the Baptist.
Ms. HIGGS: I know what you're thinking. "Liz, what am I supposed to learn from a story about a nasty woman like this?" Even though if you were really honest with me, there have been a few men in your life, you wouldn't mind seeing their head on a platter, you know what I'm saying? But...I usually encourage women to look at these women and say, "Was there anything you like about them? Was there something at all admirable about them?" Just because we really need to learn how to do that for each other. We do tend to look around us and see women and say, "Bad. Good." Not exactly. No one is all bad.
LAWTON: Women around the country have been responding to her message.
Ms. HIGGS: Here is our bad girls Barbie.
LAWTON: Liz has received hundreds of e-mails and letters. She tries to reply to each one and she says women have been having fun acknowledging there may be a little bad girl in all of us.
Ms. HIGGS: And now honorary bad girl. Oh, it's really you, dear.
LAWTON: Is it me?
Ms. HIGGS: It's you. Oh, yeah.
LAWTON: Liz's home and office in Louisville are part of what she calls the Laughing Heart Farm, and indeed, laughter has become a hallmark of her ministry.
Ms. HIGGS: To Deborah, who's called a prophetess. A prophetess. Whoa. Female prophet. Write that down, honey. That is more rare than a decent dress on the 75 percent discount rack in your size.
One of the things I think kept me out of the church for years is it looked too serious. For a girl who loves to have fun, who comes from an all-funny family -- I mean, in my family you had to be funny or you were asked to leave. And so I just wasn't sure if I could fit into the church because it looked very serious.
And David, you remember, is older, too, but he is still hunk. Let me try and get you picturing David. OK, are we clear with Bathsheba's situation now?
When we are able to laugh at ourselves, when we see our foolishness, our humanity, our fallibility, then we're exactly where God wants us to be, on our knees, and he's happy if we're on our knees laughing or we're on our knees crying, we're on our knees. We're humble. We're in a place of willingness to change and willingness to learn. And I think laughter gets you there.
LAWTON: But behind the fun, Liz tries to address some of the most painful issues women face today. Issues such as low self-image.
Ms. HIGGS: And, of course, as a big beautiful woman in a narrow, nervous world, this is an issue that I had to deal with myself. What I find is that people accept you to the level at which you accept yourself. I just really encourage women, you don't want to go overboard in the outward. It's temporary. It's not our eternal selves. But sometimes one small thing makes you start -- burst into song. (Singing) "I feel pretty." Or whatever. It just gives you a sense of being made beautiful in God's image.
LAWTON: Liz says American women are too often bombarded by the notion that they have to be perfect. She says the church doesn't adequately minister to women who feel they don't measure up.
Ms. HIGGS: My bottom-line message, of course, when it comes to all those tapes that are playing and all those little voices that -- the little -- you know, the (makes noise) that either sits on your shoulder or perches on your glasses or wherever that sound is -- it's usually right over here. Those little negatives. First of all, the one I seek to please is God, and that is not God.
LAWTON: But the Oprahlike message of letting go of shame and taking care of self also has a distinctly evangelistic tone that Liz refuses to water down.
Ms. HIGGS: I would say that, yes, it is a relevant message for those who aren't believers. However, I can't be anything but honest with you. It would be my prayer that they would examine faith and what it could bring to their lives. I am standing before you as woman who more than once in my life have put fame and fortune ahead of family.
LAWTON: Liz says she's still not completely a good girl. She struggles with perfectionism and with balancing her work, her marriage and her children.
Ms. HIGGS: Speak in front of 5,000 people, no problem. Write books read by 100,000, no problem. Try and raise an 11- and a 13-year-old, ooh baby. It's hard. Because you don't know what the finished product will be and you can't hold it in your hands like a page. If there's any area that I beg for grace in, it's the raising of my children.
LAWTON: Her openness, her vulnerability and her message have apparently touched the hearts of thousands of women. I'm Kim Lawton reporting.
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BOB ABERNETHY: And finally, environmentalists are calling on Catholics to make another Lenten sacrifice this year and it's not chocolate or television. Instead, conservation groups want to end a centuries old Mexican tradition of eating sea turtles during the Fridays of Lent. That's the day many Catholics abstain from eating meat. The conservationists say the turtles are an endangered species. They've even appealed to Pope John Paul II asking him to make it official that sea turtles are meat, not fish, and therefore, inappropriate for Lenten consumption. No response yet from the Vatican.
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BOB ABERNETHY: That's our program for this weekend of celebrations honoring the man revered for bringing Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century. Happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm Bob Abernethy.
To find our more about RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, log onto pbs.org or America Online, keyword: PBS.
As we leave you, Hassidic music performed by Yussi Rose at this week's Chabad-Lubavitch celebration.
 Back to Article Finder: Stories by Week
© 2002 EDUCATIONAL BROADCASTING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Prepared by Burrelle's Information Services, which takes sole responsibility for accuracy of transcription. No license is granted to the user of this material other than for research. User may not reproduce any copy of the material except for user's personal or internal use and, in such case, only one copy may be reproduced, nor shall user use any material for commercial purposes or in any manner that may infringe upon EDUCATIONAL BROADCASTING CORPORATION's copyright or proprietary interests in the material.
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