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Religion vs Atheism Book 2


Stubby

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new atheists are slackers, insufficiently hardcore.  I need real atheists, people like marx, freud, nietzsche, in whose books gods are actually slain and consigned to perdition.

It's true that the New Atheists are pale shadows of those who came before them... but in a sense that is the greatest failure of Nietzsche, Marx, et al. They might have slain God, yes... but where are the anticipated replacements? There is no Übermensch and no post-scarcity society --  even though we have the means to create such a society now. There is only avarice (only slightly restrained relative to its 19th century ancestor) and a veritable horde of different values, each with an army of adherents and the overall result being all the old evils multiplied by the power of technology. So... God came back to life. :)

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A Neruoscientist claims that "Religious Fundamentalism" could be treated like a psycholgical medical condition:

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351347

 

From the article:

 

She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.
She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."
Taylor admits that the scope of what could end up being labelled "fundamentalist" is expansive. She continued: "I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."
 
The Vauge definition of "Fundamentalism".  Treating religous belief as a mental disorder.  Yeah, this is going to go to good places. 
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Religious belief is so ingrained in the human brain that I suspect, even as an atheist, it has evolutionary significance. If it has been around for so long, I would not mess with it. Left handedness was once considered the mark of the devil too.

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Religious belief is so ingrained in the human brain that I suspect, even as an atheist, it has evolutionary significance. If it has been around for so long, I would not mess with it. Left handedness was once considered the mark of the devil too.

I feel like it's something that a person either needs/has the capacity for, or they do not.  I really tried to be a good little Catholic as a kid, but I just couldn't manage to find even a shred of belief in me.  I remember a moment as a 10year old where I just utterly rejected it as bullshit (internally in that word - I did not swear at that age so it really stood out that that was the word that came to mind), and from that point on I've never felt anything.  I get the sense of majesty and grandeur that many seem to associate with religion from the sheer beauty of the universe, a coral reef teeming with life, amazing hubble shots of nebula, shots of Earth from orbit...this stuff can reduce me to tears.  On the flip side my mother seemed unable to not believe in something, she was thoroughly disillusioned with the Catholic Church and for a while leaned towards God of the Gaps kind of thinking, but at the end she went back to Catholicism because it's what she felt deep down in her bones and it's what gave her comfort. 

Having someone I was so close to, and so similar to, but having this unbridgeable divide between the way we think on this issue really convinced me it's something on a fundamental level.  Obviously in another time I would have had to act liked I did believe, and probably would have been lying even to myself, but I can't feel real faith.  Fucked if I know what the evolutionary pressure that led to it was, but then I've got no idea what pressures led to people like me either so who am I to judge!

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Religious belief is so ingrained in the human brain that I suspect, even as an atheist, it has evolutionary significance. If it has been around for so long, I would not mess with it. Left handedness was once considered the mark of the devil too.

a few thousand years out of the hundreds of thousands that modern humans have been around? Or millions of years, if you want to include ancestors of H. sapiens under the definition of human. The numbers are not supporting the argument that 'religious belief' is anything but a relatively recent behavior in evolutionary terms

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Religious belief is so ingrained in the human brain that I suspect, even as an atheist, it has evolutionary significance. If it has been around for so long, I would not mess with it. Left handedness was once considered the mark of the devil too.

 

Funny. I feel like, every time you (I dunno why, I just associate the last time I saw this opinion on this forum with you) mention this I'm reading or seeing something that supports it. I finally finished the last of Haidt's books where he again defends the idea that there's a purpose behind it. Coordination, cooperation, on top of the one that atheists are quite happy to cede to it; providing explanations (because they can then claim that it's obsolete). 

 

The problem is...it  solves little, even if it were true. Most of the issues we wrestle with will still be around, regardless of which way that question is answered.

We're still fucked.

 

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Religious belief is so ingrained in the human brain that I suspect, even as an atheist, it has evolutionary significance. If it has been around for so long, I would not mess with it. Left handedness was once considered the mark of the devil too.

So we are back to evopsych?

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Funny. I feel like, every time you (I dunno why, I just associate the last time I saw this opinion on this forum with you) mention this I'm reading or seeing something that supports it. I finally finished the last of Haidt's books where he again defends the idea that there's a purpose behind it. Coordination, cooperation, on top of the one that atheists are quite happy to cede to it; providing explanations (because they can then claim that it's obsolete).

