Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds (cnn.com) 228
A new study published in the journal Social Neuroscience finds through functional MRI scans that religious and spiritual experiences can trigger reward systems like love and drugs. "These are areas of the brain that seem like they should be involved in religious and spiritual experience. But yet, religious neuroscience is such a young field -- and there are very few studies -- and ours was the first study that showed activation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that processes reward," said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah and lead author of the study. CNN reports: For the study, 19 devout young adult Mormons had their brains scanned in fMRI machines while they completed various tasks. The tasks included resting for six minutes, watching a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial reports, reading quotations from religious leaders for eight minutes, engaging in prayer for six minutes, reading scripture for eight minutes, and watching videos of religious speeches, renderings of biblical scenes and church member testimonials. During the tasks, participants were asked to indicate when they were experiencing spiritual feelings. As the researchers analyzed the fMRI scans taken of the participants, they took a close look at the degree of spiritual feelings each person reported and then which brain regions were simultaneously activated. The researchers found that certain brain regions consistently lit up when the participants reported spiritual feelings. The brain regions included the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with reward; frontal attentional, which is associated with focused attention; and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, Anderson said. Since the study results were seen only in Mormons, Anderson said, more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or Muslims.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that with drugs you (usually) know you're just tripping (at least pre and post event), whereas religious people seem to think that what they experience/believe is actually real. Think "Oh my god I saw pink talking bunnies" vs "god told me to circumcise my son/daughter".
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Religious people have a problem with separating fantasy from reality. What else is new?
If these people were not willing to kill, maim (circumcision of people unable to give informed consent very much counts) and slaughter to support their fantasy, it would not be much of a problem.
Re: In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Any good cause is an excuse for a tyrant, but Christianity is a hard one.
I recommend some study of the Middle Ages and some study of modern Christian fanatics. Even investing only a bit of time immediately shows that the Christian religion is just as suitable as a pretext for violence and oppression than any other one.
The only thing the Christian faith has going for it is that it is old and stagnant and hence fewer and fewer people really care about it and more and more people dare to admit this.
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Your claim that "Christian religion is just as suitable as a pretext for violence and oppression than any other one." only reveals your ignorance of religions. Clearly you have no idea about e.g. Aztec religion.
You shouldn't speak of ignorance. Do a little history reading, and I think you'll find that far more people have been murdered in the name of Christ than in the name of Huitzilopochtli.
Also, followers of the Abrahamic religion - all three varieties - continue to kill today. I'm not so worried about the Aztecs, but followers of JHVH are direct threats to me and my descendants.
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But, but, it costs me way too much money...
So, with this breaking new knowledge, I am starting to look for a religion that is going to cost me less...
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Buddhism Without Beliefs [amazon.com] is where I started...
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Buddhism rejects the concept of self or soul, but does teach that rebirth occurs, which is a difficult concept to consider - rebirth, but no continuity. So what is reborn?
But the vijñna, or commonly called in the west your consciousness, is the basis of rebirth, not a soul, but a continuum of existence. And so skirts the question of soul v existence.
All of which, to atheists, is 'magic', and dismissed.
SO, stop reading cereal boxes, and at least pick up a systematic theology text and conduct a minimal
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I note that everyone seems to be ignoring the non-clickbait part of the summary. Religious experiences affect the brain the way drugs and love do....
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Indeed. As love is an unauthorized surrogate for a religious experience, it must immediately be outlawed and punished harshly. Life in jail seems too good for these criminal elements.
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Indeed. As love is an unauthorized surrogate for a religious experience,
Love is a driver for the evolutionary drive to procreate.
Religion is an effect of the evolutionary drive to avoid death.
While both are delusions, one still serves a useful purpose, while the other is now a dead end. Where it earlier could have a positive net effect of groups of humans protecting each other and each others' offspring, in modern society with ultimate mobility religion has become a cause of death more than a deterrent.
We may one day evolve into not needing either delusion, but we're not there
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You know, that is probably the whole real justification for the "war on drugs": Getting rid of competition that has a better product. Tragic.
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Religion generally is largely opposed to drugs because they threaten the religious leadership's monopoly on spiritual experiences.
