|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Born believers: How your brain creates God | |||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
The study with the children echo as much. Show me a child that has an inate notion of the Christian God without someone teaching it to them at an early age. I know not one. Religious faith is preceded by indoctrination. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
I did read the Bible. That is self-indoctrination. I am saying that if one is never exposed to God either through religious training by one's friends or family and/or reading the Bible (or any other religious scripture) than one will never believe in a Christian God or any other God for that matter. One is not born with an innate understanding of religion one must either learn it through some source on their own or be taught it to them or both. 9/10 it is the third option, children learn it early in life though some adults become Christians (replace Christian with any other religion) later in life through there own reading of the Bible (or any other religious scripture). It is not innate though. One is not born believing in God or religion. Babies are born atheists (not believing in God), it must be taught to them or learned through self study later in life as you have demonstrated. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
I was drawn to 'The Rats' by James Herbat as a kid because the grown ups were reading it. I will have to read that. Of course the fictional but much researched 'Lord of the Flies' is also a good case study of the behavior of feral children IMO. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
The human brain even at a very young age can learn the distinction between real and not real. However, even the oldest among of us can be easily fooled, hense the popularity of optical illusions, the occult, paranormal phenomena and the like.
BTW, I have a 4 year old daughter, who is an only child and does not go to preschool or day care. She is very imaginative and just for the sake of having someone to play with has dozens of imaginary friends (mainly dolls and stuffed animals). However she knows the difference between real and imaginary. She knows these imaginary friends are not real. She knows that cartoon animals really can't talk. Though she still believes in Santa Claus, mainly because the barrage of "realistic" Santa Claus movies at Christmas and he looks like a real person (and we are not so heartless to tell her he is not real). Some things are better to let them figure out for themselves. Both for Santa Claus and for God. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
Meant exactly what it says. I had put forth that because of the different atheist that had said they believed in God at an early age but when they got older they did not believe in God. That: "IT SEEMED" a person has to learn to not believe in God. That does not address when or why they believed in God to begin with. Just that they did and had ceased to do so. If my assumption is incorrect please point out where I went wrong.
So in totallity this is actually what is happening: 1. A baby is born a clean slate from which all beliefs are learned after they are born including religious beliefs i.e. the belief in God. 2. Some children are indoctrinate early in life with religious beliefs. Others grow up in nonreligious homes and later learn religion on there own. 3. Some people will maintain there religious beliefs there entire life but this belief may evolve to a greater or lesser degree or may stay relatively the same. Some people will chuck religion all together later in life and some people who were never had religious beliefs in the first place will mantain there nonreligious worldview Either way, when a human is born they are not born with an innate belief in God. It has to be acquired later in life. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
I had put forth that because of the different atheist that had said they believed in God at an early age but when they got older they did not believe in God. Like myself. I also believed in Santa Claus at one time.
"IT SEEMED" a person has to learn to not believe in God. And a person has to learn to believe in God in the first place. Your point? We all go through life evolving in our beliefs and knowledge.
That does not address when or why they believed in God to begin with. But you agree that a baby does not believe in God, correct? So a young child has to learn somehow to believe in God before he or she can later reject that belief. Is that not correct?
If my assumption is incorrect please point out where I went wrong. You can believe anything you want. However whether these beliefs in any way reflects reality is what I am trying to discern. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
Hi ICANT,
ICANT writes: Myself writes: But you agree that a baby does not believe in God, correct? So a young child has to learn somehow to believe in God before he or she can later reject that belief. Is that not correct? Here is my statement in Message 4. I believe it is the spirit part of mankind that has a vaccumn that nothing can fill but God. I also believe a person can come to the point that he can not hear in his mind that vaccumn say fill me, because the mind has been filled with natural things. I'll take that as no, that is a baby does not believe in God but does have the capacity to in the future believe in God. Let me know if I am misinterpreting you on this as you kind of dodged around my question and your answer didn't really answer my question directly (I didn't ask about filling some spiritual vaccuum). So if a baby does not believe in God but does have the capacity to (this is what I infer from your statments), then that child has to LEARN to believe in God, either on there own or through indoctrination by someone else. Correct?? Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
ICANT writes: I believe if it were possible to perform an experiment with a male and a female baby where they were totally isolated from the world on an island, they would grow up believing in a God. This may or may not be true depending on how you define the term "god". However, I would venture that it is sociologically/psychologically impossible for one human being in one generation to develop a monotheistic belief in a creator God on par of the Jewish/Christian God with no previous exposure/cultural transmission of religious beliefs.
