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Many think of Vatican City only as the seat of governance for the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics. Atheist critics view it as a capitalist holding company with special privileges. However, that postage-stamp parcel of land in the center of Rome is also a sovereign nation. It has diplomatic embassies—so-called apostolic nunciatures—in over 180 countries, and has permanent observer status at the United Nations.

Only by knowing the history of the Vatican’s sovereign status is it possible to understand how radically different it is compared to other countries. For over 2,000 years the Vatican has been a nonhereditary monarchy. Whoever is Pope is its supreme leader, vested with sole decision-making authority over all religious and temporal matters. There is no legislature, judiciary, or any system of checks and balances. Even the worst of Popes—and there have been some truly terrible ones—are sacrosanct. There has never been a coup, a forced resignation, or a verifiable murder of a Pope. In 2013, Pope Benedict became the first pope to resign in 600 years. Problems of cognitive decline get swept under the rug. In its unchecked power of a single man, the Vatican is closest in its governance style to a handful of absolute monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE. 

During the Renaissance, Popes were feared rivals to Europe’s most powerful monarchies.

From the 8th century until 1870 the Vatican was a semifeudal secular empire called the Papal States that controlled most of central Italy. During the Renaissance, Popes were feared rivals to Europe’s most powerful monarchies. Popes believed God had put them on earth to reign over all other worldly rulers. The Popes of the Middle Ages had an entourage of nearly a thousand servants and hundreds of clerics and lay deputies. That so-called Curia—referring to the court of a Roman emperor—became a Ladon-like network of intrigue and deceit composed largely of (supposedly) celibate single men who lived and worked together at the same time they competed for influence with the Pope. 

The cost of running the Papal States, while maintaining one of Europe’s grandest courts, kept the Vatican under constant financial strain. Although it collected taxes and fees, had sales of produce from its agriculturally rich northern region, and rents from its properties throughout Europe, it was still always strapped for cash. The church turned to selling so-called indulgences, a sixth-century invention whereby the faithful paid for a piece of paper that promised that God would forgo any earthly punishment for the buyer’s sins. The early church’s penances were often severe, including flogging, imprisonment, or even death. Although some indulgences were free, the best ones—promising the most redemption for the gravest sins—were expensive. The Vatican set prices according to the severity of the sin.

The Church had to twice borrow from the Rothschilds.

All the while, the concept of a budget or financial planning was anathema to a succession of Popes. The humiliating low point came when the Church had to twice borrow from the Rothschilds, Europe’s preeminent Jewish banking dynasty. James de Rothschild, head of the family’s Paris-based headquarters, became the official Papal banker. By the time the family bailed out the Vatican, it had only been thirty-five years since the destabilizing aftershocks from the French Revolution had led to the easing of harsh, discriminatory laws against Jews in Western Europe. It was then that Mayer Amschel, the Rothschild family patriarch, had walked out of the Frankfurt ghetto with his five sons and established a fledgling bank. Little wonder the Rothschilds sparked such envy. By the time Pope Gregory asked for the first loan they had created the world’s biggest bank, ten times larger than their closest rival. 

The Vatican’s institutional resistance to capitalism was a leftover of Middle Age ideologies, a belief that the church alone was empowered by God to fight Mammon, a satanic deity of greed. Its ban on usury—earning interest on money loaned or invested—was based on a literal biblical interpretation. The Vatican distrusted capitalism since it thought secular activists used it as a wedge to separate the church from an integrated role with the state. In some countries, the “capitalist bourgeoisie”—as the Vatican dubbed it—had even confiscated church land for public use. Also fueling the resistance to modern finances was the view that capitalism was mostly the province of Jews. Church leaders may not have liked the Rothschilds, but they did like their cash. 

The Church’s sixteen thousand square miles was reduced to a tiny parcel of land.

In 1870, the Vatican lost its earthly empire overnight when Rome fell to the nationalists who were fighting to unify Italy under a single government. The Church’s sixteen thousand square miles was reduced to a tiny parcel of land. The loss of its Papal States income meant the church was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. 

St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Rome (Photograph by Bernd Marx)

The Vatican survived going forward on something called Peter’s Pence, a fundraising practice that had been popular a thousand years earlier with the Saxons in England (and later banned by Henry VIII when he broke with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England). The Vatican pleaded with Catholics worldwide to contribute money to support the Pope, who had declared himself a prisoner inside the Vatican and refused to recognize the new Italian government’s sovereignty over the Church. 

