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New: "What Causes Religion?" by Vexen CrabtreeThe conclusion reads: "Religions arise as collections of popular beliefs, codified and institutionalized by the progression of Human organisation. Eventually, the changing beliefs of the masses out-evolve the more dogmatic, established religions. The causes of the religious beliefs of Humankind are rooted in our psychology. Psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and scientists tend to view religious beliefs as the result of mostly normal psychological systems being applied in the wrong context. A prime example is the way we get angry with cars and computers, and shout insults at them, or the way we tend to see patterns in random behaviour such as brownian motion (our 'hyperactive agent detection device'). Historical investigators such as William James have found that outstanding religious innovaters and leaders have frequently been psychotic, suffered from various mental problems and nervous instability. Experiments on the Human brain have allowed us to discover many of the specific neuronal networks that can misfire to cause us to have 'religious' feelings and experiences. Childhood fantasies, including an absence of death and the seemingly all-present, ever-caring and all-knowing parental figures who give us comfort, often become the basis for religious beliefs in adults. This hidden wishful-thinking mechanism feeds our ego (that someone cares about everything we do) and gives us consolation from death in the idea of an afterlife. Many strange things we 'experience' are cultural (therefore an aspect of upbringing), and once a scientific and critical understanding of them is attained, the beauty of the natural world displaces the appeal of the supernatural. Religion is self-inflicted delusion, illusion, smoke and mirrors." Related to: "Experiences of God" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)</p> </div> Tags: belief, beliefs, experiences, faith, fantasy, god, illusion, irrationality, myth, religion, science, sociology, supernaturalism, theology
Current Location: Germany
Current Mood:  happy
Listening To: "Aiges Mortes" by Ataraxia
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I've added the following text to my page on " Experience", proceeding from the text on how " expectations and beliefs CAUSE us to experience events in a certain way, and even seem to generate their own self-affirming experiences: " It is not just random events, confusing correlations or data processing where our expectations cause us to have certain experiences inplace of others. Our mental thoughts on what we want to see, and what we expect to see, can influence the very objects that we see before us, overriding what is real and replacing it with what we expect, or merging the two together. After citing some experiments and examples of where this happens, Eysenck and Keane report on a particularly colourful demonstration of it: “Another illustration of the possible pitfalls involved in relying too heavily on expectations or hypotheses comes in a classic study by Bruner, Postman, and Rodrigues (1951). Their subjects expected to see conventional playing cards, but some of the cards used were incongruous (e.g. black hearts). When these incongruous cards were presented briefly, subjects sometimes reported seeing brown or purple hearts. Here we have an almost literal blending of stimulus information (bottom-up processing) and stored information (top-down processing).” ["Cognitive Psychology" by Eysenck and Keane, p75] " Original page: www.humantruth.info/experience.html#ExpectationsTags: beliefs, epistemology, expectations, experience, illusions
Current Location: Afghanistan
Current Mood:  bored
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Contents:
- Experiences
- Culture
- Argument from consensus
- Our expectations influence our experiences
- Abstract Man
- Materialists
- Phsyiological causes of strange experiences
Tags: beliefs, consensus, conspiracy theorists, delusion, epistemology, expectations, experience, experiences, god, illusion, psychosis, religion, subjectivism, supernatural
Current Location: London, UK
Current Mood:  hyper
Listening To: "Heart in velvet" by Marc Almond
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"Religion in the United Kingdom: Diversity, Trends and Decline" by Vexen Crabtree (2007) Tags: beliefs, british, england, english, london, northern ireland, religion, scotland, uk, wales
Current Mood:  hopeful
Listening To: "Joan" by Ultraviolence
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