But that would explain why we have never discovered a people who were isolated from the world that did not believe in some kind of a God. You are wrong. The Pirah tribe of the Amazon have no concept of God(s) or religion, though they do have a primitive form of belief called animism (human like "spirits" inhabit living and nonliving tangible things to make things animate/move). They did not worship or pray to these "spirits" but just believed them to exist to help explain their view of the world. The only purpose of these spirits is to explain why things were animate (moved), thats it. They were not considered supernatural (as everything to them was natural) and they were not considered anything like our definition of god(s). This belief is common among primitive unexposed cultures that have very little cultural transmission from one generation to the next and no exposure to cultures outside there own (up until the present day). Here is an excerpt from Dr. Daniel Everett, a linguist professor at Illinois State University and one time missionary who has studied the Pirah for over 30 years stated this:
Dr. Everett writes: I sat with a Pirah once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just always were here. They have no concept of God. They have individual spirits, but they believe that they have seen these spirits, and they believe they see them regularly. In fact, when you look into it, these aren't sort of half-invisible spirits that they're seeing, they just take on the shape of things in the environment. They'll call a jaguar a spirit, or a tree a spirit, depending on the kinds of properties that it has. "Spirit" doesn't really mean for them what it means for us, and everything they say they have to evaluate empirically. This is what I hadn't been doing, and this challenged the faith that I thought I had, to the extent that I realized that it wasn't honest for me to continue to claim to believe these things when I realized how little investigation I had done into the nature of the things I claimed to believe. You can read more about Dr. Everett here: Recursion and Human Though: Why the Piraha Do Not Have Numbers BTW, other cultures/religions that are atheist include Buddhism and Taoism amongst others. Religion does not have to incorporate a belief in god(s).
ICANT writes: When people came to America they found tribes of Indians who had no Bibles yet worshiped the Great Spirit up in the happy hunting grounds. Why did they do that? It is only through thousands of years of human psychological and social evolution that humans have gone from: a. acognitive (lack of thought/rationalization) i.e. an animals lack of higher cognition needed to develop a system of religious beliefb. animism/totemism (belief in human-like spirits which inhabit both living and non-living things) c. polytheism d. monotheism However, even if your statement were true, would this supernatural being/entity be anything like the Jewish/Christian God of the Bible? I would have to say that would be a resounding NO. There is no way I can see that you can prove this to be absolutely true. Your historical examples i.e. the American Indians, etc only show how religious beliefs have evolved through time and have been culturall transmitted/evolved from one generation to the next. Even so, would you consider an American Indian a Christian and saved? Would he/she go to heaven without believing in Jesus? For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
CS writes: Myself writes: It is only through thousands of years of human psychological and social evolution that humans have gone from:a. acognitive (lack of thought/rationalization) i.e. an animals lack of higher cognition needed to develop a system of religious belief b. animism/totemism (belief in human-like spirits which inhabit both living and non-living things) Gosh. That's an awefully big step, dontcha think? How many points do you think there are between a and b here? Having taken some cultural anthropology and visiting similar cultures, my understanding is that what modern Christian/Western World think of as spirits and that of primitive cultures is two totally different things. Many of these cultures did not see these "spirits" as supernatural but rather natura phenomena that caused animate objects to move i.e. trees, stars, animals, etc. Early animism did not consist of religious practices i.e. praying, worshiping; later more evolved religious beliefs did. Once humanoids were capable of attempting to comprehending the world around them, they used whatever tools and previous learning to attempt to understand why things behaved the way they did. Thus they may have asked? Why do things move i.e. animals, the sun, the moon, etc. Since they themselves moved than they thought that these other animate things must be powered by these same thing that animates them like some type of life force aka "spirit". For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
Buz writes: Myself writes: Show me a child that has an inate notion of the Christian God without someone teaching it to them at an early age. I know not one. Religious faith is preceded by indoctrination. I never head a sermon, read or heard a Bible verse or darkened the door of a church until I was in the 3rd grade at about age 8. However, there was a time before we moved to town and were taken to a church when my bother, sister and I prayed. My parents were gone for the evening and we three were left home. My brother and I did something we never did before or since. We streaked through the house with our pants off. My sister did not participate but saw us. After we went to bed, my sister said we should pray. We all prayed and asked God to forgive us.
Would you have believed in God much less prayed if you were never taken to church or exposed to Christianity in the first place?
