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Reflections
on Good and Evil - - - Summation of posts made March 14-24,2007, in a thread titled "Reflections on Good and Evil": - - - Anyone can claim a God or a Devil or a par- ticular version of a supposed supernatural Jesus ... Many have done so, in the past and present. Such claims oft-times come across as contradictory self-serving exhibitions of human desire, fear, pretense, and power trips. ... Contradictions, religions are loaded to the gills with them. Self-serving? Religions are built with their primary priority being perpetuation of the particular religious faith promoted within their so-called 'holy' places, and depend on people acting as if their own personal fates are leveraged off of buying into the particular religious faith being promoted. Desire? Religions desire a pleasant immor- tality and a sky buddy who they like to believe acts as if human desires matter. Fear? Religion's hell and/or oblivion card, most pronounced, in addition to all the death/destruc- tion religions have resorted to in converting or killing those who've yet to "see the light". Pretense? Required to believe in magic beings, powers, and places, for without any evidence, what else have they got? Oh sure, they call it faith, but tell me, honestly, isn't faith and pre- tense one in the same? Power trips? Clearly, that's the manner in which religions claim to know all, provide naught but claims, and cowtow to faith to just believe in order to get the supposed goodies. Oh sure, they're so insecure about their faith that they rely on childhood brainwashing as the corner- stone of perpetuating their myths, but asser- tions of power go hand-in-hand with religions, from beginning to end. Compare to Pro-Humanist FREELOVER prin- ciples, and you'll clearly see the difference between open-minded, freethinking pursuit of truth and love and beauty -and- the ancient modalities of religious intolerance of any and all approaches which differ from / doubt in / disbelieve in the magic being realm. ... When folks perceive religion in a manner differ- ing from its actual nature, differing dramatically from historical fact, differing profoundly with science, logic, and reason, and far removed from what's actually written in the entirety of the ancient foundational texts, and follow that with words like 'good', 'worthy', 'estimable' or 'True' in reference to religion, it's clear that a dramatic disconnect between reality and per- ception exists. Only by discussing that disconnect can humans ever break free of the downsides of ancient myth. The cost? Freedom and reality don't come without a cost, and the primary cost is one few (in the current day) are willing to pay, publicly, and that is re- nouncing the anti-humanism of their ancient faiths, recognizing the myths as simply super- stitions, and accepting that human fate, until or unless actual contact between humans and other intelligence occurs, has been and still is solely up to humans and nature to determine. - - - In response to a poster who said "You're a funda- mentalist - just of the atheistic variety. You're a one man moral majority (with apologies to the moral majority)", I replied as follows: Your statements imply that I have as strong a com- mitment to Pro-Humanist FREELOVER principles as do the believers who claim to literally interpret the bible. Strictly speaking, by definition, fundamentalism is a movement begun in 20th century Protestantism, bible-based, and as such, is the antithesis of Pro- Humanist FREELOVER principles in most respects. Why does fundamentalism cling so tenaciously to (most?) Americans in the current day? Simple. Fear, and the role it plays, once instigated into the mind of the young and innocent, at a very vulnerable age, an age at which susceptibility to adult influence is at its strongest. 4 examples, 2 from previous posts, 1 from a recent Scientific American article, 1 from a recent Wired News article: Key words -- amygdala, neocortex, regions of the brain that impact the behavior of mammals in a man- ner imparted by billions of years of evolution, the happenstance of existence over billions of years in a threatening and oft-times death-dealing environ- ment. In these posts/articles, ponder the amygdala - fear - religion residing in a fast-acting primitive part of the human brain, and think of neocortex - rationality - reason - logic as residing in the heart of human intellect, a slower-acting recently evolved part of the brain that has to deal with the primitive instincts inherited by the amygdala ... ~~~ Youth-Brainwashing-Hitler's Germany (Top Posts - History - 012805) http://prohuman.net/history/youth_brainwashing_hitlers_germany.htm ... ~~~ Hint at how fear is used to promote religion (Top Posts - Science - 122305) http://prohuman.net/science/fear_used_to_promote_religion.htm ... - - - Regarding the following article, focused on the human emotion of fear, I can't help but recall some of my most fearful mo- ments raised in the heart of a fundamen- talist church environment, exposed to the hellfire threats year after year (first 18 years of my life), the ultimate threat used by many of the christian faith to try to scare children and adults into belief in a particular version of religious mythos. Fear as a religious weapon? You be the judge ... - - - December 2005 issue Can We Cure Fear? http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-we-cure-fear - - - ... Fear is more than a state of mind; it is chem- ical. The feeling of alarm arises from the circuitry of our brains, in the neurochemical exchanges between nerve cells. ... When one feels threatened, the metabolism revs up in anticipation of an imminent need to defend oneself or flee. ... The body unleashes an outpouring of vessel- constricting, heart-thumping hormones, includ- ing epinephrine, norepinephrine and the ster- oid cortisol. The heart speeds up and pumps harder, the nerves fire more quickly, the skin cools and gets goose bumps, the eyes dilate to see better, and the areas of the brain involved in decision making receive a message that it is time to act. