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<p>Religious belief has very little to nothing to do with argumentation because it is almost exclusively an instinctive, emotional contrivance. There’s nothing incompatible about that. Read the sources. </p>
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<p>The obligation to supply proof is necessary for any individual who make a contention in hopes of validating an argument.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if you can see the difference between this</p>
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<p>and this</p>
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<p>Here are two equivalent statements in a different context:</p>
<p>1 (reasonable): “It is ridiculous to believe that the quality of the teacher has little or nothing to do with a student’s achievement.”</p>
<p>2 (unreasonable): “A student’s natural intelligence has little or nothing to do with his or her achievement”</p>
<p>The first points out the fallacy of assuming something to be entirely based on one of two things, while the second commits that very same fallacy.</p>
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<p>In that case, it is neccesary for you to provide proof of your contention that religious belief “does not have the slightest extent of relevance to reason or argumentation” and is accepted “on emotional pretext”.</p>
<p>It would be helpful to both of us if you weren’t so intensely resistant to simply reading the sources that I have posted and educating yourself on the matter rather than habitually plugging your ears and responding with pointless non-parallels. Repetitious analogizing of matters that are not even remotely relevant to what we are discussing is a waste of your time to write and a complete misuse of my time to read and exact some sort of response. I feel that you are being remarkably defensive towards religion’s basis in emotion, superstition, and fear, rather than its grounding in objectivity, for absolutely no reason. If you read these and look at the collection of other psychological and neurobiological research with an open and unbiased mind, you’ll reach the same conclusion, as would any unprejudiced individual. But I am not the least bit astonished; you have spent this entire thread propagating conceits and other remarks that are fundamentally tainted by the dogmatic convictions that you hold.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t have time to read a 600 page book. But after a quick skim, I expect there is little there that I have not heard before. It will describe how various Religions effect people’s emotions. A mathematical model will be designed, which “simulates the decision to believe or disbelieve in a God”. In this model, the choice to believe will be weighted as providing “emotional benefits”. When the simulation is run, unsuprisingly the result will be that religious belief is based in emotion.</p>
<p>It is similar to many such articles. You create a simulation, plug in certain arbitrary variables, and get the result you expect. But such simulations are absolutely meaningless, because the variables have nothing to do with real life.</p>
<p>In real life, people don’t choose a religion based on an emotional weighting system that gives so much weight to “eternal life” and so much to “a sense of belonging”. Even if they did, there’s no reason why the values chosen by Dr. Thagard should be the same as the real life values, unless, of course, we assume the conclusion is true and then find the values that produce it. But in that case we’re using circular reasoning.</p>
<p>When I find time to read the paper more I may have more to say. The above was based on my experience of similar papers.</p>
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<p>These statements are mostly out of place. For instance, consider the common assurance of an afterlife, the promise of an eternal existence that is so emotionally and doctrinally consequential to religious matters (the book above touches upon this). (Or, as congruous manifestations of the same mentality, consider reincarnation, metempsychosis, samsara, and other transmigratory convictions, which are most common to Far Eastern ideologies.) The entire thing is grounded in fear (perhaps the most conspicuously powerful and physically influential emotion there is) – fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of deprivation – and the brain’s natural disposition to concoct mythical narratives to suppress contradiction (in this case, the fact that life entails death). Scientific studies and correlation studies have been performed on these matters, with the ardency of religious belief directly correlated with the intensity of fear associated with death.</p>
<p>[The</a> Fear of Death and Religious Attitudes and Behavior](<a href=“http://www.jstor.org/pss/1384409]The”>The Fear of Death and Religious Attitudes and Behavior on JSTOR)</p>
<p>An additional generalized source of information:</p>
<p>[Evolutionary</a> origin of religions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions]Evolutionary”>Evolutionary origin of religion - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Below is perhaps the most lucid source of these three, which intelligibly accounts for the concept of how innate, and ultimately blemished, cognitive systems (and their structural and chemical governings) predispose the human mind to the irrational belief in supernatural beings and extramundane sentience. </p>
<p>[Malinowski</a> Lecture](<a href=“http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/bec/papers/boyer_religious_concepts.htm]Malinowski”>http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/bec/papers/boyer_religious_concepts.htm)</p>
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<p>Once again, this is a claim. How would you test it? How would you tell the difference between “religion attracts people who fear (don’t fear) death” and “religion causes people to fear (not fear) death”?</p>
