Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Why don't you consolidate your posts instead of making two? I think more people will be more easily able to refer to the article if I post its text or refer to parts of it for comment. I think it makes for a clearer discussion.
Fair enough.
Now as to your argument that a predisposition to believe in the irrational does not make the irrational true, that was not the argument that was being made.
That is the argument I made. I didn't attribute it to you or the article; it was just a comment on the conclusions of the article.
The argument being made was that doing so is adaptive, that you rationalists may be a threat to human survival and should be exterminated. Oh wait, it didn't go so far as saying that last part maybe, but perhaps some might make that interpretation, especially in the face of "all the religious folk are nuts" and "religion should be done away with" types.
And why does the fact that atheists are using the same parts of the brain that religious people do when thinking about moral issues show, not as you want to imply, that the religious folk are like atheists, but the opposite, that atheists are making religious decisions about morality. The problem, if you haven't realized it yet, is that different people look at the same things and believe different things about them, things I would claim are conditioned into them by their experience and LR might say is genetically programmed which this last of my articles seems to strongly imply.
Nothing in the article supports this conclusion whatsoever. Most of it is completely speculative, other than the results about which areas of the brain are stimulated by certain activities. It specifically says:
"Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions. Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world."
So according to the article, religious belief is either: 1) a biological trait that evolved as a way to escape or avoid psychological trauma, or 2) an extension of the human need to understand the universe. That's it.
If (1) is true, I don't see why the same couldn't be said of
any coping mechanism, of which many could be considered non-spiritual. If anything, the article supports the idea that atheists and religious folks use the same biological tools to answer moral questions, which means atheists do not lack any evolutionary trait and would be no threat to human survivability anyway. They would just not be using these centers for spiritual prayer, meditation, or otherwise conjuring religious feelings. I also don't understand your turnabout on this. The only way an atheist would be making "religious decisions" in these morality tests is if the person is not really an atheist, thus making the resulting conclusions moot.
If (2) is true, then science is a worthy substitute for unsubstantiated philosophizing as a means of searching for answers about reality.
As to what is the point of posting things damaging to my position, there are two answers that come to mind. Do you really know what my position is accurately enough to say that? Why would a person interested in truth confine himself to points of view that only mirror his or her own? A seeker should be happy to deal entertain all points of view, no?
I don't have a good grasp on your position, which is why I've asked
repeatedly what it is and what these articles are supposed to prove or support. You have challenged the value of reason and held up at least some concept of faith or belief or meaning derived outside the bounds of logic, and the rest of your mumbo jumbo has been mostly unparseable to me, even if it makes perfect sense in light of your own experiences. If you're posting these articles only because they're interesting or peripherally relevant, then... thanks, I guess? They are that, anyway.
Have you noted that I am not a person of faith? I do not believe in a religious God. The idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient sets up in my mind absurdities I can't rationalize away. I wanted a God I could prove exists and I could not find Him.
Then I think we're on the same page.
As for your experience with depression, I'm sorry. You sound sad. I have faced and am currently facing similar challenges, and I think we all can at least appreciate some common struggle to live in our own skins and make some sense of our lives. The tools we use to persevere and the conclusions we reach may be different, but our fight is the same and we are comrades in arms, no matter what, by virtue of our shared humanity. I think it's easy for us all to forget that, sometimes.