We live in a world where it’s possible to question the very existence of God, even the supernatural altogether. Our world also contains many religions that, more often than not, tend to break out along ethnic and cultural boundaries. Most of these religions claim to be the one true way to win the “game” of life — whether that’s through reaching enlightenment, receiving salvation, etc.
So for the sake of argument, let’s say that there really is a God, and he’s given us one of these religions that we’re supposed to follow. As most of these religions teach, picking the wrong belief system will result in horrible punishment that is likely to last an eternity. I already see lots of problems with this scenario, but let’s ignore those for the moment.
How are we supposed to know which religion is the true one?
We’re not born with the luxury of knowing about all these religions from a young age. Instead, each of us is raised to believe that one of the options (or none of them) is the truth, so it’s not until we’re adults that we really begin to learn more about the wider world. And at that point, we have a lot of preconceived notions to overcome. But luckily, these religions usually teach that God is a benevolent being that wants every single one of us to find the path to him, so we can reasonably expect that he’ll help us find a way to him.
The most direct way to communicate something to someone is to speak to them directly. So God could choose that method to let us know what he expects of us. If you’re into video games, this is similar to the tutorial dialogs that pop up in your game to let you know the rules. It’s a helpful tool. You can still press whatever buttons you like, but at least you’ll know what’s expected.
Of course, God doesn’t do that for us. Fair enough — what’s another method he could use? Ah, he could send us some kind of “cosmic email” — writing in the sky, or something like that. You know, something that would be nigh impossible for another person to fake. The message would be accompanied by the kind of sign that would give us assurance we’re dealing with the divine. The burning bush, Gideon’s fleece, Paul’s episode on the road to Damascus, etc.
But if God does this kind of thing today, he’s not ubiquitous with it. I’ve never received a sign like that, nor have most people that I’ve ever known. I guess that’s his prerogative, but it does make one question the Bible’s passages that say God is impartial. But I’m starting to digress…
So maybe God could send us some trusted messenger. It would need to be someone that I know well, so I could really trust what they’re saying. But again, I’ve never gotten such a message, and I also know that even well meaning people can sometimes be delusional. I’m not sure I want to risk my soul on such a message delivery system.
So God could send a messenger imbued with divine powers, someone that could work miracles that could only come from God. I would listen to an individual who could do the kinds of miracles that the Bible describes, but I’ve never seen anyone do them.
However, the Bible is a religious text that claims God did use this method a long time ago. Isn’t that just as good as witnessing the miracles for myself? Not for me. Thomas Paine said that once you tell a divine revelation to someone else, it ceases to be revelation and becomes mere hearsay. I have to agree. For me to accept the word of a religious text, the text would have to be incredibly amazing. The writers would have to demonstrate knowledge of things that they couldn’t possibly have known about ahead of time. When events are recounted in multiple places within the text, they must be without error or contradiction. When science is recounted, it must be without error — not simply a regurgitation of what was already known at the time. Its morals must be without reproach. If it gives prophecies, they must be without error.
If those standards seem too high, then maybe you aren’t truly considering what’s at stake. The soul of everyone who has ever lived hinges on the judgments of this God. Each and every soul should be just as precious to him as the souls of your own children are to you. Would you leave the fate of their souls up to chance, or would you do everything within your power to save them from eternal torture (or punishment, or annihilation — whatever your particular flavor teaches)? If you saw a windowless van pull up to your child and watched the driver coax them to come closer, would you stand back to see how your child reacts, or would you run to them as fast as you could, calling them back all the while? You don’t have to answer, because I know what you would do — you’d do what any decent human would do. Why doesn’t God do the same for us? If I’m currently bound for Hell, and I’m influencing my innocent children to eventually follow in my footsteps, why doesn’t God intervene to help us?
And before you say he does just that through scripture, the Bible fails every one of the criteria I listed out. In fact, I’m not aware of any religious text that comes close to meeting those standards. If we accept that God is loving, merciful, and just, then it does not follow that he would be the author of the Bible. I’d be happy to cite specific examples of the Bible’s failings, but I’ve written way too much already. Luckily, I have links to those examples on my home page.