During the nearly 60-year stalemate that followed, the Vatican’s insular and mostly incompetent financial management kept it under tremendous pressure. The Vatican would have gone bankrupt if Mussolini had not saved it. Il Duce, Italy’s fascist leader, was no fan of the Church, but he was enough of a political realist to know that 98 percent of Italians were Catholics. In 1929, the Vatican and the Fascist government executed the Lateran Pacts. It gave the Church the most power since the height of its temporal kingdom. It set aside 108.7 acres as Vatican City and fifty-two scattered “heritage” properties as an autonomous neutral state. It reinstated Papal sovereignty and ended the Pope’s boycott of the Italian state. 

The settlement—worth about $1.6 billion in 2025 dollars—was approximately a third of Italy’s entire annual budget.

The Lateran Pacts declared the Pope was “sacred and inviolable,” the equivalent of a secular monarch, and acknowledged he was invested with divine rights. A new Code of Canon Law made Catholic religious education obligatory in state schools. Cardinals were invested with the same rights as princes by blood. All church holidays became state holidays and priests were exempted from military and jury duty. A three-article financial convention granted “ecclesiastical corporations” full tax exemptions. It also compensated the Vatican for the confiscation of the Papal States with 750 million lire in cash and a billion lire in government bonds that paid 5 percent interest. The settlement—worth about $1.6 billion in 2024 dollars—was approximately a third of Italy’s entire annual budget and a desperately needed lifeline for the cash-starved church. 

Satirical depiction of Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini during the Lateran Treaty negotiations. (Illustration by Erich Schilling, for the cover of Simplicissimus magazine, March 1929.)

Pius XI, the Pope who struck the deal with Mussolini, was savvy enough to know that he and his fellow cardinals needed help managing the enormous windfall. He therefore brought in a lay outside advisor, Bernardino Nogara, a devout Catholic with a reputation as a financial wizard. 

Nogara took little time in upending hundreds of years of tradition. He ordered, for instance, that every Vatican department produce annual budgets and issue monthly income and expense statements. The Curia bristled when he persuaded Pius to cut employee salaries by 15 percent. And after the 1929 stock market crash, Nogara made investments in blue-chip American companies whose stock prices had plummeted. He also bought prime London real estate at fire-sale prices. As tensions mounted in the 1930s, Nogara further diversified the Vatican’s holdings in international banks, U.S. government bonds, manufacturing companies, and electric utilities. 

Only seven months before the start of World War II, the church got a new Pope, Pius XII, one who had a special affection for Germany (he had been the Papal Nuncio—ambassador—to Germany). Nogara warned that the outbreak of war would greatly test the financial empire he had so carefully crafted over a decade. When the hot war began in September 1939, Nogara realized he had to do more than shuffle the Vatican’s hard assets to safe havens. He knew that beyond the military battlefield, governments fought wars by waging a broad economic battle to defeat the enemy. The Axis powers and the Allies imposed a series of draconian decrees restricting many international business deals, banning trading with the enemy, prohibiting the sale of critical natural resources, and freezing the bank accounts and assets of enemy nationals. 

The United States was the most aggressive, searching for countries, companies, and foreign nationals who did any business with enemy nations. Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s direction, the Treasury Department created a so-called blacklist. By June 1941 (six months before Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into the war), the blacklist included not only the obvious belligerents such as Germany and Italy, but also neutral nations such as Switzerland, and the tiny principalities of Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Andorra. Only the Vatican and Turkey were spared. The Vatican was the only European country that proclaimed neutrality that was not placed on the blacklist. 

There was a furious debate inside the Treasury department about whether Nogara’s shuffling and masking of holding companies in multiple European and South American banking jurisdictions was sufficient to blacklist the Vatican. It was only a matter of time, concluded Nogara, until the Vatican was sanctioned. 

The Vatican Bank could operate anywhere worldwide, did not pay taxes … disclose balance sheets, or account to any shareholders.

