Religion/ belief in God is largely genetic & spiritual feelings are actually neural

The genetics:

This would help explain why even though I grew up in a religious household, I never believed in God.

It would also explain why some people can feel a personal, spiritual relationship with God while that concept is completely alien to me and other people. It may be that it's almost or even literally impossible for us to experience that.

What about the neural basis?

In summary, neurotheology argues:

It scientifically explains as physical the things people claim as spiritual.

Neuroimaging provides physical evidence that many things we percieve as spiritual, such as relationships with God and other spiritual feelings, are not spiritual at all.

Instead, they are just feelings created by certain neural networks in the brain being activated; a purely physical thing. If we had the required technology and we implanted these same neural networks in the computer, we could make the computer have what it thinks are spiritual experiences.

In other words, feeling a connection with God is the neurally same thing as feeling a connection with aliens that are beaming you messages of world peace through your hair dryer (Harris). It's a hallucination caused by physical reactions and not real.

So, given that these things are purely physical and that the feelings that they are spiritual are just illusions created in our mind, these neural networks obviously retard the logical faculties that require some of us to have proof to believe things. Much like autism retards social development, this retards logic. Could it, like autism, be considered a mental disease?

 

Sure the evolution gives us the instrument to think that something else guides our life ( ex.: god, spirits, alien.....). The discover let us suppose that something could really has been created by a project. I think that we have to connect the modern neuroscience discover with the modern religion thought and try to answer the cosmic doubt of life.

sorry for my basic english

matteo

 

I understand what you're trying to say and if you read the post then you kind of missed out on what it was saying. Try reading it again.

This leaves no possibility for any interaction between the supernatural and the human brain in "spiritual" experiences.

 

It's completely clear.
Thanks, now we have to discover why the evolution gives us that particular instrument: defense, reproduction, social life.....
what you think?

 

the part after the andpersand makes a certain amount of sense. not 100%, but some. the part before it does not. though perhapse the misundertanding is understandable.

which btw, none of which has a damd thing to do with whether or not there might actualy BE, one or several.

ALL feelings are, in a sense "actualy neural". that is where we expience everything, or rather that's where the preproccessing of everything we experience takes place, in our own individual meat computers. actualy withing the software running on them, the opperating system thereof generaly refered to as mind.

but experienced in a considerably different mode then pure abstractions.

of course most subscribers to organized beliefs are taught to confuse genuine spirtuality with as much abstractions as feelings.

but then most of them have never experienced the natural 'church', the REAL spirituality, of being alone with everything that is real without the distractions and distortions of human coerciveness.

=^^=
.../\...

 

The leading theory is that religious beliefs, like homosexuality (there's actually a lot of evidence for this being the case with homosexuality), are just a side-effect of another beneficial trait.

For example, the same gene that allows for better eyesight might also instruct for the construction of neural pathways that encourage religious beliefs.

Religious beliefs go across cultures and land masses so they're more than cultural, they are somehow rooted in our DNA.

 

I was tempted to roll onto the floor laughing my ass off but instead I will stay in my chair and laugh it off

 

Wow, strong response.
The tendency to create religions is obviously rooted in our DNA. We have already isolated some genes that predispose one to religious beliefs.

 

Damn it! I came to this conclusion myself without doing any research into it. I was hoping I was the first to think of it. It makes perfect sense; I would call it more of a worship gene than God gene. Worship in one form or another would have been a crucial element in primitive societies for organizing armies, enforcing rules, building structures and anything else their leader needed. Those who did not fall in line and devote their lives to their leaders’ whishes would have been quickly eliminated. Therefore only the dutiful would reproduce. Our DNA is the product of at least 12 Million years of this type of breeding.

In some societies you see people worship a God and in others it is Person. All leaders utilize this faith in their people to rally support for whatever cause it is that they have in mind. The stronger the faith, the more willing people are to die for someone’s cause. Of course this led to clashes with different societies and religions, genocidal holly wars. It’s survival of the fittest religious war engine.

 

"Neurotheology attempts to explain the actual neurological basis for those experiences, often subjective to the extreme,which have been popularly called "spiritual", "out of body" or other terms for forms of abnormal cognition such as:

The perception that time, fear or self-consciousness have dissolved
Spiritual awe
Oneness with the universe
Ecstatic trance
Sudden enlightenment
Altered states of consciousness
Increase of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland or epiphysis.
These subjective experiences are seen as the basis for many religious beliefs and behaviors."

I disagree with saying that having any or all of these experiences has anything to do with the belief in a god/gods, except that one may interpret those experiences as such and that rational people don't.