It’s God’s overwhelming hiddenness that sounds the death knell on religion for me. As Delos McKown has said:
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Finding Truth 
*sigh*
Travis, you don’t understand what a placebo is. You say, “The placebo is usually a stimulus into a casual chain that produces real results.” This is not true. It is not efficacious. If it were it’s neither a placebo nor a nocebo. The placebo effect is what we cal SELF-REPORTED improvements. There are no empirical improvements. (“The concept of a placebo is that it is completely physiologically inert, therefore any response to the placebo is due to other factors (other than a physiological response to an active intervention))”. For a great deal of reading on the subject and everything you ever wanted to know about placebos and just how insidious is the misunderstanding you’ve used here, check this site out.
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@tildeb, I am the first to admit I am not well versed on this subject. That’s why I asked the question about placebo.
Your explanations on both awarding agency and placebo make sense . They are subjects I need to get up to speed on.
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I just wanted to throw out my support for the idea of reproduction versus spirituality. I’ve just begun a new Unit in Health with Gr. 9’s – the Sexuality Unit. If anyone wants confirmation for Tildeb’s suggestion, you might want to be a mouse in the corner of the room in the next few days; the boys would love to straighten you out on that . . . 🙂
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Like kcchief, neurology is not something I’ve looked into very much, but I’m a bit skeptical of these statements. I think the only reason we’d expect different (and isolated) cultures to develop the exact same religions and ideas of spirituality would be if something supernatural was really behind it. I agree with you that agency is probably the main driver of the development of religion and spirituality, but I don’t think Travis was saying anything that contradicts that idea. Maybe I just misunderstood both of you…
As a side note, maybe there are better ways to express these points? They came off kind of combative…
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Good luck with that. Faith-based belief in all its forms I think is inevitably pernicious.
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@kcchief1, well that’s a relief.
I know I was very frustrated reading Travis’s comments and no doubt that seeped into my writing. Me and tone, donchaknow… not good allies. I get frustrated because good minds like yours and Travis’ shouldn’t be willing to go down the religious rabbit holes without first being armed by excellent critical thinking skills. It’s a warren down there and intentionally so.It’s easy to lose a sense of direction and want to look favourably of the person who invited you there. If the warren was in fact a benefit, it wouldn’t have to live in darkness but come with clarity and elegance and function, all of which is sadly lacking except by misrepresentation, distortion, and a certain amount of deceit. When this is supported under the guise of being friendly and polite and respectful to ideas that are contrary to all three rather than steadfastly and deservedly critical, I begin to get annoyed and feel a need to explain why we need to rip the lid off the warren and see just how serpentine and ill-formed it is.
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tildeb,
Ironically, I’m going to suggest that you’re being dogmatically religious about semantics. You’re welcome to favor your own definition of religion but if it defies conventional usage then you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel obliged to follow suit. And I agree with Nate’s comment – the “one religion” and “one spirituality” claim is a complete non sequitur.
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My comment was partially informed by having recently listened to this podcast featuring this guy, who wrote a book called “Placebo Effects”. Read Chapter 2 on Google Books and then take your case up with him.
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@ Nate, You’re quite right; my tone was and is combative because people who use this kind of information warp it to fit ideas it does not support. That really irritates me when done by people who I think know better.
Religion does not come from our biology; our biology projects agency into the world (hence the tens of thousands of conflicting religious tenets) and regularly and reliably targeted where we know perfectly well no independent agency exists. It is this vast number and thousands upon thousands of forms of spirituality that indicates these terms to be highly malleable if not contortionist… very handy for those who wish to warp reality to fit a belief, donchaknow. You can’t presume religion and spirituality are the kinds of nouns that actually describes anything accurately. So what is ‘it’ we’re really talking about that religion and spirituality produces from our biology?
