She was an ordinary-looking woman. Fortyish. It would have been civil to invite her in out of the rain, but I kept her standing on the doorstep. She wanted to save my soul. Usually I listen politely for a minute or two, agree to differ, and see them on their way. I certainly don't enter into debate. But she said something that caught my attention. I don't know how she got there; perhaps it was something to do with Jesus releasing our untapped potential. "Do you know," she said, "that we use only 10 per cent of our brains?" What made her think that? "Scientists have shown it," came the reply. Perhaps they were the same scientists who showed that the Earth was merely 6,000 years old, I wondered. But I said nothing.
One of my Latvian uncles is a Seventh Day Adventist. On his first visit to England, in 1987, I collected him from the ferry port at Harwich and took him back to my home in Essex. My father had travelled down from the Midlands for the reunion with his brother and was waiting for us. They hadn't seen each other for 43 years. It was a poignant moment. But soon there was a chasm between them. Uncle Pavels is an intelligent man, but all his thoughts loop back to religion. He was incessant and intractable. My dad soon wearied, but his forbearance that summer was saintly. I told him I thought his brother's belief in the literal truth of the Bible was fundamentally barmy. "Live and let live," he said.
Fundamentalist religious faith is not far removed from psychotic delusion. Both centre on fixed beliefs held in the teeth of contrary evidence. In fact, religion and pathology seem to have converged in one of the 19th-century founders of the Adventist church, Ellen G White. At the age of nine she sustained a severe head injury and, in time, developed signs and symptoms of what would now be recognised as temporal lobe epilepsy. Contemporary accounts of her behaviour are in line with the clinical manifestations of complex partial seizures, including automatisms and hallucinations. As well as visions of the saints, she once described a journey to Saturn ("The inhabitants are a tall, majestic people, so unlike the inhabitants of earth"). Hyper-religiosity is a recognised feature of some forms of temporal lobe epilepsy, as is hypergraphia-a tendency towards excessive writing. Ellen's published output amounted to more than 100,000 pages, although much of her work was "borrowed" from other writers.
But religion is not the only form of institutional psychosis. Unlike Pavels, my uncle Janis likes a drink. He lives with his wife in a shack on the edge of a birch wood outside Rezekne. I went to see them a few years ago and, on the first morning of my visit, there was vodka on the breakfast table. Janis is a warm, gentle man, who shows no signs of religion. During his time in the Red army he served a different set of truths. He was in one of the tanks that rolled into Prague. "What had they been told of the purpose of their mission," I wondered? "It was to repel the American invasion," he said. "What American invasion?" He smiled and shrugged.
Richard Dawkins sees religious faiths as viruses of the mind-parasitic, self-replicating patterns of information akin to computer viruses. Post-11th September, he says, "It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough.'" Religions should no longer be accorded special respect. Let them be subject to the same rational scrutiny and open criticism as systems of belief in other spheres, such as politics and economics, philosophy and science. Let's stop pussyfooting around. I agree with Dawkins. I admire his radical atheism. But if human minds were expunged of irrationality would the residue of pure reason be worth preserving? I am fond of irrationality. It is what makes me a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. People's heads are stuffed with unreason, as Dawkins knows; not all of it religious, and not all of it pernicious.
As I listened to the woman on the doorstep, I wondered whether I should, if nothing else, try to dispel the 10 per cent brain myth-explain its possible origins (misinterpretation of William James, misquotation of Einstein and misunderstanding of Freud), give some reasons for its prevalence and persistence (the self-improvement industry) and generally point out that, well, it just isn't true. Perhaps it was my moral duty to insert the anti-viral floppy disk of reason into the slot between her ears. But she was ready to move on to the next soul. She said she'd leave me some literature and would be happy to come back and answer my questions. "Really, no thanks," I said, beginning to shut the door. But wait, I thought. There was one thing I wanted to know. "What happened to Peter Knowles?" She looked blank. "God's footballer," I said. He played for Wolves in the 1960s but suddenly left to become a Jehovah's Witness and was never seen again. There's a Billy Bragg song about him: Heard the voices of angels above the choir at Molineux... scored goals on a Saturday, saved souls on a Sunday. She thought I was teasing, and I was, a little. But, truly, I wanted to know. Each to his own virus.
