Really, I was just pissed because Emon barged in here and accused me of believing in Intelligent Design. I can deal with being called dumb, since I realize me thinking I'm smart has an obvious bias and my results can't be trusted, but believing in Intelligent Design; if that theory is correct, then God did a real ****ty job. He should be impeached.

From my perspective, the real core belief of Christianity is Jesus' actual message : Stop being a dick. It's little more complicated than that, but Jesus seemed to have the correct insight, that you can't 'save someones soul' by threatening them, and that only kindness begets kindness. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only thing in the bible they don't believe. So, excusing what the religion has become, it seems that acting like a dick to Dick Dawkins isn't what Jesus would do. Obviously calling someone stupid or saying they will burn in hell will never make them change their mind and agree with you. At best, it will amuse them. Dawkins is just as bad, really. He uses the same tactics against them. Respond to them the way their faith says they should respond to you. They probably won't understand, but those around them will and might be better for it.

This fellow illustrates this perplexing hypocrisy in Christianity so well that I don't see any point in doing it myself.

Now, religion does serve a few important purposes.

The organization itself can create a community. It's a comfortable place for people to meet and greet with some assurance that the people they are meeting will be friendly toward them. In a social capacity, the local church is much more than a place to hear about God. It's the bingo hall, it's a charity, it's a place where you can find emotional support and a good plumber.

The spiritual nature also serves an important purpose. There are structures in the brain that seem to be connected to it, at a purely biological level, giving many of us a hunger for belief in something higher than us. There are things science still can't explain, such as the origin of free will. Religion can bring hope, in both that there is justice even when the world itself does not give it, and that the future will always be brighter.

These are all emotional needs that religion can fill. Science doesn't do much for filling emotional needs, unless you have a graph fetish or like popping pills. It sure would be nice if we could extend these benefits to those who don't react nicely to the dogma, though.

(Editor's note : JM does not attend church and thinks the Christian God is kind of a dick.)

I think he's referring to the Sam Harris sense of the word but I could be wrong.

To be fair "The Greatest Show On Earth" more closely resembled his older works (e.g: "The Blind Watchmaker") & didn't really focus on religion at all.

Unless you can cite some good references, I'm going to call BS. What we DO have is an innate desire to understand, to question and be curious. Religion exists because we didn't have good answers to these questions many thousands of years ago. This is NOT the same as a biological need to believe in a higher power.



All of the things you listed are not worth the fundamental problem with religion: faith. The suspension of reason to believe in virtually anything is incredibly dangerous.

Sanderson, Stephen K. "Evolutionary approaches to religion: Is religion an evolved adaptation?" American Sociological Association; 2008 Annual Meeting, 1-35

It's just a soc conference paper but what you're really interested in is the bio/psych prior work anyway.

JM is probably right. You are probably wrong.

And which of these support the hypothesis that there are structures in our brains that make us want to believe in a higher power? I'm looking through some of them, but there's a lot and you seem pretty sure about it.

I'll buy the notion that the brain can be wired for religious beliefs, especially given plasticity at an early age. But that distinct areas of the brain have evolved for the purpose of making us want to believe? That's a pretty bold claim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology

That should be an adequate gateway into the topic.

Incidentally, everything you claim I said I didn't. You will notice the phrase 'seem to be connected'. A specific example would be the temporal lobe, the magnetic stimulation of which appears to generate some sort of otherworldy experience. I was careful not to make any claim that there is a structure that exists purely to 'make us want to believe' because there is not much evidence, and much of it is flawed.

That's too bad. I tried it purely because you mentioned it and that post actually works really well in his voice.

In other words, the Mythbusters are scientists. Physics undergrads are not. I'm inclined to like this definition.

As far as I know, most Evangelicals don't think that God hates fags. I don't, at least.

It's possible that the evolutionary reason for a belief in religion is simply to stop people questioning how the world works for long enough to not die all the time.

Cavemen probably didn't need to know what the sun actually is, just that it made things warm and fuzzy. Anyone who wasted time trying to think about things more was probably not doing important things like hunting and making babies, so there was a need for society to condemn such people. Religion may have been a convenient shortcut to stop people wasting so much time questioning things. Though it probably got out of hand when people started spending all their time worshipping instead...

Or because we have a subconscious need to believe in and be obedient to a superior, which facilitated the development of a hierarchical social structure but also created a need for the people at the top of the hierarchy to be subservient to a potentially fictional higher authority.

Primitive peoples actually tend to do less. There is plenty of liesure time in their lifestyle to be spent thinking about gods.

Seriously? The amount of unsubstantiated hypothesis on this page is incredulous.

There are many possible explanations for religious belief, comfort, attempting to answer questions with otherwise are beyond the technically possible. Why do you think so many ancient cultures worshipped the sun? They couldn't explain it but knew it was needed for life.

I'm with Emon, unless you can provide some proper references for what you're suggesting then Occam's Razor applies and there's no reason to connect the two.

There's nothing wrong with speculation, as long as you don't try to portray it as fact.

Put your hands in the air and step away from the thesaurus, sir.

hahaha I just read it as 'incredible'

I think it's even simpler than what Jon`C suggested. A sense of other is necessary in order to communicate with others on the level that we do, and to simulate their emotions and desires for us. All animals also listen to their parents when they're born in order to learn and develop. The overwhelming shame we feel when we've wronged our parents isn't too distant from the idea that the sense of other isn't too happy with what we're doing, either. The morals this "other" person in our head has would be reflective of our culture or society's values, especially in the beginning when those rules would have been implicit.

JM and I have both provided evidence that the academic communities concerned with the problem believe that an evolutionary and physiological origin for religion is plausible. These people are more qualified to make this judgment than any person on this forum.

If you are unwilling to accept this evidence because you don't consider it "proper" enough,... well, let's just say it's impolite to masturbate in public.

I don't think Ni or I believe it implausible, simply far from conclusive. I misread JM's post, I thought he was implying something he didn't. I won't disagree that it's possible.

It always bothers me when people say Mythbusters "isn't science." The methodology is sound. It just doesn't have the rigor of a "real" study because Discovery wouldn't make money by paying Adam and Jamie to do the same experiment 200 times, analyze the results and then announce what everyone pretty much already knew.

Also because they don't actually care about the myth, just about blowing things up.

Not all mechanics & plumbers have ass-crack-itis either but a ****-ton of them do. A lot of fundamentalists will say something like "god doesn't hate the homosexual, he merely hates their actions". Those are typically the same folks that think that there's a cure for gay. They aren't really any better than the other group & probably have less scriptural basis.

Hating Christians because you have ****ty parents is no different than hating black people because you have ****ty parents.

I don't think that anyone here has mentioned anything about hating Christians or even having ****ty parents. If you're referring to me, that would leave me hating 100% of my family & 99% of my friends.

wha?

You don't have to be religious to validate personal convictions with fallacious arguments.

I get the sentiment, it's not exactly above my level. I'm just having trouble placing it in a coherent conversation.

The problem w/ the above is that I wasn't making an argument. I was merely poking fun at the ridiculousness of fundamentalism.