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Contributor
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Sweden, Europe
Posts: 12,091
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The believers thinks God into social reality.
I'm not sure of if I get the grammar right. I partly base this on an old thread by Apostate Abe here in iidb but also a text from here.
Quote:
Even Thinking about God Boosts Positive Social Behaviour Says New Study
VANCOUVER, August 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Thoughts related to God cultivate cooperative behaviour and generosity, according to University of British Columbia psychology researchers.
In a study to be published in the September issue of Psychological Science journal, researchers investigated how thinking about God and notions of a higher power influenced positive social behaviour, specifically cooperation with others and generosity to strangers.
UBC PhD graduate Azim Shariff and UBC Assoc. Prof. Ara Norenzayan found that priming people with 'god concepts' - by activating subconscious thoughts through word games - promoted altruism. In addition, the researchers found that this effect was consistent in behaviour whether people declared themselves believers or not. The researchers also found that secular notions of civic responsibility promote cooperation and generosity.
"This is a twist on an age old question - does a belief in God influence moral behaviour"" says Shariff. "We asked, does the concept of god influence cooperative behaviour" Previous attempts to answer this question have been driven by speculation and anecdote."
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http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/aug/07083002.html
ApostateAbe thread is here. The software says it is too old to revive so I start anew here unless Abe want the old revived. 
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...ght=ideatheism
Quote:
So why should I keep calling myself an atheist? I have decided that it is misleading to call myself an atheist. There is no word that denotes my new perspective until I decided to invent one. I call it, "ideatheism."
An ideatheist is someone who believes that the gods exist mainly as ideas.
You might ask, "So what is the difference between ideatheist and a normal atheist?" The answer is: fundamentally nothing.
The important distinction is the approach one takes to thinking about the gods. I credit Richard Dawkins for proposing "memes," which is the perspective reflected in ideatheism (ideas are evolutionary units). But he also made the analogous move of placing the gene as the evolutionary unit of natural selection, as opposed to individuals, populations, or species, as he wrote in his books, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. It didn't change the fundamental theory of evolution, but it offered a more useful new perspective on thinking about it. I would like to do a similar thing with Dawkins' meme idea, applying it our own way of thinking about the nature of the gods, how we identify ourselves, and how we distinguish ourselves from religious adherents.
Allow me to explain what Dawkins first proposed. Memes are ideas that evolve by the Darwinian mechanisms of reproduction, variation, and natural selection. It doesn't have anything to do with biology except as an analogy. Just as the more efficient viruses will outmatch the less efficient viruses, so will the more persuasive ideas outmatch the less persuasive ideas. When Christian churches send missionaries to the privative natives on a lonely island, they introduce a robust religion that usually outcompetes the native mythology, just as their rats and dogs outcompete the dodos. Christianity and Islam were cults that descended from the most persuasive ideology out of a large selection of tribal religions (Judaism was the only religion that was based on holy written scriptures). Christianity and Islam each have had 2000 years and 1500 years respectively to adapt to the attacks from pagans, heathens, heretics, and apostates. They have grown in complexity and ubiquity, beautiful and robust, almost completely inseparable from the believing hosts.
Any fundamental trait of a large religion can be explained in terms of natural selection. The duel-ultimate afterlives of heaven and hell, for example, are explained by the carrot-and-stick method of human persuasion. As products of the human imagination, nothing has constrained Christianity and Islam from maximizing the carrot and stick. And it is no mere coincidence that the duel-ultimate afterlives are found in the two most popular religions in the world. A lesser carrot and stick afterlife doctrine is found in the third largest religion, Hinduism, with reincarnation as beetles and celebrities, places on a hierarchy depending largely on one's religious devotion. Promises of rewards and punishments have helped the survival of the gods--that is part of the way an ideatheist thinks about religions.
Besides the better way to think about the gods, there is a secondary benefit to this new title of ideatheism. It offers a much more interesting and productive way to start conversations with religious adherents. Atheism is a contentious way to identify one's self in the company of theistic believers. It says, merely, "I don't believe in your gods. I am not one of you. I do not believe the same things you believe." And it often implies, "There is probably something wrong with you for believing in the gods." Atheism has no philosophy or substance of any sort except the belief that there are no gods (and atheists are divided even on that minor point--is it believing the lack or is it lacking belief?). So all conversations on atheism between atheists and theists tend to start on that divisive point, putting at least one member of the conversation on the defensive. I am an atheist and you are a believer in the gods. One of us is right and the other is wrong--let the arguments begin.
The author Dale Carnegie was on to something when he wrote his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. He had 12 rules for how to win people to your way of thinking. The first rule listed was,
"The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it."
Ideatheism avoids the argument. It says, "The gods exist mainly as ideas. Whatever you may think about the gods, be they up in the sky or not, they seem to manifest themselves most relevantly as religious doctrines. Given the nature of ideologies, it is natural for you or anyone else to believe in the gods." And even a religious adherent may not disagree with that. It is already blazingly obvious that the gods are indeed very powerful ideological forces, and, looking outside of one's own religion, it must be the general rule.
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Maybe there are texts by him that even better than this one explains his views.
So God or gods are how the believers act on their thoughts on gods. the action they take creates the social reality that makes gods politically effective. the believers manifest their gods by their acts of faith.
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09-01-2007, 08:32 AM