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<p>A great number of religious people do not fear death at all, as seen with militant fanatics.</p>
<p>I don’t believe you can say “religion does this” or “religion is caused by this”.</p>
<p>While one religious group may indeed be motivated by fear, another may not, and generalizing between the two is of no value.</p>
<p>The people you point at to support your theory are just as ridiculous to me as they are to you. Hoever, I call them “misguided” while you call them “religious” and lump me in with them.</p>
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<p>Didn’t that study find that the greatest fear of death was with “moderately religious people”?</p>
<p>Obviously those who are most uncertain about death fear it most. Atheists and strongly religious people are confident of what will happen to them.</p>
<p>Within Christian denominations, “dogmatic adherence to religious doctrine” correlated with fear.</p>
<p>In other words, the “fire and brimstone” churches (what we call legalists) have the greatest fear.</p>
<p>This is also unsuprising. A church which (misguidedly) preaches a “don’t drink, don’t wear shorts, don’t miss Sunday school, or you will burn in Hell” doctrine, obviously is going to have more fear.</p>
<p>But the difference between you and me is that I see that and say it “is bad religon”, while you say “religion is bad”.</p>
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<p>Once more, this is an example of model fixing. The people who did these studies were not proving that religion evolved, they were determining how it evolved given that it did. This is useful research in the area of evolutionary science, but is not useful for comparing evolution to other theories, as it can only provide negative proof of a mechanism.</p>
<p>Anyway, that study was based on a survey of “70 people from 2 Protestant and 1 Catholic congregations in a small Mid-South town”.</p>
<p>This is hardly a representative sample of Christians, not to mention religious people in general.</p>
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<p>So have you bothered to read the book yet (that entails the various psychological and neurobiological roots of spiritual belief) or are you simply content to unremittingly feign ignorance so you can pretend as if it’s some arbitrary opinion?</p>
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<p>Yes, these people are vigorously entrenched in the ineradicable certitude that they will ascend to some heavenly or nonmaterial paradise upon death, the ultimate mental conviction that assuages this fear. </p>
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<p>That’s your opinion, because you have a very robust hostility to scientific ventures that seek to undermine your dogmatic assurances. Since religion and spirituality is culturally universal among humans, and humans have evolved from more cognitively primitive organisms (although you don’t believe this, you are overwhelmingly wrong), applicable mutations have occurred and been selectively accumulated in the comparatively recent evolutionary past for the phenomena to be genetically grounded. The significance is that religious sentiment will be preserved as part of the human psyche until selection works to exact genetic changes that eliminate its neural essence. Of course, it is important to remember the pervading influence of the social and cultural zeitgeist on habituated belief. (Source: The Psychology of Religion, p. 58) </p>
<p>There is a vastly increasing series of research that studies the genetic and consequent sociobiological aspect of religious belief – namely, how evolutionary adaptations affect social behavior. Religion and spirituality is therefore viewed as a heritable cognitive feature that possesses survival value (a key evolutionary point) and subdues selfish tendencies in favor of submission to the social body in which they are associated. Survival and reproduction are thus augmented via group compliance, which, in turn, is further accomplished by teaching ritualized practices, ceremonies, worship, deference, and other conformist traditions, which are often temporally structured. The logical outcome is that genes favoring acquiescence and conventional behavior come to preponderate the population while those that manifest noncompliance and other undesirable behavior are reduced to marginal frequency. In the past, the lack of social conformity had little to no survival merit, often led to ostracism, and consequently reduced one’s mating prospects, thereby diminishing the probability of propagating one’s genes into future generations. By this account, genes that deftly predispose one to persuasion are selected for and hence act as fundamental mechanisms that ensure common survival. (Source: The Psychology of Religion, p. 58) </p>
<p>Other efforts have been made, with varying levels of success, to determine the roots of superstition and religious belief on the neural level, with variously identified neural indicators of causation. (Source: Ibid. p. 59)</p>
<p>You will dismiss the entirety of this, though, since you are extremely ingrained in your intensely anti-scientific temperament that humans are your god’s chosen people and that this being simply chose to make us all cognizant of he/she/it/they. It is the very feebleness and abominably structured positions that you hold that reduce you to criticism of the arguments and findings of those who make an honest, objective attempt at proper understanding.</p>
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<p>To clarify, people who are the passionately unwavering in their faith possess the least anxiety, since they are rather confident in the assertion of eternal existence, which serves as the great mechanism to mitigate the fear of death. Those with a “loose affiliation” hold the greatest degree of disquietude.</p>