The Christians mostly co-opted alcohol consumption into their religious practices because it was already culturally endemic in the areas where organized Christianity took root and their religious orders often turned production of alcoholic beverages into an economic asset. Of course later Protestant denominations often rejected alcohol, too, although it's muddier as to whether
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool story, bro. Any citations?
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I can't remember the title, but what I posted largely came from a somewhat academic history of drug use in America I read last year.
Another interesting factoid -- smoking opium was the predominant form of illicit opioid use into the late 1920s, despite the obvious notion that more concentrated preparations like laudanum, morphine and heroin had been widely available and generally unrestricted until 1914. Most notably smoking opium remained dominant even after the restrictions of the Harrison Anti-Narcotic
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"The Christians mostly co-opted alcohol consumption into their religious practices because it was already culturally endemic"
Wine and strong drink are well documented in the Christian Bible, and from times long before Christianity came to be. Some Hebrew sects rejected alcohol also, most notable manifested in Samson, a Nazarite at birth. Even his mother abstained after visitation by an angel.
Alcohol was an issue for Jews well before Christ, and well before Israel even.
For all the declarations of understandi
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I initially thought the headline read "Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking a Dump."
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FTFY... again, and again!
Rick James was wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Opiates (Score:5, Funny)
You could say it's the opiate of the people.
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I intended to reply to this but instead replied to the comment below, which see.
This is your brain (Score:2)
Re:This is your brain (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the famous Karl Marx quote.
Keep in mind that, in context, Marx was referring to opiates as something that relieves pain, rather than something that gets you high.
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Oops, disregard. replied to the wrong post. Should be the one above.
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Yes, the famous Karl Marx quote.
Keep in mind that, in context, Marx was referring to opiates as something that relieves pain, rather than something that gets you high.
[I posted this erroneously to another comment below.]
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Oh man, forget it. It must be too late in the day for me to keep my replies straight. Sorry.
Re:This is your brain (Score:4, Funny)
I think you need to cut down on your opiate dosage
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/thread
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The pain of socialism?
So why are religions still legal? (Score:2)
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We can try banning religion just as soon as the War on Drugs is won.
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You have it backwards. The whole "war on drugs" is an attempt by religion to kill competition from a better product. Organized religion is behind this.
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If you pray, you're basically circumventing drug access controls. Also, cerebrospinal fluid should be banned due to its DMT content (not to mention vision problems in space).
You're asking the wrong question. You should be asking "So why are drugs still illegal?"
Small Sample Size (Score:5, Informative)
Only 19 persons were tested. All were from the same religion. There was no control set of non-religious individuals tested to see if the MRI scans were indeed representative of "religious and spiritual experience".
Most important, the Slashdot headline "Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds " differs from the title of the original study report. In the original report, the title is "Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons", clearly limiting the scope of the study to one religion.
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I love how the one intelligent, skeptical comment on a site full of "skeptics" is always half-way down. You'd think "skeptics" would be more skeptical of everything. Turns out, they're just skeptical of things threatening to their ego. But their egos are just as threatened as everyone else's apparently. In other words, they're just as religious as religious people, they're just meaner and smarter at being mean.
"Ha ha! Look at these stupid religiouses!"
"The study was poor science."
"The study is still correct
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Of course the study was limited to one religion. The sample size was small.
Of course the sample size was small, putting 19 people through an MRI imaging an area over and over in different scenarios costs real money.
Of course there was no ability to extend this due to a lack of funding.
Of course there's a lack of funding because science is just garbage making conclusions from small sample sizes and insufficient control groups.
I suppose you'd only be happy if we abandon all science completely.
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Salmon also exhibit religious euphoria [wired.com]
Or something like that.
A lot of folks won't like this (Score:2, Flamebait)
One conclusion that might come out of this is that it's sometimes appropriate to treat religion as an illness, as drug addictions are treated. Now, this is done today for some people in cults, generally by their relatives and against their will. It brings up all sorts of problems regarding freedom of belief. For some people, religion appears to be a beneficial part of their personality. When does it become an illness?
Before you dismiss this, consider how many people historically, and today, are killed for r
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Another conclusion is that we shouldn't make all that much out of small functional MRI studies done by random researchers since they're hard to do correctly.
