Well, since I've presented my argument for exactly what I consider to have been trivialized and oversimplified - at least three times - I can say nothing more than: Group think is not the catalyst. It is the result of the catalyst. The real catalyst is "agreement".

This is very easily demonstrated by the fact that, without the agreement, there would be no group think. And without the individual beliefs, there would be no group think.

So I can literally quote your own statement back to you "To pretend that groupthink does not exist in the manner that it does ... merely ignores the [true source of the] problem."

I never said that it can’t. I’ve simply said that it hasn’t. And without some conclusion or solution to compare the undisputed evidence against, there is no place left to go. There is nothing left to discuss.

Dr Andy picked a bunch of facts and presented them as evidence.

Look at it this way:

Here’s some evidence: “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.”

Ok, that’s the evidence. Never disputed. So where do you go from there?

Without application of that evidence - to a conclusion (“therefore the axis of the earths spin has a north/south orientation”) or solution (“we can tell which direction is east by observing the sun”) - it’s totally worthless. It has no relationship to anything outside of itself.

Agreed. Never disputed. So what’s your point?

That no other evidence is allowed or applicable?

That the only allowable posts are one's which either support or refute the evidence?

That the evidence must necessarily, and can only, lead to one specific conclusion?

I disagree with all three of those.

Anything else?

Personally, I think I have pretty well proven the relationship between “group think”, “individual think” and “agreement”.

Group think exists. Individual think exists. Agreement exists. Their relationships exist.

So what exactly is it that has been postulated but not proven to exist?

I agree.

However, in addition to showing evidence and indicating their common denominators, Dr Andy himself went on to lay the blame on (or “assign cause to”) those common denominators. That is just exactly what he did in his concluding statements. He basically said “This and that, in combination with so-and-so, are the cause of such-and-such phenomenon.”

I think the bolded sentence must have just been a "slip of the tongue/pen", considering the definitions for the verb form of the word "postulate" (from dictionary.com):

1. to ask, demand, or claim.
2. to claim or assume the existence or truth of, esp. as a basis for reasoning or arguing.
3. to assume without proof, or as self-evident; take for granted.
4. Mathematics, Logic. to assume as a postulate.

Abra, I absolutely agree. Neither materialist atheism, spiritual atheist, strong, weak - none of the above follow automatically from the premise that they theory of evolution is sound. You mention a "Mediterranean" picture of God; I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I would go so far as to say the "Deist" concept of God is even compatible with evolution. Even a miracle working God is compatible.

In generally, 'positions' and beliefs are lumped together unnecessarily all the time. Its sad when one person wants to simply make a particular observation (or state a belief), and another person - who is opposed to some position which they think is automatically implied by that observation - starts arguing vehemently against it. Not because they actually have reason to, for that particular observation/belief, but because of what they think it implies. If someone is interested in truth, they will be willing to consider each claim or proposition on its own terms.



I completely agree, and yet, we still have genetically influenced behavior. Such as my taste in food, and my tendency to get sleepy.



That's my impression, thanks for giving credence to it. I'm eager to learn of a counter example to this. I'm sure there is one out there, somewhere, but such an example would not change the basic fact of how complex the interactions are.



I agree that there are shallow views associated with this idea, but I don't agree that its inherently shallow. Maybe this is a semantic issue, but at least it depends on what significance you give to the 'predisposition'.

I consider myself genetically predisposed to many things which I choose not to do. I don't consider 'being predisposed' to something to be license to do it. It happens that I have not eaten processed sugar in about two years. I am aware that I am 'predisposed' to favor sweets by my evolutionary heritage, which was influenced by a previous need to efficiently obtain energy, and sweeter fruit tending to have large quantities of of energy than un-sweet fruit/vegetation.

The fact that I have a viable explanation for this predisposition helps me to put it in perspective, while I make a conscious choice that is contrary to it.



Again, maybe it semantic, but I see both statements as true/accurate and useful.

I think I see what you are getting at. I can imagine some losers in a gang that assaulted someone telling themselves that their actions are 'natural'.




I think most people agree, and have no reason to suspect the lecturer would disagree either. But, AFAIK our predisposition to love and peace is not causing problems in the world.

If we want to improve the human condition, we can work it from many angles, under both umbrella categories 'positive predispositions' and 'negative predispositions'. There are people studying the evolutionary and psychological basis for love and peace and using it to try to better influence themselves and others for a better world; and there are people doing the same with respect to tendencies towards violence.

There are some who might want to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the violence - but as long as its happening, I salute the people who seek to understand every angle of the question "Why?". I hope its clear that I do not consider this lecture to be the 'most important' part of the answer to "Why?", but I do think it is part of the vast and complex answer.



