Dop-a-minded !

My parents always had this doubt about us kids. How come all the four kids, of devoted Christian parents, raised in reasonable religious awareness, turned out to be skeptics who question the highhandedness of religion on a regular basis. All attempts to show this as a 'healthy' and 'normal' behavior had so far been as successful as the India-Pakistan agreement on Kashmir.

But now, looks like I have identified the culprit. After all, what we need is a sacrificial lamb to blame everything on, and then crucify it to let us off the hook. Our villain in this case is a chemical called Dopamine (no relation to 'dope' or 'wine' what so ever!). The story starts with the not so recent discovery that interpretation of causality has a biological foundation. So if you are one of those who believe the recent earthquakes in Japan and Newzealand are signs of end times fast approaching, you cannot really be blamed! The blame should go to those little strands of polypeptides inside you, which increase your propensity to believe in 'seemingly interesting & rewarding' ideas like religion.

Lack of Dopamine in the left hemisphere of the brain, among right-handers, can bring down the authority of belief systems. This makes them more vulnerable to pattern recognition, separating the casual coincidences from the so called 'miracles'. So this should possibly be our guy. All our transgressions into the unquestionable territory of religion is perhaps the result of Dopamine deficiency. But the question is how can we blame something for the consequence of its absence?

Ahem! Any answer suffixed by a why is a new beast.