27 Jan 2008, 9:50 pm
27 Jan 2008, 10:12 pm
People need something to believe in, and most do believe in a type of God. 
28 Jan 2008, 3:22 am
singularitymadam wrote:
Does theorizing with incomplete data qualify as a "capital error"? I think that is what a great deal of us function on socially, theologically, and emotionally. I am not sure I am capable of suspending my constant need to attribute reasons for everything, and this may be what the OP was getting at.
I doubt this means atheists are more highly-evolved than religious people, or vice versa. That is like saying people with ASDs are more highly-evolved than NTs. Where is the proof?
I doubt this means atheists are more highly-evolved than religious people, or vice versa. That is like saying people with ASDs are more highly-evolved than NTs. Where is the proof?
um.....where did a suggestion of being more or less highly evolved come into it? 
What made you think that anyone was arguing that? People have different needs; some need to see patterns all the time, everywhere; others accept a higher level of ambient chaos, or don't even see it, or only need pattern in certain places, at certain levels of functioning, etc . The unattributed doesn't worry them so much.
But although plant leaf growth and metal molecules are wonderfully ordered there are many things which are less so, especially human behaviour, but also quite a lot of "nature", it turns out, is based on fundamental uncertainty.
Those who need to see pattern most, especially in peoples behaviour, to be able to assign cause, may have begun believing in god as a wheelchair to carry them through the "inexplicable"/currently unknown. Not to stop them thinking, but to take the anxiety out of it.
I still think that food opioids may be a factor, fed from 13,000 BC ( when glutenous plants first evolved, in the middle east) onwards to children from infancy producing changes in the brain structure of those of each new generations whose systems didn't/couldn't digest gluten enough to prevent it entering bloodstream relatively intact. Bread. Milk ( dairy).
You say in your previous post that:Quote:
I think that the question "Why?" is the very essence of being human, that makes living worthwhile.
It took me a very long time to realise that the father of my child wasn't some aberration of nature, to accept that in fact it is possible to be a fully functioning human and almost never think, consciously at least. Because i believed the same as you.
Now i accept that many many people don't think much at all. I don't know what he does with his brain. i don't know whether it is genetic , or environmental, or a mix. But the plain fact is that he lives, and supports us financially, and loves us, and has fun, and enjoys things, quite as if he was a real live human being, without thinking very much about anything.
)