Of course, we could also use a dead fish [scientificamerican.com] as a control.
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Or the conclusion that we should leave the drug users and religious people alone. For at least one very large subset of drug users, it basically already is a religion. They have music, dancing, community, charity, and pilgrimages. Let adults live the life they choose.
You have to do better than this. (Score:2)
That conclusion can no more come out of this research than could the idea that listening to music is an illness.
The research simply said that people reporting a positive experience showed activity in the reward centers of their brains. Big surprise! Hey, going outside in the sunshine activates the reward center of my brain, maybe that's an illness too.
The slashdot headline is there because people who are irrational and partisan want to ignore what the research actually said and use lies about it to bludgeon
Re:You have to do better than this. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the report, even at the start they state:
and at the end
So, this is stated very carefully in scientific language, but what they are discussing is how religious ideation and the following of religious leaders can bypass rational centers of the brain and create a self-reward loop in which these acts become their own reward.
It doesn't seem to me that it's being a bully to be concerned with why religion leads some people to kill and prompts others to acts of violence and oppression. The study is a start toward an answer. One could connect this study, for example, with the Stanford Prison Experiment, and research whether the same reward mechanisms were activated. Leader-following and an in-group were involved in the Stanford student's behavior. Do self-rewarding loops of religious ideation and leader-following reinforce such behavior?
Re:You have to do better than this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately, the pairing of classical reward responses when hearing music with learning a smattering of music theory may indicate a brain mechanism for greater music appreciation. So what?
That's not "bypassing rational centers of the brain and creating a loop." It's simply "these people had a positive experience and there were ideas that were associated with that positive experience." If anything, the fact that brain regions which are active in moral reasoning were especially active in these people suggests the opposite of "bypassing rational centers."
You've conveniently ignored the actual data and results of their study entirely and instead taken a couple of speculative comments ("here's an idea, please fund us") out of context and twisted them.
The old baloney about religion being a primary cause of violence is a ridiculous urban legend. Ultimately you can trace the exaggerations back to centuries-old partisan tracts. Actual historians (e.g. Encyclopedia of Wars) find religiously motivated wars to be roughly 2% of the total death count.
If what you get out of the Shoah is that Hitler was right on both counts - Judaism is a disease, as is Christianity - there's something fundamentally wrong, not just with your understanding of history but with you.
The Inquisition killed about 3,000 people over the course of 350 years. (Secular courts, of course, killed people at a much faster rate.) For some perspective, the Great Leap Forward killed 30,000,000 people in 3 years.
Re: You have to do better than this. (Score:2)
The assertion that the Inquisition only killed 3000 can't take into account the repeated forced migrations of the oppressed populations. It's sort of like saying the Trail of Tears only moved people. And we need only look at the Syrian refugee crisis today. And please don't imply that it's no problem because Mao was worse.
Re: You have to do better than this. (Score:2)
Then again, there are the facts (Score:2)
"The inquisition" comprises a combined series of undertakings beginning with Pope Lucius III's instigation in 1184 CE and terminating in 1834 CE - a span of about 650 years. The Spanish Inquisition was one chapter of this, but by no means can be reasonably considered an isolated or peak event.
Perhaps you'll find this of interest. [unc.edu]
Historically speaking, Christianity, between the inquisitions, the crusades, the pograms, blood libel, and jus
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That guy may know Prolog but he doesn't know history. The vast majority of his citations are 19th-century Protestant anti-Catholic tracts, with one of his few 20th-century sources being a conspiracy-theorist type Baptist missionary writing in 1960.
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That conclusion can no more come out of this research than could the idea that listening to music is an illness.
It probably is, at that.
Both religion and music might have conferred evolutionary net advantages at one point, which explains the existence.
Both music and religion might have served to keep bands of nomads together, increasing survival chances through mutual protection.
The rhythm part of music might also have served to increase our mobility, adding the ability to pace. That we prefer tempos in the range we do is notable.
Harmony might be a side effect of our brains greatly enhanced pattern recognition abili
Compare spiritual experiences and Diablo (Score:2)
They might be quite similar. Irony.