"Responsible" for? Or contributing to? I don't consider my genes "responsible" for any aspect of my specific behaviors. In general terms, maybe things like eating and sleeping, but even those are somewhat under my control. Clearly, the idea that genes are specifically, directly, responsible for human behavior is not a premise of this lecture - the lecture is all about the interplay of such genetics and some parts of our culture. He's just putting the spotlight on one small-but-important piece of the equation. I strongly believe that culture generally trumps genes, and nothing in the lecture struck me as inconsistent with that.



I'm glad, because while I respect your view, I feel that the "spirit advocacy" was a bit disruptive earlier in the thread. It saddens me when a thread in "Science and Philosophy" that is premised on a materialistic and evolution-based view gets waylaid by anti-materialism and anti-evolution arguments. (Yes, I agree that materialism and evolution are independent.)



I agree. And even if spirit doesn't exist, we are still not driven solely by our genes, nor was such advocated by the lecturer.



Agree. How about "This is part of why we have the way we do, and we can choose to do otherwise."

Dr Andy was giving a lecture to group with varying educations and vary tolerance for complex sentence structures. There are dozens of examples of him using non-literal 'shorthand' in his speech.

Personally, I'm glad he didn't waste lecture time giving 'proper treatment' to this. Now, if it was a series of ten one hour lectures on this topic, I would fully expect him to touch on the exact ideas you have raised. Further, the audience is composed of adults, they can think and learn further on their own.



Good for him. I'm not voting for him as a congressman, I'm listening to him lecture. I'm so glad that the normal course of human interaction is for many people to contribute ideas in different areas, and for many people to discuss them. If I expected every person to have a complete, well thought out, coherent plan of action before I listened to them, I would learn little in life.



You really don't like PsychoPriests, do you?



Pretty much every human engaged in an action has an intent; most intelligent people have something resembling an agenda of some kind. Today, my agenda was to clean the house. Or did you mean some diabolical, dishonestly manipulative agenda?

It was in this spirit that I made my comment on team sports. You mentioned how sports can be non-violent; I don't think of the hypothetical 'we band of brothers' genetic influences as an all-or-nothing proposition. It could be that a variety of tendency's work together, and that team sports hijack/fulfill some of those tendencies. I remember, as kids, that everyone loved to pig pile on a victim.

I just now realized - even though he hinted at it in the video - this whole business of banding up and murdering another unprotected person could be nothing more than predation-oriented-genetic-tendencies gone amiss. These tendencies could have evolved to motivate group predation, of non-humans for food, but since it is not an all or nothing proposition, but a system of cues and responses...well it could also encourage groups murdering.

So just as team sports could be several steps removed from the original genetic influences, but still partially motivated by it, even the 'we band of brothers' activities could be removed from the original genetic influence (and still partially motivated by it).

Fine. Then it's just a matter of our different reasons for listening to the lecture. Personally, I look at any information of a factual and or scientific nature with the purpose and intention of evaluating it against it's usefulness to me. So if a lecture presents nothing that I can reasonably apply to any problem or situation, then the lecture is, by definition, useless.

You got that right.

Put it this way:

There was most definitely an attempt at evoking strong emotional responses from the viewers. (Although this might not be apparent to those who only listened and did not watch.)

Now as an allegedly "scientific" lecture, I see no point in purposefully attempting to evoke strong emotional reponses at all.

As far as I'm concerned, that is the very antithesis of science and logic.

In my opinion, it is in fact, exactly the thing that he is decrying - playing on an unreasoned response to influence others at the emotional level.

I don't see any other possible purpose or reason for it.

I can't watch the video, but several people who did watch it posted the following comments from their impression of the video a few pages back so let me repost those and comment on them directly.



Well, there is nothing in this argument that mentions religion. The only thing here that is being proposed is the idea of "natural selection". But natural selection itself does not imply atheism or non-spirituality. Also there is nothing new to the idea of "natural selection" this was indeed Darwin's original idea was it not?

(I'll come back to this view at the end of this post, but first let's see what Sky and JB have in their summaries:



So here we do see a "conclusion" being made that attacks the ideology of religion as something that is very "dangerous". So this does appear to be an 'argument' for atheism rather than an argument for "natural selection" (which doesn't imply atheism anyway).

Surely Dr. Andy isn't the first one to recognize the religions can be dangerous. Many people have long since recognized that the Abrahamic religions, in particular, have been very "dangerous" the followers and clergy of those religions have indeed incited and committed many atrocities throughout all of history in the name of God.

So there's nothing new here and we don't even need any concept of "natural selection" or atheism to recognize this truth.

