Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
It's all in your head.
Now and again I wonder whether I am just simply missing some critical little bit of biology, if there was a small glitch in my development that left out the ability to "sense God". You know, somewhat like how someone with color blindness suffers from a slight defect in their physiology, and is able to see most of the things that the rest of us see, but just can't make out some crucial differences that allow us to make subtle distinctions. I wonder about that.
So, it seems, does Sam Harris. From a Time article dated last Friday titled "What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith", reporting on a recent scientific paper by Harris (and others):
Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden somewhere in his brief paper. But his next neurological enterprise may be another matter. He is planning an fMRI run that will concentrate specifically on religious faith, which Harris thinks he now knows how to plumb more deeply. He also plans to set up two different subject groups — the faithful and non-believers. "That way," among other things, he says, "you can ask, 'Do believers believe that Jesus was born of a virgin the same way that nonbelievers believe that Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may turn out that the brain treats religious faith as its own special category of belief unlike ethics and math.
But that is not what Harris expects to find. He suspects the machines will show that "belief is belief is belief." And that conclusion, he admits, may put him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one, he says, could accuse him or anyone else of trying to disprove God's existence on the basis of an fMRI. But faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel that religious faith is a singular operation of the brain — if they admit that it's an operation of the brain at all — would object to what I'm doing, since it may show that faith is essentially the same as other kinds of knowing or thinking. The whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we have immaterial souls running around in our bodies."
Ah. Maybe it isn't us atheists "missing something". Maybe it is, rather, that believers are mistaking (perhaps intentionally?) faith for simple wishes.
Jim Downey
(Tip o' the hat to Jerry!)
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Got to Agree with Cat
The ability to recognize patterns is a huge advantage in finding mates and avoiding predators in the Savannah. It is also both a huge advantage and disadvantage in discovering how the universe works (we look for repeatable connections, good; we so want to find them where the evidence shows they aren't, bad). In modern pseudoscience, the latter is much more prevalent than the former.
Tully
without question
I do hope Sam's research is productive, but religion is not the only dumbshit belief that gets passed without question from generation to generation. Racism is another example that lives mostly because of childhood brainwashing.
Hey, that's like
This article in Newsweek about people who tend to see patterns in random stuff as oppose to those that don't. Apparently a key difference between their brains was the amount of dopamine. When the researchers injected the skeptics with dopamine the skeptics began to see more patterns in nonsense too.
"If there is evil in this world, it lurks within the hearts of men" ~Edward D. Morrison, Tales of Phantasia
biology of faith
I've been looking forward to Harris getting his research going. I'm very interested to see if there is some sort of biological basis for faith. Anecdotally it seems that certain people are predisposed to faith while others are not.
I'm looking forward to seeing the results.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if "faith," or "irrational cetainty" had its own little corner of the brain to pee in. Why not? It might even have an adaptive advantage, especially in stupid people. Your poor little brain can't figure out the real situation? Take a guess and run with it!
Then again, it may be shown to be exactly the same (in the brain)as all other wishful thinking. I don't think it changes the fundamental nature of faith either way, but I am still interested in finding out what's going on.
As far as the fundamental nature, the reality of faith, it's always been painfully obvious to me that it was just wishful thinking taken to the extreme. That's not just a description of how obvious it is: when as a child and teen I was encouraged to have irrational certainty, I already knew it was irrational certainty, and it was mentally and emotionally anguishing to try to believe in it. I remember several times in my life when "faith" seemed attractive. When a loved one got sick or died, when the nature of death finally reached the adolescent mind, when school and social life seemed unfair or impossible to navigate alone, faith was there to butt its useless head in and provide a "feeling" of certainty...but like all feelings, it goes away quickly. It seems to me little more than an internally manufactured drug. The increased doses of reinforcement it requires to remain effective and the zombie-like mental behavior it promotes to keep it all running smoothly is just not the sort of habit I'm willing to start.
If research like this is kept up, maybe someday somebody will open up a medical deconversion clinic, for those brave souls who know that they just have to stop lying to themselves.
religion the mental equivalent to rape of a child
I'm convinced by my own near-death experience that irrational dogma, of the religious sort, is a mind rape from which many never recover.
Far more devastating than subjecting children to the predations of pedophiles.
Most children recover from the physical and psychological traumas of sexual abuses.
I'm not seeing much hope for those who forced to compromises their developing brains' ability to reason so to make way for the nonsensical "truths" of supernatural "miracles."
Seems that children who aren't forced by environmental pressures into somoe sort of self-destruction, as in destroy their egos so as to force open their tightly closed minds, are doomed to die as they were "born again" - as the sheep who followed "Jeeezus" or Moses or Mohammed, to name a few popular icons of irrationalisms.
These safely grazing sheep maintain as a permanent loss the one and only defense mechanism they had to live as independent, free-thinking rational humans. That is an uninhibited curiosity which made fear of the unknown their best friend and through which they honed their skills to think critically, objectively, abstractly.
The near-death experience I referred to was when my curiosity almost succumed to the Methodist cult's moderate brand of jealous-god dogma.
If not for my dad's revelation that he was agnostic, and his sister's revelation that she was atheist, when I was age 12, I wouldn't be writing to you now.
38 years later, these 2 "seeds of doubt" finally germinated and sprouted, opening up my mind that had been loosely closed by a false sense of security that the "guy in the sky" had it all under control so I needn't worry or act on things I sensed required my attention and action.
Now I'm acting. Curiosity has been restored. I call it my "Kid" - the inner child who was supposed to have been killed by the "dogmagicians" that wanted children to be seen, not heard, accepting on blind faith the "law" requiring complete submission to the "heavenly" authority that would otherwise catapult me into the eternal fires of damnation if I failed to "accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior," etc.
The Kid survived b/c the seeds of doubt served as the antidote that rendered him merely unconscious, whilst I labored as all good sheeple do, in the unattainable pursuit of "happiness" following the maniacal unnatural "laws" of that jealous god who loves all forms of torture and murder of humans - especially the ones closest to him.
Anyone have any thoughts as to the viability of my notion that it should be illegal for any adult, including parents, to expose children to religious dogmas that are reasonably calculated (based on empirical evidence only) to permanently impair their ability to reason?
The First Amendment prohibits Congress only from making a law restricting the "free exercise" of religion - not the involuntary exercise of it as is the case when a child is made to "believe," so if the parens patria law allows us to jail parents who spare no rod as a means to not spoil their child, why not do the same when they force them to fear death because of the "hell" they'll descend to for the missteps that we must all make on the path to true freedom?
I'm going to keeping an eye on this site in hopes I'll get some feedback - any feedback.
Apparently Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are the only two who've been thinking along the same lines as I've outlined here.
Unfortunately, as of yet I have found no serious scientific study that has yet been published to lend support to either side of my argument.
I'm sensing a little bit of the Capt. Kirk syndrome coming on, wondering if I'm about to boldly go where no man has gone before, maybe not at warp-speed, but deinitely under some form of warped conveyance.
Live long and prosper? Write on!
Carloco
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