Religion is the opium of the people (Score:3)
Sounds like Marx was right about that.
Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs (Score:2)
Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds
So does sport, sex, good food, and so on. Anything satisfying acts like a drug, without the drug side effects.
Cheech and Chong... (Score:3)
Oh god my stomach (Score:2)
is usually what I say from certain weed that gives me hardcore munchies and makes me pig out. On the other hand first time I did shrooms a few months back and was like damn should have done this 20 years ago, mind you a bad acid trip at a night club put me off psychedelics so never go to shrooms. Good combo 1 gram of shrooms in chocolate and some spiced rum and a bit of MDAM + watching Star Trek.
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MDAM I mean hookers and blow in motel rooms.
Forced to go to church as a kid (Score:5, Interesting)
Older I got the more I hated church. Not gonna lie, there were a lot of days when I thought about opening the car door and jumping out of the car. On the freeway. To this day I don't dress up, nor do I sing in public.
Then Wizard of Oz was shown on Wednesdays for a few years in a row. I'd heard a lot about it, never seen it, wanted to see it. But no, I had to go to church Wednesday nights, cuz reasons.
Moved out when I was 18. Only time I've been in a church since was when mom died 4 years ago. Dad keeps asking me to go to church with him, I demurr, he doesn't understand why I won't go.
During my 20's and half my 30's, whenever I found someone was religious I'd goad them. Actively tried to piss them off. I grew out of that.
I think if you have a rational, questioning mind, church is either a social thing or pure BS.
Opium (Score:3, Insightful)
So we have conclusive proof that religion really is the opiate of the masses.
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So we have conclusive proof that religion really is the opiate of the masses.
and we had it already 6 threads above..
All messed up on the Lord..... (Score:2)
Cheech and Chong noticed this years ago....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Hrrrmmm (Score:2)
LDS LSD mostly didn't work for me (Score:2, Interesting)
I grew up in a Mormon (LDS) family, and don't remember too many significant feelings of the sort mentioned in the article. I eventually concluded the church was pulling my leg and dropped out.
However, I once was visiting Utah on an informal tour of "important" LDS buildings, and had a strange feeling that brought me back to the days when I did believe. It was sort of euphoric relief that an omnipotent father figure "has our back" and that we, the LDS, are on the good team. It's roughly comparable to your t
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I grew up an odd mix of RC and evangelical. Very devout. I genuinely believed until my early 20s and then experienced a very abrupt 'loss of faith' that triggered a disintegration of sense of self, so deeply was that belief ingrained and so central was religion to my life.
In attempting to define my self without reference to church or god, I recognised that I had a pattern of thought, a mind-model as you say, that was shaped to fit religion and it was going to take a while before that could change. In the m
Religion is worse (Score:2)
And now for our guest speaker (Score:2)
We have RainBow Dash.
DUH!!!
of course religious experiences trigger the reward bits of the brain
THATS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE LABELING!
Not just religion and drugs (Score:5, Informative)
Don't ALL subjectively enjoyable experiences have the same effect on the brain, releasing dopamine and serotonin, and activating particular pathways? Not only religion and drugs, but also sex and chocolate and cat videos and the election of your preferred candidate?
Grass is green (Score:3, Interesting)
So they discovered that participating in what they have been brought up to rejoice and be in awe of actually causes them joy. I'd be more surprised if the result were the opposite.
That's why people sign up and most never get rid of these delusions because it makes them feel good about themselves. They realize that santa and the easter bunny are not real, somehow they can't do the same thing with their deity and it's prophets.
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Christianity has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself. In fact, doing things to feel good about yourself is a grievous sin.
There are many strains of Christianity. This is a common view among them, but by no means universal.
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Yes, there are many, but there is only one strain of God's word. And, according to God's word, there is but the Glory of God to motivate.
Clearly there is not only one strain of God's word, else there wouldn't be so many interpretations of it.
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As a former atheist,... one can never satisfy his own desire to be equal with God
I se a major flaw in your logic here. As an atheist, there are no gods to be measured against. You can only be the best person you can through self motivation. Not because some guy is watching you and will withhold his love, send you to hell or deliver a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.
