I had a feeling you were going to say this. To which I can only reply, sorry, I don't think I'm being arrogant or condescending. (at least not initially, if someone insults me, I'm likely to jab back) But, I can easily see how people that are having their sacred beliefs or pet ideals challenged would feel that way. All I'm doing is sticking to the facts, I'm not being personal and I'm not being insulting, if that pisses people off and hurts their feelings, then sorry, I guess the D&D isn't for them. *edit I just scanned this entire thread, again. The two most inflammatory things I've said are that 1) personal pride causes people to become defensive about their religion and 2) it is not logical to believe in something for which no evidence exists. Are these really arrogant, condescending things to say? Is that really how sensitive people are? Might as well censor the topic entirely if that qualifies.
I don't see how comparing a unicorn to god is the same as comparing a person to a genocidal maniac. The problem is not that unicorns, tooth fairies and Santa Claus are inflammatory because you would be hard pressed to think of less inflammatory characters. The problem is the people who are so sensitive and so biased that ANY comparison ruffles their feathers. Not to mention, many people don't even know who the hell Atum or Vishnu are so good luck offending them any less by throwing out those names as comparisons. It all goes back to my initial post in this thread. The problem isn't the criticism, the problem is the people who think their beliefs should be immune from criticism. They have no problems blasting scientology as a religion of crooks and lunatics but calmly and respectfully point out the inconsistency of their thinking and get ready for their wrath.
Getting back here since I have checked this thread since morning. In regard to a relationship between secularism / atheism and attrocity if you take a completely materialistic view, as Mao espoused, that can lead you to devalue things like culture and tradition and even human life. In a situation like the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia that clearly was the case. Once traditional morality was uprooted it became fairly easy to convince people to commit attrocities since under a purely materialistic view a spiritual morality was meaningless and all that mattered was a reductive view of power. This isn't to say that morality is inherently dependent on spirituality but to point out that secularism / atheism can also lead to attrocities and as I state earlier most of the blood shed in the 20th Century was due to secular movements.
It's not the same. It's similar, in that it causes the other person to become defensive and stymies discussion. Whether that's because the other person is too sensitive or not is largely irrelevant if you already know (or should know) what the result of the comparison will be. I wouldn't normally use Atum or Vishnu (I had to look those names up myself), I think Zeus and the Greek or Roman gods are the best analogy. But as I said above, it doesn't matter if the reason the comparison is inflammatory is that the other person is hypersensitive, it is still inflammatory and can be controlled. You're arguing that any comparison would be considered inflammatory, but I disagree. Things like the tooth fairy or unicorns are known as made-up creatures and are almost always used dismissively when being compared to a religious god. If you made the comparison to Zeus or Mother Nature, perhaps, then that layer of condescension is less likely to be there. Sure, you may have to be super careful when making analogies depending on who you're talking to, but shrugging your shoulders and pointing the finger at the person who is too sensitive is a cop out if you yourself have the ability to keep the discussion from getting heated.
No harm, no foul. Everyone gets caught up in the heat of the moment and tone can be misread in prose. I can be as offensive, arrogant, and rude as anyone when it is necessary. For instance, a basso thread. There is a big difference between comparing belief in unicorns and someone's heartfelt religious belief that may be based upon years of contemplation, the death of a loved one, or a singular moment of clarity where a religious epiphany occured. I was originally speaking in a more collective manner and not specifically referring to you. You just responded, so no offense. Keep up the good fight.
You can have a brutal, authoritarian regime that is "secular" or "religious". Its the centralization of power and disregard for individual rights that leads to atrocities. I don't know what the correlation is between how religious a society is and how undemocratic their institutions are. Any ideas on that?
Fair enough. We disagree in that I don't think it's a cop out when I don't restructure a solid, accurate argument/comparison in order to cater to someone else's bias or pride. The problem isn't how the atheist talks to the theist, it's how the theist makes the subject of god immune to criticism. I'm relatively certain I could pick the most benign mythical being to compare to god and I would get the same response. Unicorns, Santa Claus etc. are good comparisons because they are beings that most of us believed in at one time but grew out of thanks to the ability to reason.