The following is what JB saw:



She also sees a call for 'atheistic views' here that are apparently being denied by the atheistic crowd who are supporting this video.

Based on the comments of Sky and JB, this video appears be atheistic propaganda. Two people have recognized this agenda. Sky summed it up the end of the video supposedly "verbatim" so he says.

So now what has it been reduced to? Atheistic propaganda, that is trying to claim that religious views are "dangerous" and attempting to almost subliminally be implying that 'natural selection' implies atheism.

But wait a minute!

Let's go back to Red's summary!

What was the conclusion there? That "natural selection" is the cause of our propensity toward violence and being easily manipulated. Well, if so, what does that have to do with religion versus atheism? Other than religion is one method of inciting a mob or convincing people to do nasty things in the name of God, like torture and burn innocent midwives at the stake for over 300 years!

Do we really need to look at suicide bombers to recognize how horrible religions can be?

What exactly is Dr. Andy attempting to show that we don't already know?

Besides, there seems to be some implication here that a believe in spirituality itself is dangerous. But has Dr. Andy forgotten about Hilter's agenda that was based precisely on the tenants of "natural selection"?

Genetic engineering? Selective breeding? Mass murdering of genetically inferior races?

Alolph Hilter has shown us what horrors those ideals can lead to! No religion required.

So now we're right back at square one. Clearly a belief that genes control our behavior can be just as "dangerous" as a belief in religion! Possibly even more so!

So Dr. Andy's whole presentation was for naught. He was attempting to denounce religions as being dangerous, but it appears that all he has truly succeeded in doing is proving that humans are dangerous whether they are religious or not.

He wants us to reject spirituality as being "dangerous" and turn around and accept atheistic genetics as not being "dangerous".

But that's hogwash. Neither spirituality nor atheistic genetics is necessarily dangerous. It's what people do with those ideas that can be dangerous.

So his fundamental argument; that a belief in atheistic evolution is "safer" than a belief in spiritual evolution is utter nonsense.

I can sympathize with his sentiment that the Abrahamic religions that are based on a jealous godhead who lusts to be worshipped, and who hates heathens, is indeed a very dangerous basis for spirituality. But surely if Dr. Andy is even the slightest bit educated about religions around the world he should know that all religions aren't based on such egotistical jealous godheads.

Moreover, as a psychiatrist (or psychologist) he should be well aware of the power of spiritual beliefs. In fact he actually seems to recognize this. Unfortunately he appears to be focusing solely on their destructive power, rather than on their positive potential. We can't just take everything we know and say, "That's too powerful we shouldn't play with it, we might hurt ourselves".

That's a totally empty argument. If his true "discovery" is that religious beliefs are powerful this his conclusion should not be to eradicate them, but rather to encourage them to be used in positive ways.

Also, if he truly is a psychiatrist (or psychologist) shouldn't he also be fully aware of the negative affects that atheism can have on people? Where's his "equal time" on that study?

I've heard many religious people say that if they didn't believe in God they would see no reason whatsoever to worry about moral values. If the universe is just a random accident then there is no rhyme or reason to it. Thus if your neighbor does things that bother and why not just grab a gun, blow them away, and say, "Well I got rid of that stupid accident".

To teach people that humans are just sophisticated slime mold that accidentally evolved to grow egos is hardly a positive philosophy.

Without having actually seen it, and just based on the responses posted by Sky and JB is sure sounds like it was nothing more than atheistic evangelism being passed off as a 'science lecture'.

And when I see that kind of nonsense it does upset me quite a bit because science does not support atheism and these atheistic scientists who attempt to use science to push that agenda truly tick me off.

From my own personal experience with science, it's been my conclusion that science actually supports a spiritual picture rather than denouncing it.

At best it can't say one way or the other. This idea of looking at evolution and saying, "See it's all just due to natural selection thus atheism is implied" is nonsense.

Natural selection does not imply atheism. That's a crock of bull right there.

As a movie critic, and propaganda expert (my own evaluation) I will add:

The video begins with some facts about some very specific individual suicide bombers and what they did, to include their names, dates, etc.
The purpose if these details? Shock value I suppose. Giving them names and personalities, describing them as educated young men blah blah blah.. My mind kept thinking... okay so get to the point... We now know the video is about suicide bombers, and that they are people with education and family.

The question posed is "Why do people do this?"

Well, one theory presented is that it is in our genes, and then he went into stories about chimps going on raids to kill other chimps.
This is his evidence -- since we evolved from primates (chimps?) that we inherited this violent tendency from them. (Even though I don't think we evolved from chimps, maybe we evolved from Lemurs, or some other primates.)