There is no doubt at all that it serves a purpose -- we don't need to do studies of ancient societies for that, it can be empirically proven from the world today (by a fairly substantial margin, it's mostly not the children of atheists who will inherit the Earth).

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a few thousand years out of the hundreds of thousands that modern humans have been around? Or millions of years, if you want to include ancestors of H. sapiens under the definition of human. The numbers are not supporting the argument that 'religious belief' is anything but a relatively recent behavior in evolutionary terms

 If I remember correctly there is evidence for ritualistic practises that goes back a lot longer than a few thousand years. 

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I think we need to draw a distinction to clan-based or even individual beliefs on the one hand and organized religion on the other hand. The latter obviously can't have appeared until the dawn of civilization. The former, on the other hand, is probably something we've always had floating around.

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Correct. There is evidence of ritual burial (i.e. not just burying the body in the ground, but giving it tools, weapons, dead animals, etc.) on the order of a 100,000 years ago. We don't know much about their religious beliefs, but given that we don't know much about society before recorded history in any case, this does not preclude the existence of religion even earlier than that.

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oh, that's not religious, alth.  they actually needed that stuff because dead was different back then. these days, the dead are coddled, and pretty much everything one needs is provided. but in the good old days, the dead actually worked, unlike modern parasites.

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I wasn't talking about the cleanliness rules, mate. ;)

Tywin et al said:

 

 

Given how frequently women, kids and those that aren't the same tribe or share the same beliefs get casually bumped off or violated, it can hardly be said to be a guide on "how not to die".

I think you took my comment way too seriously. It was a light-hearted joke, my friend.

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A Neruoscientist claims that "Religious Fundamentalism" could be treated like a psycholgical medical condition:

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351347

 

From the article:

 

 
The Vauge definition of "Fundamentalism".  Treating religous belief as a mental disorder.  Yeah, this is going to go to good places. 

Anything personality trait that interferes with a person's ability to function in life or with society has, by definition, a psychological medical condition.  It is the difference between anal-retentive, and having OCD.  It is the difference between going to church 4 days per week and praying 5 times every day, and stopping your kid from getting medical help, or performing exorcisms, or protesting soldiers funerals, etc.  I do not think that fits many Christians (or many fundies of any stripe), and she is casting far too wide a net.

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Correct. There is evidence of ritual burial (i.e. not just burying the body in the ground, but giving it tools, weapons, dead animals, etc.) on the order of a 100,000 years ago. We don't know much about their religious beliefs, but given that we don't know much about society before recorded history in any case, this does not preclude the existence of religion even earlier than that.

Now we're stretching the definition of religion pretty far. I know about neanderthal and early modern human burials, I'm an archaeologist (not to sound condescending, but yeah that's what I got a degree in and what I've been employed as). Ritualized burials could just have easily been ancestor worship, or any number of other things. As you said, we know nothing about what those people were thinking or how they really saw the world. If we are going to redefine religion as believing in the supernatural, then sure it is possible that those burials constitute evidence of that. Remember, though, that we could always bring out the examples of elephants showing behavior around their dead that could be described as 'ritualistic' if we want to stretch that definition (and strangely, not even other primates or even apes show behaviors like that, although I might be ignorant of some examples).

I will even buy the evo-psych arguments that spiritualistic or ritualistic behavior is linked to pattern recognition as an evolutionary advantage (eg, seeking to assign a 'creator' to the observable patterns in the natural world, as one might assign a predator as the cause of rustling bushes or the like). That is NOT what religion means to me, though. The organized, codified nature of religious belief may well be an outcome of a 'natural' human spirituality, linguistics, and social behavior, but that is an entirely different argument than stating that religious belief is itself a trait selected for during human evolution. 

Anyways, the discussion of human spirituality, and the evidence thereof in the archaeological record, is much more interesting than religion to me, so cheers on that note :)

This video is a good piece on thinking about the burials, especially in terms of the when, where, and why evidence of these kind of behaviors start showing up in the archaeological record. His youtube channel is also a really great resource on archaeology and human evolution in general

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