Every financial transaction left a paper trail through the central banks of the Allies. Nogara needed to conduct Vatican business in secret. The June 27, 1942, formation of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR)—the Vatican Bank—was heaven sent. Nogara drafted a chirograph (a handwritten declaration), a six-point charter for the bank, and Pius signed it. Since its only branch was inside Vatican City—which, again, was not on any blacklist—the IOR was free of any wartime regulations. The IOR was a mix between a traditional bank like J. P. Morgan and a central bank such as the Federal Reserve. The Vatican Bank could operate anywhere worldwide, did not pay taxes, did not have to show a profit, produce annual reports, disclose balance sheets, or account to any shareholders. Located in a former dungeon in the Torrione di Nicoló V (Tower of Nicholas V), it certainly did not look like any other bank. 

The Vatican Bank was created as an autonomous institution with no corporate or ecclesiastical ties to any other church division or lay agency. Its only shareholder was the Pope. Nogara ran it subject only to Pius’s veto. Its charter allowed it “to take charge of, and to administer, capital assets destined for religious agencies.” Nogara interpreted that liberally to mean that the IOR could accept deposits of cash, real estate, or stock shares (that expanded later during the war to include patent royalty and reinsurance policy payments). 

Many nervous Europeans were desperate for a wartime haven for their money. Rich Italians, in particular, were anxious to get cash out of the country. Mussolini had decreed the death penalty for anyone exporting lire from Italian banks. Of the six countries that bordered Italy, the Vatican was the only sovereignty not subject to Italy’s border checks. The formation of the Vatican Bank meant Italians needed only a willing cleric to deposit their suitcases of cash without leaving any paper trail. And unlike other sovereign banks, the IOR was free of any independent audits. It was required—supposedly to streamline recordkeeping—to destroy all its files every decade (a practice it followed until 2000). The IOR left virtually nothing by which postwar investigators could determine if it was a conduit for shuffling wartime plunder, held accounts, or money that should be repatriated to victims. 

The Vatican immediately dropped off the radar of U.S. and British financial investigators.

The IOR’s creation meant the Vatican immediately dropped off the radar of U.S. and British financial investigators. It allowed Nogara to invest in both the Allies and the Axis powers. As I discovered in research for my 2015 book about church finances, God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican, Nogara’s most successful wartime investment was in German and Italian insurance companies. The Vatican earned outsized profits when those companies escheated the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps and converted the cash value of the policies. 

After the war, the Vatican claimed it had never invested or made money from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. All its wartime investments and money movements were hidden by Nogara’s impenetrable Byzantine offshore network. The only proof of what happened was in the Vatican Bank archives, sealed to this day. (I have written opinion pieces in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, calling on the church to open its wartime Vatican Bank files for inspection. The Church has ignored those entreaties.) 

Its ironclad secrecy made it a popular postwar offshore tax haven for wealthy Italians wanting to avoid income taxes.

While the Vatican Bank was indispensable to the church’s enormous wartime profits, the very features—no transparency or oversight, no checks and balances, no adherence to international banking best practices—became its weakness going forward. Its ironclad secrecy made it a popular postwar offshore tax haven for wealthy Italians wanting to avoid income taxes. Mafia dons cultivated friendships with senior clergy and used them to open IOR accounts under fake names. Nogara retired in the 1950s. The laymen who had been his aides were not nearly as clever or imaginative as was he. It opened the Vatican Bank to the influence of lay bankers. One, Michele Sindona, was dubbed by the press as “God’s Banker” in the mid-1960s for the tremendous influence and deal making he had with the Vatican Bank. Sindona was a flamboyant banker whose investment schemes always pushed against the letter of the law. (Years later he would be convicted of massive financial fraud and murder of a prosecutor and would himself be killed in an Italian prison.) 

Exacerbating the bad effect of Sindona directing church investments, the Pope’s pick to run the Vatican Bank in the 1970s was a loyal monsignor, Chicago-born Paul Marcinkus. The problem was that Marcinkus knew almost nothing about finances or running a bank. He later told a reporter that when he got the news that he would oversee the Vatican Bank, he visited several banks in New York and Chicago and picked up tips. “That was it. What kind of training you need?” He also bought some books about international banking and business. One senior Vatican Bank official worried that Marcinkus “couldn’t even read a balance sheet.” 

Marcinkus allowed the Vatican Bank to become more enmeshed with Sindona, and later another fast-talking banker, Roberto Calvi. Like Sindona, Calvi would also later be on the run from a host of financial crimes and frauds, but he never got convicted. He was instead found hanging in 1982 under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. 

