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.
You hit the nail on the head again. St Cyril and his followers inspired the Alexandrian mob to drag to death, MS Hypatia, one of the first African Mathematician and Philosopher of Egyptian descent, on the pavement on the road till she died, and dogs finished her bare bones body. All because, it was inferred about her paganism.
The human brain is actually not capable of explanation of God. At one point Benedict Spinoza attempted to sustain the existence of God in/as nature, rather than human form “Divinity”as such, Descartes tried to place God in his work , proving that the only truth that he cannot doubt is the fact that he could not doubt his own existence as a thinking being,(Cogito Ergo Sum), “I think, therefore I am”. And from non-arbitrary existence, he posited the existence of a God who cannot deceive him as far as his capacity to think is concerned. Dante Aligheri, attempted to demonstrate the accountability of the human to stand in judgement before the LIVING GOD in his ‘Divine Comedy’. Charles Darwin in his 1859 work: The origin of the species and The Descent of Man, tried his best to talk of Evolution of the scheme of things, hence removing the idea of creation by a supernatural invisible being.Tom Paine in his Age of reason Found God in nature not in churches or temples or Mosques. For the Igbos God is Anu ana agba egbe Ona ata afifia, anu kporo nku n’eju onu. Christ defined God as spirit, but did not define Spirit. Science cannot jump that loop, even if science leads men to the surface of the sun and the surface of the moon. God is THE INEFFABLE. God is the Undefinable, All in all, the Real Unknowable. A German mystic, Mister Eckhart, once contended that:”The Eye with which God sees me is the eyes with which I see God”. The unknowable GOD, is the greatest lifelong puzzle to man. Abraham Lincoln, once contemplated “If there is a God we will answer for all these”…. human suffering….Enslavement etc. Reverend Wright once thundered:”God Damn America” which God do we know? Mani the father of Manichean Religion once designed his two essences, The good he Called God and the Bad he defined as evil.
Nice exposition, my philosopher friend!