THE RELIGIOUS BRAIN
The religious brain is not amenable to reason, education, or logic and its primitivity cuts across all races, languages, and regions of the world. Hindu professors of public health will bathe in the disease and vermin infested River Ganges for religious reasons! African nuclear physicists believe in witchcraft and sorcery! American rocket scientists are also dead-again, sorry born-again Christians because the more births a person undergoes the better Christian that person becomes! The first scientist to find a medication to control our religious brains will be an instant billionaire. Does the religious brain exist? Yes, it does. People with brain tumors, traumatic brain injury or mental illness, especially schizophrenia are known to suddenly change their religious beliefs and become fanatic adherents of an entirely new religion, discarding their old religious beliefs. Removal of brain tumors can also change your spiritual experience.
Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome suggests that “If a stable personality trait like ST (Self Transcendence) can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas,” and that “Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders.” Extreme religiosity can be seen as a mental illness or personality disorder that may be amenable to surgery or medications that alter neural activity.
Explore more at http://phys.org/news/2010-02-brain-modulates-human-spirituality.html#jCp
How many prophets both in the holy books, and in our modern era, that are functioning schizophrenics; is open to conjecture. The rest are fraudulent failed businesspeople who have embraced the religious business because there are no checks or balances. Once ideas are trapped in that part of the brain, it is locked down and refuses to be changed or modified, despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary except by surgery and soon medication. The standard answer of the extreme religionists to dissenting views is that it is spiritual and that you will not understand because you are not spiritual. Isn’t it the same God that gave dissenters the thinking abilities and logical reasoning to challenge the religious status quo?
Christians will usually label dissenters as anti-Christ, Lucifer or being controlled by the Devil. It is amazing how humans who have never been proven to go to heaven or hell and return to earth to narrate their experiences, are familiar with the name of all the angels, devils, and other inhabitants of heaven and hell! There are also Limbo and Purgatory that are parts of one big after-life kingdom somewhere in the sky above us. And remember God gave us the freewill to commit any form of mayhem on Earth, while God watches probably with amusement or indifference and then renders judgment at the end of our lives.
That may explain why Christian Hatists will drag a living and breathing human being along a paved road to his/her death while God watches idly. If the hatist perpetrator atones and confesses to his/her “sin” before dying, the Angels will fling the gates of heaven wide open on his/her arrival. If the perpetrator does not confess, she/he may end up in Hell, Purgatory or Limbo depending on how many people that she/he dragged to death while on earth. This is religion for you.
Religion without violence or hate may never be achievable by the majority of humankind. It is the hate and violence that finances religion worldwide. Remove money from religion and the world would be a safer place. As the Americans say it, go figure.
Comments always welcome.