Anyway, he establishes his foundation that humans are capable of violence.. we inherited this trait. I think this is pretty much common knowledge.

He did say that countries(governments or factions) were found less likely to recruit suicide bombers if they had some other more competent form of weapon, and I think this is a very important fact that points to the evidence that suicide bombers do it because they are desperate, or they feel their cause is a desperate one.

If you are being attacked by an enemy, or a huge and dangerous opponent, say a bear, you might run or hide or try to bluff and scare him away. BUT if that bear has you cornered and it is clear that he intends to kill you, do you just offer up your life to him or do you fight back with anything you have?

Suicide bomber mentality is fighting back with what they have... and they only have their lives and the element of surprise. Do you really think they care about the after life? I seriously doubt it. They are hoping it is true, but how many really believe it? Being a hero, dieing for a cause, is just more attractive to them than the bleak future they see for their life and their country.

If we were suddenly being invaded by aliens who were enslaving humans and we were powerless to stop them, how many of us would gladly give our lives as a suicide bomber if we could take a few of them out with us? It is not that we don't want to live, we don't want to live in slavery and oppression.

So why don't we all just get along? Because there are the slave masters who want to rule the world and make people into slaves and those people want freedom.

Allow everyone to have simple the freedom to live their lives and there would be no suicide bombers.

I think its more about dieing for the cause of freedom than it is about any religious notions or manipulation. I think that is only used for an excuse by a lot of people.

The question posed was this...

What motivates them?

It is specifically about suicide bombers, the links to coalition violence and other inherently genetic behaviours. He links the psychology of a suicide terrorist with a deeply held religious belief. That is true in all known cases. There are other similarities as well. Add to these the human universals which can be linked to evolution that leave room for religious manipulation through reward in an afterlife.

I would love to get into what the guy actually claimed.

massagetrade wrote:

Yes I know that is what he is attempting to do. That's pretty obvious.

But I wonder if he is a qualified psychologist. Religious belief is certainly a factor in most cases, but I don't believe that is the only or even the strongest factor. If they had a powerful weapon that would do damage without having to die; I'm pretty sure the number of suicide bombers would go way down.

I think that's a great idea. Let's address precisely what was claimed.



Well, this has already been legitimately contested.

It's also true in all known cases that desperation and political agendas are also an element. People who have the resources to do damage to others without bothering to kill themselves don't bother to kill themselves no matter how religious they are. They just kill others and the go home to be called 'heroes'.

So it's already been shown to be a false conclusion of Dr. Andy's because it's not just religious beliefs, it also includes a lot of other factors including a sense of desperation, hoplessness, helplessness and political agenda.

It's also true that there are many deeply religious people who are very peaceful and denounce violence of any kind. Thus proving, beyond any resonable doubt, the religious beliefs on not the culprit to be pointed.

All Dr. Andy is truly saying is, "Look, knives can be used for violence, we need to get rid of knives." But that's crazy because a lot of people use knives for constructive peaceful purposes.

It's the same thing with religion. It makes no sense to point to the cases where religion is being used for violence and then just denounce all forms of religious beliefs from that.

That's insane.



Linked to evolution?

I'm not even convinced of the whole 'natural selection' premise to begin with. That's an unproven premise right there. And besides, what's even the point to it? Are we supposed to automatically equate evolution with athiesm?

I can make extremely good arguments against 'natural selection' as having 'formed' human behavior.

It's well known that many primates (potentially including our very own early primate ansestiors were a "Trophy species". These are species where the males tend to win harems of females in an attempt to hoard them and have offspring with all of them.

From an 'evolutionary' concept of "natural selection" this is actually a bad thing. It's not the best way for a species to evolve. It's actually quite sloppy and counter-productive.

So to say that it was "driven by natural selection" is absurd. It should have been "selected out" if that were true! Species that paired up monogamously and both the male and the female contributed to raising the offspring would be far better for evolution.

Sometimes evolution just happened to 'get by' in spite of the fact that the behavior of the speicies was not 'geared' toward "natural selection".

So as far as I can see these traits that Dr. Andy attributes to "natural selection" are actually triats that aren't very conducive to evolution anyway.

This actually causes me to wonder if we should even be using the term "natural selection" at all.

Maybe we should be using the term, "species that were lucky enough to have survived evolution in spite of their anti-evolutionary behaviors".

Trophy species are actually examples of animals that were lucky to evolve in spite of the fact that their behavior was not in perfect harmony with process of evolution.

So I disagree with Dr. Andy's claims directly. Sounds to me like he's just trying to make a case for atheism and 'natural selection' as being the driving force behind evolution (which has never been proven to be the case). Evidently a lot of species (humans in particular) may simply have been extremely lucky to have evolved in spite of their anti-evolutionary behavior.

