On 03 Oct 2014, at 18:45, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
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.
If by "universe" you mean "the physical universe", then this is a
statement in Aristotle theology, which is very plausibly incompatible
with both mechanistic cognitive science and quantum fact and theories.
If we are machine, the physical universe is information, structured by
self-reference by some class of universal machines sharing some class
of computations/dreams. Even time and space are emerging from the flux
of consciousness associated with the machine/numbers dreams.
More on this is in the answer to other posts in this thread.
Bruno
-Chris
From: meekerdb <[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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