I agree that a very religious society may have a correlation to being undemocractic since its hard to respect pluralism under an extremely religious society. Of course secular regimes like Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and North Korea weren't very democractic either.
But that implies that when you are smarter/more enlightened, you see the truth that the mythical being does not exist. In addition, those things are known to be fabrications. There's no way someone who believes in God can allow such a comparison because it almost presupposes that God does not exist. An example like Zeus, though, works better. As far as we know, people honestly believed he was real and did not "grow out of it" as they matured individually. They believed they had evidence for his existence. And now, while we all assume that he never actually existed, that is not part of his definition, it is because we do not belong to that religion. It's not a matter of, "when you get smarter or less ignorant you'll realize he doesn't exist," it's just a different set of beliefs from a different people. And that's why I mentioned Vishnu. People right now believe in Vishnu. It's not part of the definition of that God that one will grow out of that belief as they grow older. Therefore, it provides a less inflammatory comparison.
Where do atheists come from? 03 March 2010 by Lois Lee and Stephen Bullivant Magazine issue 2750. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. For similar stories, visit the The Big Idea and The Human Brain Topic Guides Perhaps the capacity to believe in a supernatural agency is simply non-existent in atheists Editorial: Time to accept that atheism, not god, is odd HERE's a fact to flatter the unbelievers among you: the bright young things at the University of Oxford are among the most godless groups ever studied in the UK. Of 728 students surveyed in 2007, 48.9 per cent claimed not to believe in any god, with 49.6 per cent claiming no religious affiliation. And while a very small number of Britons typically label themselves as "atheist" or "agnostic" (most surveys put it at about 5 per cent), an astonishing 57.3 per cent of the Oxford sample did. This may come as no surprise. After all, atheism is the natural stance of the educated and the informed, is it not? It is only to be expected that Oxford students should be wise to what their own professor Richard Dawkins calls "self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery" - and others call "faith". The old Enlightenment caricature, it seems, is true after all: where Reason reigns, God retires. Of course, things are never quite that simple. Within the sample, for instance, the postgraduates (that is, the even-better educated) were notably more religious than the undergraduates, in terms of both belief in God and self-description. Although the greater number of non-Europeans in the postgraduate population is almost certainly a significant factor here, evidence from elsewhere backs the idea that there is no straightforward relationship between atheism and education. Let's look at some results from the World Values Survey, an international attempt to assess the global state of socio-cultural, moral, religious and political values. The 2005 results show that while there is a clear positive correlation between education and lack of belief in God, the effect is slightly weaker, not stronger, among those with a university education (14.8 per cent were non-believers) compared with those whose highest attainment was secondary level (17.2 per cent). What is more, the survey shows a far stronger correlation between education and certain "irrational" beliefs: for example, only 29.6 per cent of those without even an elementary education believe in telepathy, compared with 51.8 per cent of people with degree-level education. Closer to home, an analysis of the 2008 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey by David Voas of the University of Manchester reveals that the historical correlation between being educated and being "non-religious" has not only weakened but reversed. Looking at white British people, for example, the findings show that only around 25 per cent of men aged between 25 and 34 claiming "no religion" have degrees, compared with around 40 per cent of those describing themselves as religious. For women in the same age group, the difference is less marked but the trend is the same. The picture is more complicated across different ethnic groups, although the overall trend remains the same. It appears that Enlightenment assumptions about the decline of religion as the population becomes more educated will no longer do - at least, not without considerable qualification. Why is it that, despite the long history of the study of religion, the picture seems to be getting more and not less confused about what it means to believe in God? We, and the scholars who gathered in December last year for a conference at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, think we may have the answer. The problems stem from a long-term, collective blind spot in research: atheism itself. This oversight might seem remarkable (or remarkably obtuse on the part of the social scientists) but it is one with deep historical roots. Many of social science's 19th-century founders, including Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Auguste Comte and Max Weber, were unbelievers, or "religiously unmusical", as Weber memorably put it. For them, religion was the great explicandum: how, they wondered, could so many people believe in something so absurd? What they failed to recognise was that their own, taken-for-granted, "lack" of belief might itself be amenable to inquiry. Ironically, sociologists, psychologists, economists