I had the privilege of hearing Jared Diamond speak the other night at USC. He's a professor at UCLA, author of the brilliant Guns, Germs and Steel, and one of the most learned human beings on the planet at this time. There may be no one else alive who has studied cultures as broadly as he, and I eagerly listened as he held forth to an audience of about 250 people.

Professor Diamond's topic was religion. Basically from the perspective of evolutionary biology--and cultural anthropology and, um, scientific economics (I made that one up, but it seems apt)--one must assume that if an institution exists and persists, it provides a needed function. Otherwise the drain of resources required to keep it going would outweigh the benefits. Scientists assume this about our physiological characteristics as well as our social structures. How does the particular body part or institution justify the massive expenditure of energy needed to bring it into being and to keep it around? Nature, it seems, likes to run lean and mean.

With this in mind, Diamond turned his dazzling highbeams on religion, positing that since he sees it in every culture he's studied, it provides benefits that can be isolated and analyzed. This analysis seems to be his current project, and we were offered what he made clear were a series of initial inquiries into it. Using his own observations and that of other scholars, Diamond theorized that religions have aspects in common no matter how different they may be. Some are monotheistic; some poly. Some offer an afterlife; others say this is it. Some have sacred texts; others exist orally. But all of them, in spite of variants, are remarkably alike.

First, he said, religions have an explanatory function--that is that they tell us why we are here. The anecdote he began with, the genesis narrative of a tribal people in New Guinea, involves a man with testes so swollen from disease that he had to sit in the high branches of a tree and rest them on the ground. I forget the details from there, something about everyone in the tribe getting flung all over the world following a fight with strangers, but anyway like the origin myth of Judeo-Christianity, among other things it explains why people speak different languages. Apparently if you're going to start a religion, this is one of the mysteries you need to account for.

Religions also help to support the development of state government. As people began to have the extra resources to commit to otherwise uselessly wasteful enterprises like politics, there emerged the presence of beings known as kings. These people not only wanted to sit around all day and eat the food that you laboriously collected, they also wanted to push you around and perhaps even put you to death. How to justify this? Simple: religion. See if these kings could say they represented a god, then they had a powerful rationalization for their existence. And so religions grew up fundamentally intertwined with the rise of large empires because the priest class, also interested in a free meal, wisely backed up the king when he asserted his divine right.

Also, obviously, religions establish and support a moral code for the society. Such codes are a great idea because otherwise everybody would kill everybody else, take their stuff, and sleep with their wives. Yes "everybody" means men--remember science and religion both emanate from patriarchies. Just think of the commandment in the torah (what goyim call the old testament) not to covet your neighbor's wife. Sappho notwithstanding, we can assume this dictate was written by men for men as they were the only beings imagined as citizens. As to the sexism inherent in science, let's save that for another time.

As Diamond explained, tribal societies are small enough to handle their justice in-house on a relational basis. Living in a small band means that you know every other member of your group, and know not to kill them. This moral code does not extend to outsiders, who absolutely must be killed. The professor recalled a number of occasions when he was with New Guinea tribesmen who'd encounter an outsider. The thing to do, it seems, is kill him or run. (Or both?) Anyway, there's absolutely no moral code whatsoever prohibiting the killing of outsiders. In fact you'd be a fool not to. The sacred texts and practices of Judeo-Christianity hold this same rule dear. For example, if you sack a city, it says in Deuteronomy, be sure to kill every last person if they're Canaanites, meaning "outsiders." Don't even keep some to marry.

So with the advent of the big society comes a big problem: if I am going to encounter strangers all day long, what's to keep me from killing them even though they are members of my "tribe" as it were? I wondered that as I looked at all the strange faces at the gym last night. The answer, traditionally, has been religious affiliation. Don't kill your brethren, now defined not literally as those members of the extended kinship group making up your tribe, but as members of your religion: fellow Christians, fellow Jews, fellow Muslims, to use salient examples from three of the world's major religions, each of which has a lush history of killing one another simply because they think they worship god right and the others are getting it wrong.

Which brings me to another benefit of religion for a culture: it promotes population growth in yours and the decline of population in rival groups. So welcome to war, one of religion's primary contributions to world history (and well-being I guess, depending on how you define well-being. Halliburton and I tend to see things differently on this issue.) Remember the moral code prohibits killing and stealing--apparently most religions promote these rules as means of stabilizing their culture. So how can the same king telling you not to kill and steal order you to go and kill and steal? Voila! These people to be killed get god wrong, so they're fair game. The folks in the World Trade Center, the daily victims in Iraq, the bodies in Northern Ireland, all serve as modern examples of an ancient moral truth: if you don't see eye to eye on god, kill somebody. Thanks religion!

Diamond noted that these different uses of religion have waxed and waned. For example nobody in her right mind believes the Genesis myth of Judeo-Christianity any longer since science has offered a much more demonstrable explanation of our origins than that we were all flung out from the tree with the guy with huge infected testes sitting on it. But still he says he sees these four factors as commonalities found amongst the world's religions.

Here he paused to take questions.

And here after following along with no conflicts whatsoever I split into two different people because I simply don't know what I believe.

