People generally care more about believing in a consistent reality than they care about making sure they commit no error in their assessment of reality. They say they care about truth, but then they eschew taking that principle to its logical conclusion. There is a consistent sense to be made out of the world through naturalistic materialism, and it is superior in terms of what it can accomplish and how often it contradicts itself compared to any half-baked apologized view of any religion. If you want to be right more often than not: choose “scientism.” My religion is, I guess you could say, to believe whatever is true and prove false whatever is not true, and I don’t mince the word truth to define my unfalsifiable biases into the word. Mormonism says, “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” (DC 93:24) Truth is sacred to me, and I’d rather know about my universe accurately than be consistently wrong. So I’ve chosen to build my worldview on this rock, and I understand religion through a materialist lens that says that this is all cooked up in our heads but it means something in deep psychological ways that is worth exploring and visiting with suspended disbelief from time to time like any great literature. But it would be a tragedy for someone who claims to be a truth seeker to decide that the “Greatest Story Ever Told” is the only truth that matters and so any reports of reality that contradict it must be lying to them. Stop insisting that religion is true in some scientific sense and move it out of that realm altogether. It doesn’t belong there, and the longer it talks shit about being able to compete in that arena but bitches out when it gets a serious challenger is converting more people to my nonreligion every day.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2021 03:46PM by Cold-Dodger.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201810/how-religious-fundamentalism-hijacks-the-brain

Ideological Viruses and Mental Parasites

There are various types of viruses and parasites, and viruses are themselves parasites. While biological viruses are infectious agents that self-replicate inside living cells, computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs. One particularly nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a “Trojan horse,” disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own “fitness” (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as “parasitic manipulation.”

One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.

In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call “magical thinking,” which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can’t survive, nor can it replicate itself. Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought, which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic.

We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.

According to Donald Hoffman, for reasons of evolution we don't and can't perceive objective reality.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

That’s not to say we shouldn't believe in objective reality, but it's on no more solid ground than subjective reality. There are lots of reasons to not be Mormon. Magical thinking is not one of them.

Joseph's Myth was successful because of its reproductive fitness. Granted, it was probably driven by his sexual mania, but it fit perfectly into our evolutionary wiring. The mythology is pure BS, but it delivers a payload. Kids grow to adulthood without self-destructing (if they aren't gay). Parents like that. Women get to control their men by using their wieners as a leash. If you're a guy, your status in the ward depends on your wife not ratting you out. Chicks are like "Sure, I'll play the subservient role, but you screw this up and I'll make you regret it". But even if you take the freak show of Mormonism out of the equation, religions in general confer high reproductive fitness.

The older religions came from times when survival to old age was a real challenge. That didn't just mean physical functioning, it meant using intuition beyond the material to avoid lethality. God is a mind hack we use to work around the subject object split in our thinking, or objectify the nonlocal aspects of our minds. Nature selected for higher intuitive abilities, or God sense. There is no God gene, we are God incarnate. Translating that into something useful is no small feat.

Some scientists, like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake have done many experiments that prove magic is real. Yet materialists defend their dogmas the way Mormons defend theirs. Because maybe they just want to get laid.