February 17th 1600

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Religion does not conquer ignorance; it gives ignorance a vocabulary. It survives and coexists with ignorance because it explains ignorance cheaply.

Religion presents itself as ancient, armored, and metaphysically grand, but its vulnerability is embarrassingly biological. It depends on ordinary human cognition: agency detection, pattern hunger, fear of death, attachment, ritual bonding, authority bias, memory distortion, and the craving for narrative closure over the unknown. Modern neuroscience is the spear in religion’s heel. It shows that revelation is not a window into the divine, but a human brain interpreting itself under pressure.

Once belief can be explained by the brain, revelation loses its hiding place. It does not deny the experience of a god’s presence. Rather it provides natural mechanisms by which such experiences can arise without requiring a supernatural source. It shows that inner certainty is a cognitive construction whose compelling character is not evidence of its external truth. Modern science has separated the reality of subjective experience from the truth of the interpretation. It explains the machinery by which religious belief becomes compelling from the inside. It explains why humans are susceptible to belief, and snaps the scaffolding bars that once held revelation above scrutiny.

Religion once hid in the gaps of nature. Now it hides in the gaps of self-understanding. Those gaps are shrinking every day. It is not that “humans are foolish for believing.” It is even worse for religion than that because humans are exactly the kind of animal that would invent religion. And once that is understood, belief stops looking like contact with the divine and starts looking like a predictable output of a vulnerable, pattern-seeking, death-aware primate brain.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

If only there could be a return of Bruno, as well as a return of Bruce Willis to neurological health so he could play Bruno in a movie. (Afficionados of Eighties music will understand the reference.)

Bruce as Bruno could sing to a whole lot of people both then and now the words of The Staple Singers: “Take the sheet off your face, boy, it’s a brand new day!”

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Religion explained the unknown while the unknown was vast. Neuroscience explains why those explanations felt true. As our understanding of the mind grows, revelation is asked to compete not with disbelief, but with explanation.

Hypatia of Alexandria might have said……”If the soul’s visions admit of natural explanation, then let us investigate those explanations without fear. Truth does not diminish when its causes are discovered; it becomes clearer.”

[jakelafort]

Religion is substantively substanceless and its subsistence saturates substantial pockets of stupidity that leak into and support woo and ideology. What else does one need to know except how religion still has a hold over so many? So how the fuck are idiots gonna figure out Magma and Palestinianism are lying to us?

[jakelafort]

Just look at that pic. Chimps with their toys. Dogs trained to be what they become. Give me that old time religion. It is good enough for me.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-903606

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