Religion, it seems rather obvious to me, comes from those who confuse reality with their projected beliefs about it. Furthermore, why should anyone respect a projected religious belief that is contrary to and in conflict with how we know reality to actually work, opposite to how we utilize it successfully, different from how we know it to operate consistently inside reality? Snakes and donkeys can’t talk because they don’t have cheeks. That’s the reality. Projecting that they do by magical means doesn’t fit this reality. How does pretending this to be reasonable if unlikely aid us in doing anything but coddling ignorance?
The problem is the slipperiness and play-dough nature of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ as if designed to fit into any box that appears to be supportive. That’s what’s happened here and we should know better than to trust it. What we’re really talking about with both of these terms in their faith-based sense are explanatory models that don’t work. They don’t explain anything, and we know this because they don;t produce any application, therapy, or technology that works for everyone everywhere all the time. Science produces this constantly. Only in this sense do we utilize this agency projection – and remember, our brains project agency – into the cosmos to give us a sense of an ‘answer’ – very often to really poor questions we know have no answer independent of us – questions we know do not have objective ‘answers’ (like, Why am I here, What is the meaning of life, and so on). We project agency to satisfy a model that seems to work right now providing us at most with the appearance of an answer that really answers nothing (because it’s simply another claim masquerading as a conclusion) but helps us to feel better. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for many.
Bump in the night? Ghosts. Strange behaviour? Possession. Will it rain? Call in the rain dancer. What’s in my future? Tarot cards, tea leaves, goat entrails, dropped bones, bird directions, and all kinds of stuff merely labeled as ‘omens’ that I’m going to pretend ‘reveal’ the future. And we’re to respect this because it’s a belief? That’s a really poor metric. Is ignorance really abated by offering a faux-respect for these ‘answers’?
I know, I’ll sacrifice something valuable and ‘earn’ credit from the future and feel like I’m actually doing something efficacious. It’s all nonsense, of course, and we know it’s nonsense (because it’s not efficacious) but it makes us feel like we have a bit of control in a rather brutal and indifferent world. That’s what we’re chasing… the feeling. There’s our biology at work. It’s not religious or spiritual… it’s temporarily suppressing fear.
The faith-based models don’t work to explain anything, solve anything, do anything beyond briefly satisfy our feelings right now (paid for by whatever we end up using… perhaps virgins, perhaps crops, perhaps livestock, perhaps a bit of genital mutilation of a loved one to show we really, really care, and so on)… no matter how much praying we do over a blocked toilet or during the set up for the game-winning field goal, we find out our belief efforts don’t have any efficacious properties. At all.
I think Travis very much wants to offer a biological excuse for belief in Oogity Boogity! There is none. That’s brutal honesty not because I think so but because reality has arbitrated the method of faith that creates tens of thousands of such agencies to be a guaranteed method to fool the credulous and promote the gullible… a method, let us never forget that really does bring real harm to real people in real life each and every day, century after century. I think he very much wants to be able to coddle and make room for this confusion between faith-based and evidence-adduced beliefs as if equivalent, as if a matter of opinion, as if reasonable when it’s not because it makes him feel better. I think Travis wants to feel like the good guy and make it appear that reasonable people accept the incompatible faith-based claims to appear to be compatible with evidence-adduced beliefs for reasons other than respecting reality, other than respecting what’s the case, but not really respecting people enough to call them on accommodationist faith-addled claptrap.
Just my opinion, of course, and yes it must be combative by necessity because people like UnkleE are never, ever going to change their methodology that supports their beliefs as long as they can count on people treating their confusion with privileged kid gloves and a measure of undeserved respect. That treatment, too, I think is a measure of intellectual dishonesty that is far too often ignored or left unsaid for fear of being seen as intolerant and combative. But it doesn’t make the observation any less true or any less worthy of some serious reflection.
So what kind of mind confuses the obvious and nonsensical agency projection our biology provides us with for reproductive success with an adduced conclusion… as if talking snakes and donkeys without cheeks were reasonable? Well, only the religious kind, the kind that accepts projected faith-based beliefs to be virtue because, well, just because… rather than the vice (read, harm) such misplaced confidence inevitably produces (if we’re satisfied with non-answers and explanatory models that don’t work but willingly accept the costs others pay).
