slept2long

Thanks for that information Bill. That was just the type of book I was looking for and I didn't even know it. I love it when that happens. Know of any books that explore group or gang or mass psychology in the same way?

Taffy Lewis

Bill:

Have you read these books?

Here are a couple of quotes from Why God Won't Go Away:

[ June 30, 2002: Message edited by: Taffy Lewis ]</p>

Gurdur

I myself was disappointed by Why God Won't Go Away, and writing a mildly harsh review is one of the things on My To Do list.

The best books are:
Austin, James H.
Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness
EXCELLENT

Cardeña, Etze, Lynn, Steven Jay and Krippner, Stanley (editors)
Varieties of Anomalous Experience : Examining the Scientific Evidence
EXCELLENT

Ramachandran, V. S. & Blakeslee, Sandra
Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
GOOD
However, if you buy Zen And The Brain above, you really don't need this one too.

And for a perspective not from a neuropsychological viewpoint (as the ones above are), see:

Karen Armstrong
A Hístory Of God
EXCELLENT

See the below links for more books, and for links to Amazon, and for more general information.


<a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_Appendix_15.htm" target="_blank">Which Books To Buy ?</a>

<a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_Appendix_01_01.htm" target="_blank">Bibliography on religion and associated in general</a>

<a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_Appendix_01_02.htm" target="_blank">Bibliography On Neurological Aspects Of Religion & Mysticism</a>

<a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_Appendix_01_04.htm" target="_blank">Bibliography On Evolutionary Psychology</a>

[ June 30, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

Gurdur

And now that I've been all helpful above, allow me to be savage .

The greatest disappointment I've ever had on SecWeb (o Home, Sweet Home !) is an overall failure to explain the origins of religion, and instead the unjustified and unjustifiable assumption by some here to claim religion always as a foreign imposition.
Let's go through some of the most common agitprop myths here together:

<ol type="1">[*]Would religion exist if it were not inculcated at an early age?

Well, if it couldn't, then where the hell did religion originate from in the first place ?
Outer space ?
___________
.[*]Religion can only perpetuate itself through violence and indoctrination.

D'oh, that completely fails to explain the Doukhobors or groups like the Quakers.
And don't try high birth-rates as an explanation --- Quakers don't have high birth-rates.
____________
.[*]Religion is a meme.

Memetics is a failure as a science or philosophy as yet, and is not succesful at explaining anything much at all as yet, including religion.
For the best book on memetics from a beginner's viewpoint (this book is absolutely in favour of memetics), read:

Susan Blackmore
The Meme Machine
_______________
.[*]Religion is a survival trait.

And this is incredibly over-simplistic as a general explanation ---- see the huge range of differing religions, often wildly diametrical in purpose, and see Point 2 above.
Also check out martyrs.
__________________
.[*]People can't choose religion or atheism; it's an automatic process.

This is a new dogmatic viewpoint going round the traps; it's rubbish. There's always a cross-over between theists, deists, fideists, agnostics and atheists; people often enough convert from one to the other, and then back again.
Humans will be humans.
______________
.[*]Adults with little or no exposure to religious ideas would never convert to a religion willingly.

Hey; I've known a couple who did (from my travels in Eastern Europe).
Furthermore, one of the fastest-growing Christian areas (albeit in a heavily polytheistic, syncrestic fashion) is formerly hard-line atheist China.
Think again !
_____________
.[*]There is a basic difference in the brain between religious people and atheists.

Nonsense.
The main brain differences you will find are those who undergo more mystical experiences than others --- but most religious people (as do most of the population) undergo no significant mystical experiences in any case.
Also, atheists possibly tend (according to a couple of studies) to be less social and more independent than general, but that is not an explanation - there have been plenty of independent and unsocial believers, and there have been heavily social atheists.[/list=a]

I despise dogmatism and simplistic explanations that are pushed as political agitprop of all kinds, atheist or no.
________________

Hiya Excreationist !
I'm still working on my new Morality thread just for you and Samhain; please pardon my tardiness, and in the meantime have a good day.

[ June 30, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

Taffy Lewis

Here are some more interesting quotes from Why God Won't Go Away:

Gurdur

Hi Taffy Lewis --- with any luck we'll get a good conversation going about this subject, one which I find very interesting.

