Critical thinking skills do not come naturally to most people. They can (and should) be taught, but most people have to actively quash a host of instinctive responses in so learning. And some manage to learn critical thinking only in a particular area of speciality; see, for example, the dentists who appear on the “scientific thinkers who reject global climate change research!” lists, or oncologists who subscribe to Intelligent Design, or whatever.
The drive to find cause and effect is only part of the story, I think. More significant is the fact that we have a hyper-sensitive pattern-matching apparatus in our heads, one that inappropriately over-recognizes associations. It’s not enough that we want to understand B-follows-A; rather, it’s that, one time, A happened, and then 12 happened, so our brains instinctively draw a line between them for no reason beyond proximity in spacetime.
As has been observed above (and by others previously), this has benefits and drawbacks. If we notice that when Thag ate the purple berries, he got a stomach ache and went blind three days later, we know we should avoiding eating the purple berries. However, if Thag then loudly cursed the Great Mountain God, and three days later there was a flash flood that wiped out the camp, what conclusion should we draw about how to behave toward the Great Mountain God?
I feel we are underestimating the power of belief in what other people tell us and in the persuasive power of organized religions that over the centuries have been finely tuned to pull our strings.
Believing other people is clearly an important and effective mental quality, so we can’t count it as a defect, but obviously it fails in some situations, particularly when it is not an isolated individual telling us something but virtually everbody around us. Organized religions have added to this by teaching us that:
faith is a virtue - we should be proud of believing without question,
belief in some particular doctrine is a virtue and so anybody disputing it should be regarded as a corrupting influence,
and people have died horribly defending the faith (and Jesus died for our sins), so we are ungrateful if we don’t believe.
In addition wishful thinking comes in (a mental flaw perhaps, but not particularly related to the supernatural) as we are promised eternal life.
This is powerful stuff. It is not thrown aside easily.
There is a very good reason people believe in the spiritual world. That is because we were spiritual before we were physical. Actually we are still spiritual beings inhabiting a human body for a physical experience.
Some people can remember their life in the spiritual world and entering the physical plane. I can remember a small part of mine. There is a web site of these experiences that some of you may find interesting, while others will be too frightened to go there.
There is an email address of the author, he is an acquaintance of mine. We humans are really spiritual and in a quandary of what we are doing here and why.
Every year some of us figure it out and graduate from the school of the physical called planet earth.
On the other hand, while I would (barely) not insist that “organized religion” was redundant, I would hold that religion requires the component of some systematic belief and goes far beyond merely suggesting a group association.
Even if (as I would not) one defines religion as the set of beliefs held by an individual, religion remains the ordered attempt to provide definitions and explanations of phenomena, it is not impulse toward the spiritual that has been proposed by Bloom.
What a load of crap. How anybody could possibly come to the conclusions this author did is a mystery to me. Was she high?
Does this magazine not have an editor?
Still others will recognize that nutty people are often superstitious as well as nutty that they are unable to sort out superstitions from reality. The individualization of supernatural experiences and the myriad varieties of superstitions from ghosts to channeling to life before and after death to magic are proof that they are all internalized meanderings of the mind unrelated to anything that actually happens.
Were there a real alternate reality, so to speak, it would be an identical experience for all.
But do Europeans have other superstitious beliefs? Again, the point is not a predilection for Creationism but the drive to believe in anything supernatural, whether it’s luck, ghosts, religion or magic tricks.
Instead of saying we have a predilection for believing in the supernatural, isn’t it simpler to just say we don’t automatically rule out supernatural claims?
People believe in UFO abductions, bigfoot, cancer cures, perpetual motion machines, and WTC conspiracies, which are highly dubious, but not supernatural. We don’t have to have a special drive to believe supernatural things in order to believe some of them. We just believe false stuff sometimes.
Perhaps they are. Given that many early colonists/immigrants were religious refugees/missionariers/crusaders and the Founder Effect, America may well have ended up with a bigger helping of whatever genes tend to produce strong religiosity. There’s no way to prove it until someone proves those genes are more than theory, of course.
