Re:Why do people believe in God?
« Reply #15 on: 2003-07-02 19:40:37 »
I now have confirmation of my "insufficient education" hypothesis. Quote:
Once a student believes the state-mandated theory of evolution, that person is statistically likely to become a liberal voter and an agnostic or atheist. It’s no mystery why some seek to require the teaching of evolution. What is a mystery is why we allow it.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
you have been FnoRded, may the farce be with you..
Re:Why do people believe in God?
« Reply #17 on: 2003-07-29 15:44:44 »
not that i am some kind of theological expert, but most people find strength in their religion.
i propose a different approach though. it is not their religion that helps them. rather it is their faith that aids them. this makes the phemomena a lot more universal instead of practical for one religion or another. i'll do you one further as well. it also extends the phenomena to those without a religion to speak of. such as no denomenationists, agnostics, atheists, Satanists [i speak of left hand path LaVey type satanists...if you aren't quite sure what that is, visit http://www.churchofsatan.org and check out the faq, the 11 laws od the earth, the 9 sins and the 9 statements of satanism...see what it really is], etc...
these people refuse to blatently believe in a god or any other such, because no one religion has proved to have the miricle monopoly. or simply because they are capable of seeing the flaws of any given religion. whatever the reason these people do not cling to a theist religion. yet they encounter 'miraculous' happenings in there lives: for a satanist, it may be a successful curse or self empowering spell; for an agnostic or atheist, it could be something more tangible and more likely to go unnoticed...
but, why does this happen for them? is it coincidence? perhaps. or perhaps it's manifestation of will. after all, we scientifically and medically know so very little about the brain, and there is still a good deal of genetics to explain (the seemingly unnecessary "junk DNA" sequences for example), so why couldn't it be possible that their faith is what does it for them?
now now, you'll probably say that a satanist probably doesn't have much faith, and agnostics aren't sure if they have faith or not...and atheists don't have faith at all...and you'd be right. they don't have faith...faith in the typical sense at least. but they do have faith none the less. a satanist has faith in the self, an agnostic or an atheist usually has faith in the abilities of reason and the such. while these aren't the typical types of faith, they are, in every way that counts, forms of faith.
and faith has an unexpected result on many people. a satanist who's spell apparently worked; a christian that prays for an illness to go away, which in time does go away; an agnostic's/atheist's faith that reason will lead him to the path of sanity, etc... faith works. in this respect, faith is simply and intuitive form of "mind over matter," but none the less works well.
we have also observed the opposite in "faith." a person can believe strongly that something bad will happen, and it usually will. another case of mind over matter. say, for example, that a person has a big test coming up. they worry the whole time that they are goiong to fail the test. they worry about it in class, they worry while they study, and eventually that worry creates a pattern in their intuitive subconscious, causing them to preform poorly on their test.
or other type of such negative thinking causing similar effects in the person's life. in fact, this is the basic principal of magick from a psychological standpoint. if you can cause yourself or someone to believe or have faith that a certain thing will happen pertaining to yourself or them, it will likely happen to yourself/them.
anton lavey calls it the "intellectual decompression chamber," as this is an aspect of the self that pertains to the intuitive and emotional side of a person's being. often times people try to consciously make something happen by force of their will, or they'll try to consciously intuit something, but they'll try to do so through an intellectual and logical means. but when you try to mix logic and intuition, intellect and emotion, things don't really work out so well.
this is perhaps why so many of us "heretics," us virians, us atheists, and us agnostics and the such view religious people from a standpoint of idiocy (their idiocy, i should say). the fact is, though, that they aren't automatically idiots because they believe such-and-such, but rather, they are more reliant on their intuition than their reasoning abilities. as is usually the case, they were raised that way, making any other mode of existence unimaginable for them. or they have just been that way for so long that any other mode of existence is unimaginable because they have forgotten how to exist that way. it's a type of brainwashing, i suppose one could say. but then, were one to venture so far, they could just as easily make the same report of those that rely solely (or mostly) on their reasoning and their intellect.
true, we may generally here at virus value intellect more than emotion, but emotion as well as emotional reactions are just as vital to our existence. take for example Fight or Flight. you do not intellectually weigh the factors that would cause you to stay and "fight" or run away in "flight", rather you intuitively weigh the factors. you don't stand there and think "there is a huge frickin semi truck heading straight for me. should i step out of the way? or perhaps i could defeat the truck by standing here and refusing to move. it may cause me bodily harm to do so though. and if i run, i may be thought a coward if i could have defeated the truck...(etc...)" one does not do that for a simple reason: if one thought it out as far as "there's a huge frickin semi truck..." one would probably be incapable of following through with the rest of that thought, as one would be DEAD. so you simply intuit the resonse and act accordingly, instinctively jumping out of the way.
the general problem with most people's preception of one or the other (as most people are usually mostly intuitive or mostly intellectual) is that they see that person denying the one to enrich the other, not noticing that they are doing the same thing, only in reverse.
