spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Your inability to make sense of it doesn't concern me very much.
Folly of blaming all evils on religion
- Thread starter Light Travelling
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Positive reinforcement yes absolutely, the same experiments have been done on humans wih same results. And in a way all animals learn like that to degrees.
Analogous to superstition, no its not.
There is reason behind positive reinforcement, superstition is an irrational thought process.
Note. . Irrational is not necessarily a bad thing, our ability for irrational thought seems to have given us an evolutionary edge.
you may not think we do... but we do of course. Because humans are not distinct from nature. We are part of nature.
Morality changes on a whim anyway. Animal instinct is the only real morality. When our own lives, family, hunger and shelter is threatened we behave differently than our intellectual morals would otherwise dictate.
look at plane crash survivors and what they sometimes do to survive. Different behaviour than they would ever condone from a Florida suburb. Soldiers in war become different people... out of necessity.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
How Skinner's pigeon experiment revealed signs of superstition in pigeons.
http://www.psychologistworld.com/superstition.php
So there are no immoral ideologies, because there is no morality. Got it.
Wow.. you serious.
so some caged animals starved to anorexia exhibit walking in circular movements around the cage and engage in heading nodding i.e rocking back and forth.
All caged animals and humans end up walking in circles and rocking head back and forth. It's a sign of mental illness.! In 2015 we know that.
In 1947 apparently they didn't. Mind you they still had smoking beagles then. These experiments would be judged cruel and illegal today.
This is the worst piece of science I have ever seen.
there are morals. .. but natural ones. And not all bad.
take the courageous act of self sacrifice, or the ethics of protecting women and children from warfare.
well just look at a heard of bison when attacked by wolves. They get in a group women and children at centre men on outside.
then one bull in a heroic act charges the wolves.... All human behaviour is there. We just try to dress it up as a false set of morals.
when there is plenty of space and food we live in peace as animals do. When food and space get in short supply we fight for it, as animals do.
Words can be used to heal and to destroy. It is the person in charge that can have people become more understanding and tolerant or start wars to get their POV across.
None of them said Macbeth backstage either.. I guess they really are superstitious then.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
An ideology isn't a person.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
OK, you are immune to the methods of science. Is it even worth continuing?
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/
But we do bad things to people regardless of being hungry or needing space. We do it because we believe in things without evidence. We do it because of religion.
But it only seems like that when we don't fully appreciate the role of religion. I have been trying to explain..... as I said this is not a defence of religion.
try this, leaders of groups whether animal or human have got their tribes to do things.. mainly from the primal response - from fear. The sliver back gorilla rules as he can wup anyone's ass who does not obey. Same with wolves same with humans. But you can only excerpt so much influence with brute force alone and there is only so much that can be achieved with that.
So this is where human's evolutionary edge comes in. The ability to imagine.... abstract thought. And from that we can influence (fear) much larger groups of people and motivate them to do much greater things - discover continents, build cities.
but the underlying driver is still food and space. Religion is just the tool that helps us do it.
It is just a bit more abstract than what the silver back gorilla does.
We may not need space and food as individuals. But as a society... as a species we do. Hence we keep expanding
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Yes, it's a tool for social control, you could even say cohesion. I'm not saying it's all bad, obviously there was enough of a positive effect for it to last for so long, but it's bad enough that it doesn't outweigh the good. And it will be increasingly ineffective when reason is embraced as superior to faith.
Yeah maybe it has run its course. I don't think we will see a massive difference in good and bad done in the world when it does eventually die out though.
And due to our nature, not sure if humans will be able to resist replacing it with something else similar (other than reason)
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Reason isn't exactly winning these days. But I think a reduction in religiously inspired violence would make a huge difference. Ethnically inspired violence would be next. And nationalism. It's a long road.
Nationalism is the one, that and xenophobia.
Religion was not created by mankind .
Religion came about by the evidence of higher intelligent beings in our ancient history . Sumarian writings of these beings .
They influenced thinking upon a very simple people , they were at that time in our history , very uneducated , hence imagined these beings as " gods " . What else would they think .
It was the presence of these beings that created religion not mankind .
By your own admission religion is a creation of mankind in response to inexplicable phenomenon. Absent any reliable evidence of your proposed higher intelligent beings, we’re left with imagination as the sole basis for man’s creation of religion.
