Enough authorities say that homosexuality is. Or in other words, what causes atheism? Does the WTS cause it?
Is atheism genetic?
by Teirce 7 Replies latest jw friends
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Imbue
Your not related to Gravedancer are you?...LOL
"Not part of the inner circle class"-Larc
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gravedancer
Imbue you look good in genes...
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Abaddon
Teirce; the same methodology (twin studies) have shown that religious belief is likely also a factor that is genetically influenced.
In twins who were raised seperately, if one was an avid believer, the seperated twin, even though they had no knowledge or contact with their twin, was very likely (above that of a randomly selected person) to be an avid believer.
They have also shown that a certain part of the brain is active during some religious activity, like praying.
It would seem some humans have an inbuilt tendancy to believe, poor things. One can speculate that a tendancy to believe in things would make a population react more uniformly and with greater unity, and thus increase both individual's and groups' chances of survival.
Now we have evolved past a point where blind belief is neccesary for survival, it will be intersting to see how the religous genes do; they don't seem to reduce the chance of breeding (outside of Roman Catholic priests and other celebates), so may well stick around for some time, even though they are not as useful in an educated and highly structured society.
Of course, I don't think that's the point you wanted bought up - it sounded like you wanted a nice little way to enter the old 'people don't believe in god because they are bitter about the WTBTS' chestnut. Please don't... it's a dumb, insulting arguement; many atheists here have done a great deal of research on the Bible, history and science, and don't believe because there is no proof, not because they are in a sulk.
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funkyderek
I am an atheist because, in my considered opinion, there is no evidence for the existence of gods. Whether the analytical approach I use to try to distinguish reality from fantasy is the result of a genetic tendency, I don't know. I'd guess that I have at least some genetic bias towards rational thought.
Some studies seem to indicate that there is a significant correlation between high IQ and atheism, so that may also be a factor.--
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts -
Silverleaf
I've always thought religion caused atheism.
Silverleaf
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Teirce
Abaddon, sorry for any misleading order of my questions. What you guessed I might be leading into is the farthest thing from my mind. So if I may deconstruct your guess of my meaning, "people don't believe in god because they are bitter about the WTBTS", I would say that the everyday humans of this world are perfectly capable of arriving at the logic for the non-existence of god without having witnessed the performance and/or hypocrisy of the WTS. However, I do stand by my general wonderment that many persons can remain religious after having been in the WTS, if it were not in fact caused by some form of genetic predisposition.
But here I depart from the physical and concrete: There is in every person a marvelous arrangement of brain chemistry whereby in certain moments, we can feel like God, we can see forever, we can live forever. I think it would be rather premature to assign this to the modern symptom of chemical imbalance. [Even if it still falls under genetic heritage.]
So, there are certain scriptures, yes, even in the New World Translation, that have a ring of truth. (This is besides the fact that most of the Proverbs are basic common sense, and that some of Paul's statements are ripped off of Socrates and Plato. Beware that human wisdom folks, true genius is the hiding of sources.) One such scripture that comes to mind for this subject is, "He has put eternity into their hearts." Surely, I hope that everyone, at least once in their life, is in a situation where their brain chemistry and endorphins are emotionally overpowering, to such a degree that some have found it to be evidence that we are connected on a higher plain with an unseen existence or benefactor. Lucas' statement "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter", resonates with most everyone, because he is getting at the core of the matter, that the human mind has capacities beyond the apparent roles that we 'were evolved' to fulfill. Because of this sensory capacity, I do think it's premature of anyone to completely disparage those who express a faith.
But your thought on this is new to me, and rings well. Perhaps religion is the magnetic alignment of these various genetic ionic cognative capacities, thoughts that cannot bind to anything concrete or of this physical world. So perhaps religion is caused only when there is a powerful enough attractor to form a Pole towards which all these myriad maelstroms are pulled. And thus religion stretches one, as on a medeival rack, because the maliable credence of this genetic membership of mankind is by their thirst for an ideal pulled towards the impossible ideal, while that which is normal and animal remains anchored precisely where physical reality placed it, ie, nothing ideal whatsoever.
But, and this I profess, not all that is initially only the raw material of religion is doomed to that fate. And by this, I mean that the inherent divinty of man, that suite of sensations which he can label God, happiness, ecstacy, euphoria, eucharist, epiphany, do not necessarily have to have been a harmful thing of themselves. It is only their alignment by evil genius that breeds evil by factors.
And yet, religion cannot breed itself out anytime soon because sexual relations are the uneducated, the poor and the third world's most affordable recreation. The obverse, for those who are religious And wealthy, is not that they eschew having children, but rather that they have them not because it is the sole means of affordable recreation, but as the enviable perogative of perpetuating their estates.