“You can’t run the church on Hail Marys.” —Vatican Bank head Paul Marcinkus, defending the Bank’s secretive practices in the 1980s.

By the 1980s the Vatican Bank had become a partner in questionable ventures in offshore havens from Panama and the Bahamas to Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. When one cleric asked Marcinkus why there was so much mystery about the Vatican Bank, Marcinkus dismissed him saying, “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys.” 

All the secret deals came apart in the early 1980s when Italy and the U.S. opened criminal investigations on Marcinkus. Italy indicted him but the Vatican refused to extradite him, allowing Marcinkus instead to remain in Vatican City. The standoff ended when all the criminal charges were dismissed and the church paid a stunning $244 million as a “voluntary contribution” to acknowledge its “moral involvement” with the enormous bank fraud in Italy. (Marcinkus returned a few years later to America where he lived out his final years at a small parish in Sun City, Arizona.) 

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Vatican Bank remained an offshore bank in the heart of Rome.

It would be reasonable to expect that after having allowed itself to be used by a host of fraudsters and criminals, the Vatican Bank cleaned up its act. It did not, however. Although the Pope talked a lot about reforms, it kept the same secret operations, expanding even into massive offshore deposits disguised as fake charities. The combination of lots of money, much of it in cash, and no oversight, again proved a volatile mixture. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Vatican Bank remained an offshore bank in the heart of Rome. It was increasingly used by Italy’s top politicians, including prime ministers, as a slush fund for everything from buying gifts for mistresses to paying off political foes. 

Italy’s tabloids, and a book in 2009 by a top investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, exposed much of the latest round of Vatican Bank mischief. It was not, however, the public shaming of “Vatileaks” that led to any substantive reforms in the way the Church ran its finances. Many top clerics knew that as a 2,000-year-old institution, if they waited patiently for the public outrage to subside, the Vatican Bank could soon resume its shady dealings. 

In 2000, the Church signed a monetary convention with the European Union by which it could issue its own euro coins.

What changed everything in the way the Church runs its finances came unexpectedly in a decision about a common currency—the euro—that at the time seemed unrelated to the Vatican Bank. Italy stopped using the lira as its currency and adopted the euro in 1999. That initially created a quandary for the Vatican, which had always used the lira as its currency. The Vatican debated whether to issue its own currency or to adopt the euro. In December 2000, the church signed a monetary convention with the European Union by which it could issue its own euro coins (distinctively stamped with Città del Vaticano) as well as commemorative coins that it marked up substantially to sell to collectors. Significantly, that agreement did not bind the Vatican, or two other non-EU nations that had accepted the euro—Monaco and Andorra—to abide by strict European statutes regarding money laundering, antiterrorism financing, fraud, and counterfeiting. 

A Vatican 50 Euro Cent Coin, issued in 2016

What the Vatican did not expect was that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 34-nation economics and trade group that tracks openness in the sharing of tax information between countries, had at the same time begun investigating tax havens. Those nations that shared financial data and had in place adequate safeguards against money laundering were put on a so-called white list. Those that had not acted but promised to do so were slotted onto the OECD’s gray list, and those resistant to reforming their banking secrecy laws were relegated to its blacklist. The OECD could not force the Vatican to cooperate since it was not a member of the European Union. However, placement on the blacklist would cripple the Church’s ability to do business with all other banking jurisdictions. 

The biggest stumbling block to real reform is that all power is still vested in a single man.

In December 2009, the Vatican reluctantly signed a new Monetary Convention with the EU and promised to work toward compliance with Europe’s money laundering and antiterrorism laws. It took a year before the Pope issued a first ever decree outlawing money laundering. The most historic change took place in 2012 when the church allowed European regulators from Brussels to examine the Vatican Bank’s books. There were just over 33,000 accounts and some $8.3 billion in assets. The Vatican Bank was not compliant on half of the EU’s forty-five recommendations. It had done enough, however, to avoid being placed on the blacklist. 

In its 2017 evaluation of the Vatican Bank, the EU regulators noted the Vatican had made significant progress in fighting money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Still, changing the DNA of the finances of the Vatican has proven incredibly difficult. When a reformer, Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, became Pope Francis in 2013, he endorsed a wide-ranging financial reorganization that would make the church more transparent and bring it in line with internationally accepted financial standards and practices. Most notable was that Francis created a powerful financial oversight division and put Australian Cardinal George Pell in charge. Then Pell had to resign and return to Australia where he was convicted of child sex offenses in 2018. By 2021, the Vatican began the largest financial corruption trial in its history, even including the indictment of a cardinal for the first time. The case floundered, however, and ultimately revealed that the Vatican’s longstanding self-dealing and financial favoritism had continued almost unabated under Francis’s reign. 

