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This year’s Ramadan has been a surprisingly trouble-free affair, given the increasingly high profile of religious paramilitary urban guerrilla types in the country. I’ve been expecting to have my Prohibition era teacup dashed from my lips as I enjoy a little holy water in some of the city’s less salubrious establishments, but thankfully nothing has transpired.

In fact, most of Jakarta’s brutish behavior is currently being channeled into nationalism as opposed to religious radicalism. Protesters have got all excremental on the Malaysian Embassy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that if you start throwing your own stools around like some of Ragunan Zoo’s more simian charges, then the joke’s kind of on you. Moreover, presumably it was Indonesians, rather than Malaysians, who had to clean up the whole mess.

Religion-wise, however, all seems to be calm in the capital. There has been relatively little 3 a.m. drum pounding or relentless fireworks keeping me awake all night. A couple of times, however, I found myself being woken up, having forgotten to insert my anti-sectarian foam earplugs.

The call to sahur (i.e. wake up and do some cooking) has been going off at a ludicrously early 2:30 a.m. around my neck of the woods this year. This occasionally gives me a rude awakening and finds me stumbling to the toilet through the stygian gloom of my bedroom in order to purge my bladder of Ramadan “tea” before all falls silent for another 90 minutes or so.

As a baby-eating atheist, religious observance and the commitment that the faithful show toward religious rituals never ceases to amaze me. In fact, I almost wish I could feel some of that spirituality myself, although as a true trencherman, I am not so keen on the actual fasting side of things. It’s a scientific fact, though, that the religiously committed suffer significantly lower levels of stress and depression than Darwinian infidels such as myself, who know that the existential void lurks malevolently out there beyond human culture, like a freshly soiled embassy compound.

I’ve been reading some fascinatingly contentious academic theories about religion of late, and about the mental processes and irrational behaviors that may have produced them.

We still live in an ostensibly irrational world, that’s for sure. A recent opinion poll revealed that 25 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, that 35 percent of them believe in mental telepathy and that more than 50 percent believe that Satan influences events on earth. One can only begin to speculate what the figures would be like in Indonesia. We live in a highly irrational world, but where does it all come from?

A psychologist in the 1940s, Devereux, posited religion as organized schizophrenia and theorized that shamans and prophets were neurotic and schizotypal. In other words, conditions that the secular world classifies as mental illness may have played a crucial role in the propagation of religions.

The meta-magical thinking involved in coming up with stories about talking snakes, flying horses and virgin births is commensurate with the kind of disconnection from reality seen in schizotypal patients. It’s important, however, that this shamanic-schizotypal behavior not be too extreme for it to work as a religious catalyst.

If you’re hearing voices all the time then things won’t work, but if you hear voices in the right context, at the right moments, then you can be perceived as a holy man. If you babble and speak in tongues continually then you’ll be ostracized, but babble during your tribe’s holiest ceremony and you’ve been touched by God. In other words, exhibit the schizotypal behavior in the right context and just maybe, for the next few millennia, people won’t have to go to work on your birthday.

Similarly, it’s been theorized that many religious rituals may have origins in another kind of mental disturbance, mainly OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder. Most of the world’s major religious rituals involve such OCD type behavior as repeated cleansing, entering and leaving buildings in specific ways and obsessive numerology. It is therefore not difficult to imagine OCD sufferers millennia ago saying to their tribes: “This is how I’ve been honoring the almighty all these years, you should join me.”

It’s all fascinating stuff, and if you wish to engage in a debate, all letter bombs and envelopes full of anthrax should be mailed to me with a return address on the back.


Simon Pitchforth is the editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.