I’m combating really bad ideas and questioning the motivation for sustaining and even supporting them. I think if more of us did this, (and in far fewer words, of course), we would do our collective part to leave the next generation a little less addled and a little better armed to hold reality in esteem more than the feelings of those willing to do harm in the name of piety and accommodationism. And I think we are not helping by coddling and soft-shoeing around delusional beliefs (because they are faith-based, you see, and… well… we have to be polite because, well because we just have to be) but by publicly and forcefully challenging them on merit as well as motivation. That includes faitheists of all stripes – atheist, theist, and agnostic.
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First of all, I agree with you that religion and spirituality don’t actually answer anything about the world. They’re false, to put it simply.
But I feel like many of your comments assume that the religious also know their beliefs are false:
But that’s just it — the people who believe those things don’t know perfectly well that those things lack agency.
“Reasonable” may not be the right word… but as someone who used to believe both of those things, I can tell you that dismissing it as absurd is apt to make the religious person think you’re ignorant. Sounds crazy, I know. But when I ran into people like that, I thought “don’t you understand that a God who spoke the universe into being isn’t held by the laws of nature?”
Again, the people who believe in such things don’t know that those questions have no answer. They think they do have an answer.
Also, the message you got from Travis’s comments is not at all the message I got. I don’t think he was saying religion is a good thing or that it’s accurate. I think he was saying that it would be silly and short-sighted for us to claim that religion is all bad, because there have been some decent things that have come from it. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have come about in other ways (like the feeling of community, having hope that circumstances will improve, the importance of morality, etc), but in most cultures, religion played an important part in their development. It’s okay for us to acknowledge that without pretending that religion is true.
And I think that when religious people see us display that kind of honesty, they’re more likely to be open to the other things we have to say. On the other hand, if they see us denigrate the positive parts of religion, they’ll think we’re unreasonable.
Let me be clear — I tend to think that religion has done more harm than good (though that’s not something I’ve studied exhaustively). But I can’t pretend it has done no good.
I don’t agree. First of all, I don’t think anyone’s arguing for being polite for no real reason. It’s that religious people are usually decent people who are well-meaning, even if they’re a bit ignorant of their own beliefs. They shouldn’t be ridiculed for that, anymore than a 5-yr old who’s been taught to believe in Santa Claus should be ridiculed for still believing. Be a friend to the person — an advocate who can help them learn more. Not a jerk who berates them for not being an expert in every conceivable field. Sometimes ridicule can be used to make a point, but it shouldn’t be the only tool in the shed, and it shouldn’t be the first one we grab.
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@ Travis
You’re suggesting that evolution has produced religion and so, in this naturalistic regard, it must contain some positive benefit.
I disagree that evolution has produced religion and I’ve explained why; projecting agency is not the same as the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition I use for religion: “The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” Religion in this sense is not a projection – which is what evolution has endowed us with, the projection and not the belief in gods. Because of this reversal, it is incorrect to assume religion is an expression of evolution.
Labeling my explanation as ‘dogmatically religious’ does not serve to point out where my reasoning has gone astray. Calling my use of the term ‘religion’ my own is not correct. If our biology provided what you claimed it provides – religious belief – then we should be looking for a common expression of that belief and not the reversal of it expressed tens of thousands of different ways. This is not a non sequitur and I think you dismiss it too readily for the wrong reasons. The common feature is the PROJECTION OF AGENCY and not the ubiquitous belief IN the independent existence of such a divine agency.
My comments are longer than most because I take the time and make the effort to explain my reasoning so that I can benefit by the critical assessment of others where and how I have gone astray. If you can do that, I would appreciate it.
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This is always the concern about faith-based beliefs: differentiating the believer from the beliefs and being told all the time to be less harsh, use a gentler tone, slowly draw the believer into considerations they might otherwise wouldn’t face. I don’t think that approach works very well at all (going by hundreds of conversion stories I’ve read) but that’s not the issue here with Travis.
The issue with Travis is the idea that religious belief is compatible with reality and the method we use to gain insight into its workings, that it is somewhat benign except towards the extreme, and that those who hold it have the ability to modify it into alignment with reality over time.
