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talkpoliticsYou miss that meme? Rendering Unto Caesar. Well, let me give you a taste of that long-forgotten snack a little bit here. I'm gonna occupy you with the topic of the downfall of reason. And the degradation of the mind. The larger the extent that religious cults regulate a person's everyday behavior, the more beneficial they become to some people. The nature of this symbiotic relationship between cult and brain-death is that the former allows the mind to spare energy it would have spent in unreasonable quantities in search of complex, nuanced decisions, building strategies and behaviors, and in-depth exploration and understanding of the world that surrounds us.
The job of this crucial human organ is significantly simplified by adopting a strict set of social instincts that are imposed from outside, and require the employment of little to no intellectual capacity whatsoever. The blissful mindlessness is actively sustained by the metaphorical brain endorphins. By getting immersed in a religious cult of some sort, one could easily spare energy and use a template algorithm of behavior for almost any standard situation that may emerge in life (now, for the more non-standard situation, things could get a bit messy, granted). The prospect of freeing one's mind of the heavy consumption of energy related to critical thinking can be quite an alluring motivation. Not that people like myself who tend to feel increasingly intoxicated by the process of swallowing and processing more and more new information, are capable of comprehending how it's even possible to feel "freed" through shutting one's mind, but yeah.
The reverse correlation between erudition/education and religiosity has been strongly supported by a number of researches, whose analysis suggests of a relation between the extent of religious faith and the IQ. Simply put, the higher the individual's intellect, the less likely they are to be religious, or very religious. The graph tends to range between 7% for the academic circles and 60% for the people of primary education. Thus, the reverse correlation between IQ and religiosity has become something of a scientifically confirmed urban legend now. Whether it's really true that IQ = education, is an entirely different topic, though.
The reasons for this statistical correlation, as a whole, could be viewed both in depth and on the surface: the "God hypothesis" provides an immensely attractive opportunity for getting easy answers to virtually any difficult question, without necessarily making the effort to acquire knowledge of anything at all. Just give somebody an authoritative system of explaining everything in the world, and provide an interpretation for each and every phenomenon in life (including, or maybe especially in political life), and pass it through the prism of this neatly designed model. Then impose all that upon them through systematic indoctrination from an early age, and social pressure throughout the entire duration of their life. This approach does not require any intellectual effort or knowledge, right? Just switch your brain off and wait for the result.
But even if you do already have a firmly formed opinion on religion, there's one thing that could help the person adequately adapt to modern society - even if it's done late, at an advanced, presumably mature age. It's called reconsideration. And there's a useful tool, a method that's called correlation. It considers two things that occur simultaneously, can be compared, and of which you intuitively know are related in some way, even if you're not sure yet how exactly (but are willing to learn how). As is the case with the clouds and the rain, the wind and the rocking tree branches. Even if you're a young child and you don't know how exactly one leads to the other, you may be willing to learn. The fact that deeply religious people tend to be also the people of lower education, is one of those intuitively understood facts as wel. By extension, here's another fact: people who are religious are more likely to remain uneducated and ignorant. Because they already do purport to have all the answers. They've read their respective holy Scripture, after all. Right?
Still, there's a very useful way to debunk the written sacred fairy tales, and it is to read them. Read them from cover to cover, and try to understand them. The best method of analyzing their content is to approach them with an open mind and use your brain for figuring it all out for yourself. You just have to spend some time reading. And if you inevitably reach a point where you realize that none of it makes any sense to you, you'll know the reason is not in you, but in the author(s). And by extension, in all those who prefer to take it all on face value, every word and every letter, and literally apply everything it says in the real world. That they're losing their humanity in the process, and their mind along with it, and everything that is supposed to define them as autonomous thinking beings, is on them. As for the fact that for some reason we're letting them largely dictate the discourse, and shape up our very way of life - now that's on us.
