I recently watched a video of Dr. Andy Thomson (a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia) at the 2009 Atheist Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, and I caught something which is just one of those things that happens to bug me...
Unfortunately YouTube doesn't allow videos to be embedded anymore for some misplaced copyright horse crap. So I will just have to link the video by URL. Before I post the link, I'll give a brief summary of where I take issue with this piece of media.
In it, Dr. Thomson creates a 'comprehensive' breakdown for why people are presidposed to religious belief. Has anyone else been aware that groups which organize and endorse the Atheist Conventions (like the Rational Response Squad) have said time and time again that people are born atheists and are indoctrinated into their respective religion? I'll make that an important highlight later on.
So the video goes on to break down religion from a psychological perspective. It argues that people get sucked into religion because of cognitive "vulnerabilities" based on natural processes of thought. Religious belief finds its consumers on the basis of a set of interpretations of "ordinary events with extraordinary explanations." This all good science and everything, but anyone else see what seems to be the flat out contradiction here? I certainly do...
It may not appear to be a contradiction in technical terms. After all, you were probably not endowed with a theistic worldview at the time of birth. But if I'm not mistaken allot of the dressing and accusations of religious belief being just another form of "indoctrination" are emotional pleas for attempting to paint religion as an evil mallicious and unguided force. Yet, if in most cases religious beliefs thrive due to the consequences of natural human processes, this cannot be true.
After all, Prof. Dawkins is fond of stating that the naturalistic world is not immoral but amoral. So if religion primarily arises from naturalistic states, it is also an amoral phenomenon.
Also, it would seem that this is a direct slap in the face to all of the campaigns out there advocating the abolishing of religion or at the very least theism. If spirituality has led to religion and religion is ultimately derived from the cognition of the human mind, this would also render such efforts implausible and impossible, simultaneously.
If children's minds are, as Richard Dawkins apparently says in his books, geared to the manipulative mechanics of the culture they are reared in due to natural selection, there is little to nothing that can be done to stop this. Unless of course we wish to halt or alter the course of natural selection, thereby interfering with the occurence of evolution.
Of course we can and should strive for a better quality of life which is dependent on our capabilities to manipulate and dictate certain aspects of nature, but it is folly to suppose that we can pinpoint religion as something separate and uncessary to the human species if it relies significantly on what is typically necessary and vital to our survival.
Sorry guys, I'm going to need a better case for why religion should disappear. It looks like it's here to stay for good.
Oh...and here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg
Actually, I'm interested in studies that suggest that human beings--and many species of animals--are predisposed to certain types of ritualized behaviours. Remember BF Skinner's dancing pigeons?
ReplyDeleteI would bet my last $20 that every atheist you know has at least one task every day that they perform in a certain order, for no reason other than habit. Do they wash their hair first when they shower, working their way down to their feet? Or the reverse order? Do they even think about why?
From there, it's not such a stretch for a person (no person in particular) to start eating eggs on the morning of an important baseball game. Now that may have started because the protein combination worked well for the ballplayer in question, he was more focussed, he won his game. But does it work every single time? Probably not. Some of your atheist friends may even engage in a little of this behaviour. George Gmelch released a fascinating study on the similarities between the ritualized behaviours that American baseball players engage in, with crosscultural comparisons to African (Ghanan?) fishing superstitions. The study is called Baseball Magic.
Where atheists differ is that they have developed the critical thinking skills to catch their ritualized behaviours, and examine them to make sure that they're not self-defeating. Atheism puts such an emphasis on not being overly credulous that I bet you won't see problem gamblers at an atheist convention, either.
Your speaker's observation is misguided. Did you say that was Dawkins? I must look into that statement. It sounds like he needs to take some anthropology courses before he gets on about evo-psych. People are not born atheists. Every creature that's intelligent enough to choose whether it should locomote in this direction or that is susceptible to ritualized behaviours. Only those with a certain type of cognitive apparatus are capable of mythologizing a 'Supreme Alpha'. People need to be just as careful about idolizing their atheist heroes, if said heroes are pushing bad science on them.
Big sigh of relief. That was not Dawkins. That was Dr. Andy Whatsis. I didn't think Dawkins would be preaching bad science like that.
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