and, particularly, cognitive anthropologists have become so skilled at explaining why humans seem to have such a widespread bias towards theistic beliefs that a new question readily presents itself: if religion comes so naturally to us, why are so many people, especially in western Europe, apparently resistant to it? In the UK, for example, a sizeable 43 per cent said they had "no religion" in the 2008 BSA survey. If religion comes naturally to us, why are so many people resistant to it? Moreover, social scientists themselves consistently rank as the most atheistic of all academics: see a recent study by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and Solon Simmons of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia (Sociology of Religion, in press). What we need now is a scientific study not of the theistic, but the atheistic mind. We need to discover why some people do not "get" the supernatural agency many cognitive scientists argue comes automatically to our brains. Is this capacity non-existent in the non-religious, or is it rerouted, undermined or overwritten - and under what conditions? Psychologically, we need to know how the self functions without theistic belief, and how our emotional resources might be altered by its absence. Anthropologically, we need to understand how people without religion make sense of their lives, how they find meaning, and how non-theistic systems of thought are embedded in, and shape, the different cultures in which they are present. Sociologically, we need to know how these alternative meaning-making systems are shared between societies, how they unite or divide us, and whether non-religious groups contain pro-social elements commonly associated with religion itself. For all these reasons and more - not to mention the sheer thrill of entering uncharted waters - we set up the international and interdisciplinary Non-religion and Secularity Research Network in late 2008. The Wolfson meeting was the NSRN's inaugural conference, only the second event on this topic ever to be held in Europe. (The first was convened by the Vatican in 1969: make of that what you will.) The conference presented the first fruits of research in this area - and discussed how much still needs to be done. One of the first tasks is to develop a common academic vocabulary. In this article, for instance, we have danced between "atheistic", "non-theistic", "non-religious", "unbelieving" and "godless" as if they were synonyms. They're not. Interesting findings have, however, begun to emerge; some providing insight into the relationship between education and atheism. Voas, also a keynote speaker at the Wolfson conference, says one reason why a greater number of religious people are degree-holders may be that "better educated people have typically reflected on religion and have the self-confidence to come down decisively, on one side or the other". The issue is not which idea - atheism or theism - is more stupid than the other, but that education helps us either to work out or simply to communicate our beliefs, no matter what they are. He also notes the observation by another keynote presenter, Colin Campbell of the University of York, whose 1971 book Toward a Sociology of Irreligion had until very recently been a lone voice in the wilderness. Campbell argues that though the educated are often the first to articulate a new cultural perspective, if that perspective becomes popular, it will spread across the population. As a result, the education levels associated with that perspective naturally average out. So it is that the relationship between intelligence or education and cultural shifts may not be as significant as they first appear. Everybody stands to benefit from wider and more systematic research of the atheistic or non-religious. The believers may take heart from the fact that the most comprehensive studies no longer suggest the unreligious are cleverer or more lettered than them. But the non-believers might also comfort themselves that they are no longer outside the mainstream. They have become a "normal" and significant part of many societies. And researchers ignore them at their peril. Editorial: Time to accept that atheism, not god, is odd http://www.newscientist.com/article...-atheists-come-from.html?full=true&print=true maybe that article is boring enough to kill this thread
So, I’ve actually come full circle to looking into a supernatural thinking and a magical thinking, which had interested me initially all those years ago. I came back to it again after years of studying experimentally about how children come to think about the world, and put together this theory that, although children may learn to be more rational as they become adults, their earlier notions never entirely go away. That’s really the crux of the SuperSense that I talk about in the book. Dr. Campbell: What is the SuperSense? Dr. Hood: Well, it’s a term I coined just to kind of capture what is a really broad phenomenon. It’s this idea that there is a hidden structure to the universe—that we have hidden powers; that there’s hidden organization; that there are patterns; that there are elements which we can’t necessarily directly see, but we feel that there’s something in addition to reality, as it were. It’s this sense, that there’s something in addition to reality, I call the SuperSense. And it can manifest in all manner of ways. It might be rituals that people engage in. It might be the notion that there are certain significant patterns out there that other people can’t see, but those who feel that they’ve got some special connection can detect. It’s the idea that there’s a life energy; there’s a force that can be tapped into. These are kind of vague conceptual ideas that you find in all