Re: Is religion "cultural baggage" or a natural, default way of

From: darth_versive (darth_versive_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/10/04 

Date: 9 Sep 2004 23:21:11 -0700

liger007@msn-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (Matt_D) wrote in message news:<413f6a6c$1_2@127.0.0.1>...
> I personally believe that the "default" is that a child will believe
> whatever is told them, and hopefully you teach them the right thing.
> When I asked my Dad a question like "why is the sky blue?" he
> answered "because of the oxygen in the atmosphere". If I asked a
> question he didn't know the answer to, the book he consulted was
> Encyclopedia Britannica, and I always thanked my Dad for not spewing
> biblical nonsense and instead counting on rational scientific
> explanations for life, the world and all the rest.
> He never talked down about religion, or stopped us from going to
> church over the years for whatever reason, but after learning about
> the world from a scientific perspective, the religious experience
> just wasn't there. To me it seemed obviously false and unappealing.
> Personally I am quite thankful for being unencumbered by ancient
> superstition, and I intend to raise my daughter the same way. She
> will not hear about Adam and Eve when she asks where people came
> from. She will not hear that stories about virgin births, burning
> bushes, or cramming animals into arks really happened anymore than
> she will be told that bigfoot or UFO's are real.
> In my opinion religious and superstitious beliefs are learned
> behaviors just like other negative traits. People that are otherwise
> rational and educated believe in fortune tellers because they went
> with their mom's as a kid. Kids learn to drink or commit crimes
> because their friends or even parents do it. People believe in all
> kinds of stupid things for stupid reasons because they were taught to
> believe them at some time in their pasts. Teaching your kids is
> important, but sometimes it's what they DON'T learn that really makes
> a difference.

Then would you agree with my original post in the original thread? It
seems like you are making some of the same points that I did. Did you
read the original post?

(I don't know why Trigger started a new thread, then omitted 2 of the
3 original newsgroups, then truncated my original subject heading, and
then omitted the quote of my original post. I'm sure he must have had
his reasons. But here it is, and with the other newsgroups added back
in to this reply.)

DV

From: darth_versive (darth_versive@yahoo.com)
Subject: Is religion "cultural baggage" or a natural, default way of
thinking?
Newsgroups: alt.religion, alt.religion.christian, sci.anthropology
Date: 2004-09-06 15:32:55 PST
 

Some people say that the fact that religion is so common in society
shows that people naturally think in religious terms. Of those who
say this, some say it's because God designed us this way, and others
say it's a result of evolution.

Other people say that atheism is the "default" state of mind, and that
religion is just "cultural baggage" from past centuries, which will
fade away as the culture becomes more educated in modern knowledge.

I think that this is a question that can be answered in terms of the
social, behavioral and cognitive sciences. At least I think it can be
answered in these terms a lot better than it can be answered by just
arguing about it without reference to scientific research in these
areas.

While a lot more research needs to be done before this question can be
answered definitively, enough data is out there now for us to at least
discuss it.

To start with, isn't talking about "cultural baggage" and "default
ways of thinking"--as if this is an "either/or" issue--a bit
simplistic?

That is, isn't "cultural baggage" a natural part of the human
condition? That is, didn't we evolve within some cultural environment
or other? If so, then whatever mental structures are involved in
taking on "cultural baggage" is just as "natural" as those involved in
acquiring language. At least it seems this way to me.

And so, if a particular system of thought or worldview is part of a
particular human culture, then I would think that acquiring whatever
system of thought is present during child development would be
"natural," or the "default"--whether that happened to be an atheistic
system of thought or a theistic system of thought.

So, the "default" state of the human mind is one that is open to a
variety of different ways of thinking, just like it is open to a
variety of languages. It has evolved the mental structures to quickly
"make sense" of the world in terms of some system of thought or the
other, in the same way as it has evolved the structures to quickly
acquire some language or the other.

In the same way that the mind is no more predisposed to acquire French
than German, perhaps it is no more predisposed to acquire a theistic
system of thought than an atheistic one. Perhaps the greater
prevalence of theistic systems of thought over atheistic ones nowadays
is that these theistic systems of thought have been around longer, and
have themselves "evolved" in such a manner as to come up with more
appealing answers to those sorts of questions that people have been
asking since the beginning (such as, why am I here? what's my purpose
in life? what happens after I die? etc.). The atheism I usually see
around me seems less designed to answer these sorts of questions from
young, developing minds, like the theistic systems are, and more
designed to address the minds of adults, and to deny or to not believe
the answers that the theists have come up with, rather than coming up
with psychologically appealing answers of their own to these
fundamental questions that children ask. Therefore, perhaps the
theists just happen to get to the young people first more often, with
the answers to those questions that they want answers to; and getting
there first, these ideas are much harder to dislodge from the mind
than if an atheistic system of thought had been there with the same
sorts of answers when the young minds were first asking these
questions.

It seems to me that the older someone gets, the harder it is for them
to change their general perspective on life, and therefore the less
likely it is that someone will change that perspective. There are
many exceptions to this rule, of course, but on the average, most
people who are raised in a particular system of thought will remain in
that system of thought. And so that may be part of the answer as to
why theistic worldviews are so much more prevalent than atheistic
worldviews nowadays, and why theists are so resistant to the reasoning
of atheists.

At least, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me. Has anybody
heard of any research, or do they have any scientific evidence, that
might undermine this hypothesis?

DV

Relevant Pages

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