selfology

I'm not trying to make any generalizations here, I haven't seen any studies on this, I'm just speaking from what I've noticed in my circle and from my short 24 years of experience. But, my grandparents are extremely religious (of that elite group you would call sanctified), and they had 13 children 7 girls, and 6 boys. All of the girls have grown up to follow or actively participate in a particular church. None of the men have been actively religious, although if asked they would say they believed in god. This isn't just a trend in my family either, most of my friends have said the same thing about their family, and of the christian churches I've visited the women usually outnumber the men by quite a bit. I will confess that my circle is primarily of African American persuasion, and we tend to be quite a religious lot, (mostly christian which is an anomaly to me especially given our past relationship with this religion and slavery, but that’s another story). Does anyone here notice this, and if so what do you think is the reason for this trend?

(let me strap on some protection...ok I'm ready)

[ May 02, 2002: Message edited by: selfology ]</p>

Samhain

If you're looking for personal opinions...Well...I've also noticed this some too, I will not say a wide trend, in this case, just because I do not wish to discredit any women around. I think there are a few reasons which should be observed, and from my own opinion (these are just some general assumptions people, don't go barking down my throat here ) I'd have to say a lot of it would have to do with logic vs. emotion and childbirth. Regarding women, we can assume that they are generally more emotional than men, and in many cases (IMO) tend to make quite a few decisions on how they "feel" as opposed to finding logical reasoning to provide some kind of backup. Men, however, seem a bit less emotional in that regard, and so more often think and reason their actions out prior to making an action. I hold this isn't just my opinion, how long have we been hearing the "Hell hath no fury..." quote? Also, a lot has to do with childbirth and making of life. Of course, there "has to be some explaination for that" as a mother once told me.

These are just assertions based upon my own observations people, remember that

[straps on his riot gear]

Ender

Women confuse thinking with feeling. In general they think truth is an irrelevant trivality that serves as the stumbling block for men.

~WiGGiN~

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>

Ender

One more chauvinistic remark:

Where neither love nor hate is in the game a woman is a mediocre player.

~WiGGiN~

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>

Samhain

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> THANK YOU! At least I know someone agrees with me, I especially like the latter remark. Sorry, I may have a biased opinion myself, being a male, sometimes I feel like a sexist of late just because I feel there seems to be reversed sexism in the US today. Sometimes I find it hard to give the male perspective when I have the opportunity. There have been many occasions in which I've been labeled as a chauvinist just because I don't agree with the logical validity of some of the remarks which women make regarding certain things. I don't know, maybe this should be more for the RRP, but I feel like I've been labeled unfairly on some occassions just because I disagree with a remark that a woman makes, and therefore I must be anti-feminism. It just boggles my mind sometimes.

Automaton

phaedrus

Umm, let me indulge in some PC...

While people have different reasons to subscribe to religion, you will find people who tend to go with the "flow" or are part of the herd mentaility have a greater chance of being religious without ever stopping to question the basic tenets. (whichever gender they belong to)

Having said that, they are more religious for the same reason there are more housewives than working women and for the same reasons men dominate most of the fields compared to women....history, social conditioning or subjugation, brainwashing, genetics, biological & pyschological makeup and grounding....etc etc. Obviously there are exceptions, but generalisations wont go away easily i guess......

Ted Hoffman

My chauvinistic contribution:
Women are more docile compared to men (tetosterone factor?) and thus better suited to following what our patriarchial society has laid out for them.

Men like me are allergic to beaten paths.

Karen M

Hello selfology

I have also noticed that women are more religous than men. I personally think this is because women's brains are more wired to have religous experiences than men's are(same with blacks brains being more likely to have religious experiences than average).

There have been tests done on people while they pray and do other religious activities that shows their brains actually go into a different state than normal.

These are from an article in Newsweek on May 7, 2001:

“In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have dissolved, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. Which ones? Activity in the amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats and registers fear, must be damped. Parietal-lobe circuits, which orient you in space and mark the sharp distinction between self and world, must go quiet. Frontal- and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and generate self-awareness, must disengage. When that happens, Austin concludes in a recent paper, "what we think of as our 'higher' functions of selfhood appear briefly to 'drop out,' 'dissolve,' or be 'deleted from consciousness'."