Religion in general and Christianity in particular are all about the priests (or politicians) controlling uneducated masses. Postpone your rewards in this lifetime so that you may receive them in the next. Work harde
I can confirm that. (Score:3)
In my teens I praticed meditation in general and, more specifically, what is called "astral projection", basically inducing out-of-body-experiences. I practiced it for six years just about every evening. In the end I finally made it, achieving that higher state of mind, where you experience the buzzing and humming, your body shrinking and your soul expanding and see "the tunnel" and such. It's the most intense state of being I've ever experienced and I doubt any drug can push you further. You're basically hyper-awake while it happens. And it's scary. Turns out we don't like to leave our body most of the time. :-)
The difference in state of mind and awareness compared to normal as normal compares to vivid, semi-lucent dreaming. I stopped it after this event, but one effect is that I don't fear death as much as I used to.
I cant say for sure that we are still around after death, like the mystics like to point out, but it sure felt like it.
My 2 cents.
Re:I can confirm that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh.
I never get why we have to overblow this.
Do you know, I drove home last night and have no memory of doing so? Automatic pilot, driven by my brain, while I thought of "higher" things.
I changed gear, negotiated roundabouts, kept to speed limits, stopped for pedestrians and red lights and navigated home without giving it a single conscious thought.
I also know that every night I fall unconscious, hallucinate vividly and then have complete amnesia about the whole event if I'm not interrupted before my brain is finished with it. It's called dreaming.
If I was sitting in a room for six years trying to do something, my brain would hallucinate the same (that's not meant to be an insulting word, it's quite literally what imagination and dreaming are) and believe I was outside my body. Yet, nobody, ever, in any controlled experiment, even when saying they ARE in that "special place" has ever demonstrated knowledge of, say, what's on top of the dresser behind them that they couldn't see from inside their body, or similar. You can even awake completely relaxed, unstressed, energised, without even having an hour's rest if you've had the right dream.
In the same way as out-of-body near-death experiences and suchlike, attributing it to some other existence seems, to me, to be entirely insulting to the capacity of the human mind under normal circumstances.
We have composers who see colours, artists who can paint pictures that don't complete until the final brush stroke but they can see it in their head in vivid detail, and story-writers who live in their heads most of their lives even if they can't write it down to save their life.
When the brain is then deprived of sensory information, and forced to entertain itself, it's no wonder that such experiences happen. To push them to "something else" rather than "Woah, my brain is capable of stupendous feats" is, I feel, condescending.
It doesn't require a supernatural explanation, or even comment. We've probably all done more amazing things in our sleep, or driving home from work.
Hell, I dreamed a "movie" from start to finish in twenty minutes of being asleep one night and still, to this day, I like to fold back into that dream or even write it down (which has taken YEARS of my life to do so). My brain was on-form that night, and I awoke exhilarated and haven't forgotten that experienced in 20+ years.
I really find it annoying when people then - as you just did - write it off as supernatural and, having "mastered" it in what sounds like a repeatable way, then ignore it and never do it again for fear of... what? Discovering some truth? Angering some god?
What if that's the way to escape the Matrix? What if that's the way to gain insight from your own mind on things nobody else has ever managed? What if that is the way to Heaven/Hell or whatever?
As someone of a scientific mind (can't you tell?), it drives me mad that people get near the equivalent of the next level of human existence, then never repeat it, wrap it in crap like "astral projection" and meditation, and basically forget it ever happened.
If it made you not fear death, surely you could do it again and be less scared, and not fear dying in the process?
But, maybe that would then conflict if - actually - it turns out just to have been a particularly vivid dream?
Schizophrenia (Score:2)
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Obedience to God is the STANDARD of behavior, not an aberrance of behavior.
Alright then, let me just go buy some slaves and while I'm beating my slaves in accordance with Jewish law, I'll declare men of more value than women (in shekels mind you) and also berate women for the uncleanliness of their menstruation during that time of the month. Sources: Exodus 21:12-28, Leviticus 15:19. That's quite a standard for reasonable behavior.
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Obedience to God is the STANDARD of behavior,
Say that often enough and maybe you can convince yourself [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps you need to read another book [wikipedia.org].
a personal experience (Score:2)
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Can you please distinguish between religious and spiritual when your own explanation contains:
"who is watching the watcher"
It sounds immensely like you belief you hit an existence controlled or observed by an entity other than known ones. Sounds exactly like a religion to me!