shamanic medicine and herbal folk medicine. how was it discovered? did the shamans and the druids and the other various witch doctors of the old tribal paganistic culturs go by trial and error, probably killing or at least making ill a good deal of people before they found herbs that produced a desired homeopathic effect? doubtful, otherwise the people who relied upon them would have lost faith in them and stopped going to them. rather, they were usually discovered because (i suspect) the shaman had somehow experianced such a problem him or herself, and whiole being more intuitive than the average person, was more intune (so to speak) with his/her own body and the things surrounding it.
when you are such intune with your body, you can sense what your body is calling out for (once again, so to speak). usually, today, people call it a craving. "i have a craving for chocolate" a depressed girl might say, intuitively knowing that chocolate has a chemical reaction similar to antidepressants. "i crave a nice fresh salad" another might say, subconsciously noting that they are low in iron and carbohydrates. and thusly did a good deal of modern medicine evolve. of course, the secular and more intellectual people in today's medicine practice have reverse engineered the process, finding out what chemicals in the herbs etc.. produce the desired chemical reaction in the body, thereby making concentrated and more controlled doseages of that chemical and mass marketing it.
science and, yes, even logic were discorvered in similar ways. we've always had logic, intuitively, but eventually someone reverse engineered their intuitive logical process, and started to discover the "rules" of logic.
what i am saying, in surmise, is that people believe in a god of some sort because they are usually more intuitive, and they nead some symbolic representation and manifestation of the source of their intuition. there is usually some correlation between god (s) and the people that worship them too. example, lots of christians are really actually decent people, as they have seemeingly entered into more of a "new testiment" state of mind...but the "old testiment" christians, from the 1600's and earlier i mean, were far more vengeful and agressive, launching the crusades and the inquisitions, raping pillaging and plundering, killing people who believed differently and would not convert...etc...notice how the old testiment depiction of god is wrathful and agressive to those who disobey him or run contrary to his will? though in the new testiment he is the new, kind loving god.
god is a diefied image of the self or of what the self wants to be, and people of a more intuitive nature use that image as a symbolic source of their intuition in order to focus their faith and produce what are commonly called miracles. this is, while probably not the only or the most conscious reason, a very strong psychological reason that people are theists in some manner.
If I understood that correctly (not to nag, but here's one vote for bringing back capital letters, since it's hard on my eyes otherwise), what you're proposing is that everyone has a sort of intrinsic spiritual sense, which doesn't directly imply specific systems of belief. That jives pretty well with the Boyeristic template-violation fascination I mentioned earlier.
So some people find they can specialize in interpreting these spiritual feelings we have. In complex societies organized groups of these purveyors of spiritual interpretation win the competition against individual shamans for people's subscription. They win, of course, not just by virtue of organization, but by developing more consistent and fulfilling explanations of the world than their competitors. In many cases monopolies are established - such as Catholicism in pre-Lutheran Europe.
To digress, I wonder if we were better off in the monopoly days. Sure, if there's only one church around, it has lots of power to do bad things, like suppress the rise of science, but then it unifies people rather than dividing them. Of course, it did help to unify crusaders against the Saracens... but if there were only one denomination in the world, what would happen? What if there were no infidels to begin with?
Digression aside, what does everyone think of the above as a brief history of world religion?
you have been FnoRded, may the farce be with you..
Re:Why do people believe in God?
« Reply #20 on: 2003-07-30 15:42:54 »
thanks for the eloboration and consise interpretation. i've appologized before, and i'll do so one more time for posterity: i know i have a habit of making rather long posts sometimes, but i suppose that derives from all those "3 hours til class, have to churn out an essay" sleepless nights. forgive me if the length annoys anyone (not the content though).
but, even when the Catholic church had the Xian monopoly in Pre-Lutheran Europe, there were still the various Pagans, as well as a rising number of Muslims. though i understand your arguement.
i suspect that in a world where there was one and only one "religion" that in time (because of people's need for individuality, or perhaps through another step in social/emotional evolution), there would be some sort of dissent in the doctrine and theology, and a "cult" would spring up, timidly at first, and then gaining vast popularity among others who were seeking a similar sense of individuality, but lacked the means and the ability to create it themselves.
my friend who's trying to break into video game concept design wrote a story line for one of his RPG's (called "Heart Land", i'm not allowed to divuldge much on it due to secrecy issues, but i can give a hint to the plot)...in the near future, scientists discover that Magick is real, through science, and they find ways to scientifically employ it on command. they also discover (somehow) that all the mythical creatures and all the mythical gods of old civilizations are indeed real, and that they all come from the same source (a bit like Zoroaster's teachings to the mediterranians, there was one "Supreme" god, and all other gods were lesser gods, demons and angels, etc...).
from this (in the game) developes a One World Religion that everyone follows and there is Utopia on Earth. of course, the rest of the game is a secret, but you don't need to be a genius to know that that doesn't last forever in the game (otherwise, where would the game be? what about marketability? you need some sort of conflict to have an RPG)...
well, i shall retire from my ranting for now... thanks again, nameste, athenonrex