Let's just critically examine two of the passages you cited from Why God Won't Go Away, shall we ?
Short answer (long answer comes much later):

the phrase above, "sound, healthy minds coherently reacting to perceptions" is fundamentally philosophically and neurologically flawed.
It should read (IMHO), "sound, healthy minds coherently reacting to input", which of course dramatically reduces its intended effect --- in other words, it's a fallacy of ambiguity.
Let's look very briefly (for now) at why:

And this is arrant nonsense.
The authors have gone right out on a limb here with this, and are completely wrong.
Here's a short list of only some of the conditions that can provide experiences "as convincing as that of mystical spirituality":

<ol type="1">[*]being in love (with another human), with consequent ideation and mood-affecting concentration on the loved one
.[*]Clinical paranoia
.[*]Tertiary syphilis presenting with euphoria and later monomania.
.[*]Despite what the authors say about epilepsy, pre-epileptic onset-auras can be very convincing indeed to the sufferer; see this <a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_Appendix_01_03.htm" target="_blank">Bibliography on neuropsychological case-study collections</a> for somke interesting cases.
.[*]LSD experiences
.[*]Stimulus-deprivation experiments, such as being suspended in stimulus-deprivation tanks.
.[*]Schizophrenic episodes with consequent delusional hallucination and ideation[/list=a]

Of course, this all depends on just what the authors meant by "convincing", which is a whole debate in itself.
I look forward to your input, since hardly anyone else appears interested in such matters.

Bill

Here I agree with you. Of course religion virtually inherant in the human condition. We always have unanswerable questions confronting us, and repeated demands for answers to those questions. The "old wise ones" of each society cannot be blamed for creating religion in order to dispose of those questions and get people's minds back on doing their job on behalf of the society at large and the particular ruler currently in charge. That is just the way things seem to go in every known "civilization." Of course I agree with you, yet again. Religion perpetuates itself by making it more enjoyable and/or beneficial in some significant respect(s) than not joining would provide.

The "enjoyment(s)" and/or "benefit(s)" of any given religious sect may well be totally in the mind of the believer. In other words, even if joining some particular sect results in extreme persecution unto death, the religion might still flourish if all of the followers were strongly convinced in a worthy reward in an afterlife of some sort. (And, of course, this sort of sacrifice seems silly to atheists and other unbelievers in any form of "afterlife," so yes, this sort of "benefit" tends to receive no value when religious motivations are examined by folks like us).

People tend to leave religion when they become convinced that the "enjoyment(s)" and/or "benefit(s)" are no longer worth the time and/or other commitments required to maintain religious participation. For religions (like most mainstream Christian sects) which make few actual demands upon their followers, "deconversions" are relatively few and far between.

And even when the downside detriments to joining are extreme, there can still be a steady trickle of conversions into the religion if various sorts of mind control techniques can provide the appropriate level of persuasion for the convertees to make the conversion into this sort of "bad religion."

All-in-all, my opinion is that atheists and other unbelievers generally make this whole question far too simplistic for a real model of real life to emerge. <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=733" target="_blank">Blackmore's book</a> is rather an over-selling of the idea of memes. Nonetheless, I find it necessary to disagree with you as to the currently-demonstrated merit of memetics as a science.

A far better explication of the idea of memes is <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=853" target="_blank">The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate</a>. This book, by Dr. Robert Aunger, gives a far more scientific (and yet still introductory level) overview of the "science" of memetics.

Dr. Aunger also edited <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=854" target="_blank">Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics As a Science</a>, which presents a coherent set of essays by the main proponants and opponants of the idea of memetics becoming a separate science of its own. This book, more than any other, presents an objective overview of both the pros and cons of memetics as a science.

Finally, just as an example that the idea of memetics as a scientific concept is gaining "legs," I would like to at least mention the book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=855" target="_blank">Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology</a>, by Jack M. Balkin, a Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University. Dr. Balkin uses the concept of memes to make some cogent points about how we acquire biases and prejudices as part of our overall ideology.

While I personally feel that some degree of skepticism about memetics as a science is justified, I still feel that a concept endorsed by as clear-thinking of a theoretician as Dan Dennett can't be so wrong as to justify discarding it on the flimsy basis you suggest. Here I find it necessary to strongly disagree with you. I think you misperceive the idea of "religion as a survival trait." Religion, per se, operates as a survival trait for all of humanity. But of course, that does not prevent differences in religion from creating differing survival values for their adherants, nor does it prevent those survival values changing over time as the external circumstances (or "fitness landscape" in genetic terms) changes.

I think you are dismissive of this idea because you have over-simplified the idea of "religion as a survival trait" down to the point where you have created your own strawman.

Legs are a survival trait for humans. But that doesn't mean that all animals must necessarily have legs to survive (water animals do far better with fins, for instance). Different "fitness landscapes" favor different adaptations.

The particular adaptation that religion serves is to allow humans to band together into larger and larger groups for the purpose of joint action. While some religious cohesion is favored within any given group of humans (to maintain the motivation for self sacrifice towards some sort of joint goal), there is certainly no need for all humans to share the exact same religion in order for humans as a whole to survive better. In fact, from the standpoint of Darwinian theory, it is far better that a plethora of differing views on religion ought to develop and compete against each other for survival in view of whatever opportunities and obsticles the particular current "fitness landscape" might present. Well, this is more readily seen as advocacy of, or an attack upon, the idea of determinism.

