Evidence supports the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/18/opinion/la-oe-thompson-atheism-20110718

Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods

Op-Ed In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA."

July 18, 2011|By J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer

<snip>In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."

Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.

For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs...
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth...
:rofl:

:rofl:

my Facebook page. Non-family Fb "friends" who haven't already de-friended me for my political posts will likely do so now, but my family will like the article as much as I do.

Thanks!

"Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection."

Fred Phelps has his version of a god that resembles his own beliefs, and so does every other believer as well. With Christians alone, there's over a billion different versions of god and Jesus out there, in many cases, none of them resemble each other even within the same denomination.

My guess is Michaelangelo's father looked a lot like this guy:

He said we have a psychological need for a protective sky-daddy.

He also wrote about Religious Expression as Neurosis.

the fact that it encourages subjective thinking rather than object. It trains the mind to follow rather than lead, perfect for the desires of manipulative individuals.

Think of how parents always play the Santa Claus game around Christmas - we tell our kids to be good and Santa Claus will come and give them a stocking full of presents. If they're bad, they get a lump of coal. We pull out lots of stops getting our kids to believe this - shopping mall Santas, TV shows, childrens' stories, the parents waiting until the kids fall asleep and putting the presents under the tree at midnight on Chrismas, and telling the kids the next morning that Santa came and put them there... And it works - the kids believe this.

Eventually, the gig has to come to an end. When kids are old enough, the news is broken to them one way or another that Santa isn't real, he's just pretend, it's Mom and Dad putting presents under the tree, it's all just a game they play with kids to have fun on Christmas.

So it should be with religion. We turn it into a kids game, turn Jesus (or your deity of choice) into a friendly fun figure for the kids, rewrite the Bible (or canon of choice) into a children's book, and play the religion game only with kids who are small.

When they grow up, we make sure they understand that just like Santa, Jesus isn't real. I cried when I was a kid and my folks broke the news about Santa, and I'm sure tears will be shed when they learn that God is just pretend as well. But I think it's a necessary lesson. Kids need to learn this, so they're grounded in reality when they grow up.

Otherwise, they might grow up acting like Michele Bachmann...

All children (except for some autistic children) anthropomorphize objects until they are taught not to. From this you get the animistic beleifs that eventually evolved into religion.

The notion of "god" is simply the ultimate and most abstract form of anthropomorphizing nature.

certainly not of ground-shattering or breath-taking originality

parents pass traits on to their children has been known for millennia and not earth shattering. The mechanism through natural selection and DNA was.
A scientific explanation for gods and religion is important.

The author of the OP is free of course to jabber about the "DNA" of religion, but that doesn't necessarily make his views scientific

simply taking comfortable "notions" about existence and then claiming that their "notions" are valid and can be live by. I call them "Notionists".

The Creationist, for example, have the baseless notion that the Earth has been in Existence for less that 10,000 years despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Then they elevated the status of their notions by calling them science. Creationism is now taught in public schools as a alternative to the theory of evolution.

The further one moves down the path of living by notions, the more the likelihood for their demise.
Unfortunately for America, numerous politicians are "Notionists". They are now in the position to alter National policy, which is extremely dangerous for all.

You know how the right-wingers, when they talk about things like civil-rights laws, or health care laws, they frame them not as laws, but "edicts" - to give the frame that those laws don't really count - their law, "God's Law", whatever law they decide is right, takes precedence, and they can disobey laws like requirements to teach evolution, laws that keep prayer out of schools, laws that make it hard to get an abortion, laws that require pharmacists to dispense medications and treatments they think God doesn't like, and so on.

So we should be framing all of the right-wingers' beliefs - young-earth creationism, mandates to hate homosexuality, etc. as notions, as ideas that have nothing substantial to them, and thus can be easily dismissed as nonsense unless the believer backs it up with something substantial.

comes out of the experience of people is not to deny its authenticity. Science also grows out of human experience, and that is not to deny its authenticity. The Bible did no float down from somewhere above. It came up out of the encounter people over the centuries had with the Mystery which defies all authentication. That is why it is a Mystery, not a series of problems.

that Science has figured out.
God of the Gaps anyone?

that religion is concerned with what makes believers feel good, whether or not it's true, while science is concerned with what's true, whether or not it makes us feel good.

Connections.

http://tinyurl.com/WellConnected

First:




Under exactly what circumstances do we know these brain networks become engaged? If we ask people about their pets, are these networks engaged? If people are shown a picture of, say, a chimpanzee holding hands and walking with a human, and asked about it, are these networks engaged? If so, what conclusion should we reach about pets and chimpanzees?


And then on the "helmeted research subjects":




I would really like to know what experience people who wore the "God helmet" but didn't experience a supernaturasl or religious figure had; and wht the corre;lation between those who experienced "another" presence and the religious background of all the participants.

As to the validity of Persinger's results, they haven't been replicated (at least not for peer reviewed scientific literature). A failure to replicate Persinger's results has been published in the scientific literature (from wikipedia):



These experiments are interesting, but, I did not see a significant explanation for how these brain images or "God helmet" establish that man created god.