The job of this crucial human organ is significantly simplified by adopting a strict set of social instincts that are imposed from outside, and require the employment of little to no intellectual capacity whatsoever. The blissful mindlessness is actively sustained by the metaphorical brain endorphins. By getting immersed in a religious cult of some sort, one could easily spare energy and use a template algorithm of behavior for almost any standard situation that may emerge in life (now, for the more non-standard situation, things could get a bit messy, granted). The prospect of freeing one's mind of the heavy consumption of energy related to critical thinking can be quite an alluring motivation. Not that people like myself who tend to feel increasingly intoxicated by the process of swallowing and processing more and more new information, are capable of comprehending how it's even possible to feel "freed" through shutting one's mind, but yeah.
The reverse correlation between erudition/education and religiosity has been strongly supported by a number of researches, whose analysis suggests of a relation between the extent of religious faith and the IQ. Simply put, the higher the individual's intellect, the less likely they are to be religious, or very religious. The graph tends to range between 7% for the academic circles and 60% for the people of primary education. Thus, the reverse correlation between IQ and religiosity has become something of a scientifically confirmed urban legend now. Whether it's really true that IQ = education, is an entirely different topic, though.
The reasons for this statistical correlation, as a whole, could be viewed both in depth and on the surface: the "God hypothesis" provides an immensely attractive opportunity for getting easy answers to virtually any difficult question, without necessarily making the effort to acquire knowledge of anything at all. Just give somebody an authoritative system of explaining everything in the world, and provide an interpretation for each and every phenomenon in life (including, or maybe especially in political life), and pass it through the prism of this neatly designed model. Then impose all that upon them through systematic indoctrination from an early age, and social pressure throughout the entire duration of their life. This approach does not require any intellectual effort or knowledge, right? Just switch your brain off and wait for the result.
But even if you do already have a firmly formed opinion on religion, there's one thing that could help the person adequately adapt to modern society - even if it's done late, at an advanced, presumably mature age. It's called reconsideration. And there's a useful tool, a method that's called correlation. It considers two things that occur simultaneously, can be compared, and of which you intuitively know are related in some way, even if you're not sure yet how exactly (but are willing to learn how). As is the case with the clouds and the rain, the wind and the rocking tree branches. Even if you're a young child and you don't know how exactly one leads to the other, you may be willing to learn. The fact that deeply religious people tend to be also the people of lower education, is one of those intuitively understood facts as wel. By extension, here's another fact: people who are religious are more likely to remain uneducated and ignorant. Because they already do purport to have all the answers. They've read their respective holy Scripture, after all. Right?
Still, there's a very useful way to debunk the written sacred fairy tales, and it is to read them. Read them from cover to cover, and try to understand them. The best method of analyzing their content is to approach them with an open mind and use your brain for figuring it all out for yourself. You just have to spend some time reading. And if you inevitably reach a point where you realize that none of it makes any sense to you, you'll know the reason is not in you, but in the author(s). And by extension, in all those who prefer to take it all on face value, every word and every letter, and literally apply everything it says in the real world. That they're losing their humanity in the process, and their mind along with it, and everything that is supposed to define them as autonomous thinking beings, is on them. As for the fact that for some reason we're letting them largely dictate the discourse, and shape up our very way of life - now that's on us.
(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 12:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 15:46 (UTC)Mind you, there are only a few of us around. And we don't proselytise. In fact are forbidden to do so.
#notallreligiousnutters. :)
(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 18:10 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 18:42 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 19:59 (UTC)Render this idea simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument)
Because it is genius.
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof) Paying strict attention to the difference between necessary and contingent.
Some things are complicated, alas. It doesn't stop them being great and deep thinking, nor genius.
Not everything can be simplified for all to understand. Shame, I know: and I struggle with lots of ideas still, as do the folk who actually do the difficult thinking on the edge...but where I see a small ledge to which I cling, they see, at the top of the mountain to which I cling halfway, plains of meaning stretching to infinity. We each have our level.
(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 21:09 (UTC)Hug.
(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 22:49 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/12/15 21:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/12/15 16:25 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/12/15 16:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/12/15 18:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/12/15 21:48 (UTC)