Study the following phrasal verbs. Article 2 says: “If more traditional southern churches were to break away from their liberal brethren ”

1.

Nothing out of the ordinary, a sense of enlightenment, eternity, a deity, consciousness, insight, ambiguity, to have the capacity for doing smth, to be prone to smth.

2.

To identify smth with smth, uplifting, sorrow, divine, compassion.

Article 1

Religion and the Brain

One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The American neurologist, who was spending a year in England, saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings and some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then, Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. He saw things “as they really are,” he recalls. The sense of “I, me, mine” disappeared. “Time was not present,” he says. “I had a sense of eternity. My loathings, fear of death and selfhood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things.”

Call it a mystical experience, a spiritual moment, if you like – but Austin will not. Rather than interpret his instance of grace as a proof of a reality beyond comprehension of our senses, much less as proof of deity, Austin took it as “a proof of the existence of the brain.” As a neurologist, he accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is created by the brain. Austin’s moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have dissolved, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. When that happens, Austin wrote in a recent paper, “what we think of as our ‘higher’ functions of selfhood appear briefly to ‘drop out’, ‘dissolve’, or be ‘deleted from consciousness.’”

He spun out his theories in 1998, in the book “Zen and the Brain.” Since then, more and more scientists have flocked to “neurotheology,” the study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality.

What all the new research shares is a passion for discovering what happens in our brains when we sense that we “have encountered a reality different from the reality of everyday experience,” as psychologist David Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it. In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says Wulff, that it “suggests a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain.”

Are spiritual experiences within the reach of anyone? Neurologists are still clueless on this question. In numerous surveys since 1960s, 30 or 40 percent of respondents say they have, at least once or twice, felt “very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself.” Gallop polls found that 53% of American adults said they had had “a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight.” Psychologists believe that those people most open to mystical experience tend also to be open to new experiences generally. They are usually creative and innovative, with a breadth of interests and a tolerance for ambiguity. Since “we all have the brain circuits that mediate spiritual experiences, probably most people have the capacity for having such experience,” says Wulff. “But it’s possible to foreclose that possibility. If you are rational, self-controlled, not prone to fantasy, you will probably resist the experience.”

Brain-imaging studies have helped explain how nonspiritual people can be moved by religious ceremonies. Drumming, dancing, incantations – all rivet attention on a single, intense source of sensory stimulation, and at the same time evoke powerful emotional response. This combination sends the brain’s arousal system into hyperdrive, much as intense fear does, causing one of the brain structures responsible for maintaining equilibrium to put on the brakes. It inhibits the flow of signals between neurons, like a traffic cop preventing any more cars from entering a tied-up highway. The result is that certain regions of the brain – including the one that goes quiet during meditation and prayer – are deprived of neuronal input.

Neurotheology may wind up having its biggest impact on our thinking about consciousness, the biggest mystery of neuroscience. “In mystical experiences, the content of the mind fades, sensory awareness drops out, so you are left only with pure consciousness,” says Robert Forman, a comparative-religion scholar at Hunter College in New York. “This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and it is a mere byproduct of sensory action.” The question of whether our brain wiring creates God or whether God created our brain wiring will most likely remain purely a matter of faith.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)

Article 2

Faith Is More Than a Feeling

Skeptics used to argue that anyone with half a brain should realize there is no God. Now scientists are telling us that one half of the brain, or a portion thereof, is “wired” to religious experiences. But whether this evolving “neurotheology” is theology at all is doubtful. It tells us new things about circuits of the brain, perhaps, but nothing new about God.

The chief mistake these neurotheologians make is to identify religion with spiritual experiences and feelings. Losing one’s self in prayer may feel good or uplifting, but these emotions have nothing to do with how well we communicate with God. In fact, many people pray best when feeling shame or sorrow, and the sense that God is not present is no less valid than experience of divine presence. The sheer struggle to pray may be more authentic than the occasional feeling that God is close by, hearing every word. Very few believers have experienced what Christian theology calls mystical union with God. Nor, for that matter, have many Buddhists experienced the “emptiness” that the Buddha identified as the realization of “no-self.”

Neurotheologians also confuse spirituality with religion. But doing the will of God involves much more than prayer and meditation. To try to love one’s enemies does not necessitate a special alteration in the circuits of the brain.

On the other hand, most of us at one time or another experienced the dissolution of the boundaries of the self – and a corresponding sense of being at one with the cosmos. But such peak moments need not be religious. What else is a rock concert but an assault on all the senses so that individual identities can dissolve in a collective high?