Susan Blackmore, in her book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=733" target="_blank">The Meme Machine</a>, ends by asserting that there is no reality to "the self" because everything that exists within her brain is in reality there as a consequence of some sort of memetic selection process. Yes, people will choose one meme over another, and will change their selection occasionally (I rather think that two or more honest religious conversions in a single human lifetime is a very rare occurrance). But the process can still be "automatic" in the sense that it is totally causal (it is based upon the algorithm for meme selection that is built into the "hardware" of our brains).

I rather think that the idea of memetics as a science so completely demystifies our brain processes that it ends up as a strong justification for maintaining determinism. After all, the outputs of brain functions are about the only real barriers to a complete victory for classical determinism (the prior existing state of a human, plus the environmental circumstances of the moment, will, acting together, completely determine the action(s) of the human; there is no "self" capable of truly independent action, as Blakemore suggests).

But this determinism argument is really a topic best covered in an entirely different thread..... I think that you need to view the state-supported atheism of the Communist countries as a "virtual religion" in its own right, and when the political strings are loosened, the weaker adherants will convert to some other religious point of view.

So, just as I did in the earlier, related, assertion of yours, I find myself basically agreeing with this assertion of yours. I do believe that there is a biochemical factor or set of factors that predisposes people towards religious belief. However, it is way too over-simplistic to assert that this sort of thing also predetermines, in some rigid fashion, either atheism or belief.

Notwithstanding that statement, I would assert (a bit more cautiously) that there is strong scientific evidence of exactly these sorts of biochemical brain differences, and that, while perhaps not truly "basic," they are strong and readily discernable differences. I would agree that "dogmatism and simplistic explanations" are bad things for any alleged "freethinker" to assert. However, dismissing ideas with counter-dogmatism and equally simplistic dismissals (as I'm afraid you have somewhat done yourself) is just as bad.....

== Bill

Gurdur

Precisely my point in view of a couple of theoretical agitprop strands emerging from the ruck of SecWeb rugby.
quote:
You seem to be mischaracterizing my admittedly brief post.
While I myself adore Dennett, there are many more reasons to be extremely sceptical of memetics - would you like to hear more ?
Furthermore, I was also attacking the popularized view of memetics, where such either trivially true or fundamentally wrong (the difference in scope and meaning of the theory) statements such as "Religion is a meme" come from.
Wrong; again you misjudge me; I was attacking the popularized and over-simplified idea of survival traits, and also evolutionary "Just So" stories, as well as some of the thinking abounding on SecWeb at times.

I'll be looking at some of your other statements here a while later, when I have a wee bit more time.
Correct.
This is where the question devolves down to ratehr empty semantics; who or what is doing the choosing between different memes, and moreover, eventually all current views on determinism devolve into sophist circles.
For my more expanded attack on determinism, see my future thread, please. I beg for patience.
Which is what it's used for often, here. Political choices of competing scientific theories; Lysenkoism. Bad news, and contrary to the ideal of honesty which is so often used as a battle flag by either agnosticism or atheism.
This is in itself a dogmatic statement of yours, and moreover I must strongly disagree with "the outputs of brain functions are about the only real barriers"; I suggest (in brief again) the real barriers are not only what you're summing up here in terms of "brain output", but also randomicity (IIRC, you yourself cited uncertainty, itself an aspect of randomicity, as a reason for agnosticism) --- and randomicity can be hard to distinguish from other factors in brain functional output.
I'll add more, much more, on that later, but for now let me add:

A completely causally determined brain --- that is, a brain formed from completely causal origins, and a completely causal enviromental history, still do not guarantee a completely causally predictable output brain output --- either philosophically, neurologically or practically.
Indeed.
And I will be doing so in a big way in a while.

I suggest to you this is a self-serving circular definition of religion, and in fact I see many differences, and I see many difficulties inherent in your view.
If you like, I will expand.
Ah well, please forgive my nastiness in using a down-turned thumb on this response of mine, it's just that I've seen so many down-turned thumbs of yours around the place, my evil twin just couldn't resist the chance to use one on you.
Plus I must say your closing statement of your post is hardly merited, IMHO
Expand, please, with basic definitions at the ready, since this is exactly my greatest point of interest.
And they happen so often on SecWeb.
It's a nasty disappointment.
Wrong.
My dismissals, while couched in accesible, simplified language and coded taunts to the enemy camp, are neither dogmatic nor simplistic - I stand ready to expand on any detail you should really care to discuss.
I've put a hell of a lot of effort into this very area, after all, over the past few months.
____________

Edited a day later since I was tired when I wrote this, and made one mistake owing to a misinterpretation (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), and also to throw in one more sentence.

[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>