What happened was that the woman next to me asked him about the individual benefits of religion, apart from those larger structural ones that permit social cohesion. In this context, she said “what about mystical experience?”

The reply stunned me. "I've never thought about that," he said. He scrambled over to make a note, presumably for future reference.

He scrambled over to make a note????

Quite possibly the smartest and best educated person I have ever seen has done this much thinking about religion and he's never, ever, paused to think, how does religion affect a human being's relationship to something greater than herself? And by greater I don't mean President Bush pandering to the religious right and working to dismantle women's reproductive freedoms because some people still believe that fishy tree story. I mean the possibility of connecting with the spirit of the universe, finding joy, getting out of oneself and into the ecstatic oblivion of eternity.

What about that function of religion?

Now as a disclaimer I must admit I never got that kind of experience from religion. I knew I was supposed to, hoped that during my adolescent participation in the confirmation ritual at my liberal protestant church that I would feel some magical flash and hear the voice of god and be forever changed. But nothing happened. Same thing in junior high when I dabbled in fundamentalism and went to Billy Graham revival because I wanted my friend Terri Burks to like me (what about that function of religion?). We drove to the Hollywood Bowl on a freeway surrounded by other "believers" in their own minibuses, all flashing each other the upward index finger sign that meant we were all looking and heading heavenward. During the revival, when they asked the heathens to come forward and be converted (according to Diamond another important way religion has established and maintained itself), I dutifully stepped up and accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. There was much rejoicing.

Myself, I felt nothing.

Every cathedral I have visited in Europe, every slurp of communion wafer and wine (or juice, depending)j, every recitation of the lord’s prayer, I've waited for that lightning bolt, been willing to transcend the mortal coil and fly free with the saints, waited for that god buzz.

But the rest was silence. Except the head of course. It kept thinking, analyzing, planning an escape. The heart--the soul?--always remained quiet.

So it's not exactly that I was offended when Diamond blew off the mystical aspects of religion. And I certainly wasn't at all uncomfortable with his steely-eyed empirical view of religion as clearly a human invention as were a number of other audience members. One young woman passionately defended Judaism against his observation that it encouraged the killing of heathen. (Read the book, lady.) Another woman with a southern accent that caused me to assume to she was a fundamentalist christian (prejudice alert!) said given that all religions have moral codes, musn't there be some, ahem, "origin" for them all? Diamond was plussed, if that's a word, addressing this covert endorsement of intelligent design as a serious scientist would, could, should. Yes there's an origin he replied. It's the ruler's desire to have control and keep everybody killing and stealing only the right people and stuff.

But I was surprised that he hadn't considered individual experience as a power offered by religion. And so with an open mind I surmised that perhaps that simply isn't an aspect that he has discovered in his myriad examinations. Maybe New Guinea tribesmen don't consider themselves connected to the spirit world via religion. Maybe they don't consider themselves individuals as we do in the modern West and so there’s no individual experience to be experiencing. Maybe they consider the spirit world such a given that they don't view it as related to religion. Maybe they don't even entertain the notion of there being a spirit world or them having a soul or it being connected to said spirit world via religious experience and explanation.

Don't know.

Am myself a man of science. Can’t be grouped with the beknighted Yahoos.

But.

I've myself have been affected by what I must call mystical experiences, for lack of a better term, in spite of sharing the same skepticism--hell fullblown disbelief in relgious doctrine--as Diamond does. And there's the rub. I can completely understand what he means when he says that religions are human and then elucidates the very human reasons why they exist. I can see how they cause and maintain power relations in a society; I understand that they do an awful lot of harm. I frankly don't see the need for maintaining them, at least as we know them today.

But.

The fact that I cannot ascribe to any discursive system defining itself as religious does not mean that I cannot imagine being a part of the universe in some way that I fundamentally don't understand, some way that science hasn't yet constructed a compelling description of or explanation for.

So since science, the seeming alternative to religious belief, certainly has not offered any attractive alternative--the more we know, it seems, the more we don't know--we, I, need to be in abject humility--something religions commonly promote--not mistaking enlightenment discoveries and the perspective they mandate for an excuse to operate with an inflated ego. After all, that ego is housed in a human body which will certainly die. No better reason to remain humble than that one. My vote for the World Trade Center memorial? Leave the scar on the earth and stick a handwritten sign on a small wooden pole in the somewhere in the middle of the mess that states “we too are mortal.” That's one assertion I can certainly endorse. The rah-rah, we big, we bad, well, um, no. If there's a god, he was sound asleep on September 11. Or enjoying a sadistic show.

This week I am a guest speaker myself at USC, asked by the Women's Student Assembly to address the topic of Women and Spirituality. What do I say? What do I believe? What is worth believing? What is believable? I am humbled by the invitation, awed that young people on their life path value my truth enough to ask for it. So what is it?

Last Monday Diamond told us that the great theologian Paul Tillich, under whom he studied at Harvard many years ago, asked his hyper-rational Ivy League undergraduates, “Why is there something when there could have been nothing?” Diamond noted that these young men had no answer.

Neither do I.