Say, for the sake of argument, you assume the human imagination created religion. Because these products of the imagination are capable of uniting and touching so many people, one can assume that these products of the imagination were induced by the collective unconscious and not the ego. The collective unconscious are the firmware that define human nature.
In other words, we can consciously induce our imagination; fantasy of me flying, but my personal fantasies will not have the power to bind millions of people for hundreds of years, by hitting a resonant cord in their hearts. Imagery of the imagination, with that power, would need to be generated by the personality firmware, so the symbols and images touch everyone, deeply; collective human.
The best works of art are attributed to something much deeper than the ego of the artist; genius. A line of bull, did not paint the Mona Lisa, it was inspiration. Religion has the ability to reach many people, over long a periods of time. They are like works of art that are timeless. Good art can make you feel something, with religion still making the atheist feel all types of negative projections that collectively unites them. It works like art, pro or con. An atheist can get so freak out by religious art, they will demonstrate and complain. While the faithful is so work up, in a different way, they give thanks each day.
That being said, since the collective unconscious would be needed to generated such timeless symbols; inspiration, that can induce collective human emotions, both pro or con, I would infer religions were a natural product of the human psyche designed to unite. They were connected to new behavior firmware that was evolving, as humans evolved willpower and choice. They appeared to consciousness to help to regulate the psyche, so one does not lose the connection to the natural inner self, in favor of unnatural choices of the ego.
The idea of being created by God is consistent with a natural creation within the human psyche connected to the needs of natural human evolution, due to the wild cards called willpower and choice, which can mess up all things natural. Religions tend to regulate the ego and choice in favor of choices that are more natural to the firmware; morality.
In other words, we can consciously induce our imagination; fantasy of me flying, but my personal fantasies will not have the power to bind millions of people for hundreds of years, by hitting a resonant cord in their hearts. Imagery of the imagination, with that power, would need to be generated by the personality firmware, so the symbols and images touch everyone, deeply; collective human.
The best works of art are attributed to something much deeper than the ego of the artist; genius. A line of bull, did not paint the Mona Lisa, it was inspiration. Religion has the ability to reach many people, over long a periods of time. They are like works of art that are timeless. Good art can make you feel something, with religion still making the atheist feel all types of negative projections that collectively unites them. It works like art, pro or con. An atheist can get so freak out by religious art, they will demonstrate and complain. While the faithful is so work up, in a different way, they give thanks each day.
That being said, since the collective unconscious would be needed to generated such timeless symbols; inspiration, that can induce collective human emotions, both pro or con, I would infer religions were a natural product of the human psyche designed to unite. They were connected to new behavior firmware that was evolving, as humans evolved willpower and choice. They appeared to consciousness to help to regulate the psyche, so one does not lose the connection to the natural inner self, in favor of unnatural choices of the ego.
The idea of being created by God is consistent with a natural creation within the human psyche connected to the needs of natural human evolution, due to the wild cards called willpower and choice, which can mess up all things natural. Religions tend to regulate the ego and choice in favor of choices that are more natural to the firmware; morality.
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OK following your line of thought. If that was the case, (which it may well have been). Then the presence of these beings would have been the inspiration for the creation of religion. But the creation itself would still be by men
The constructs of religion, priesthood, ceremony, books etc were all put in place by men.
That remains true whether the inspiration was actual gods, beings from other planets, or simply imagination.
Imagination is an expression of our perception. Whether real time sensory data or long term memory, our neurology to varying degrees is constantly conditioning this information and expressing it accordingly. Be it the hallucinations of a meth addict, the musings of George RR Martin, or the recollections of Brian Williams, the paths to imagination are not limited to a singular psychological construct.
Personal fantasies of flight will not hit a resonate chord in the multitudes? Flying has been a universally imagined theme in the form of dreams and conscious desire throughout recorded history. This preoccupation with flight resonates with some 3 billion people annually who travel by air, not to mention the remaining billions who fantasize about it. Human flight is an example of a product of imagination that went through countless stages of refinement, from ancient supernatural fantasy to the technical reality we experience today. The path for religion or any other subject of imagination is no different, given suitable conditions the associated fantasy and superstition eventually yield to practical understanding and reason.
The idea of being created by God is consistent with refinement of imagination I mentioned above, it endures until it can no longer meet a more reasonable standard.