Religion on the Brain?

ylooshi »

Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:23 am Agree: 7   Disagree: 0

tpique1,

Your opinion of atheism appears to be one in which you have come to a conclusion and seek only to pidgenhole atheists into it. Your opinion is utterly and completely wrong when you state "atheism affirms a negative." Atheism is merely the state of being that we are all born into before we become indoctrinated by the cultural memes of religion. If one is lucky enough to become enlightened after this indoctrination, or if this indoctrination isn't complete, the believer may one day return to that state of refusing to accept the positive claim of theists.

I, like most atheists, state that there is no good reason to accept your theistic claim. A lack of understanding of the universe, claimed by most theists is a terribly fallacious reason to accept a god. Indeed, even if I were to accept that a god were needed in the universe, that hardly gets me from there to your particular notion of a god. To accept such a god would be a massive non sequitur.

On the subject of logical fallacy, I note that you're quite familiar with them. You've made an attempt to poison the well by associating Richard Dawkins' well-argued "mind virus" analogy of religious indoctrination to Adolf Hitler in a manner that would make Godwin proud (google Godwin's Law). But your argument is doubly fallacious in that even if Hitler et al did see religion as a virus more than a tool for genocide as they did, it doesn't imply that religion does not behave like a virus.

You say atheism is evil. You fail miserably at demonstrating this claim but succeed in showing a certain measure of expected bigotry.

-Yenald Looshi

tpique1 »

Tue Jun 30, 2009 5:22 pm Agree: 0   Disagree: 5

RevShnorrRocks,

I site your high priest Dawkins who says that religion is a virus of the mind. He compares the spread of a virus to the spread of religion and how it migrates from computer to computer, or human being to human being, in this case, like a computer virus over a network.

This line of thought is very reminiscent of another well known social engineer - Adolf Hitler - who took Darwin's theory of evolution and the idea of Nietzsche's superman and actually worked it to it's logical conclusion.

The idea that some are flawed and must be weeded out from the whole. Especially as it dealt with the Jews.

"For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst." (Applause)

Who said this? Adolf Hitler.

Atheism is evil.

tpique1 »

Tue Jun 30, 2009 5:08 pm Agree: 0   Disagree: 4

jshuey,

I can do it quite easily.

Atheism is not saying that it does not think there is a God. It is not even saying that it doesn't believe there is a God. It is affirming the nonexistence of God. It affirms a negative. It affirms the nonexistence of God. Anyone with an introductory course in philosophy recognizes that it is a logical contradiction. How can you affirm a negative in the absolute? It would be like me saying to you that there is no such thing as a white stone with black dots anywhere in all of the galaxies of this universe.

The only way I can affirm that is if I had unlimited knowledge of the universe. So, to affirm an absolute negative is self-defeating, because what you are saying is that you have infinite knowledge that there is no one with infinite knowledge.

As Ron Carlson and Ed Decker rightly contend:
It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. Its hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

If you'd like to take the argument from the point of view of evil, that there is no God because of all the evil in the world - a loving God would never allow all the evil in the world.

When you say there is evil, you have to then admit that there is good. When you accept the existence of goodness, you must affirm a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But when you admit to a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver because this moral law is transcendent. But if there is no moral lawgiver, there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, there is no good. If there is no good, there is no evil.

So, there absolutely is a God and you are very much accountable to Him whether you believe in Him or accept Him or not.

abhodim »

Tue Jun 30, 2009 7:58 am Agree: 0   Disagree: 0

The whole weakness of Newberg's article is his insistence on an either-or approach to God. God of compassion and mercy vs. God of wrath and punishment. Couldn't it be conceivable that He is both? His grace is astonishingly great to all; but what if this grace is rejected ... what is God to do?
Newberg's conception of God is intriguing. If he found "born-again" Christians to be pleasantly annoying in their uncompromising devotion to their Lord, I wonder what Newberg's view of Christ would have been in the first place.

RevShnorrRocks »

Tue Jun 30, 2009 2:54 am Agree: 2   Disagree: 0

Flagged as inappropriate. show tpique1: The "new atheists" believe that if they can simply reduce religion down to a chemical issue... Another unsubstantiated assertion about new atheists. Now if you'd claimed that the "new atheists" believe that if they can simply reduce religion down to a superstition issue the world would be a better place, I'd agree with your characterization. tpique1: "Science in the hands of an atheist only leads to evil". Another unsubstantiated assertion about atheists. The fact that you are using the "evil" science of the internet proves you don't really believe your own words. hide

believer »

Sat Jun 27, 2009 8:35 pm Agree: 1   Disagree: 1

cheisa, and look who agrees with your view, an atheist!!

Cheisa »

Sat Jun 27, 2009 11:26 am Agree: 6   Disagree: 4

Geez! Some Christians can be so paranoid. When a scientist attempts to explain belief from his discipline's perspective, it must be part of a grand plot to isolate Christains and work for their demise. Please.

While there are some genuine threats to religion out there, the persecution complex some display is really over the edge. Look at some foreign nations wehre Christianity is really under stress and to be a Christian is dangerous. It might give you a little perspective. Finding a bogeyman around every corner is a bit delusional here in America.

jshuey »

Fri Jun 26, 2009 10:43 pm Agree: 4   Disagree: 2

"...it never crosses their mind that God COULD actually exist..."

And what is your proof? of course gods don't exist. Grow up!

Science, anthropology, and philosophy have an excellent understanding of what drove primitive man to invent gods. You claim is just another example of a combination of wishful thinking and personal credulity.

You might not like where science is leading you, but you should pay attention. Old myths die hard, but die they must and will if humankind is to evolve from the intellectual and spiritual quagmire that the religions of cattle-sacrificing desert tribes have imposed upon us.

tpique1 »

Fri Jun 26, 2009 5:15 pm Agree: 3   Disagree: 6

This has been done before. It's just "The God Delusion" lite.

That everything a human being believes in the way of religion (or are conditioned to believe) are all a result of chemical processes within the brain.

Of course, it never crosses their mind that God COULD actually exist; that's too fantastic a "tale" to accept in this age of Self-indulged "enlightenment" and intellectual arrogance.

Because the secularist/naturalist has written his own set of rules as to how reality should be measured - namely through a naturalistic framework - then even matters dealing with spirituality must too be hammered and measured by a naturalistic worldview.

Hence, what you have are people like Newberg and Waldman reducing religious experiences down to neurological processes or genetic predispositions rather than a genuinely real and active experience like Christians claim.

The problem is, EVERYTHING, even atheism can be given the same diagnosis - that atheists are atheists because they have a "genetic lean" towards it passed down by their parents.

The "new atheists" believe that if they can simply reduce religion down to a chemical issue, then they can either genetically weed out those who are genetically predisposed to it, OR label them crazy and therefore render them obsolete. (Sounds kind of Nazi-esk doesn't it?)

Science in the hands of an atheist only leads to evil.