Letters to the Editor
droogoy
Published Letters: 590 Editor's Choice: 9
-
1964 -65
[Read the article: Where were you freshman year?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]AT Loyola University, New Orleans.
The Lousiana Intelligence Digest, a right wing screed rag, was still being circulated on campuses (Tulane, Loyola) by Guy Bannister - the right wing nutcase involved in the FPCC handbills that Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed barely a year ealier on Canal Street.
Downtown, the 544 Camp St. address was still being used.
Big events:
lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre at the Fieldhouse
concert by Peter, Paul and Mary - same venue
CORE civil rights meetings, planning for students to join marches in AL, MS
Most enjoyable aspect of college: late night "bull sessions" where 7-8 students would gather to argue, war & peace, philosophy, religion etc. The whole 9 yards.
Took my draft physical in March, '65- got classified IY. From then, I would not have to worry after 'Nam heated up.(Still a year or more away)
-
Not all that original
[Read the article: Manufacturing belief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is a very interesting piece, but alas, not all that original. Others have pretty well set the groundwork and demonstrated that god belief is a confection of the brain.
For example, Michael Persinger has shown in his research (e.g. The Neuropsychological basis of God Belief, the god claim is more along the lines of a phantasmagoria fabricated in the brain's temporal lobes following "micro-seizures" there - and then given substance, and gravitas through the ancient, bowdlerized, edited-mistranslated writings of pre-scientific, semi-literate nomads.
Thus, electro-stimulation (including from extraneous sources) triggers religious piffle - then the neocortex seized on already engendered ancient piffle - as in the bible - to justify and validate it. The rejoinder I love the most from these religiously, brain-jacked zombies is:
"The fool hath said in his heart there is no God"
Errrrr......no! The fool "hath said", there is, the alert and aware compatriot human tries to inform him it's all a delusion or dream.
In his book(p. 187), Persinger noted:
"The God Experience is an artifact of transient changes in the temporal lobe."
By "God Experience" he meant the entire matrix of behaviors associated with, and fueling, God belief. In his experiments (using a special helmet to deliver electrical stimui) he found the very repetition of these behaviors made their future manifestation more likely. By "artifact" he meant - as in the standard definition- "an object made by human craft," a creation or invention, in this case a creation of the brain itself."
Or, to use the words of Paul Kurtz (The Transcendental Temptation, Prometheus Books, 1991):
"submission to the brain's own transcendental temptation".
(Which is why one often has to yell at godists, "Hey, get the f*ck out of the theo-X-box, Charlie!)
Jack Hitt ('This is Your Brain on God'), after his interview with Persinger, noted:
"Persinger is not the first to theorize that the Creator exists only in the complex landscape of the human noggin."
He then cites Julian Jaynes' 1976 work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:
"...brain activity of ancient people...lacked the sense of metaphor and individual identity that characterizes a more advanced mind...some of these synaptic leftovers are buried deep in the modern brain, which would explain many of our present-day sensations of God..."
The problem, as always, is that because of these "synaptic leftovers" the human brain is a hostage to nonsense as well as mind viruses that bear nonsense. What plays into this pernicious dynamic is the brain's ability to forge nonsense words for which there need be no parallel in reality.
If someone says: "the bat-winged elephant-baboon jumped over the eight dimensional Moon", that doesn't mean that anything real exists or has transpired, other than in the firing synapses of the afflicted person's brain.
However, the power of speech and writing (now amped up enormously in the internet, digital age) confers the ability to pass specious bilge onto others at the click of a mouse. We refer to these infectious ideas as "memes" - and Richard Dawkins has called them "mind viruses". Whatever they're called, religion is the greatest generator of them in all human history. More religions generate more mind viruses per absorbing brain than any other human construct or artifact. And 'G-o-d' is at the center of most of these viruses.
Thus, we are more dealing here with a hallucinatory phenomenon not much different from what various alcoholics report during delirium tremens. Albeit endowed with the enormous power of replication on a mammoth scale.
Do we take their reports (even if numbered in the millions) of "giant, eight foot spiders" seriously or assert we "cannot know absolutely they don't exist"?
Of course not! We treat them as existent only in the claimants' brains until they can drag them out into the open for full empirical and objective scrutiny. It is not OUR problem they are unable to do so, it is their problem! The onus of validating the claim is on THEM, not on us to "disprove" it. (Since proving a negative isn't on)
Likewise, if a deity claimant can't make his case using adequate evidentiary support (which entails knowledge or epistemological support) then I am free to regard the probability of his claim at about the same level as a random claim proffered by a sidewalk drunk afflicted with DTs that giant, three-headed spiders are crawling toward him.
"See! Right here! Now! The footprints are all over the #%!@% place! Are you blind, man? Are you a fool? How can you risk going about and not accidentally bumping into that monster? Pay attention or it will eat you!"
Sound epistemology, of course, begins with a good definition of the entity claimed. Up to now, few if any godists have provided this, suggesting that they have no clue what they are talking about, at least to the extent of defining it in 50 words or less.
And so I rest confidently as an unbeliever, quite sure no deity exists - just as I quite sure that the four foot high elf that my 4 yr. old niece claims is dancing in the fireplace doesn't exist.