Link between religious fundamnetalism and brain damage found.

Speaking of making fire, many cultures used to rush burning wood from lightening strikes into caves to keep them lit, to keep the fire going, because they weren't able to generate fire by hitting rocks.

 

The more you know...

Maybe I'm being too hard on science. Because I like science. I just...I don't know. I just wish they weren't such know-it-alls.

 

Yeah I'm pretty much in the same boat.

 

Yes, I'm saying the basic approach to the method has always been around. Not that they've always been submitting their results for peer review. Though I can imagine Captain Caveman would show his banging of rocks together to other caveman and seeing if he could make a fire. I asked why the fire occurred, not why the spark occurred. Captain Caveman theorized it was because of the spark. I know his use of the method is rudimentary, but he is a caveman, give him a break.

 

I definitely think a damaged brain can affect the acceptance of certain beliefs and perhaps social institutions as well. I recommend reading Oliver Sacks, particularly a book which features case studies (IE An Anthropologist on Mars), if you want to read some examples where changes in brain neurophysiology can influence behavior and beliefs. I don't recall a particular case study in that book revolving around religious belief, but one individual gets a brain tumor and subsequently forms anterograde amnesia, often maintaining that it is still the 1960's roughly some 30 years later.

To even speculate, both operative phrases here "functioning brain" and "rational thought" would need to be unpacked. I assume you're considering a functioning prefrontal cortex and frontal lobe.

I could certainly imagine a scenario where someone has damage to a part of their occipital lobe, affecting their vision, which has minimal to no effect on their rational faculties.

Also, let's consider someone who has learned logic and reason prior to experiencing a traumatic brain injury... They may have less rational capabilities compared to their pre-injury self, but do they have less capabilities compared to someone who has not learned such skills?
There seems like a ton of variables to consider.

 

Yes, that's a tautology.

Some good info here... Skip to 2:30 to get to specific answers to the questions.

 

Toilet paper? Training program? Transport protocol?Turning point? Trivial Pursuit? Twisted pair? TP

 

I think that you have hit the nail right on the head.
It is simply that people with many brain problems are easy prey

 

Many people think of scientists as rude. I guess that is what you mean. An arrogance that puts others down turns them off.

The issue is that with all the anti-science nonsense going around you need to fight back. Your religious text or politicians with no credentials is not as good as peer reviewed evidence.

A scientists will not have that attitude if you can prove why they are wrong. Few that dislike them can though since all they have is religion and party lines.

Science is a threat to religion since it shows the nature of the universe beyond "god did it". I think that is what annoys scientists and brings out an arrogance. The religious ask for evidence not required of them. For example they say evolution is a theory where is the missing link since you can not show it then it's a lie. OK where is god how to show it exists? It's there since you said it. Double standards. For this reason it's the enemy of modern American society.

 

Back in the day when brain scientists and physicians were into lobotomies, people with strong (and psychotic) religious convictions could be turned non-religious by severing connections in their pre-frontal lobes. I remember reading that in Battle for the Mind by British psychiatrist Willliam Sargant, who was majorly into psycho-surgery.

 

Lol, what a shock. Sever brain connections and you don't think the same. Holy fucken shit balls whoda thunk that.

 

This is similar to the debate over "fake news". Science is the gold standard of reliable human knowledge by engaging in rigorous testing of falsifiable hypotheses. Unfortunately, not all areas of human knowledge lend themselves to rigorous testing of falsifiable hypotheses. Also, unfortunately, scientists are human. It's depressing to see tobacco companies and oil companies trot out their scientific experts to show that second hand smoke is harmless or that climate change is a hoax. In the environmental area, scientists working for environmental interest groups, those working for corporate polluters, and those working for the government can come up with three separate sets of results (Walter A, Rosenberg, Environmental Poltics and Polcy, 10th edition, 2017, pp.138-39). See also Faneli, Costas and Ioannidis, (march, 2017"Meta-Assessemnt of Bias in Science",Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
Meta-assessment of bias in science There's also a lot of pseudoscience around. The truth is out there, and reputable scientists are in the best position to get it in areas amenable to scientific methods. But the lay public has to use judgment to tell the reputable professionals from the charlatans.

