Conchobar

Islamo-Christian Fundamentalism is a mind set that I think is brain based, hereditary, with a cultural contribution of a narrow minded ideology.

There is a frontal lobe brain defect in processing complex mechanisms like evolution, plate tectonics, continental drift, radioisotope decay, and gene mutation rates. Some on another forum speculate that “people who tend toward fundamentalism have a particularly weak ego that cannot sustain any difference, any challenges to its own identity, since any affront to their established beliefs is capable of destroying their ego.” Their solution is to circle the wagons of mind control. They cannot tolerate any challenge to a scriptural dogma no matter how irrational it may be. Questioning is outlawed, ridiculed, or lead to the shunning of the questioner. They want a blind unquestioning conformity of all views religious and even political.

People with frontal lobe brain circuitry that is well developed has some complex reasoning processes. One is the evaluation of new data for its rational structure. I call it the Rubbish Filter. In its most efficient form it rejects anything that makes no sense, and has no evidence supporting it. The rubbish rejected is god belief, alien abductions, astrology, numerology, Tarot cards, biblical prophesies, the Biblical genesis myths of creation, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, goblins, and trolls.

These people form views that are coherent and logical. These ideas must get through processing by the Rubbish Filter of the Frontal lobe. They then undergo more detailed multilobular circuits for critical analysis, comparison to other known data and facts, examination of any evidence for its credibility, and using our frontal rational systems plus our memory and association areas, we formulate a coherent concept of the information. This ability enables them to analyse a series of competing or conflicting ideas to select the one that passes the Rubbish Filter, critical analysis, and rational evaluation of the evidence for each idea presented. That is why Atheists make up 93% of Scientists. They do not rely on scriptural writings as any legitimate authority.

Conchobar

Tenek

"There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lied, and statistics." -Benjamin Disraelijj

Nice idea - I guess - but the 93% figure seems a little too high. 93% not-fundementalist, maybe. I could imagine fundies being perfectly capable scientists as long as they either a) don't run into problems with dogma or b) ignore it. But atheists - strong or weak - making up somewhere around 13 in 14 scientists sounds a little high. Liberal theists would be able to do just fine...

seebs

93% sounds like a made-up number to me. At least around these parts, I think theists are still a majority among scientists, although I guess it depends which sort of scientists you're counting.

Gurdur

Yeah.
Mind you, all the Creationist scientists I've ever met personally were physicists; quite well able to understand plate tectonics (if not above twisting evidence), despite the OP poster's claims.

Plus it all just misses the point, doesn't it; implicitly equating all theists and flavours of theism with fundamentalism, then making odd unsupported claims about brain structure.
:banghead:

This thread doesn't belong in Secular Lifestyle and Support.

philechat

I think a Nature article pegged 40% of theists among the scientist population, and a lower number (15% for mathematicians and less than 10% for Biologists and Physical scientists) for the NAS members. It was supposedly a modern reproduction of the Leuba experiment.

Here is the link.

DamagedGoods

Well, I was a fundy for 10 years, and I had no problem grasping plate tectonics, radioisotope decay (I was a nuclear power plant operator in the Navy), physics, calculus, differential equations, etc. There were several other guys like me in my church/cult that were very sharp in some ways, but dumb as hell in other ways. In this particular group, the guys that people perceived as 'smarter' seemed to be the ones that stuck around the longest (the average seems to have been 10-15 years).

I think fundamentalism is due more to social environments than some inherent physical condition. Some people are raised in a fundamentalist environment, some people are exposed to it when they're rebounding from some personal crisis, etc, etc. That's why it bothers me when religious people want access to children (or other vulnerable parties) for indoctrination. It wouldn't bother me so much if I thought that mostly 'defective' people got sucked in, but I know that's not the case.

I personally attribute my swerve into wacky fundametalism to a lack of personal philosophy. Maybe that's just part of being young and dumb, but I can't help but feel that I could have avoided it if someone had been kind enough to introduce me to some kind of non-theist philosophical material before I went out into the world.

So, based on my massive study with 1 observer, I conclude that the occurrence of fundamentalism isn't quite so closely tied to some mental deficiency.

AspenMama

I agree-- it might belong in Miscellaneous as I see very little science in this--but here ya go for now.

AspenMama, SL&S Moderator

jayh

Fundies that I have encountered tended to be compsci, math, engineering, fields which don't really provide any serious challenges to the fundie mindset.

Biology, geology, astrophysics, etc are a different story (though not incompatible with being religious in general) because they conflict strongly with the literal Genesis interpretations.

j

DamagedGoods

I think that's pretty much true. At one point I was going to go do some research into all the dating methods that show the earth to be much older than 6000 years, "just to see what kinds of bad assumptions those silly scientists had made." By the time I got around to doing that, I was already on my way to thinking for myself and I found that there were no grossly bad assumptions in most of the dating methods. That just sped me along towards dropping the fundy outlook.

The only way I could have retained any belief in Genesis would have been to think that a deceitful God had created the world as an exquisite forgery, complete with bogus fossils and radioisotopes present in the correct ratios to make the earth look 4 billion years old. Oh, and fake starlight arriving from objects billions of light-years away. I just couldn't swallow a story like that.

acidphos

I have actually heard the 93% number before. IIRC it was actually a survey of the Nat Acad Sci members and the 93% was actually agnostics and athiests (which fuundies have a hard time understanding are two distinct groups).