LA Times article: God Didn't Make Man; Man Made Gods (link)
Offline Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too."
No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will." Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.
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.
The article is a couple months old but well worth the read! So what's the point about talking about Jesus at all when we all know he was made up to start with?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-thompson-atheism-20110718,0,5682260.story
Click here to find out why Christianity is the biggest fairy tale ever created!! www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm www.JesusNEVERexisted.com
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Hey, JesusNEVERexisted!
Great link. I'm currently interested in the reason why some humans stick with religion and your link answered some of my questions.
Thanx!
You can find throughout recorded history lots of examples of skepticism. The lack of logical consistency in the moral god in Epicurus. Ingersoll, Freud, ect ect ect ect.
But, I think Dawkins uses the best metaphor so far to date to explain why our species fills in gaps with superstition. His "moth mistaking the light bulb for moonlight" is scientifically the best analogy to explain our evolutionary flaw.
It is the same as retrofitting images to ink blots or clouds. It is the same gap filling that causes our brain to think the hallway in the video is really scale, but when the man moves backwards the hallway shrinks. It allows us to believe the black olives in the dark room at a Halloween party are a bowl of eyeballs.
God belief is caused by our default to fill in gaps in patterns, nothing more. It is mere anthropomorphism. It is why humans thought vocanos were gods. It is why humans once thought the sun was a god. It is why humans today still believe in gods. It is not that the gods are real, they are not. It is that we did not evolve to train ourselves to test.
It is because for a long time in our species history time and speed mattered to survival, so we would react instead of observing and testing.
God belief works just like a Superman movie. Suspension of disbelief. If you want to believe something badly enough, you will, regardless of the evidence it lacks.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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You didn't think looney ChristNUTS stuck with religion because of their great intellectual depth and logical thinking?
After all, this is what they believe:
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.Click here to find out why Christianity is the biggest fairy tale ever created!! www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm www.JesusNEVERexisted.com
Yes, it does sound wacky, doesn't it?
But why do people still believe this crap? That I find interesting.
One factor is that theists are being manipulated by their churches.
What you mean is theists are being LIED to by their churches! Over 10 billion Christians have died over the past 2,000 years and not a peep from them! The church doesn't want to admit the entire pearly gates/Jesus story is just a primitive legend as EINSTEIN said himself! Not to mention Thomas Edison called it "fake" and "bunk"!
Oh, and there's that problem of the MYTHICAL Jesus being over 2,000 years late and how he promised his followers he would return in THEIR lifetime!
Click here to find out why Christianity is the biggest fairy tale ever created!! www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm www.JesusNEVERexisted.com
The more often this kind of article shows up in the press, the better.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.