Physicist Thomas Kuhn brought to our attention how science in the real world differs from the idealized model of the scientific method, the scientific community resists changes to accepted paradigms, and how the breakthroughs that lead to paradigm shifts are forced by accumulating anomalies. Science is always tentative, which is its strength. The theory of evolution is vulnerable to a potential discovery of rabbit fossils in the Precambrian. So far, no rabbits! In the final analysis, nothing is certain, not even that. We place our bets and take our chances. But I like to place educated bets informed by the weight of the evidence, scientific and otherwise.

 

Scientists in general are no more rude than religious people. Both have a limited understanding of what the true nature of reality is, yet both make pretense as to having a grand understanding of what it is. Maybe science is just fighting back against the worst of religion. Maybe it's even necessary. But in the end I would hope they would grasp that there may be more to life than they can directly perceive with their five senses. I know religious fundamentalists can make it seem like theism in general is a bad thing, but the concept of there being some higher order of things is not just some silly, flighty thing. On the contrary, it's a very real possibility, and my fear is that we'll just trade one dogma for another. To be truly fair minded, neither approach is infinitely right.

 

For an interesting debate on religion and brain functioning between Dr. Grafman and psychiatrist Andrew Newburgh, see Religion and the Brain: A Debate
According to Grafman,"the evolution of brain networks concerned with understanding the actions of others seems to have made possible concepts of a godlike entity’s involvement in human life. The crucial brain areas for this function are in the part of the frontal portion of the brain that also is involved in observing purposeful human action and detecting underlying intentions. These brain areas work with other regions to decode the emotional impact of the actions we observe....

(w)e believe that religious belief emerged for the purpose of social structure. Social structure originally was based upon principles derived from small family, group and tribal social interactions and a need to explain natural phenomena that did not appear to have an obvious human or animal physical cause. Then, as societies grew larger, religious belief further developed through the establishment of greater religious infrastructure. This emergence and adaptation of religious belief depended on the sophisticated cognitive and neurobiological processes we have described. In addition, if human brain evolution gave us foresight as a weapon against stronger foes and natural phenomena, then religious beliefs that concerned an afterlife might have been an effort to extend the boundaries of life in a way that was consistent with this newly found ability."

Newberg replies: "A religious perspective challenges all of these neuroevolutionary approaches by reversing the causal arrow’s direction: Perhaps religious belief causes the brain to change rather than the other way around...(M)ost religious individuals do not exhibit signs of a neurological or psychological disorder, and researchers have demonstrated that religion can help people cope with stress and, in many cases, reduce anxiety and depression....In much of my own work, I have suggested that a large neural network appears to be involved in religious phenomena, including experiences and a vast array of beliefs. This model includes many of the regions Kapogiannis and Grafman have identified, but their new research provides even more detail. Given the richness and diversity of religious phenomena, which Kapogiannis and Grafman appropriately point out, the brain network that “gets into the act” is probably relatively large. However, ... we may end up simply showing how the brain helps us feel and think in general rather than discovering something that is truly unique to religion."

 

See the problem is, the research is biased based on pre mediated and pre determined belief in then first place. A scientist who doesn't like religion is going to find any nook and cranny to take away its validity, so it almost become pointless to try and listen to it unless you're already under the same pre determined and mediated belief which in that case you're basically just enjoying being pissed in the ear.

Fact: science has never been able to disprove religion or God

Which makes every scientific argument about religion nothing short of laughable.