cultures, but they’re all underpinned by the idea that there is this hidden dimension, this extra complexity to the world that science, as yet, has failed to discover, and yet most people feel it’s there. Dr. Campbell: Would it be fair to say that an important theme of your book is that these supernatural beliefs—or SuperSense—are a result of our natural ways of thinking? Dr. Hood: Yes, that’s the contribution I’ve really made to the field. I mean the idea that children have misconceptions and have magical thinking is something which was recognized decades ago. That’s something where, quite often, every parent can hear their child engaging sort of in strange notions. But what I’ve added to the debate is the idea that this is actually a natural consequence of the way that children reason. For example, research over the past 20 years shows that children think about the world in terms of what we call ‘domains.’ So, they think about there being physical properties of the world; they have physical reasoning, if you like. They think about the properties of objects and how objects should behave. From a very early age they think about there being a difference between objects and living things. So, they know that if something gets up and moves by itself, it’s likely to be alive. They have a kind of intuitive, or naïve biology. And once they understand something is alive, they also attribute it a property of having a mental life; so, they see purpose and intentions. Dr. Campbell: And most of these tendencies that you talk about in your book are not really tendencies that ever go away. Dr. Hood: Yes. That’s the other, I suppose, unique aspect about it. Because you would imagine that, with education and scientific education, you should be able to abandon these ideas. I’ve been intrigued by the possibility that, in fact, you never really abandon any idea. You can suppress these ideas, and you can replace them, if you like, with more advanced ideas, but the original notions never truly go away. And I think this is actually plausible biologically, in the sense that the central nervous system has representations that never really entirely go away. I think the best example comes from the reflexes. We know, for example, that there’s a whole repertoire of reflexes we have that we’re born with as infants. And, with development and maturation of the right parts of the nervous system, you can suppress them. But they can reappear again. For example, in patient’s who are comatose, you might see the reemergence of very infantile reflexes. And I think there’s no difference between that and the ideas that we form in terms of concepts. I think that these can be suppressed and replaced by more advanced ideas of thinking, but nevertheless, they do remain there. And we know this experimentally, because you can get infantile ways of thinking, if you like, or childish notions reappearing in adults if you put them under the right circumstances. Typically in a stressful situation, for example, you might get a misconception reappearing. Or, indeed, in the very elderly who have compromised mental abilities, they can often show examples of childhood misconceptions reemerging again. So, I suppose what I’m saying is that we develop into adults, and we learn, and we can get all sorts of information through education, but our natural way of thinking—what I call our intuitive thinking—never entirely goes away. And that is something which can form the basis for magical thinking, or adult supernatural beliefs. Dr. Campbell: I’d like to explore your use of the words ‘intuitive thinking’ for a minute, because obviously there has been a lot written on this by other people in the last few years. And their use of the word ‘intuition’ has tended to be a little bit broader than the way you use it in your book. In your book you use it to only refer to the way we think without being taught? Dr. Hood: Yes, that’s right. It has some overlap with the way that other people use it. Very often it’s thought to be a gut reaction. And I think there’s something to that, but I use the term ‘intuitive’ as ‘untutored’—‘unlearned.’ In many instances it’s an unconscious process. We don’t have to be told how to do it, we just simply do it, and that’s the intuition that we operate with. Intuitions can tap into emotions, so you can have instances where you feel the correct response, but logically you’re working it out in a different way. So, that would be a conflict between your intuition and your rationality. Psychologists have shown that, in fact, we operate with both systems. We have a very rapid intuitive system, which is very fast and furious—as I say, it automatically kicks in. And there’s a second system, which is the rational system, which is more laborious, and much slower. It works on logic. It works on evaluating circumstances. And people vary in the extent to which they use one or the other; and that will depend upon the circumstances. For example, Marjaana Lindeman in Finland, has shown that if you look at large samples of people, and you assess their reasoning in terms of their intuitive reasoning vs. their rationality, those who score very high on intuitive reasoning—in the sense that they rely very much on it—are those who also score much more highly on measures of supernatural thinking and belief in the paranormal. So, I think that this inclination towards one of the ways of thinking is also a bias towards susceptibility to the possibility of their being something supernatural in the world. Dr. Campbell: But we really still need both types of thinking, right? Dr. Hood: Oh, yes, absolutely. And in fact, if you read some of the biographies of some of the greatest scientists, very often the insights that they’ve had reflect intuitive processes. And