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Once a person has learned to feel appre- hensive about something, he or she may always dread it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At the center of these processes is the amygdala, an almond-shaped region of the brain. Neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux of New York University, a pioneer in the study of the fear cycle, describes the amygdala as "the hub in the brain's wheel of fear." ... It takes only 12 milliseconds ... for the thalamus to process sensory input and to signal the amygdala. He calls this emotional brain the "low road." The "high road," or thinking brain, takes 30 to 40 milliseconds to process what is happening. "People have fear they don't understand or can't control because it is processed by the low road" ... Fear is a deep-rooted emotion, difficult for the brain to control. ... ~~~ - - - Why the Human Brain Is a Poor Judge of Risk By Bruce Schneier 05:00 AM Mar, 22, 2007 http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/03/SECURITY_MATTERS0322 - - - Excerpts: ... Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there's a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It's the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what's called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is respon- sible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness and fear. It's an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes. When an animal -- lizard, bird, mammal, even you -- sees, hears or feels some- thing that's a potential danger, the amyg- dala is what reacts immediately. It's what causes adrenaline and other hormones to be pumped into your bloodstream, triggering the fight-or-flight response, causing increased heart rate and beat force, increased muscle tension and sweaty palms. ... We humans have a completely different pathway [different from creatures that evolved much earlier than mammals] to cope with analyzing risk. It's the neocortex, a more advanced part of the brain that developed very recently, evolutionarily speaking, and only appears in mammals. It's intelligent and analytic. It can reason. It can make more nuanced trade-offs. It's also much slower. So here's the first fundamental problem: We have two systems for reacting to risk -- a primitive intuitive system and a more advanced analytic system -- and they're operating in parallel. It's hard for the neocortex to contradict the amygdala. ... - - - end excerpts - - - - - - I disrespect religious faith, and understand the modality by which it is perpetuated, the physics of belief. Been there, been done by that. Escaped it, after many years of being entombed within it. Non-fundie religionists, fundies including islamists / chris- tians / other religionists, many agnostics, many weak atheists, many in media, you, and (let's see, who have I left out?) some others tend to strongly oppose strong disbelief most often, strong disbelief like that practiced by (among many others) former pastor Dan Barker, biologist / anti-religionist Richard Dawkins, esteemed cosmologist (the late) Carl Sagan (though relatively shy about his disbelief relative to Dawkins), yours truly, and many others. Why? They like the pleasant immortality fantasy, regardless of whether it's true or not, they've been taught to keep their doubts and disbelief to themselves (if unable to extinguish them) as a shameful sin (to those exposed to that religious pitch), they've been taught to demonize strong disbelief as the 'ultimate sin', they've been taught that disbelievers and disbelief are abominable, and they're determined to act out as if religions are, on their better days, good, and strong disbelief is bad, no matter how the facts counter that blatantly false and devious deception planted within them when they were too young to defend against it. ... Fear is intrinsically fundamental to religious faith. Scare 'em and seduce 'em into believing, Religion 101. ... Current-day religions, many have spun the threat from immortal torment to a judgement/lake of fire torturous second death or mere oblivion assured if you don't buy into their version of what it takes to get the heaven ticket. Funny thing is, few religions are so sold on their modern spin on oblivion for disbelievers threat that they actually preach immortal torment is not in the cards for disbelievers. In other words, they leave it in the deck as an implied threat. Catholics, you may be surprised to find, still hold on to that immortal torment threat engine. Muslims do, too. Many Protestants, yep, still cling to that as a possibility, if not probability, even though it's a very difficult sell when juxtaposed against the positive religious seduc- tions. ... religion has a much more pernicious influence on societies than your nice heaven for nice people fantasy would suggest. Creationists and IDers, for example, trying to get religion into science classrooms. The "all fertilized eggs are 'babies' crowd", like GW Bush, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of fertilized eggs fail to be born due not to act of humans, but due to the way human fertilization works. That gang, devoted to fighting against stem cell research no matter how many birthed sentient humans suffer because of their actions. Muslim extremists, their version of heaven is their under- lying motivation for mass murder. Crusaders, religion as motivation for war, and mass murder. The inquisition, perhaps you've heard of it, motivation for imprisonment, torture, and murder. Witchhunts, not the modern type, no, the type that occurred in Europe (and a bit, in America) where women were ac- cused, and/or imprisoned, and/or tortured, and/or murdered. Shiites and Sunni, all the warring going on right now, moti- vated by, you guessed it, religion. Protestants and Catholics, until recently in modern day Ire- land, and in the past, in Europe, war / torture / murder, the cause? Religion. Open up so-called holy documents, and you'll find positive and negative, but the negative, so intensely anti-human, it's difficult for rational, logical, and reasonable individuals to deal with the negative as if it's just or ignore it as if it's irre- levant, and accept the positive as if that's all religion is about. Clearly, as seen from the brief examples above, there's a lot more than mere heaven fantasies going on with religion, and that's why I oppose it, in its current form, as practiced by billions on the planet. - - - end excerpts - - - - - - |
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