 

Science does have its biases and assumptions, some built into its basic fabric. Naturalism is one of them. Many scientists would define the enterprise of science as a search for naturalistic explanations of phenomena. I think that's reasonable. I don't see how it could make much headway if scientists thought the phenomena were caused by spirits, elves, gods, etc. Science also tends to reject miracles. Hume taught us that extraordinary claims need to be supported by extraordinary evidence, and that if somebody claims to have seen UFOs, Bigfoot, etc., you should believe that only if the it seems more likely than alternative explanations, like the witness is lying, drunk, nuts, or hallucinating on mushrooms. Occam's Razor--the law of parsimony or a preference for simpler explanations is another. Reality might be complex as all get out, but scientists will prefer explanations that aren't. Scientists also prefer explanations that fit in with pre-existing scientific findings and theories. And scientists reject explanations involving purpose or teleology, having been burned by such explanations in the past. Thus, notions like progress, Intelligent Design, etc., tend to be dismissed. So the deck is stacked against God as far as science is concerned. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould was willing to concede "non-overlapping magesteria", where science and religion could go their own ways, but Dawkins maintains that since religion won't stay on its own side of the line and keeps making claims about natural events, scientists should be able to do the same about supernatural ones. It's important to keep in mind that science hasn't "proven" any of these assumptions. They're just accepted as postulates as a basis for doing science. I suspect that these assumptions contributed to the remarkable progress of modern science in medicine, particle physics, astronomy, genetics, the theory of evolution, etc.

Another assumption which some scientists and many non-scientists share is scientism--defined as "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities). Definition of SCIENTISM When folks tell us what wonderful things science is sure to discover soon or in the future, they're proclaiming their faith in this ideology. Real scientists wait until the findings are published in a refereed scientific journal before crowing about their discoveries. As for God, that's a subject which is outside the scope of science, since it's not really falsifiable. How would a scientist go about getting God into a laboratory without His consent, or set up tests God couldn't evade if (S)he wanted to? Karen Armstrong distinguishes between logos and mythos as ways of knowing. Logos "is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us." Mythos, on the other hand, has to do with the more personal, "difficult aspects of our humanity, about for which there were no easy answers". Why are we here? Why are we living? What do we get? What are we giving? Science can answer those questions, but in a way that really doesn't get to what we're looking for: ultimate meaning and value. Mythos plumbs the collective Jungian unconscious to provide symbols, metaphors and archetypes to address our existential anxieties. And that's a function of religion.

 

Think of Galileo, who was forced to retract his scientific finds about our solar system, placed under house arrest and tortured until he apologised and retracted his statements only to find out 100 years later, he was right. Cast your mind back to the Wright Brothers who most likely flew their craft much earlier than we are taught but only because scientists declared that humans could not fly a machine heavier than air. Consider the fantastic discoveries my Nikola Tesla and his free energy. Raymond Rife who found the cure to all disease with sound frequency I mentioned earlier, in 1931 publically demonstrated how this can be done.

In 1888, John Keely built the first anti gravity machine and machines that used sound to perfectly drill holes into the hardest stone on earth with pin point accuracy and at will, Destroy these stones in a matter of seconds. These discoveries have been hidden up so well from the broader knowledge pool and continue to remain being covered up.

If taken seriously, these people alone would have shifted the history of planet and yet they fade mysteriously away into obscurity. During the course of exploration, we are often presented with evidence and information outside of our scope of comprehension, information that goes against everything we've been taught. This is, after all, what true science and discovery is all about. It has no limits and it is forever changing. The only constant in science is "change". Our immediate arrogant response is to often reject new information on the basis that we have never heard about it before. That is not a scientific argument and never will be.

Tesla had already harnessed the "made up" earth energy, he knew how it worked, but what happened when the electrical companies realised they were about to be put out of business? They cut all funding, tore down his creations and sent in the FBI to destroy and confiscate all of his documentation. To this day nobody knows how Tesla managed to do this, scientists remain baffled and since they don't believe in the methods used, because they go against everything they've been taught, they never will realise the potential of what Tesla was trying to do because they're too arrogant to change their minds or tinkle with the idea that the earth is alive and full of energy, just like our ancient history says, and if they one day figure it out, they'll have to rewrite human history plain and simple because then all the mythology actually becomes a reality, a reality modern day science is either too stubborn to acknowledge, or, one that they're purposely keeping from us.