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Funny comment of the week.

by senectus1 2y ago

justinclift 2y ago
Oh, it'd be great if they did. Seriously. :)
- senectus1 2y ago
  more seriously though, why isolate religion. it should be a study of "belief". I dont think anyone would honestly argue that religion isn't a belief, and if it is then it sits in the same area as flat earthers and 9/11 truthers and Andrew Tate devotees etc etc. Belief is the nurological architecture that people are building on.
  - angrygoat 2y ago
    There's a tendency for Westerners to view every religion through the lens of protestant Christianity. Religion is a notoriously hard to define concept (this was the running joke of a sociology of religion unit I took at university; each week we'd look to another attempt to define it.) The idea that it's all about 'belief', some confession of fact-statements, is very much from that protestant Christian understanding, a post-Enlightenment focus on words. The boundaries between religion, culture, language, myth and storytelling, reflection.. these are all extremely porous and vary widely. It looks to me that the researchers in the article are aware of this. Brent Nongbri's book "Before Religion" is excellent on all of this. (Full disclosure, I'm an Anglican [Episcopalian in the US] priest)
  - Animats 2y ago
    There's a neurological argument that overgeneralizing cause from effect has survival benefits. There will be a high false alarm rate for tigers in moving grass, but that's a win if, sometimes, there really is a tiger. This leads to a tendency to assign causes for random events. That in turn leads to various belief systems not justified by the evidence. Wikipedia has some notes in this area.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion
    - Timwi 2y ago
      It has always struck me as odd that when this example is recited, the animal of choice is always a tiger. The situation is supposed to play out in very early prehistory during the evolution of humanity. That evolution occurred in the savannahs of Africa, where there are no tigers.

Funny comment of the week.

justinclift 2y ago

Oh, it'd be great if they did. Seriously. :)

senectus1 2y ago
more seriously though, why isolate religion. it should be a study of "belief". I dont think anyone would honestly argue that religion isn't a belief, and if it is then it sits in the same area as flat earthers and 9/11 truthers and Andrew Tate devotees etc etc. Belief is the nurological architecture that people are building on.
- angrygoat 2y ago
  There's a tendency for Westerners to view every religion through the lens of protestant Christianity. Religion is a notoriously hard to define concept (this was the running joke of a sociology of religion unit I took at university; each week we'd look to another attempt to define it.) The idea that it's all about 'belief', some confession of fact-statements, is very much from that protestant Christian understanding, a post-Enlightenment focus on words. The boundaries between religion, culture, language, myth and storytelling, reflection.. these are all extremely porous and vary widely. It looks to me that the researchers in the article are aware of this. Brent Nongbri's book "Before Religion" is excellent on all of this. (Full disclosure, I'm an Anglican [Episcopalian in the US] priest)
- Animats 2y ago
  There's a neurological argument that overgeneralizing cause from effect has survival benefits. There will be a high false alarm rate for tigers in moving grass, but that's a win if, sometimes, there really is a tiger. This leads to a tendency to assign causes for random events. That in turn leads to various belief systems not justified by the evidence. Wikipedia has some notes in this area.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion
  - Timwi 2y ago
    It has always struck me as odd that when this example is recited, the animal of choice is always a tiger. The situation is supposed to play out in very early prehistory during the evolution of humanity. That evolution occurred in the savannahs of Africa, where there are no tigers.