"So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe."
Alternatively, maybe the neural hardware for belief was genetically grafted by a nonhuman agency in our remote ancestral past. Why? To control us. To render us incapable of transcending our planet of origin, for reasons I can only guess.
In any case, the danger is obvious. Perhaps, long ago, belief provided a sense of group solidarity, hastening our social evolution in the process. But we've long since outgrown it; as a species, we are blinkered and incomplete as long as we give into its caprices.
I maintain that belief is, in essence, a parasitic disease. Is it too late to start vaccinating?
5 comments:
I'll read anything with a picture of "Lam" on it!
I have been saying the same things about religious beliefs for years, although I never used the term "parasitic disease". It appears there is at least one thing we agree on completely.
Mac, I agree with you 100% about the nature of belief. In fact, I want to thank you (in some previous entries) for helping clarify my thoughts about this. It turns out (as I've really just begun to realize consciously although I've lived this idea for some time). We neither need to believe NOR disbelieve ANYTHING. The idea seems to be simply to go with what makes sense to us intuitively and rationally, though this may not always be easy to discern. Belief and disbelief (like the programmatic skepticism of anomaly debunkers of various stripes) both lead down the same slippery slope to fanaticism.
Also beware -- The mind-brain misidentification fallacy to which so much contemporary psychology is prone. Windows is not an Intel chip, to use a crude analogy.
--WMB
I have a theory about why people almost seem to have a need to believe in God. When we are babies we view or parents as all powerful, all knowing beings and need to have unquestioned faith in them in order to learn what we need to learn and progress into adulthood. In adulthood we substitute God for parents, never outgrowing our need to have an all powerful protector in our lives who can answer all our questions. So my advice to all the faithful is- grow up!
There are other, more sophisticated concepts of God around.
--WMB
Post a Comment