advancedatheist
Thinker
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2005
- Messages
- 200
Maybe someone can explain this to me: I've noticed the intellectual fad that tries to attribute religious belief to "god genes," "god parts of the brain" and so forth, but I have found this conjecture unsatisfactory for a couple reasons:
One, it fails to account for the explosive growth of religious nonbelief over the last century. Communist movements and regimes had a lot to do with that, but religious belief has also spontaneously declined in developed countries beyond the Iron Curtain where people have the freedom to study and practice any religion they want. (The U.S remains aberrational in that regard. In terms of religiosity we resemble a Third World country.)
Two, children have to acquire these beliefs from their cultural environment, otherwise they wouldn't independently think them up. Considering that children learn about god in the same way they learn about Harry Potter, what happens to their "god genes/neurons" when they don't receive exposure to this information? In my experience people who grow up atheistic don't seem any the worse for it -- if anything, they often seem light-years ahead of the rest of humanity because they have less nonsense inhibiting their ability to understand and analyze problems. So from the perspective of healthy human biological functioning, religious belief seems quite unnecessary.
Considering these facts, it sounds to me as if the "god gene" speculators have depended too much on the peculiar cultural situation in the U.S. instead of examining the religious situation worldwide to see the anomalies that conflict with their theory.
One, it fails to account for the explosive growth of religious nonbelief over the last century. Communist movements and regimes had a lot to do with that, but religious belief has also spontaneously declined in developed countries beyond the Iron Curtain where people have the freedom to study and practice any religion they want. (The U.S remains aberrational in that regard. In terms of religiosity we resemble a Third World country.)
Two, children have to acquire these beliefs from their cultural environment, otherwise they wouldn't independently think them up. Considering that children learn about god in the same way they learn about Harry Potter, what happens to their "god genes/neurons" when they don't receive exposure to this information? In my experience people who grow up atheistic don't seem any the worse for it -- if anything, they often seem light-years ahead of the rest of humanity because they have less nonsense inhibiting their ability to understand and analyze problems. So from the perspective of healthy human biological functioning, religious belief seems quite unnecessary.
Considering these facts, it sounds to me as if the "god gene" speculators have depended too much on the peculiar cultural situation in the U.S. instead of examining the religious situation worldwide to see the anomalies that conflict with their theory.