That was it. That alone was all I had experienced relative to God relative to anything. It was not until we moved to town and were taken to a local Baptist church by our new neighbors that we were exposed to anything Biblical. It only took one time of meeting Santa Claus at the mall at the age of 2 1/2 for my daughter to believe that Santa Claus really existed. This is reinforced after watch many of a Santa Claus movies on tv and family members reenforcing this belief. So how is this any different than your experience about God?
My point is that we three all were convicted of God that we were sinners. No, Buddhists do not believe they are sinners. Many adherants of other religions do not believe they are sinners as defined by the Bible. Fallible yes, sinners no.
This was my first experience of an awareness of God. I believe God heard our prayers and effected our eventual coming to the place where we were ministered of the gospel and became Christians by receiving Jesus, the savior. To this day our whole family which grew to six children remain faithful to God as Christians and survive our godly parents who have since deceased to await the resurrection when we will all be united in Heaven What I am saying is that if child grows up with zero exposure to the Bible, they will never believe in the God of the Bible until they are exposed to it. You were exposed and as a result you latched onto that religion. Nothing wrong with that, but it is a lie to claim that all humans have some sort of innate knowledge of God when they are born. They do not. How do I know? I have a 4 year old daughter. Even after she began coherently talking at about age 1 1/2 it wasn't until about 3 1/2 to 4 that she really started talking about God. Her knowledge of God comes from her mother and her taking her to church. How do I know? She repeats verbatim exactly the same phrases her mother and her grandmother tell her i.e. God created everything, God created us, God loves us. If my daughter was raised strictly in an atheist home who never talked about God, she would not be talking like this. Only when exposed i.e. at school, on tv, etc would that child even learn to know what the concept of God was about. How do I know this? My sister and her husband are pretty much agnostic atheists. There son never talks about God or religion. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
ICANT writes: Myself writes: The Pirah tribe of the Amazon have no concept of God(s) or religion, though they do have a primitive form of belief called animism (human like "spirits" inhabit. If I am wrong why do they believe in any kind of spirits? I explained it in my previous post, but to reiterate: What the Pirah call spirits and what Western culture calls spirits are two totally different things. The Pirah define spirits as what causes animate matter to move i.e. humans, animals, plants, the wind, water, sun, moon, etc. These "spirits" are physical manifestations of real objects and animals, not the ephemeral, ghost-like entities as described by modern mystics and paranormal enthusiasts.
As far as the Pirah have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. Like everything else in their world view, their belief in spirits is drawn from direct experience. Everett writes: They believe in spirits, though these are not the same kinds of spirits in other cultures. These "spirits" can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things. Everett writes: Moreover, the Piraha tell no creation myths and don't make up stories or draw pictures. They believe in spirits that they directly encounter at times, "but there's no great god who created all the spirits, in the Piraha view" Everett says. Anytime a being has enough intelligence to begin to comprehend the world around them, they are going to use known concepts i.e. human-like "spirits" to attempt to explain the unknown "why do things move?". The Pirah understand that they (humans) move, so therefore whatever is making them move, behave, speak, etc must also be what makes other things in their world move as well. This concept of relating known phenomena (or what they thought they know) to unknown phenomena is why religion reigned human belief thousands of years before scientific reasoning and logic really took hold. A good quote to describe this concept is this:
Aldous Huxley writes: You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. ICANT writes: The Buddist that I know have a little Budda statue who has a special place in the house and nobody desecrates that space. He is God. How are you defining the term "god"?
ICANT writes: myself writes: Even so, would you consider an American Indian a Christian and saved? Would he/she go to heaven without believing in Jesus? It doesn't make any difference what I think. But you brought up the statement that American Indians believe a Great Spirit of the Happy Hunting Grounds as part of a defense that all humans have some type of innate belief in God. If the belief in this spirit is not accepted by God as being the same as believing in himself and Jesus and thus the American Indians are not saved than your point is moot. BTW, not all American Indians believe in this "Great Spirit up in the happy hunting grounds". The religious beliefs of American natives are as varied as there cultures. In fact there religious beliefs and rituals were one and the same with there culture. The Inuit (Eskimos) believed in an underwater goddess named Sedna who was part human and part fish, as well as a host of other deities who were the masters of different kinds of artic animals. The Lakota and Dakota believed in a single spiritual force (but not a single divine being) called Wakan-Tanka. Some Native Americans believed in reincarnation and coming back as animals, others believed that the after-life consisted of coming back as spirits. Different tribes had different accounts of Creation (both of the world and of humans). The Great Spirit of the Happy Hunting Grounds was only believed by some not all of American natives i.e. the American Indians of the Great Plains area but I think it is a far stretch to equate these two as being the same supernatural entity (at least in beliefs and practice).
