10-03-2008, 05:59 AM
|
#1
|
Obsessed Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: England
Posts: 2,017
|
"The brain creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress"
The brain creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress
I'm glad this report has come up.
It's good to read.
It affirms my experience - its what I kinda thought anyway.
I think of it like this:
people who are profoundly confounded, will grab at anything giving any appearance of "sense"; they'll grab at any story that seems to offer them some stable ground by which to process their situation. It's needfulness, desperation.
This is an important part of how religions work, imho.
They throw a vulnerable person into an experience, which is to their inexperienced minds, scary, inexplicable, and utterly confounding, and then provide a false "lifeline", a pseudosense of things which they inevitably grab onto and hold fast. I don't mean to say that this is always done deliberately. It naturally happens. As this report suggests - its just the way we are - and situations like this are bound to have happened.
Healthy genes act as team-players. They are teamish!
Their winning plays are salvations of an aliveness of which they are a part.
Only a fraction of genes are selfish/parasitic (and they parasitize teams).
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 06:46 AM
|
#2
|
Guest
|
I have experienced this, too, though the stress has to be extreme for me to start wondering if there's some universal conspiracy against me. So add this to the new knowledge that there are people who are, due to brain structure, gullible, and those who are, due to brain structure, skeptics, throw in the obedience of children to their parents, and you have an explanation for religiosity/rationalism that doesn't even require insanity or low intelligence. All you need are goofy religious parents, a dollop of stress, and the wrong brain chemistry, and you'll be a religious nut.
Get the right brain chemistry, better parents (or distance in time and space from them), and infrequent stress, and you too can achieve atheism.
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 06:52 AM
|
#3
|
Obsessed Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: England
Posts: 2,017
|
Whenever I think about this, for some reason I always here Joseph (in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat) singing the line "Any Dream Will Do".
Healthy genes act as team-players. They are teamish!
Their winning plays are salvations of an aliveness of which they are a part.
Only a fraction of genes are selfish/parasitic (and they parasitize teams).
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 01:16 PM
|
#4
|
Guest
|
"The brain creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress"
No wonder I was seeing hundreds of spaghetti monsters flying in my room last night when S. Palin was "debating" against Senator Joe Biden.
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 01:17 PM
|
#5
|
Guest
|
Nice research, thankers.
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 02:54 PM
|
#6
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Chandler- Arizona
Posts: 14,227
|
Quote:
PanAtheist wrote
The brain creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress
I'm glad this report has come up.
It's good to read.
It affirms my experience - its what I kinda thought anyway.
I think of it like this:
people who are profoundly confounded, will grab at anything giving any appearance of "sense"; they'll grab at any story that seems to offer them some stable ground by which to process their situation. It's needfulness, desperation.
This is an important part of how religions work, imho.
They throw a vulnerable person into an experience, which is to their inexperienced minds, scary, inexplicable, and utterly confounding, and then provide a false "lifeline", a pseudosense of things which they inevitably grab onto and hold fast. I don't mean to say that this is always done deliberately. It naturally happens. As this report suggests - its just the way we are - and situations like this are bound to have happened.
|
Duh!!!.........we create thoughts with the brain, beliefs are thoughts. The brain produces irrational deluded ignorant supernatural fantasy beliefs ( God, ID, etc) when:
*suffers trauma.
*Ingest psychotropic substances
*Stimulii deprivation
*Inherits defective genes
*During childhood before gaining neurological maturity.
*Is under neurological disorders.... schizotypal
*Isolation
*Sleep deprivation.
*Defective genes makes it susceptible to Faith-Psychosis & gullibility despite education received.
*Extreme fear of finality which augments production of "feel good" neurotransmiters ( dopamine, serotonin) creating its own fantasies producing security & assertiveness.
*Mental retardation.
*Immediate Awareness of Death ( this makes the brain go into high gear thought production creating a sense of slow motion- it happens when ingesting cannabis)
*In the epileptic
*In people whose eyes are fix on screens their ears been submitted to same sounds day after day creating stress....(i,e computer programmers, stock market etc)
Christ-psychotics ( and all people infected with religious beliefs) swim in a world of illusions & superstitions due to this innate neurological condition.
Christians and other folks infected with delusional beliefs think and reason like schizophrenics or temporal lobe epileptics. Their morality is dictated by an invisible friend called Jesus.
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 03:00 PM
|
#7
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: prick up your ears
Posts: 20,553
|
Maybe that's why I think theists are just liars. Whenever I hear some dildo banging on about the three-in-one man god and his virgin mother who came to earth to save us from his own wrath and then started crying on the cross just before going back to heaven to hang out with himself, my mind gets totally confused and comes to the conclusion that "this mother fucker has got to be lying, nobody more intelligent than a houseplant could possibly believe that this bullshit is actually true".
You can always turn tricks for a few extra bucks. If looks are an issue, there's the glory hole option, but don't expect more than ... tips.
~ Philiboid Studge
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 04:44 PM
|
#8
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Rocky Mountains, USA
Posts: 10,218
|
Quote:
Choobus wrote
Maybe that's why I think theists are just liars. Whenever I hear some dildo banging on about the three-in-one man god and his virgin mother who came to earth to save us from his own wrath and then started crying on the cross just before going back to heaven to hang out with himself, my mind gets totally confused and comes to the conclusion that "this mother fucker has got to be lying, nobody more intelligent than a houseplant could possibly believe that this bullshit is actually true".
|
Yet millions believe, and those of us who attempt to point out their idiocy, for example, when done through a movie, find others who will defend them.
