A "God Gene"? Or Spiritual Heliotropism?

Beliefnet ^ | Tuesday June 9, 2009 | David Klinghoffer

[Dov Shalom]

Marvin Olasky spoke at the Discovery Institute yesterday and I had the opportunity to bounce off him a small heresy I've been cultivating. Olasky is the editor of World Magazine, a conservative Christian biweekly that I admire, and provost of King's College, a Christian college headquartered in New York City's Empire State Building. In his speech he made the case strongly that conservatives and especially conservatively inclined religious folks make a strategic error when they retreat from combat and engagement with the world and seek instead to wall themselves off in monasteries, figuratively speaking -- communities isolated from the sin-tainted world.

But the key point about Olasky that prompted me to share my thought with him is that he's a Jew by birth, a Jewish Christian, from a classic sort of Jewish background. His parents were secular, as was he in his youth, and he grew up to be an atheist and a Communist, becoming a Christian only later on in life. My thesis in a nutshell is that far from there being a "God gene," as some exponents of Darwinian evolution would have it; and in contrast to a strictly traditional view, Jewish or Christian or Muslim, that God is waiting for us all to make the choice of a particular religion that's right for absolutely everyone -- rather than either of these, I wonder if God imprints a certain kind of religious preference, one of numerous possible imprints, on each person.

I'm not giving this as my firm belief. Just something that from experience sure does appear to be true. Each religion, and the variations thereon, seems like it has something almost like a "taste" -- or in Hebrew, a taam, which conveys the point better. Adherents of that religion similarly have a taam in common....

[Dov Shalom]

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