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22nd May 2013

Link reblogged from BIRDS BIRDS BIRDS with 621 notes

trees are harlequins, words are harlequins: quoms: new atheism needs to be analysed as a religious movement... →

blurds:

nostalgebraist:

quoms:

new atheism needs to be analysed as a religious movement because that is what it is

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I don’t think of myself as a “new atheist” and I agree with a lot of the common criticisms of the movement.  But I, too, lack the ability to understand why people are religious.  I can understand the appeal of the numinous, I just don’t understand why people believe rather than just yearn…

I think I do understand why people are religious, or at least I understand why belief in italics is a generally positive thing for a brain to do.  Belief at its best short-circuits or undercuts a number of time-wasting brain activities (self-obsession, fear of death, paralytic indecision) and encourages some good ones (motivation, empathy.)   There’s biological evidence that belief occurs within a particular part of the brain - it lights up when people talk to god! - and I think there are sound evolutionary reasons both individual and cultural to assume that it’s wired in to most of us. 

We humans are good at hacking ourselves - motivation is a limited resource, and so we hijack our needs (for food, sex, power, company, authority) and use them to build cathedrals and civilizations.   Not everyone experiences these motivations in the same way, of course, and not everyone uses them for the same ends.  Things that make people act crazy are a) dangerous and b) essential for the survival of our species in the face of a meaningless universe, and it’s important that we treat them as vital, if perilous, resources.

Whatever makes god talk is not loud in my brain and I tend to attach that voice to people (disastrously), art (embarrassingly) and birds (spectacularly.)    But I hear it enough that I think I get why religious people do that thing they do; and, even though I don’t believe there is a god, and I don’t think there’s much of a chance that I’m wrong about that, radical atheists can suck m’balls.  

Source: quoms