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<p>Religions surely differ in terms of doctrine and supernatural belief and adherents variate in the extent of belief. However, Christianity and other Abrahamic religions, overtly promote the concept of the “fear of God,” or the emotional fervor that accompanies devotion. If there were not some sort of emotional, apprehensive sentiment towards a being that supposedly monitors your every thought and action, there would be no emotively stimulating mechanism to believe. It’s this God-fearing sentiment that creates such earnest, resolute piety, especially in the vigorously devout, but certainly not exclusive to them (as if there is some binary distinction involved), as you prefer to believe.</p>
<p>I would also recommend that you read The God Gene, but not, of course, if you are indomitably pleased to remain so close-minded about this.</p>
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<p>To clarify further, people who know what will happen to them when they die do not fear death.</p>
<p>Here is a very simple alternative to the psychoevolutionary explanation:</p>
<p>Strongly religious people believe that they will experience eternal life after death. Therefore, they do not fear death.</p>
<p>Atheists believe that they will experience nothing after death. Therefore, they do not fear death itself, but they do fear the end of chances to experience pleasant things.</p>
<p>“Loosely religious” people are unsure of what will happen to them after death. They therefore fear it as they do anything uncertain.</p>
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<p>I think you are confusing “has emotional elements” with “has no basis in reason”.</p>
<p>Maybe some people do believe in a God through some simple emotional response. That is not wrong of them, but it would be wrong for them to expect anyone else to consider that scientific proof.</p>
<p>But if you’re going to generalize that into “all religion has no basis in reason”, then you will need to show that there are no reasonable arguments which can be made for anything besides Atheism.</p>
<p>I will look in to the arguments about the evolution of religion when I have time. Even assuming the existence of a God, those arguments could very well explain they way in which myriad religons have diverged from each other.</p>
<p>I think its funny that when you say anything about religion, people go nuts. There are so many long answers here. It would be nice if the college and hs questions had 25000 views and 2000 posts. Why people get so into religion is strange unless you are old.</p>
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<p>Yes, but “know” in the sense of the assurance given to them by their faith.</p>
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<p>Religion typically venerates the expression of passionate emotionalisms and honest beloved conviction, matters which often inevitably interfere with valid reasoning. And sadly, when religion is imbibed and permanently ingrained into our mental framework at a young age, it doesn’t have a single thing to do with reason because our faculties of critical thought are not yet developed. Also, it is important to have a basic understanding of what reason actually entails and the process of which renders it valid. The past 142 pages of this thread have been so largely unproductive because so many, particularly those on the Religious Right, have no concept of what stands as evidence, sound reasoning, or of what makes for proof. It is far easier to propagate falsehoods and credulous ideological poignancies than reason based upon evidence or legitimate proof. And those, even the non-religious among us, are so unaccountably ready to remain unassertive and allow it to pass without comment, often out of fear of being accused of intolerance or hostility. Much of this discussion has been nothing but a crude bouquet of metaphysical conceits, extensive argumentative fallacies, and scientific opinions that are rather irritatingly distorted by emotional and religious biases. Earlier, rarely a sentence went by where you did not assert some logically or evidentially perverse statement. That is precisely why these discussions are so inherently worthless, because very few have the slightest degree of interest – or the ability for that matter – to preserve the common decencies of honest discourse. </p>
<p>Being devoutly religious does not mean that one is automatically mentally inept with respect to rational discourse on these matters, per se, but through rather sizable contact with the religious and through my experiences in this thread, that position often becomes exceedingly difficult to always view with a clear perspective. Poor, incompetent, incorrect, or unfounded conclusions are, in great measure, the offspring of bad reasoning. </p>
<p>Religious thought has been tormented throughout the centuries with its inability to analyze matters from a critical, (beneficially) skeptical, and reasoned perspective. Rather, it has been beset by doctrinal and emotionally entrenched sentiments. One of the primary misfortunes of religion, again, to varying extents, is that reactions to certain ideas are immediately emotional, as it was (and often continues to be so) towards the notion that the Earth is round, heliocentrism, evolution, and cosmogenesis – among other matters – despite the new enlightening information, evidence, interpretations that later follow. Religious fundamentalism, in particular, knows its conclusions beforehand, puts a vigorous stake in these, and refuses to change. As such, it certainly isn’t a wonder why arguments are so prevalently defective. Nevertheless, it would be untenable to assume that this does not occur among the more liberal faiths that promote progressive doctrinal interpretations. However, science and those who base their perspectives on the values of scientific thought know exactly what would change their minds: evidence.</p>