But as I gently tried to suggest to Maher during our recent phone call, his scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one. Any serious theologian from the mainstream Christian or Jewish traditions would have eaten his lunch for him, and that's why we don't see anybody like that in this film for more than a second or two.
"Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor." - Justin's Dad
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 05:51 PM
|
#9
|
Obsessed Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: England
Posts: 2,017
|
Quote:
Choobus wrote
Maybe that's why I think theists are just liars.
|
Not just liars.
There is ample evidence that there is a pyschological split as well ...
I think this is what happens:
Under the EXTREME FEAR of the insanity that a noviciate is thrown into, the noviciate's mind splits in two.
One part retains the knowledge that it is lying (it is lying its arse off just to survive in an insane environment. It is doing what it thinks it must, however wrong or right it may be about the need to do that).
But in the other part of the mind that knowledge is erased by absolute fear, and that part of the mind lives and breathes all the fears of an imaginary insane (theistic) world that the first part feeds it, in concert with its religious environment. It experiences genuine terror of the monsters in the imaginary world.
The engine of this split is EXTREME TERROR.
That extreme terror is caused by experiencing the world, and its people as insane.
We are so lucky.
We have a foothold.
They have none!
The EXTREME TERROR acts "like the flaming sword placed at the gate of the Garden of Eden, keeping out the cast out Adam and Eve", if you'd pardon the literary reference. It splits the mind in two, and prevents it from re-uniting.
It is ONLY POSSIBLE for the mind to reunite if and when this extreme terror ends.
If and when that happens, the mind reunites, and that's the end of their "theism" thank you very much!
That's what happened to me, as far as I can make out now.
( I was raised Christian. I recognised Xtianity as insane when very young. But because my parents, family, essentially my "world" were insane, the people who I utterly depended upon for survival, I was absolutely terrified, and I went insane myself).
Quote:
Choobus wrote
Whenever I hear some dildo banging on about the three-in-one man god and his virgin mother who came to earth to save us from his own wrath and then started crying on the cross just before going back to heaven to hang out with himself, my mind gets totally confused and comes to the conclusion that "this mother fucker has got to be lying, nobody more intelligent than a houseplant could possibly believe that this bullshit is actually true".
|
As you so aptly point it, you have to barking as well as lying!
It's a split-personality disorder, imho.
That's my hypothesis, anyways!
I mean just look at Tony Blair.
On the one hand he is lying his arse off.
On the other hand he is absolutely insane.
Do you see my point?
Healthy genes act as team-players. They are teamish!
Their winning plays are salvations of an aliveness of which they are a part.
Only a fraction of genes are selfish/parasitic (and they parasitize teams).
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 05:12 PM
|
#10
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: prick up your ears
Posts: 20,553
|
Why do theists think that only a theologian can criticize religion? Theology only exists to make the absurd seem more than it is. Does one have to be a gastroenterologist to know that shit stinks and should not be served to guests for dinner?
We need theologians to tell us about religion like we need wizards to tell us about harry potter. Fucking arseholes.
You can always turn tricks for a few extra bucks. If looks are an issue, there's the glory hole option, but don't expect more than ... tips.
~ Philiboid Studge
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 06:38 PM
|
#11
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: prick up your ears
Posts: 20,553
|
Tony Blair is a fucking jifter. We'd have been better off with Lionel Blair running the country. The fact that he is now giving it the large one on the jeebus front is just an added insult. It's like breaking into someone's house and stealing all their precious things, and then for no good reason taking a shit in their oven.
You can always turn tricks for a few extra bucks. If looks are an issue, there's the glory hole option, but don't expect more than ... tips.
~ Philiboid Studge
|
|
|
10-04-2008, 01:18 PM
|
#12
|
He who walks among the theists
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: The Big D
Posts: 12,119
|
Quote:
Choobus wrote
Tony Blair is a fucking jifter.
|
Alright, I give up, what the fuck is a "jifter"?
I looked in urbandictionary, and they didn't know either.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
George Bernard Shaw
|
|
|
10-04-2008, 03:49 PM
|
#13
|
I Live Here
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: prick up your ears
Posts: 20,553
|
Quote:
nkb wrote
Alright, I give up, what the fuck is a "jifter"?
I looked in urbandictionary, and they didn't know either.
|
A jifter is basically a useless cunt. someone who never follows through with something, usually for a really lame reason (I'm sorry I didn't pick the kids up from daycare, I was having a wank). You couldn't find it because I made it up some time ago.
You can always turn tricks for a few extra bucks. If looks are an issue, there's the glory hole option, but don't expect more than ... tips.
~ Philiboid Studge
|
|
|
10-04-2008, 01:44 PM
|
#14
|
Guest
|
Quote:
Choobus wrote
Tony Blair is a fucking jifter. We'd have been better off with Lionel Blair running the country.
|
Lionel Blair (left):
|
|
|
10-03-2008, 07:14 PM
|
#15
|
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Texas
Posts: 644
|
I have to say I read with breathless anticipation whenever a Choobus post has a sentence that begins "It's like...".
|
|
|
Thread Tools |
|
Display Modes |
Hybrid Mode
|
Posting Rules
|
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
HTML code is Off
|
|
|
All times are GMT -7. The time now is 12:16 PM.
|