Monstrous
Apocalypse Soon => Religions, Cults & Sects => Topic started by: Mr. Kreepy on February 07, 2009, 01:18:40 PM
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"Religion is part of human nature and our brains are hard wired to believe in God, scientists believe.
The evidence includes studies of babies and children which have shown the brain is programmed to think of the mind as being separate from the body.
This distinction allows us to believe in the supernatural, to conjure up imaginary friends - and to conceive of gods, this week's New Scientist reports.
Other studies suggest our minds come with an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect, which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even when there is none..."
Full articles:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1136482/Brains-hardwired-believe-God-imaginary-friends.html (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1136482/Brains-hardwired-believe-God-imaginary-friends.html)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html)
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So I'd like to hear what people think on the matter. To me, it makes perfect sense that illogical nonsense like believing in gods and such is a result of an over-developed sense of importance and the idea that we're so aware that we attach importance to things that have no importance. Sort of an abstract, spiritual pareidolia.
Or, simply put...Religion and other abstract things are nothing more than mental feces that result from "digesting" hard, cold, logical stuff.
What does Monstrous think about this?
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Makes sense. I always thought religion was born the moment our intellect was. When an animal gazes up at the stars, it passes them off, only because its mind can only register one thing at a time, and those things tend to be based on survival, like eat, sleep, sex, survive, etc. However when we set foot out of our metaphorical caves and gazed up at the stars, the thing that ran through our minds was "What the hell are those thing?" We were familiar with what was around us like the animals we could eat and the animals that could eat us. But when it came to things like the stars or the glowing orange hot liquid spewing forth from the nearby mountain, our then primitive minds we're left puzzled. More importantly, we were left frightened. In order to quell our fear of these distant anomalies, our primitive minds placed human faces and personalities on them. The stars became say "Guggaglownorn and his giant pet fireflies." The nearby volcano became Pele, and so on and so forth. By putting a human face on the unknown, these things became less frightening, gave us comfort so to speak as we lived in their shadow. Over time we wove elaborate stories around their existence in an effort to explain their perfectly natural actions. We performed "early science" with them. Hypothesizing over whether throwing an animal or a man into the volcano will quell it's rage or not. In short, religion to me was an early attempt to explain away the irrational events around us, similar to the overload of cause and effect mentioned in the article.