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<p>This reiterates the findings quite nicely. I would think that many atheists, agnostics, and others who identify themselves under some type of secular banner are mildly concerned or troubled about the prospect of death, and perhaps even express desire for immortality. I do not; if I am run over by a bus tomorrow, then that is merely the way things go sometimes. However, like others, I hope to lead a fulfilling life and pursue what I hope to accomplish. </p>
<p>That said, the very act of living is quite remarkable. We are the products of, as the scientific consensus goes, 3.5 billion years of evolution and with the most fortuitous encounter, unpremeditated event, or slightest misstep by one of our ancestors, the Earth and life within it, would be very different indeed. The number of people who could have been born in each of our places but who will never have the opportunity is more numerous than the number of atoms present in the visible universe. Yet in defiance of these incomprehensibly diminutive odds, each of us is here and conscious of this staggering reality. If this is not sufficient to give oneself a sense of wonderment or purpose, then I am not quite positive of what is. </p>
<p>So if I am the slightest bit spiritual – if one could call it that – it is because of an irrepressible appreciation of existence despite the miniscular improbability and the phenomenal splendor of the natural world and physical universe. And in sufficient time, the sun will gradually expand and consume the planet on which we live and eliminate all trace of this existence. But to live in an era where a rational intelligibility of it all is undoubtedly feasible and a respectable ambition is truly a privilege in itself.</p>
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<p>What other form of “knowing” is there? All knowledge is merely the things people consider likely to be true given their experiences.</p>
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<p>There is, however, no reason why it must. When people allow “passionate emotionalisms” to interfere with their command of their thoughts that is their mistake.</p>
<p>And it’s not like passionately unreasonable rhetoric is limited to theists, as this thread has shown.</p>
<p>I think that some people are simply going to be unreasonable, whatever their beliefs. Someone like you or me might at least believe that their worldview is based on reason, but not everyone is born to be a philosopher.</p>
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<p>I entirely agree. As an example, many Christians still argue today that it is morally wrong to drink any alchoholic beverage, even though that belief is not supported in the Bible or by rational ethics.</p>
<p>However, I repeat again that these beliefs are not supported in the Bible.</p>
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<p>Flat earth and heliocentricism were both developed by people who were making the best sense possible of their surroundings. When new evidence became available, smart people (who were for the most part religious people) developed better theories.</p>
<p>As for evolution and cosmogenesis, well, the first is indicated to be false by the Biblical account, although not outright stated, and the second (at least the atheistic materialistic form of it) obviously contradicts the Biblical account.</p>
<p>But in both cases, I base my objections on logical grounds, not Biblical authority, since obviously it would be useless for me to cite an authority that you do not recognize.</p>
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<p>Well, if you define fundamentalism as such, then of course they do. The definition of fundamentalism in Christian theology is somewhat different, so not all self-identified “fundamental Christians” will fit that.</p>
<p>Okay, there is nothing in your reply that absolutely compels me to respond, as there is either nothing that I largely disagree with or find greatly appealing as a point of discussion. So take care.</p>
<p>The same to you. I’m glad we finally found some points we can agree on.</p>
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Hm, seems like my comment brought out a sore spot. You see, I didn’t say any of the things you’re saying I meant. I was simply amused at how much time some posters were dedicating to such an argument, whichever side they happen to be on.</p>
<p>And really? “[E]thically corrosive, corrupt, or socially backwards”? You felt the need to include an attack on religion while responding to my comment? Okay… Anyway, I’ll take my religion of social justice, love, and aiding the poor over petty argument any day. The last person I heard insult a religion that preaches social justice was Glenn Beck, incidentally. Now THAT was amusing, especially the backfire. Anyone else see that?</p>
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<p>No, not a “sore spot.” There is no real justification in saying that someone’s religiosity, beliefs, viewpoints, and so on are somehow off-limits in terms of criticism. There is no reason to be intellectually demure about these matters because they are supposedly sacred and inviolable; yet unfortunately, so many are, particularly those who identify themselves within some secular viewpoint.</p>
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<p>Yes, that’s very pleasant, although I am sure you would still value those virtues even if you simply did not believe in the supernatural, just as over one billion people do worldwide.</p>
<p>@BillyMc: [Here</a> is the answer to your question.](<a href=“http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png]Here”>http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png)</p>
<p>The answer to what question?</p>
![http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png]Here](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png%5DHere){kind=link}