This is faitheism and I think it is ineffective at challenging the method utilized for faith-based beliefs, fails to explain why, and offers cover and support for religious belief that really does produce ongoing pernicious harm primarily by the granting a faux-respect to the exercise of religious belief in the name of respecting the individuals who holds them.
Now, I am a fan of Clifford’s argument, that ” “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” and so I criticize claims that do just this, that utilize faith as a justification, and I do this in order to reveal this insufficient evidence.
The method used for faith-based thinking pollutes our inquiry into reality many ways and always to pernicious effect. Religious belief is the mother ship that globally advertises it to be virtue but it’s identical to the method used to justify all manner of woo and denialism… all of which is the same vice: believing stuff on insufficient evidence AND still acting on it. I seriously think there is no excuse except ignorance to do this no matter how nicely the person may be who utilizes this broken methodology.
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“There are a few reasons why I didn’t engage with that point.”
Hi Nate, I wasn’t critical of you. You engage with me often enough, and I appreciate it.
I read the rest of your comments and I understand where you’re coming from even though I think it is way short of an evidence-based explanation, but I don’t think I’ll pursue that further. Likewise I think there are good answers to your last point (“I’d rather see them explain why their particular god exists.”) but I don’t want move that far off-topic unless you really want me to! 🙂
But I wonder if you could answer two questions, please, which are aimed at clarification.
1. You said that you think “I tend to think that religion has done more harm than good”. On what do you base that – is it just an impression, your experience, hard evidence, or what? What do you think of Newberg’s evidence?
2. What did you think I was claiming from Newberg’s evidence?
If you are fearful of this prolonging a discussion you would prefer to end, I am happy not to comment again after you answer the questions (if you are willing). Thanks.
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I think different people fall into different camps. For me, and for many of the theist-turned-atheists that I’ve met, we thought we held our beliefs for good reasons. We didn’t shed them because someone tried to make us feel stupid, but because we began to engage with ideas that differed from our own. We found out that the reasons we had for our beliefs, which we had thought were so solid, were really quite insubstantial.
With this discussion you’re having with Travis, I’m not even sure that your criticisms are justified. But for the sake of argument, let’s say they are. Travis is someone who’s already shown he can be very reasonable, and if he’s shown evidence that indicates he’s wrong about something, he’ll consider it as honestly as possible. I don’t understand why an aggressive approach has to be used if one has truth and evidence on his side.
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Though tildeb appears to be quite able to make his argument, it would be nice if he would cite some studies, statistics, etc and not just his opinion.
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Hey unkleE, I didn’t think you were singling me out, but thanks for the clarification anyway! I had simply realized that I didn’t comment on that quote as much as I could have, and I didn’t want that to give any kind of unintended impression.
I’m really just speaking about my own impression of it — it’s not from any hard data. I’ll run through some of my reasons really quickly:
As I understood it, you were saying that Newberg’s research showed that faith had great utility. Is that a fair assessment?
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“There was a typo in your comment, let me fix that for you:”
Hi Travis, yes, I agree with you, as well as appreciating how you made that point. 🙂 But I think the difficulties for atheism may be slightly more fundamental.
“would you propose that the current state of neuroscience and psychology is probably more consistent with theism than atheism?”
I am not even a student of those subjects, so my knowledge is minimal. But I am thinking so. I think if we started with the presumption that there is no God, we wouldn’t expect any universe or any life, both would be impossibly long odds. But if life did appear, I don’t think we’d expect there to be choice (life would be determined by physics and biochemistry), consciousness, religion or true ethics (there’d only be pragmatic survival behaviour patterns built-in like homing pigeons’ instincts). But on the presumption of theism, all those things can be seen as fitting, even if hard to explain scientifically (your first point).
Newberg’s work provides an example of this.