that’s because when you’ve become an expert in a field, you’re not always consciously aware of all the really important information which helps you make decisions. And those intuitive processes—they’re always looking for patterns and structure they can sometimes throw up combinations that you wouldn’t necessarily have discovered through a kind of logical process. Dr. Campbell: The key, I guess, would be then taking that intuition and comparing it to what we know with our reasoning. For example, if we see Jesus in a piece of toast, that’s not really a productive output of our intuition, is it? Dr. Hood: Exactly. We can all have these occurrences, and weird experiences. And the difference between the believer and the non-believer, I think, is the extent to which the non-believers can just simply suppress it or ignore it, whereas people who are inclined to see this as being very auspicious will put a lot of significance on these natural patterns. And the world is full of these coincidences and patterns—it’s how you interpret them that defines whether you become the believer or not. Dr. Campbell: You said in your book that most people give as their primary reason for their supernatural beliefs, their personal experience. Could you talk a little bit about that—maybe use that example of thinking that we can tell people are looking at us—of how our experience can mislead us in that regard? Dr. Hood: Yes. The brain that is designed to see structure and pattern; and that includes evaluating the efficacy of our actions on the world. So, for example, this explains the emergence of superstitious rituals in people’s behavior. If, for example, you have a particularly good day on the tennis court, you try to repeat what you did on that day in order to recapture what gave you the advantage. You try to repeat your rituals, or you try to repeat the regime that you went through. It might be something like you wore a different pair of socks that day, or maybe you used a particular racquet, or maybe you ate something special that day. People will generally try to repeat the circumstances which have been associated with a successful outcome. And this becomes a self-fulling prophecy, so that, very simply, after a couple examples of good luck or positive outcome, people can engage in very surprising complex superstitious rituals. And this is something that the association theorist, B.F. Skinner, demonstrated with pigeons. He showed that if you just simply randomly throw out reinforcements every so often, even simple birds will engage in very bizarre and ritualistic behavior, because the mind of even a bird tries to figure out the patterns and structures which lead to success. So, what we do is that when we notice events in the world that seem to have some order or causality, as we say, we think that there is some kind of mechanism creating it, and we can influence it. That’s why people have their pre-game rituals before events which they can’t control. And I should point out this is really all to do with events in our lives where there is some important outcome. And when you haven’t got a lot of control over that outcome, you engage in behaviors which you think might have some influence. That’s why rituals and superstitions are associated with important events, like taking an exam. And you also find them in professions which have potential for life-threatening events: anyone who is a deep-sea fisherman, or firefighters, or any occupation where there’s a potential for harm, you find a preponderance of these rituals—which are all really an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Dr. Campbell: And then there’s the confirmation bias—the fact that we remember when things fit what we believe. I’m an emergency room doctor, and everybody I know that works in the emergency room firmly believes that full moons bring out crazy people. And I intuitively believe that, even though I know it’s not true. Dr. Hood: That’s right. As soon as you have a notion in your head, you tend to look for confirmatory evidence. That’s called the ‘confirmation bias,’ as you say. And so, you remember every example which confirms that, and conveniently ignore every counterexample. That’s why men think women are bad drivers— because they have this stereotype and they remember every example—when, in fact, statistically women are much safer drivers than men. ..... Dr. Hood: Yes, exactly that. And that’s what I think is one of the big differences between people who succumb to their beliefs and those who are much more controlled. I think that those who are more controlled in their thinking actually have to actively suppress these ideas, and that when they’re put in situations where that ability to control their thoughts is compromised—such as a stressful situation—then they can’t readily do it. And then you get this reemergence of these intuitions driving their behavior and thoughts. Dr. Campbell: Like praying in foxholes? Dr. Hood: Exactly. Or when the plane plummets at 30,000 feet, everyone suddenly becomes very religious. http://docartemis.com/blog/2010/01/podcast34-hood/ http://astore.amazon.com/gingercamp...tail/0061452645
You are confusing the ideas of logic, evidence, and proof. There was evidence that the earth revolves around the sun before it was accepted as proven. Before there was evidence, however, yes it was illogical to think the earth was round or that the earth revolves around the sun. That doesn't mean the argument would be wrong, just that it would have no logical basis. It would be irrational. Beliefs in religion are likewise irrational and illogical. That does not make them bad beliefs, nor does it even make them wrong. You are the one that is attaching a judgment of "bad" to claims of irrationality and illogic.
