Thursday, July 06, 2006

Why God won't go away

• some researchers had made some observations of Buddhists during their mediation and Franciscan nuns during their prayers during their most intensely religious moments. What they found was that during that period of spiritual contemplation, there was a detectable change in the activity of the brain. (using radioactive tracers and a SPECT camera which detects radioactive emissions) they termed the area the orientation association area and its purpose was to orient the individual in physical space; to draw a distinction between the individual and everything else.
• this meant that mystical experiences are not the results of emotional mistakes or wishful thinking. it is biologically and scientifically real. A skeptic might suggest then that spiritual experiences were nothing more than chemical misfirings of a bunch of nerve cells. In other words, God is physically "all in your mind". However, tracing spiritual experiences to neurological behaviour does not actually disprove its realness. If God exists and appeared in some incarnation, there would be no way of experiencing His presence except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality.
• Human beings possess high level thought processes which allow us to perceive threats and to resolve them. These functions evolved in the human brain because of the adaptive advantage they offered. The cognitive imperative is the almost irrestible, biologically driven need to make sense of reality through cognitive analysis of reality. In doing its duty to identify and resolve any threat that can potentially harm us, it discovered one that can't be resolved - the knowledge that everyone dies.
• We rely on myths to alleviate our existential fears and comfort us in a mysterious world. All religons, in essence, are founded upon myths. The logical left hemisphere searches for the logical answers to the question while the right hemisphere proposes intuitive, nonverbal, holistic solutions to the question. The agreement of both sides of the brain sends neural discharges through the limbic system to stimulate pleasure centers which we experience as a surge of calmness and peace. The intuition may or may not be true. What matters is that it is based on something more than just imagination. To the anxious mind, it feels like a glimpse of ultimate truth. Uncertainties are alleviated as the problem of cause is reconciled.

Haha of course reading the book didn't really help much. So why were we born ? be damned if i knew