The negative aspects of religion have been pressed by many non-believers, often based on things Dawkins, Harris & Hitchens have written. The interesting thing is that anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and neuroscientists working in this area all say these writers are wrong and their views are not based on scientific data. Newberg is just one of many when he makes this point several times in his book. So if those eminent writers got it wrong, why did they? I’m guessing they had a few obvious anecdotal examples of nasty religion, and they just expected that religion would produce nasty effects. They didn’t expect the good effects of religion, but the data shows they are there.
So I conclude that atheism doesn’t lead one to expect Newberg’s findings, and therefore the evidence slightly favours theism.
“The unwillingness to grant anything positive to religion conflicts to some degree with the view that religion has naturalistic origins. “
Obviously I agree with your latter comments. So I’d like to try to clarify, as I have with Nate, where you currently sit on this. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just hoping to understand where you’re at. Would you mind answering, please, these two questions:
1. Do you accept Newberg’s findings as showing positive benefits of religion? (For my fuller summary of his findings, see Our brains and God, which I just finished this morning.) Do you have other science-based evidence of overall benefits or disbenefits?
2. What did you think I was claiming based on Newberg?
Thanks.
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“I was assuming that you had come across these five pillars at some point in your life. In which case you were given some amount of “light” as you call it and might somehow be more culpable.”
Hi Dave. Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I thought you were asking about a hypothetical person, but I see you were asking about me.
Yes, it is an interesting question to ask how any of us would fare if some religion other than the one we hold turned out to be true. Obviously it depends on which version of Islam turns out to be true.
If we play it straight and simply assume, as your question does, that Allah requires us to follow the five pillars, then (1) I’d score only 1 out of 5 if they are interpreted strictly, maybe 2 if interpreted liberally. But then we have to ask (2) how do Muslims believe Allah treats christians. I looked up a couple of Muslim websites, and I think the Qur’an says genuine christians who do good will gain Allah’s approval, which isn’t all that far from I have suggested for those of other religions.
So my answer to your question would be the same. Allah would probably (if my understanding is correct) judge me according to what I had been taught and believed.
I honestly find it hard to think a credible religion believing in a loving God could say any different. Of course many “fundamentalist” christians may not believe what I have said – you can draw your own conclusions!
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Nate, the comment you made about religion not being all bad is one that others should heed.
It is interesting that you should say that as it echoes a comment made by Steve Shives in the latest video in his excellent series, ‘An Atheist Reads’. Steve observes that Christian Apologist David Bentley Heart has a case of sorts in finding fault with Sam Harris who paints Christianity as wholly bad. As Steve Shives observes it is clear that some good has been done in the name of religion, to deny this is disingenuous. Shives does not dispute that many terrible things have also been done in the name of religion, he is just pointing out that the good/bad equation is not quite so black and white as zealot on both sides of the debate like to claim.
Incidentally I highly recommend Steve Shives videos in the Atheist Reads series:
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As much as I disagree with unkleE on many issues , I will be the first to admit that he does provide many links to support his views. Sometimes I feel the need to read an entire report he has referenced in order to get , “The Rest of the Story” Paul Harvey he is not. 🙂
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FYI Paul Harvey was a radio talk show host who was famous for sharing part of a story to lead you to a certain conclusion. Then at the end of his show he would tell you, “The rest of the story” which brought you to an entirely different conclusion. 🙂
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tildeb,
The definition you quoted is the public, stripped down version from oxforddictionaries.com. In the full OED it makes up 1/2 of the fifth definition (out of seven), with the rest of the content also referring to ritual, tradition, community, etc,.. These are all things that the average person considers to be part of religion and are often the relevant aspects of the research in question. I’m not interested in debating semantics, but perhaps this helps explain my comment.
Definitions aside, I’m really not understanding this need to make a clear differentiation between agency projection and religion. Nate read you as saying the exact opposite – maybe that’s a clue. Do you really think that agency projection and religious belief are independent of each other? Do you really think that other psychological traits (e.g., moralizing, teleological inference, preference for order over chaos, etc..) have no bearing on the prominence of religion?
Lastly, as a peace offering, let me offer a revised statement that to me says essentially the same thing as I said before but perhaps doesn’t make your skin crawl:
From a naturalistic perspective, religion derives from, and thrives on, the scaffolding built by the evolution of the human psyche. As such, it might be surprising if religious practice was not in some sense advantageous.