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani / Unsplash

It seems that for every step forward, somehow, the Vatican manages to move backwards when it comes to money and good governance. For those of us who study it, while it is a more compliant and normal member of the international community today than at any time in its past, the biggest stumbling block to real reform is that all power is still vested in a single man that the Church considers the Vicar of Christ on earth. 

The Catholic Church considers the reigning pope to be infallible when speaking ex cathedra (literally “from the chair,” that is, issuing an official declaration) on matters of faith and morals. However, not even the most faithful Catholics believe that every Pope gets it right when it comes to running the Church’s sovereign government. No reform appears on the horizon that would democratize the Vatican. Short of that, it is likely there will be future financial and power scandals, as the Vatican struggles to become a compliant member of the international community.

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As far as I know, this week is some kind of pro-Palestine week, and it’s kicked off with a bang at the University of Chicago. The usual suspects, the Students for Justice in Palestine, have erected a tent accusing the administration (through President Paul Alivisatos) and the Board of Trustees of the University of guilt for “economic genocide”, failure to divest (it’s not clear from what), and complicity in the deaths of Palestinians. This is in the form of a painted tent erected in the Quad yesterday, covered with caricatures of Trustees and the President Alivisatos, many with blood running out of their eyes and mouths. Yep, it’s the old “blood libel,” and I have no compunction in calling this anti-Semitism. (See some photos below.)

Note the “red hands” drawings, which have always been a symbol of death to Jews, reflecting a Palestinian who, in 2000, held up his blood-covered hands after helping kill two Jews. They were two Israelis who lost their way and wound up by accident in Ramallah. The PA detained them, but the mob gathered and, storming the building, tore the pair to pieces:

From Honest Reporting (note: gore and murder):

What followed can only be described as a savage, barbaric lynching. The crazed mob beat and stabbed the Israelis, tore the men limb from limb and gouged out their eyes. During the attack, Mr Avrahami’s wife Hani called him on his mobile phone. Instead of being greeted as usual, an unfamiliar strange voice answered the phone : “I just killed your husband.”

As all this was happening, one man came to the window and, much to the delight of the delirious crowd below,  triumphantly held up his blood-soaked hands for all to see.

The crowd stood below, waving fists and cheering. The body of one of the soldiers was then thrown out of the window. The baying crowd rushed to attack, beating and stamping the lifeless body in a frenzy. The body of the other soldier was set on fire. One of the soldiers was later seen upside down, dangling from a rope.

The horrendous episode was not over. Within minutes of murdering the Israelis, the mob dragged the two butchered bodies to nearby Al-Manara Square, and broke out into impromptu victory celebrations.

The famous photo:

As The Canary Mission notes, “The ‘red hand’ has a decades-old violent meaning for Jews in the Middle East. It signifies the bloody history of pogroms and the slaughter of Jews.”

That said, here are photos of the “installation” erected in the Quad, probably last night (I don’t remember it from yesterday afternoon):

Approval for the installation, showing who put it up:

Paul Alivisatos, our President, called a “genocide normalizer”:

Rachel Kohler, David Rubenstein (chair of the Board) and Antonio Gracias, characterized as “ecociders”, “CEOs of blood baths”, and so on. Note all the red hands, which to me means “kill the Jews”. (Of course you could interpret it as the trustees kill Palestinians, but the red hand has never symbolized that.) Note the blood coming out of their mouths and their satanic appearance. It’s the old blood libel, put onto the Trustees.

Tom Pritzker, also a Trustee with blood running out of his mouth. He’s called a “baby killing scum” and “Epstein Scum”.  Note the red hands again:

More red hands and Satya Nadella, also on the Board of Trustees.  He was born in India, and the caricature, with dark brown skin, could be seen as racist. More red hands.

Finally, trustee Michele Kang, also with blood coming from every orifice.