ICANT writes: God is the judge and I believe He is a just Judge so I will leave their eternal destiny in His hands just as I left my eternal destiny in His hands. Why should I try to put limits on God and tell Him what to do and not to do there is enough religious people and atheist doing that already. Nobody can put limits on God. If they could they would be God. Ok, so you are taking an agnostic position on the salvation of the American Indians who believe in the Great Spirit (or any other parallel beliefs). I have no problem with that however I would like to see the parallelism between the God of the Bible and the Great Spirit of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : Correct spelling For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
Buz writes: Perhaps my message was ambiguous. What I meant to say is that before we moved to town and became exposed to something Biblical, my sister, brother and myself had a prayer session in our country house to whom we regarded as God. We were genuinely convicted by some power of sinful acts which we had done. After having learned about the power of the Holy Spirit I am convinced in my own mind that it was that spirit of God which had convicted us as ignorant children. What we call conscience may be have a bearing on that spiritual power. Sorry, call me a liar but I do not believe that you had some innate, inborn knowledge of God and how to pray without first having some exposure to prayer and God in the first place. You may have learned it at school, as at that time prayer was incorporated into schools. Even when I was a child back in the 1970's in the South, prayers were said over the loud speaker in the morning in my school. I trust you were not born in China. America is not a vacuum of Christianity. It is all over the place, and probably more so when you were a child. It would have been pretty easy for you to pick up bits and pieces of the Christian faith in American society at the time. Babies and infants have no knowledge of God or prayer until they learn it through the example or indoctrination by other people. Otherwise why would not children all around the world be believers in the Christ and God of the Bible when they turn 8 years old. Your logic is screwy. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
ICANT writes: Anything you put your trust in. Like your God. Typical Christian platitude. In this case science is your god. Your parents are your god. Your granparents are your god. Friends are your god. Your federal, state and local government is your god. The police and emergency services is your god. Doctors are your god. Teachers are your god. Pastors are your god. Even your dog can be your god. Society in general is your god. Trust is doled out in the shovel fulls across human society.
ICANT writes: You trust completely in your intelligence. Thus your God. And you trust your intelligence that you are right and I am wrong about your faith. So where does this get us? Nowhere. If you can't provide evidence to back up your claims and are using emotion and irrational claims to back it up, than you are comitting a logical fallacy called Special Pleading. Please correct me if I am wrong ICANT. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
ICANT writes: Anything you put your trust in. Like your God. You trust completely in your intelligence. Thus your God. To ammend my previous statements about you considering that anyone can take the place of God, I would like to steal a line from the movie "The Incredibles": Syndrome/Buddy states the following when he threatens to release his superhuman "incredible" technology: "When everyone is incredible...then NOBODY will be." The same can be said of god. If everyone can be considered a god, than NOBODY will be.
ICANT writes: They couldn't help it if down through the years there were no fundies to keep the correct story before them so their belief had degenerated to what they had. God is a Great Spirit.Heaven to the Indian would be a hunting grounds. So they worshiped a Great Spirit that had a Paradise for them. Can you provide some historical evidence to back up this unsubstantiated claim that American Native spiritualism evolved from Judaism/Christianity? Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
DevilsAdvocate Member (Idle past 3302 days) Posts: 1548 Joined: |
Though I don't remember of my teachers praying in school or of my early school teachers advocating Christianity, likely there were references to God in some of the text books or history lessons relative to the founding fathers. In some of he patriotic songs and things like the Pledge of Allegiance there were references to God but not to the point that I had a particular awareness of them. Most of the stories were things like Dick, Jane & Spot or fairy tales, etc. At Christmas it was all Santa. Certainly prayer or Bible reading was neither in the school or home in my experience. I never heard the term "born again" until I heard it in church. We lived in the country in Wyoming and I never experienced a flush toilet until the 2nd grade, though the year before we moved to town our home had a flush toilet. The one room schoolhouse had a wood pot belly stove and an outhouse. All 8 grades were taught in the school house. When we moved to town that all changed. That was during grade 3. I don't remember of prayer in our home before we went to church. There was a little prayer I prayed before bed time as a child, but to the best of my recollection that was after we began going to church. It was the one, "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." ....or something like that. Ok, Buz, I am not going to go round and round with you on this. You believe what you want to believe. That is fine. I just agree to disagree. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Dr. Carl Sagan
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024