"The brain creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress"

[PanAtheist]

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.

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.

[PanAtheist]

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".

"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.

Nice research, thankers.

[calpurnpiso]

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.

[Choobus]

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".

[Tenspace]

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.

[Choobus]

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.

[PanAtheist]

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).

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?

[Choobus]

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.

[Erik]

I have to say I read with breathless anticipation whenever a Choobus post has a sentence that begins "It's like...".

[Choobus]

Erik wrote

I have to say I read with breathless anticipation whenever a Choobus post has a sentence that begins "It's like...".

It's like opening a package from your girlfriend while serving overseas in the army and finding a box of cookies and a video. Unfortunately as you sit down to watch the video while eating the cookies you see your best mate from back home getting a blow job, and then her spitting the jizz out into the cookie dough.....

[psychodiva]

I've just had a referral for a young girl who has so far had three episodes of acute insomnia- with no sleep for about a week each time- everybody thought she was psychotic as she started seeing and hearing things and talking unintelligible crap -I am curreently treating her as a PTSD case as the initial episode was related to a traumatic incident and the subsequent episodes were triggered by similar incidents

Anyhoo makes me wonder how many of the religious 'mystics' just didn't get enough sleep at some point ?

thanks for the link- it is very helpful to me

[Erik]

Choobus wrote

It's like opening a package from your girlfriend while serving overseas in the army and finding a box of cookies and a video. Unfortunately as you sit down to watch the video while eating the cookies you see your best mate from back home getting a blow job, and then her spitting the jizz out into the cookie dough.....

Why, yes, it's exactly like that