Ok, but why would people be naturally inclined to look for these things? Animals don’t seem to have this need, and from the standpoint of evolution we evolved from lower level animals, so we must have evolved this need. Why would we have evolved this need if it didn’t benefit us? Let me see if I can sum this up. Animals don’t seem to have the need to look for order in the complex, etc. At the very least, if they do they don’t seem to believe in a god. Humans, however, tend to have these needs and have a strong tendency to believe in a god or gods. Where did this come from? If it isn’t present in animals then from the standpoint of evolution it must have evolved in us, but evolution says that we evolve towards higher efficiency and higher function, not towards things that don’t benefit us. I don’t think it fits, then, that we would have evolved these things. If God is real then these things could be a natural part of our being, but if there is no god then I can’t see a reason why we would have evolved the needs you list and then a false belief in a god to remedy those needs. Do you see what I’m saying?
Umm, there are quite a few theories as to why religion exists at the evolutionary level. Boyer's book Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought, Wright's book The Evolution of God, and Pinker's article, Evolutionary psychology of religion come to mind immediately. Look at the work of Sosis and Alcorta as well. I'm sure you won't believe anything any of them write, but it's worth a shot.
I don't understand this argument. The human brain is very different from other animals. Lesser animals do not seek order in nature or reason about cause and effect because their brains are not complex enough for them to do so.
I'm afraid that time is the issue. Is there any chance you could give a Coles Notes version here? I am interested.
Why would our brains evolve in such a way that we would have these needs? I’m questioning where these needs come from. I basically agree that they’re there, but you’re starting point is that they exist, and I’m questioning where they came from, because I think that’s an important factor in this discussion.
I think it it is because we evolved into an intelligent species that can reason. We didn't have the physical advantages that other animals had, so making use of our brains to reason about the world became vital for survival. As humans developed more sophisticated reasoning tools (i.e. scientific method) in recent centuries, they arrived at more useful explanations for nature. But before that, needing some explanation, it makes quite a lot of sense to me that people would form theories such as "When there is a violent storm, that means the storm god is angry" or whatever.
1) The book you described is the Quran. Since you've taken it upon yourself to tell me what the Quran says, please show me where it says such a thing. Thanks. 2) My response and the quoted paragraph had nothing to do with atheism. It had to do with Islam saying that you are either a Muslim or an infidel. My issue with it is that, for a large group of people, there are only a few million muslims and for another equally large number of Muslims, there are billionS of muslims in the world. I did not want anyone to take the image that anyone who self-identifies as a Muslim believes that 'you are either a Muslim or an infidel, and the definition of a Muslim is someone who believes in God and Prophet Muhammad PBUH, and follows the Quran and Hadith." IF someone took that impression, it would be a FALSE one. It is not an opinion, it would be an incorrect 'fact' that all (or most) Muslims believe that. Your reaction is interesting though. I would love for you to validate the last sentence in the quote above. I wasn't aware that I am supposed to kill atheists. Please show me. Thanks!
