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DemonKia -> RE: Outliving philosophy (7/1/2009 8:16:07 PM)
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Rulemylife, it's more that we created religions & the associated beliefs out of these feelings we were having. & the evolutionary argument would be that those populations which had these higher rates of these feelings had higher survival & reproductive rates over the eons . . . . .
I don't know that I'd characterize it the way you did, because it's more ambiguously played out than that . . .. . As we can see from the last coupla thousands of years of human history, religious beliefs have entailed a great deal of shame-generation, so . . . *shrugs*
During the concentration of prayer, the encompassing peace as we draw near death, a mystical revelation, or the sense that God is talking to us, we experience the most intense experiences of our lives. Since the beginning of time, people have imbued such experiences with religious significance. But in recent years, scientists have begun to explore this spiritual realm, asking their own questions about what goes on in our brains during these extraordinary events.
...A study of epileptics who are known to have profoundly spiritual experiences has located a circuit of nerves in the front of the brain which appears to become electrically active when they think about God....
...parts of the brain's temporal lobe -- which the scientists quickly dubbed the "God module" -- may affect how intensely a person responds to religious beliefs...
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ORIGINAL: rulemylife
Then what you are saying is the belief in God and spirituality is just a fantasy world created by our brain chemistry that makes us feel better about ourselves.
Calla, I had some other thoughts about your OP . .. .
The first thing that came to mind was L. Ron & Scientology. He only died recently, but the problems wreaked by Scientology were going on nearly from the get-go, so restricting religions to the lifespans of their founders would seem to be only a partial limit . . .. . . . It could be the squeezed-balloon problem, in that fewer dead religious leaders to follow may be accompanied by an explosion of living religious leaders to follow, especially if both the need to follow & the experience of religiosity are as much inborn as culturally acquired . . . ..
The more fundamental issue, to me, would seem to be that spiritual feelings are, kinda by definition as emotion-states, irrational, & thus it's a tough row to hoe to expect rational behavior to be a default response to those emotions. We can hope that people will be orderly about their lusts, but that doesn't seem to go in a consistent linear direction. I think what you posit is a nice idea, but until our psychological evolution reaches the point where our herd behavior is that much more rational, we'll probably still have populations following the wrong ideas of dead people.
& to flip this around some, we regularly subscribe to the correct ideas of dead people without problems: Newton, for instance, spent most of his time grappling with theology, but we remember him for the incidental stuff he did about calculus, gravity, & so on . . . . . *snickers* . . . . & since so many apparently think of science as a religion, I'd hate to see it open to chucking out & us needing to reinvent all those wheels.
On yet another hand, I'd suggest that we are absolutely capable of, & allowed to, re-invent religion to suit our evolving senses of spirituality. For instance, I don't align as a Christian but I find useful things attributed to Christ & I incorporate those things into my belief structure, & leave the other stuff behind. I suspect that that's a growing trend, picking & choosing the useful / more correct stuff & leaving the rest behind . .. . .
Great OP, by the way, very thought-provoking. . . .
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