 

For example, out of body experiences can be explained by a psychological theory which is very convincing. I have heard there are as many as 8 million people who have claimed to have had one. It is my view that the theory psychologists have come up with does indeed explain some of them, but I am firmly convinced that it does not cover all of them. I have seen an example of an OOBE that I have found impossible to rationally explain. It is an option for others to doubt the truth and accuracy of the account, and by the act of disbelief they can easily explain away the event. My options are more limited. I was there. If 2.5% of the worlds people are atheist, 85% are theist, and the other 12.5% don't know, which I have read is the case, then the term 'abnormal' for someone who believes in spiritual reality is incorrect. Disbelief, or atheism, appears to be the most abnormal of all the beliefs. God is something I don't have any desire to know about, prove, or understand, but that attituce is only applicable to me. If someone tells me they know 'God', I support that, even though I don't, because I am not that person and feel it is not for me to say what is true for them. LSD, and other drugs will initiate a very spiritual experience for some too, but does that mean that spirituality is not real? No, it does not, and I feel that ones spiritual beliefs cannot be known by anyone else to be true or not. We must all walk our own path, others can share the journey, but no one can walk it for us.

 

By the same logic, all things known through the senses - everything seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled - does not really exist. They are only informational phantoms of the neural networks they haunt. Everything your sensory information may tell you in reference to anything "out there" is entirely erroneous.

By the same logic, light, for example, is nothing more than a hallucination created by the eyes, the optic nerves and the visual cortex. And any thought one may have, about anything, is nothing more than a drop of chemicals affecting a handful of neurons, assuming, of course, that either of those "things" are "real."

If your knowledge is correct, then all thoughts, all sensory information, everything, is empirically indistinguishable from anything else. There can be no difference between the quality of one's thoughts and the neural mechanism that thinks them. There is no basis to make any distinction between a spiritual universe that is primarily physical and a physical universe that is primarily spiritual. The only thing that can be proven to exist is the consciousness of the thought, and presumably, whoever it is that is thinking.

Now, who are you?

Good luck with your theory.

Peace and Love

 

^ ^ ^ ^
If we put someone on psychadelics and they repeatedly see the same microwave they don't see when they're sober and no one else can see that microwave then that microwave doesn't exist. If the person only sees that microwave when they're sober and no one else can see it, and when they see that microwave their brain state is the same as when they're on psychadlics then they're delusional.

Replace microwave with God.

 

If there is in fact a "god gene" or a "spirituality" gene, that would actually SUPPORT the existsence of God, not disprove it, in my opinion. Atheist scientists seem to think that anything that can be explained by science/neurology/whatever is a shot against God. Guess what? If God exists, he made our brains capable of receiving spiritual experiences. He also made our genes.

 

Unbelievable

There are realy people who believe there is a genetic coding for a
predisposition on the issue of god.

The only such coding is reason.
Which none seem willing to use.

Using reason based on data.
One can sustain an arguement for direction

But it seems most are too lazy to bother finding the data.
Because that is WORK
So they grasp the first thing that comes along.
genetic predisposition. Sounds good.
But so does giving up freedom for security in a world
'on the brink of collapse' cause a few idiots blow themselves up.
Which is no theat at all

And Genetic predisposition to belief in anything is no position too.
We are born blank slates. What we believe is taught or learned.
Our BIOS
Does not encompas predispositions to etherial concepts

LOL. It's hard for occam to understand why we are having this conversation.
Did i turn away at just the moment human intelligence dropped 50 points?


Occam

 

Our BIOS!

And can you really then believe that individual humans do not differ in their respective predispositions to learning?!





Though I agree with your sentiment that it need not pose a problem.

 

Dejavu.

Our BIOS has a thing that has made us what WE CALL
the lords of earth.
REASON. Without reason we might as well be sheep.
[which fits well with religious symbology, be faithfull sheep]

All human Bios's have great potential for reason.
Little of this potential is achieved.

The less it is achieved, the more likely religion enters the equation.

Occam

 

All? I admire your optimism! We all have different potential, and the art is in not letting our potential be diminished in the difference.

 

I did not understand whether your point was that all of us are different as in some have greater and some lesser potential, or that we are equal yet unique in our potential. It is like the man/woman subject. Men and women are different in some ways, yet neither is better or worse because of it. It is my view that every role is important.
Gandhi "Whatever you do in life will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
Potential is of no matter unless it is acted upon. Loving without acting may be different than acting without loving, but unless love is acted upon it does not make any impact, imho.

 

Blackguard:

The former, with potential in regard to 'reason'.


Gandhi: "Whatever you do in life will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."


What rubbish! Pretending, for the moment, that whatever you do in life will seem insignificant, it's inevitable that you do it, that's all.