As I said, this was erected by the Students for Justice in Palestine, the major contributor to antisemitism on our campus. I have noted this in a 2024 letter to the Chicago Maroon and have called for a reassessment of their status as a Recognized Student Organization. From my letter:

Has the time come to ask whether the activism of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) belongs on our campus? It’s not the morally reprehensible things they say that brings this question to the fore, as their speech is protected, but how they behave: in a way that violates campus rules and disrupts the University’s mission.

.  . . . The continual disruption of our campus and violation of University regulations raises the question of whether SJP as a campus group is involved in these actions. If so, we should ponder whether that group should be a recognized student organization. At the very least, student organizations should enrich the mission of the University: promoting discourse and enriching our intellectual life. SJP does none of this, for their mission seems to be purely ideological: to promote Hamas and whitewash its terrorism—as well as to erase the state of Israel—all through disrupting campus activity. If it is to remain, it should at least desist from violating University regulations.

In fact, SJP did not desist from violating University regulations, and was given a slap on the wrist: an “official warning” that further “discipline” (LOL) would be enacted should SJP violate university regulations. This tent, since it was approved, is not a violation, but if the past is any guide, there will be more violations. And the University, which has other problems, won’t do anything.

Note that the University has already affirmed that it’s not divesting from anything, so this is purely performative, and I see it as an act of hatred and antisemitism. That, of course, is within the purview of the First Amendment, and although this kind of thuggery makes me queasy, we Jews have been subject to this for millennia and we’re not going to be put off or scared by it now.

It’s going to be a rough spring.  SJP knows that it’s lost the war, both in Gaza and on campus, and that will simply make them more active and more hateful. I trust that the Jewish students will respond with messages that aren’t hateful, but simply call for the return of the remaining hostages and embody the phrase “Am Yisrael chai” (“The people of Israel live.”)

UPDATE:  We have high winds here today, and apparently the tent blew down. Here’s a photo of the remnants. I’m sure it will be put up again.

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Malgorzata, who lost many of her family in the Holocaust, has been arguing with me for several years about whether stuff like this constitutes free speech. I think it does since it doesn’t violate how our courts have construed the First Amendment, but she differs and thinks installations like this should be banned. I will reproduce with permission what she said to me when we discussed this installation this morning:

You see, Jerry, that’s why I’m definitely not a free speech absolutist. As somebody famous (I don’t remember who) said: the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz, it started with words. OK, the ground was fertile, hatred of Jews was very popular for centuries, and smaller orgies of murders were done in many places. The words which are spoken now, the pictures which are shown (like this installation in your University), can very easily morph into violence (in some places it already has) and to greater and more organized violence. In Rwanda they needed the radio dehumanizing Tutsis for a few months before they went over to calling for the murder of Tutsis. The ground was prepared and people started the mass murder with joy. It’s always easier to give rise to hatred and violence than to love and tolerance. Good ideas always lose against murderous ideas.

 

It’s not a good time for Jews and not a good time for Western civilization. The monsters of barbarism are awake again and many people are embracing them.

Have you ever been into a video game that you played for hours a day for a while? Did you ever experience elements of game play bleeding over into the real world? If you have, then you have experienced what psychologists call “game transfer phenomenon” or GTP.  This can be subtle, such as unconsciously placing your hand on the AWSD keys on a keyboard, or more extreme such as imagining elements of the game in the real world, such as health bars over people’s heads.

None of this is surprising, actually. Our brains adapt to use. Spend enough time in a certain environment, engaging in a specific activity, experiencing certain things, and these pathways will be reinforced. This is essentially what PTSD is – spend enough time fighting for your life in extremely violent and deadly situations, and the behaviors and associations you learn are hard to turn off. I have experienced only a tiny whisper of this after engaging for extended periods of time in live-action gaming that involves some sort of combat (like paint ball or LARPing) – it may take a few days for you to stop looking for threats and being jumpy.

I have also noticed a bit of transfer (and others have noted this to me as well) in that I find myself reaching to pause or rewind a live radio broadcast because I missed something that was said. I also frequently try to interact with screens that are not touch-screens. I am getting used to having the ability to affect my physical reality at will.

Now there is a new wrinkle to this phenomenon – we have to consider the impact of spending more and more time engaged in virtual experiences. This will only get more profound as virtual reality becomes more and more a part of our daily routine. I am also thinking about the not-to-distant future and beyond, where some people might spend huge chunks of their day in VR. Existing research shows that GTP is more likely to occur with increased time and immersiveness. What happens when our daily lives are a blend of the virtual and the physical? Not only is there VR, there is augmented reality (AR) where we overlay digital information onto our perception of the real world. This idea was explored in a Dr. Who episode in which a society of people were so dependent on AR that they were literally helpless without it, unable to even walk from point A to B.