Honestly, I'm not being facetious here... what's the difference? Absence of a belief-in-god does not make something non-religious. Absence of knowledge of any-god-or-not doesn't either.
What's the difference between spiritual and reli
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Nice to see it confirmed. (Score:2)
Religious folks have been claiming for years that they help people feel more loved. That prayer can help you feel better and to form a bond with god. Also, they claim has been made for many years that part of the reason we experience that feeling is because we were created for relationship with God.
So nice to see some scientific confirmation that praying and loving feel good.
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Or favorite sports teams, or social movements, or fandoms, or whatever else makes people tick.
Yep, exact same regions of the brain in fact:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10... [nytimes.com]
So next time somebody talks about how wonderful Steve Jobs was, you can tell them to lay off the drugs, and still mean it both figuratively and sincerely...and hell...probably literally too.
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So next time somebody talks about how wonderful Steve Jobs was, you can tell them to lay off the drugs, and still mean it both figuratively and sincerely...and hell...probably literally too.
Dopamine and Serotonin, technically the only two things you enjoy.
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more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or Muslims.
Or favorite sports teams, or social movements, or fandoms, or whatever else makes people tick.
Or dead salmon [prefrontal.org].
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more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or Muslims.
Or favorite sports teams, or social movements, or fandoms, or whatever else makes people tick.
Eh, not quite the same thing. That stuff exists. And as far as further research being needed, I thought Tim Leary pretty much settled the question.
This is a non-experiment (Score:2)
Why is it worth looking for experimental proof that when people feel emotions, their brain chemistry will be involved in the experience? This is already well understood. I don't understand the point of this study at all. You might as well conduct experiments to determine whether water is wet. Was there any question that a religious experience is also an emotional one? ANYTHING deeply felt will be physically manifested. Duh.
Man, I hope the taxpayers didn't pay for this.
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As this applies to the majority of people, maybe that would be a bit risky. Sure, it is an obvious fact for anybody halfway smart and free of this mental plague, but like all groups of authoritarian followers, religious people are willing to kill, maim and slaughter to protect their fantasy, and their authoritarian leaders tell them to whenever there is a credible threat to that fantasy.
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You are making a fundamental mistake here: The ideology you are talking about is a quasi-religion in this form. A bit different in its "theory", but basically the same thing. And no, they are not representing atheism and neither is atheism an important characteristic. That was just something they adopted to fight competition for authority from theism.
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I'd call Islam a cult bent bent on world domination. Convert or die.
That's exactly how Christianity became a dominant religion. Convert or die and if anybody thinks that I'm trying to defend Islam here, think again. I dislike all the Abrahamic religions equally since they are all missionary and violent.
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I'd call Islam a cult bent bent on world domination. Convert or die.
That's exactly how Christianity became a dominant religion. Convert or die and if anybody thinks that I'm trying to defend Islam here, think again. I dislike all the Abrahamic religions equally since they are all missionary and violent.
What do you mean? The crusades were full of very reasonable gentlemen going door to door offering to share their love of jesus with you. If you said no they gave you a piece of cake and went next door. Am I thinking of the right thing?
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How are the crusades any different than today? We are actively trying to eliminate all the radical muslims that we can...we just do it safely from unmanned drones. It was a political response to the violent spread of Islam, very much like today.
How is it different? Because then we went over there in great numbers and killed basically everyone who didn't convert radical or not. Nowadays we're more discreet about it and all we really give a shit about is the oil.
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I dislike all the Abrahamic religions equally since they are all missionary and violent.
actually the Jews aren't missionary - but hey, that's not enough to like them either, for me.
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And you'd be wrong. Just think about it - if you were right, everyone would be dead or Muslim. As that's patently not the case, you are incorrect.
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I'd call Islam a cult bent bent on world domination. Convert or die.
Yup, just like Christianity was, back when it could get away with lopping your head off on a whim.
Christians would still love to be able to do that kind of thing, and they're jealous as hell that Islam is so upfront about it.
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