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For somebody who is so anti-oogity boogity, you sure do seem to think that you’re good at reading minds from a distance. I neither very much want to offer a biological excuse for religion, nor do I think religion offers a valid epistemology. In the interest of civility, I’ll resist the temptation to reciprocate by offering my attempt at reading your mind.
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@ kcchief1
Yes, UnkleE has a boatload of links to do what he needs them to do: offer the appearance of respectability to his beliefs. It’s a lot of work to go through them and find out what they actually say. Newberg’s article is a case in point. It does not support what UnkleE thinks it does, that religion and religious belief is good for the brain. Look at the mental and linguistic gymnastics needed to claim not that long term stress yields negative health results in comparison to low stress lifestyles and activities but that ‘faith’ produces positive effects in comparison. Take as look at how Newberg defines faith as he carefully carves by supposedly synonymous linguistics the square pegs of reality so that they just so happen to fit into his round hole of theology he desires. This is not good science; this study is apologetic nonsense because it has nothing to do with religion aka love aka meditation aka positive outlook, and so on and everything to do with stress that Newberg arbitrarily categorizes as not religion.
Well, duh.
This is the kind of link that UnkleE specializes in and it would take dozens of links to show just how bad this study actually is to claim faith is good for the brain. It’s good for supporting the sale of Newberg’s book. It’s good for confusing people with a patina of scientific respectability. It’s good for making people like UnkleE appear informed. But its content does not produce a demonstrable link that religion is both brain food and a quality of life enhancement.
This is so patently false that it’s a marvel anyone could take it seriously. All one needs to do is look at aggregate population statistics. If the effect is positive as claimed for the individual, then the aggregate should easily demonstrate this compound effect. Oh wait… we find exactly the opposite. Not only does religious beliefs robustly correlate to poorer results in a veritable host of social dysfunction, the rate of religiosity correlates robustly with greater income inequality, lower rates of education, and lower ranking on national scales of happiness and contentment. How does Newberg’s thesis account for this huge discrepancy? Well, it doesn’t bother. Too inconvenient, I suppose.
Go ahead and google all these claims I make if you want to find out just how contrarian is the Newberg article’s claim to the mainstream data. Faith, any more than science, is not good for the brain. The brain simply utilizes these different methods of inquiry. Which method produces what kinds of aggregate results is a little more germane. And that’s very bad news for anyone who assumes faith-based belief is an equivalent means to produce insight into reality and improve the quality of life. Unquestionably, faith does not produce these results but its opposite. And then go back and look at how Newberg alters the language just enough to produce the results he wants rather than the easily available results of all kinds of studies that are contrarian. It’s a sleight-of-mind trick as old as the hills. Con artists, magicians, and priests have known this bait-and switch method has worked on the credulous forever.
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Yes, many dictionaries contain all kinds of further definitions of ‘religion’ which only goes to support my claim that its a weasel word to which all kinds of claims can be attached by association. Spirituality is not better. I prefer to think of these terms as thieves in the night… absconding with anything of value and claiming it for its own.
As long as we have the right order, that religion comes from us, as do all the agencies we assign to it, then we’ve made progress.
Religious belief in this sense assigning agency to supernatural beings that then cause effect in reality is simply one offshoot of the ability to project agency. This doesn’t mean it is advantageous at all unless it can be shown to increase reproductive rates; it simply means these particular kinds of projections (taught to children as if real, as if existing independent from us, as if possessing natures and properties and powers that cause real effect in reality and that we can come to ‘know’ about these by accepting on faith that our projection is actually real) are as much a byproduct of this ability as our bowel movements are part of the digestive ability. I think it’s a bad argument to assume bowel movements themselves promote reproductive fitness, that religious beliefs themselves promote reproductive fitness. I think this is what you are suggesting and I think you’re quite wrong to do so. Religious belief is not a ‘natural’ product of our brains but a very unfortunate byproduct of some of them borne from confusion and fear and ignorance and satisfied with Just So stories.
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