For me the question is – when will GTP cross the line from being an occasional curiosity to a serious problem? For example, in some immersive video games your character may be able to fly, and you think nothing of stepping off a ledge and flying into the air. Imagine playing such a super-hero style game in high quality VR for an extended period of time (something like Ready Player One). Could people “forget” they are in meat space and engage in a deeply engrained behavior they developed in the game. They won’t just be trying to pause their radio, but interact with their physical world in a way that is only possible in the VR world, with possible deadly consequences.

Another aspect of this is that as our technology develops we are increasingly making our physical environment more digital. Three-D printing is an example of this – going from a digital image to a physical object. Increasingly objects in our physical environment are interactive – smart devices. In a generation or two will people get used to not only spending lots of time in VR, but having their physical worlds augmented by AR and populated with smart devices, including physical objects that can change on demand (programmable matter)? We may become ill-adapted to existing in a “dumb” purely physical world. We may choose virtual reality because it has spoiled us for dumb physical reality.

Don’t get me wrong – I think digital and virtual reality is great and I look forward to every advancement. I see this mainly as an unintended consequence. But I also think we can reasonably anticipate this is likely to be a problem, as we are already seeing the milder versions of it today. This means we have an opportunity to mitigate this before it becomes a problem. Part of the solution will likely always be good digital hygiene – making sure our days are balanced with physical and virtual reality. This will likely also be good for our physical health.

I also wonder, however, if this is something that can be mitigated in the virtual applications themselves. Perhaps the programs can designed to make it obvious when we are in virtual reality vs physical reality, as a clue to your brain so it doesn’t cross the streams. I don’t think this is a complete fix, because GTP exists even for cartoony games. The learned behaviors will still bleed over. But perhaps there may be a way to help the brain keep these streams separated.

I suspect we will not seriously address this issue until it is already a problem. But it would be nice to get ahead of a problem like this for once.

The post Game Transfer Phenomenon first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

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A team of NASA scientists proposed a new initiative at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2025 LPSC). Known as the Commercial Hall Propulsion for Mars Payload Services (CHAMPS), the

How can you fairly compare one telescope to another? It’s all in the (angular) resolution.

In the next couple of days, when I finally get time to write, I’m going to point out several articles in the MSM which are gleeful about the supposed return of religion to America.  The New York Times, for example, is laden with pieces about how we’re afflicted with a God-shaped hole in our souls that must be filled by religion. They have, in fact, published several excepts (which I’ve criticized) of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Believe in God, and now you can find his goddy lucubrations at The Free Press as well. The New Yorker also gave his views a lot of space, views that I summarized and criticized here. An excerpt from that post:

I swear, NYT columnist Ross Douthat must have a huge publicity machine, because his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is appearing everywhere, usually as excerpts.  The point of the book is to assert that religion’s decline in America is slowing, and that readers having a “God-shaped hole,” denoting a lack of religious meaning in their lives, should not just become religious, but become Christian. (Douthat thinks that Catholicism is the “right” religion, and of course he happens to be Catholic).

And by “believe,” Douthat doesn’t just mean adhering to a watered-down form of Christianity that sees the New Testament as a series of metaphors. No, he really believes the tenets of his faith, including the miracles of Jesus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the existence of Satan and the afterlife. (See my posts on this delusional book here.) It is a sign of the times that this book, which calls for people to embrace claims that are palpably ridiculous and totally unevidenced—unless you take the New Testament literally, which you can’t because it’s wrong and self-contradictory—is getting not only wide press, but approbation.  Even the New Yorker summary and review of the book, which you can read by clicking below (the screenshot links to the archived version here) is pretty mild in its criticism. Author Rothman is a nonbeliever, and gives good responses to Douthat’s “evidence” for God, but at the end says the he “respects [Douthat’s effort to persuade.”  What does that mean? He respects Douthat’s efforts to proselytize people with a divisive and harmful faith, and to believe stuff without evidence? Well, the New Yorker has always been a bit soft on faith (despite the fact that most of its writers are atheists), because some of their rich and educated readers have “belief in belief”.

