pug846

Kenny, I have an enormous amount of respect for you and believe you to be one of the more intelligent posters on this message board. However, below is probably the stupidest thing you’ve ever posted on this message board:

Along the same lines, if you really want to get down to it, people who don’t believe that Santa Claus exists as a real entity have committed more murders than any other ‘belief system.’ From a quick look at the math, I believe the numbers come out better than a billion to one.

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It would be interesting to post a similar topic on the Baptist board and see what kind of response we get. (Obviously switch it around so that every Atheist would be ‘right in the head’ and become a theist, or a Christian.) I think even most of the Christians would be appalled.

sullster

The controversy going on here is not quite what I expected, but you never know. I do have what I think is a strictly scientific question which concerns neuroscience, which motivated my provocative posting.

I have read that some research has found that an area of the brain is stimulated in a like fashion, be the stimulation cocaine or gambling. This has made me curious about areas of the brain which are stimulated by religious concepts.

We all know that a segment of the population uses drugs and gambles to excess. Are their brains more wired to derive stimulation for these things than others? Unless I am misinformed, it seems that neuroscience is saying "yes".

This leads me to the religion question. If neuroscience can prove that an area of the brain is involved in all things religious and we see a segment of the population more taken with religion than others, can we partially explain the impulse for religion as being like the impluse for a drug or gambling? These person's neurons are firing more over this stimulation than others.

The concept of a drug stopping a section of the brain from functioning is disturbing and the advocacy of such a drug being used on religious believers is abhorrent to me. I count myself among the atheists who utterly repudiate the concept that I myself started the thread with.

I would not want some theist to bring up this thread as an example of athiest thought and intentions. I understand that this is part of the worry of some of the posters and I want to set the record very straight.