“The scientists recruited Baime and seven other Tibetan Buddhists, all skilled meditators. In a typical run, Baime settled onto the floor of a small darkened room, lit only by a few candles and filled with jasmine incense. A string of twine lay beside him. Concentrating on a mental image, he focused and focused, quieting his conscious mind (he told the scientists afterward) until something he identifies as his true inner self emerged. It felt "timeless and infinite," Baime said afterward, "a part of everyone and everything in existence." When he reached the "peak" of spiritual intensity, he tugged on the twine. Newberg, huddled outside the room and holding the other end, felt the pull and quickly injected a radioactive tracer into an IV line that ran into Baime's left arm. After a few moments, he whisked Baime off to a SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) machine. By detecting the tracer, it tracks blood flow in the brain. Blood flow correlates with neuronal activity.

The SPECT images are as close as scientists have come to snapping a photo of a transcendent experience. As expected, the prefrontal cortex, seat of attention, lit up: Baime, after all, was focusing deeply. But it was a quieting of activity that stood out. A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain, had gone dark. This region, nicknamed the "orientation association area," processes information about space and time, and the orientation of the body in space. It determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. Specifically, the left orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited body; the right orientation area creates the sense of the physical space in which the body exists. (An injury to this area can so cripple your ability to maneuver in physical space that you cannot figure the distance and angles needed to navigate the route to a chair across the room.)

The orientation area requires sensory input to do its calculus. "If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything," Newberg and d'Aquili write in "Why God Won't Go Away." The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity.”


They noticed the same results from Catholic nuns and other religious people. Usually, people interpret these depending on the culture they are from(Buddists would have a Buddist interpretation, Christians would think it was Jesus telling them something, etc.).

These experiences are more likely to occur in women and africans than other groups and they feel very real(for example, this might not be an exact analogy, but your senses tell you that there is a computer in front of you; the only way you would doubt if there really was was if they did tests and found that people who did not have computers in front of them occationally still thought they did). These tests above are one of the reasons I personally became an atheist, because they basically said that you could not trust your senses on this issue and that different cultures interpreted them however they wanted too. But, these could modivate someone to believe in God if they have been brought up all their life being told that this was “God talking to them” and they are ignorant of the scientific tests done on these experiences.

Also note that, when a theist tells you that they have "felt God" or to "just pray and you will find God," some of them probably arn't lying and really do feel things when they pray and such.


Just my opinion

Karen

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Karen M ]</p>

WJ

"Women confuse thinking with feeling. In general they think truth is an irrelevant trivality that serves as the stumbling block for men."

Well, men confuse emotions with rationality too (whatever that means). Otherwise, how does one rationalize the act of falling in love?

The fact is, "thinking and feeling" comprises an illogical mix of pure reason and emotion (again, whatever that means). Being a man, I personally think that certain men can learn things from women, and women can learn certain things from men. But also, I know women who are just as irreligious as men. The problem of "truth" affects both gender's.

I believe it has more to do with the so-called 'people problem' viz. religion, and has little to do with gender. It is my observation that there are many psychological factors relative to upbringing, sociology, etc. that provide for this phenomenon or impact one's behavior and perspective on this topic.

I think it is a good question viz. truth. If women are more apt to aquiesce to a some-thing that accounts for the 'phenomenon of mystery' from the human experience, there is nothing wrong with that conclusion. Too me, if those are the primary motivators [mystery], in its essence, it shows that a women is perhaps 'more' intellegent than the male counterpart who can't see past the finitude of this life's mysteries.

On the otherhand, searchng for jewels among the pebbles [absolute truth] is certainly worth the effort; the question is, when does it reach the point of beating a dead horse? In otherwords, no amount of thinking will change the certain inherent mysteries from this life, which have the most basic fundamental impacts on how/why we approach our thinking-relationship to the world the way in which we do [the origins of human consciousness].

The similarity to this I find stems from the world being a man's domain. While some may resent that, other's embrace it. In a world of conscious metaphysics and human sentience, if there exists a 'thought process' that is beyond comprehension or understanding or not worth the contemplation to begin with, because it won't matter anyway, then how should the responsibility of pursing the [a] "truth" be apportioned according to gender? Should men be the thinker's and women be the feeler's? And if so, in the end, who wins?

I say learn to be both.

Walrus

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: WJ ]</p>