All the attention devoted to the “resurgence” of religion in American seems to come from a 2024 Pew survey of “nones” (people who aren’t affiliated with a conventional church), a group that’s been increasing for a long time,  Nones include atheists, agnostics, people who consider themselves spiritual, pantheists, and God-believers who don’t fit in anywhere.

Look! A drop in one year!

 

As you see, the rise in “nones” has been pretty steady since 2007, nearly doubling in percentage by 2022. But from 2022 to 2023, the number of nones fell by 3%.  That fall is what seems to have excited lots of believers (or “believers in belief”), who are pumping out articles on the resurgence of religion in America and excitedly writing books and articles dissecting why God is back.

Now this fall may be real, but I doubt it will continue, if for no other reason than, as Steve Pinker has pointed out, science and rationality continue to take up the space that used to be God’s purview, at least in the West.  My own prediction is that, given a few centuries, America will be about as atheistic as Scandinavia, with “religious” observances confined to weddings, holidays, and the like.

What does the fall mean? Well, it could reflect a rise in wokeness, an ideology that nicely accommodates religious belief. It could reflect the fact that we had a pandemic, or that American economic and social well being fell during this period. It’s well known that when well-being falls, religiosity rises and “none-ness” is likely to fall. (Marx was perhaps the first to realize this but it’s been modernized and verified by the work of Norris and Inglehart, whose thesis is summarized in this book, summarized thusly:

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

The U.S., by the way, doesn’t rank very highly in either happiness or well-being (including income inequality), possibly explaining why, though we have a substantial amount of secularity, it’s much lower than in countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland, which are also less religious.

At any rate, the slight fall in the graph above has given rise to a huge amount of press explaining and extolling America’s return to God.  We are told, for example, that we harbor a “God-shaped hole”: a longing to find meaning in life that can be fulfilled only by accepting a divine being. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a prominent exponent of this view,and it may have worked for her.)

All I’m saying is that I predict a spate of articles in the press touting America’s return to God and explaining our “God-shaped hole.”  And, as far as I can see, it all comes down to that 3% drop in “nones” over one year. There may be more to these claims that I don’t know, but I don’t think America is reverting to conventional religious belief.

John Avise has started a new Sunday series: photos of dragonflies and damselflies. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 1 

This week I begin a series of posts on Dragonflies and Damselflies (taxonomic Order Odonata) that I’ve photographed in North America.  I will go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  I also show the state where I took each photo.

Band-winged Dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata, male (Florida):

Band-winged Dragonlet, female of the brown form (Florida):

Band-winged Dragonlet, young male (Florida):

Black Saddlebags, Tramea lacerata, male (California):

Black Saddlebags, female (California):

 

Blue Corporal, Ladona deplanata, female (Georgia):

Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis, male (California):

Blue Dasher, female (California):

Blue-eyed Darner, Aeshna multicolor, male (California):

Blue-eyed Darner, male in flight (California):

Blue-eyed Darner, female (California):

Blue-eyed Darner, mating pair (California):

Scientists have known for a while that Mars currently lacks a magnetic field, and many blame that for its paltry atmosphere - with no protective shield around the planet, the solar wind was able to strip away much of the gaseous atmosphere over the course of billions of years. But, evidence has been mounting that Mars once had a magnetic field. Results from Insight, one of the Red Planet's landers, lend credence to that idea, but they also point to a strange feature - the magnetic field seemed to cover only the southern hemisphere, but not the north. A team from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics thinks they might know why - in a recent paper, they described how a fully liquid core in Mars could create a lopsided magnetic field like the one seen in Insight’s data.

You never know when a central supermassive black hole is going to power up and start gobbling matter. Contrary to the popular view that these monsters are constantly devouring nearby stars and gas clouds, it turns out they spend part of their existence dormant and inactive. New observations from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft opened a window on the "turn on event" for one of these monsters in a distant galaxy.

In a recent paper, a team of researchers indicated that photosynthetic bacteria could exist just beneath the snow and ice around Mars' mid-latitudes. If true, this could be the most easily accessible place to look for present-day life on Mars.

The solar system is currently embedded deep within the Local Bubble, a region of relatively low density stretching for a thousand light-years across. It was carved millions of years ago by a chain of supernova explosions. And the evidence for it is right under our feet.

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