According to neurotheologians, evolution has programmed the brain to find pleasure in escaping the confines of the self. Some religious practices bear this out. As every meditator quickly learns, reciting a mantra for 20 minutes a day does relax the body and refresh an overstimulated mind. The Bible, too, recommends contemplative prayer for the busily self-involved: “Be still and know that I am Lord.”

Science, of course, does not deal with the immaterial (though aspects of modern physics come pretty close). The most that neurobiologists can do is correlate certain experiences with certain brain activity. To suggest that the brain is the only source of our experiences would be reductionist, ignoring the influence of other important factors, such as the will, the external environment, not to mention the operation of divine grace. Even so, it is hard to imagine a believer in the midst of mystical transport telling herself that it is just her neural circuits acting up. Like Saint Augustine, who lived 15 centuries before we discovered that the brain makes waves, the religious mind intuits that “Thou has made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)

Role play. You are members of a discussion club in which you hold discussions on different controversial issues. The problem today is neurotheology. Divide into two groups according to your views and elect the leader who will conduct the discussion. One group must be in favour of neurotheology, and the other group must be against it. The teacher will be the listener who hesitates between the two basic views. The two groups must do their best to win over the “hesitating audience.”

Remember that you must be brief and to the point. Try to make your speech expressive and use different ways to emphasize ideas.

Professional Reading

Read the article below very carefully. You must achieve complete understanding of the text, so use a dictionary by all means. While reading, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Use these words in the further discussion of the problem.

To have much to gain from …, to command respect, to be misleading, a mosque, to shy away from…

The Ever-Moving Wall

Since Madison and Jefferson, arguments about religion in America have ebbed and flowed. This year they are ebbing. This is a pity for America would have much to gain from conducting a searching discussion of the boundaries between the secular and the religious.

There are politicians whose faith actually seemed to influence the way they thought about public decisions, and they were celebrated for it by people of every religion in the country.

Before long, however, the American Defamation League (a Jewish organization set up to attack anti-Semitism) started complaining that “appealing to citizens along religious lines … is contrary to the American ideal.” And when they suggested that public morality went hand in hand with a belief in God, various civil-rights groups claimed this was threatening freedom of unbelief.

From the viewpoint of the presidential election, that was predictable. Although most Americans want their president to hold strong religious beliefs, hardly anyone thinks that the issue of church and state is important in the election and, indeed, people are divided about whether they want politicians to discuss religion: half say yes, 45% say no.

But looked at from the longer perspective of debate over the “wall of separation”, the lull in the debate is a loss. The wall is an idea that commands enormous respect in America. The phrase itself is Jefferson’s (it occurs in a letter he wrote to some Connecticut Baptists) and has been elevated by no less a body than the Supreme Court into the guiding principle for understanding the (otherwise incomprehensible) first amendment to the constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Yet, the notion that there really is a wall between church and state is misleading, and the court’s own decisions, erected on its supposedly solid foundation, show this to be so. In its wisdom the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress may have its own chaplain. But a student may not lead a prayer at a school football match. Public money may not go to private religious schools. Except that it can if the money goes to the student first, not the school. And so on.

The lesson is not that the Supreme Court is incompetent (well, not necessarily, anyway). It is that its decisions cannot be consistent because there is no “wall of separation” to guide it – that is, no big barrier clear for us to see. Rather, church and state in America are separated by the finest of lines, which twists and turns, is hard to discern, and which changes over time.

In a recent book “What’s God to do with American Experiment?”, E.J.Dionne argues that America is now embarking on the third stage of its endless national debate about where this line should be. In the first phase, which lasted until the 1950s, the arguments were largely driven by the public concerns of white Protestant churches.

The second phase saw the country grappling with the implications of the civil-rights era by embracing the concerns of black churches, of mosques, of Catholics and Jews. What that meant in practice was that, to avoid giving offence to religious minorities, the government carefully shied away from expressing any sort of official world view that might ever be seen as religious.

That in turn laid the foundation for the third, and current stage: the reaction. Many religious leaders, and not only Christian ones, now argue that the separation of church and state, instead of just guaranteeing freedom of religion, has ended up promoting secularism. In its attempt to be indifferent between various religions, the state became indifferent to religion itself – and even hostile to it.

Simultaneously, a considerable amount of recent evidence has shown that some of America’s most effective programmes against poverty, crime and addiction are being run by religious organizations – and that the country would be better off if more public money went to them. The upshot is that this third round of debate is about trying to draw a line that accommodates “faith-based” social work and makes the public arena less hostile to religion.

It is far from clear where this line should go, or even whether it can be drawn successfully. But in general the country surely needs to hear more about it, not less. Only by arguing about it in every generation has America managed to keep its democratic state without compromising its religious freedom.

(From ‘The Economist’, abridged)