Back to alignments. I was reading Thomas Carlyle lately (may have been Hume) and one of his arguments was that primitive man, if confronted by some natural wonder such as lightning, could not but sprout up from among their number someone who had a degree of storytelling acumen to explain its terrifying mystery. This is the inverse of the argument "No news is good news", where one knows of a state of affairs and desires them to remain unchanged: For those ancestors who met the complete unknown, all life could stop until they had some accounting for it, flimsy as might be acknowledgeable, but at least they had a label, a handle with which to cognatively manaeuver it.
Synthesizing with your thought, a group of persons with the most talented storyteller, who is across the generations intentionally associating himself with the power of the natural wonders, because of the power he accrues, will be able to weild a larger and larger tribe, since he can align them on this one instance, despite the fact that they are otherwise as disputative over limited resources as typical primates would be.
So we can surmise that the religious gene is selected for reproduction because of the safety in numbers, and (I'm surmising and/or guessing) that tribes so influenced grow great in direct proportion to the imagination of their religious visionaries. Which is to say, those ancestors which did not have a "belief gene" may not have cooperated as well because they had less deferred expectation of reward for job well done. It seems to me here, that the "belief gene" is basically the basis for our cognative RAM, that which allows us to think big, to hypothesize, to maneuver and coordinate large unweildy, slippery objects in the mind. Ergo, there would be no Stephen Hawking were it not for the initial "belief gene".
Great civilizations depend on great religious imaginations? If so, I wouldn't limit them to militarily conquered empires like Greece, who had a sculpted mythologic hero tradition, or Rome, who studiously borrowed everything that was practical, including a religious system that could serve as opium for the masses. The writers of the Old Testament were clearly persons of high imagination for the time, taking myriad natural events and transforming them into compelling moral tales. (I do wonder why they didn't grow into a large empire if they were so successful under God's tutilage, but, that would make them one of the seven world powers, now wouldn't it.
But I'd also posit that religiously-caused prosperity is the exact antidote to that condition called religious belief. The higher up a religious heirarchy one goes, the less beholden one is to cooperation, the more personal wants are met, more time is available for purely cognitive function. By this, the Protestant vigilance with which Brittain enslaved a quarter of the globe became its own financial antidote, same with the Puritan vigilance with which the Founding Fathers of America appropriated the wealth of natives (we still have puritan conservatism in government, but church attendance is the Neilsons).
But what of the story-teller himself? Does he need to possess a concept and capacity for the divine to craft such religious vision? Or, can he succeed in such enterprise while harboring the fact that he is an atheist and only pulls it out of his ass as the need arises?
My apologies if I sound like I'm speaking to hear myself. I'm really sounding for other perspectives on the relationship between belief and non-belief, and whether or not they are complementary in any fashion.
Anyone want to comment on a premise that the ability to believe, to hold an object in the mind, is the foundation for intelligence? Can animals count? If they can't, is it because they can be presented with two groups of objects, and not believe, or have capacity, or virtual storage, to mentally compute their sum? I wonder if belief is that hole in space into which we throw sand and play.
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Xander
Wish I could find it, but I read a VERY good study once that described 'belief' as a sixth sense that is what 'selected' humans to progress.
See, if a monkey sees many tigers walk in and out of caves on a hillside, and he finds he needs shelter, he won't avoid the caves unless one of 2 things happens:
1) By one of his 5 senses he detects the tiger
2) He has previously been mauled by a tiger seeking shelter in these caves and survived (basic learned behavior)
Humans have an advantage - a sixth sense, as it were. If WE see a series of caves with tigers coming in and out of some of them, we can BELIEVE that the other ones ALSO have tigers in them. That belief enabled our ancestors to thrive over their peers.
In short, the sense of 'belief' enables a human, and our ancestors, to KNOW (relatively) something is true without having to experience it with one of our more short-ranged senses. Our ancestors didn't need to walk out into a desert to discover there was no water there and die - they could BELIEVE there wasn't, and thus feel no compulsion to go wandering off to their doom.
As our species became more self-aware, obviously, the ability to work as a group and, through belief, have communicated warnings be just as valid for our 'experience bank' as first-hand knowledge has been a useful trait passed on.
Obviously, within the past few millenia, many have capitalized on this to exploit others. Dunno what evolution will do with belief now - it still IS a very valid, useful sense.
Xander F
(Unseen Apostate Directorate of North America - Ohio order)A fanatic is one who, upon losing sight of his goals, redoubles his efforts.
--George Santayana