RE: generalizations_of_islam

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 09:45:54 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2014 5:50 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: generalizations_of_islam

 

On 10/2/2014 3:04 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:

Spiritual as you said is a personal quest; religion (which you are correct
derives from the Latin verb religos "to bind together") is institutional and
results in political institutions more centered on the quest to preserve
their privilege and their power than on anything else.

Even if a religion where started based on purely good -- on just and only
excellently great ideas! -- within a few generations it will become a
vehicle to the exercise of earthly power and will attract the kinds of
psychopaths whom are attracted to positions where they are able to exert
arbitrary power over other people.


Wanting power is perfectly normal and predictably Darwinian.  What's harder
to understand is why people will give up power to a priesthood even after it
has become obvious that their dogma is a bunch of fairy tales.
Brent

 

Agreed - It is predictable behavior for (some, many, even most) people to
seek to maximize their power. With the advent of recorded culture and the
rise of institutions this has led to the situation wherein once a group of
related people (either by blood or by some other strong bond, such as the
gruesome initiation rites some criminal gangs use for example) obtains
control over power they are able to culturally institutionalize this control
so that it is transmitted forward through time.

The church is a prime example of this. I believe that people, once they have
formed some internal architecture of belief are essentially imprisoned by
this mind/brain architecture for life. Escaping one's own deeply held
beliefs is perhaps the hardest thing one can ever do. So, even when the
rational mind sees the moral bankruptcy of the particular "divine"
institution they adhere to the much deeper and more entrenched mind belief
architecture sees this as a threat and throws up rationalizations, fears (as
in: "thinking such blasphemous thoughts will condemn me to hell"), doubts
about the doubts etc. The pre-conscious structures of the mind (networks of
memories, notional beliefs, prejudices, and so forth) can be like a slippery
eel sometimes. they will find ways to defend themselves from other -
questioning networks in the same mind.

I think this is psychological evidence for how the mind/brain is not a
singleton unified structure. there is no overarching structure in the brain.
We do not have one mind.. Our minds are made of a large number of
concurrently running processes all competing for prime time in the loci of
mind/brain focus.. Those executive decisional networks that appear linked
with self-aware consciousness.

Once a person "finds" religion and becomes a "believer" - either through
enculturalization or conversion - that part of the mind that believes will
function within the overall mind to defend the belief system and will work
to oppose other portions of the mind (i.e. other concurrent neural firing
networks) that the belief system neural firing network perceives as
threatening to its own zombie existence within the brain.

In truth I don't think we have "one" mind. We could say - and even this is a
stretch - that we may have one self-aware center of mind focus, which we
perceive as ourselves, but our minds have many neural firing networks active
at any given moment, for example focused on processing new visual data.
These firing networks can be triggered at any moment by a memory, a thought,
a sensorial trigger.

The mind is more than multi-threaded, in brain architecture there does not
seem to exist any central control of processing. it all seems quite chaotic
actually (take its seemingly exceedingly low signal to noise ratio for
example)

I find it the most fascinating thing in the universe actually. it is the
generator of self-aware consciousness.

-Chris

 

  _____  

From: meekerdb  <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2014 11:41 AM
Subject: Re: generalizations_of_islam

 

On 10/2/2014 8:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Religion and spirituality are not barbaric, like medication are not
dangerous.


But the distinction between spirituality and religion is that spirituality
is personal, while it is part of the definition of religion that it "binds
together".  One "belongs to" a religion.  A religion is defined by a set of
dogma. 

 



Brent

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