I think it’s not redundant at all, as the term is usually used- at least in my experience. I’ve always heard the term used to refer to the organization of a religion’s believers, not to the organzation of a religion’s beliefs into a system. I always thought it went :
Superstition : Disconnected beliefs based on faith.
Religion : Beliefs based on faith organized into a system and a world view.
Organized Religion : People sharing the same religion ( at least nominally ) who are part of an organization dedicated to that religion.
There is no such thing as identical experience for all. One doesn’t have to be nutty to figure that out. But maybe it helps.
Some people can learn not only from their own experiences, but also from the experiences of others. Millions, nay, billions of people have had personal experience with spiritual realities. I am one of those people.
Only a small minority, about 10%, believe that spiritual events are non-existent.
I know everyone can’t be nutty, some have to be fruity.
That’s a pretty wild hypothesis considering that the early colonists, only some of whom were religious refugees, weren’t fleeing atheist suppressors. They were fleeing other highly religious people who weren’t keen on letting them worship as they pleased. Plus, the vast majority of American immigrants came in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly as economic refugees.
A founder effect stems from a (usually very small) homogeneous population that carries some peculiar set of genes that aren’t especially typical of the original population.
You do now. But when you were a kid, didn’t you avoid stepping on cracks to keep from breaking your mother’s back? I suspect even the most skeptical of us had tons of magic incantations and charms in elementary school. If our elders also believed that stepping on cracks was wrong, don’t you think it would be considered as improper as baring breasts in public?
We connect the dots between actions, and it takes sophisticated statistics to prove these coincidences have no connection in fact.
As for life after death, thinking of your own non-existence is hard. Not surprising at all that this belief is common, religion or no.
For one thing, that means they were people who cared enough about religion to be unwilling to just keep their head down and go through the motions; more religious than average. Also, in a small population it’s easier for a particular gene or collection of them to come to predominance; it doesn’t need to have been massively predominant to begin with.
AFTER the prior arrivals had a chance to breed and establish a new gene pool. And perhaps we’d be even worse about religion without those later waves of immigration.
They suggest that we are spiritual beings before entering the physical world, but then describe the spiritual plane as composed of physical concepts. Darkness is absence of light - radiation which needs physical space to travel through and a physical receiver (the eye) to interpret it as such. They talk of ‘people standing’ in the spiritual realm - physical mammals standing on their physical legs? Charming as the idea of an existence beyond the physical is, if it isn’t constructed from worldly concepts it is inconceivable to the human mind.
I don’t think we have a predilection to believe in the supernatural, specifically, as much as a predilection for sorting events into some kind of coherent pattern, with a conscious purpose behind it. It’s easier to deal mentally with such a pattern than to accept that a) lots of things happen through an accidental combination of effects and b) the Universe just doesn’t care about us, one way or another.
If you are a person who has a real interest in learning about the spiritual world, then I am not the one to teach you. Because I am in the physical, and have the same limitations that you have. My job is to help others understand who they are and how this physical life works, so they can be happier and more peaceful.
I suggest you read the “Seth” books written/channeled by Jane Roberts. Here in these massive books of about one thousand pages each (8 of them) you will find everything you ever wanted to know about the spirit world and probably more than you wanted to know. They are a good read, very well written, books. I can’t remember which one I started with, but “The Eternal Validity of the Soul” is a good place to start.
But, what if there is something about that “gut feeling” being a matter of faith?
Well, one thing I know, is that we have evolved to eat more than we need in a day, evolutionary speaking, it was great to have this instinct because in the far past there was no guarantee that food was going to be there next day, the problem now is that it generates many fat people and the health problems related to being like that.
I see the realization that we are wired to “be creationists” in a similar way, it is not healthy to continuously feed that urge.
More seriously, I do agree with others that mentioned that if it was just faith the reason why we are wired that way, then we should see the same level of creationist thought elsewhere, not just in America.