So I totally disagree that these behaviors can be 'linked to evolution'. I've heard those arguments before and I'm not buying them. Dr. Andy most certainly isn't the first to argue for such connections.

Violence, suicide, terrorism is disturbing in any aspect in any part of the world. Those who find it not disturbing or find it necessary need psychiatic help - smiless

That's certainly true. But it's not exactly the point of the video under discussion.

Sky – in response to your statement:

So I’ve reviewed your posts back to the middle of page three, I will try to make some responces – one at a time.



The main question from the beginning of the lecture is: How do we understand the motivation behind the acts of a suicide bomber? There are several factors that contribute to these violent acts – Dr. Andy is showing how he connects these acts to “several” naturally selected qualities (all of them useful or crucial to our survival.) The support he uses include aspects of social and psychological behavior – these aspects have been verified through countless studies.

You have said a few times that there’s no refuting his evidence and so you want a solution. I just want to make sure you understand what Dr. Andy is saying, so I’m going to do a summary to see if this is what you have understood.

We have certain genetic qualities which are crucial for our survival. He gives examples of these throughout the lecture – I will only use a couple, since you are able to watch the lecture. Example: Children must be able to absorb vast amounts of information very quickly in order to identify and gravitate to primary caretakers (protection and necessities) and to learn culture (how to fit in). These are innate qualities – and they persist throughout life. In other words we are always trying to ‘fit in’, we always gravitate to what we see as ‘care takers’, we always regard kin above others.
I don’t know if you agree with that (and these are only a fraction of what Dr. Andy is talking about). Whether you agree or not – hundreds of studies throughout the world support these ideas.

So here is the problem – just because these qualities are innate (naturally selected genetic qualities) does not mean they are stand alone features existing only for one specific purpose. In fact, these innate qualities can and have been manipulated at a cognitive level for millions of years.

Most of these manipulations were discovered by mistake but once discovered even emperors, kings, and presidents have found this to be a useful tool. NOW consider that religions throughout history have risen through errors in understanding our innate (natural) qualities. And further understand what Dr. Andy means when he says “…and most importantly we have to face the fact that religion is a dangerous man-made phenomina because of its very design it is the most powerful ideology that can Hyjack these capacities for lethal raiding, murder and suicide.”

He has effectively used his supporting evidence to prove that religion is so great and dangerous a force that it can motivate people to take their own life and numerous others with them.

So back to your original quote:

Knowledge, understanding and education MOST certainly CAN help resolve the problem. When people understand how they can be used and manipulated, they can be taught strategies to fend off the ‘hyjacking’ of cognitive functions.

Response two:
Sky wrote:


Religion constitutes a “group” – belief is individual. It IS religion that controls the belief for a group of people. If you had NEVER EVER heard of Jesus, how would you belief? If you hear of Jesus – what belief about him would you be most likely to form? How about what you have been told?...

Yes the problem is aberrant thought because a person has both, misunderstood their his own nature and also because others have manipulated the innate capacities of survival in such a way as to create the aberrant thinking. The extreme cases, like suicide bombing are a big window which reflects the power to be had by manipulating others.

Next response:


No it is not aberrant thought that is the problem – aberrant thought is the end result of the problem. The problem is that people do not understand how easily manipulated they can be. But many people do understand and use the vulnerabilities of innate features of survival to ‘deconstruct’ their natural functions and ‘construct’ ideologies of an aberrant quality.

Next response:


See my previous posts regarding “what exactly is it the Dr. Andy want us to understand?” I have answered that above.

The solution? Well if the problem is multifaceted (and it is) then we begin with what we CAN do. As you have pointed out in others posts, we cannot change our make-up and we would not want to as so much of it is vital to our survival.

We have, however, learned much about these innate survival capacities, including how to understand them and how protect/defend against the manipulation of them. (in effect we DO understand the phenomena). So it seems that education is a good step toward the solution.

The other contributing factor is indoctrination – the biggest player in that field is religion. So what would you suggest????

I’m still reviewing some of your later posts – I may be more responses to come.

This is what I have a problem with Di. We have examples of other motivations that have been just as powerful. Hilter's movement was not motivated by religion. At least that wasn't the central focus. I'll grant that he did try to use Christianity to support his madness, but that was more of an aside than his main motivator.

Just a few pages back you suggested the following:



Well, from my point of view this is precisely Dr. Andy's state of mind with respect to religion.

He recognizes that it "can" be used to incite violence and then claims that it must be irradicated because of this?

That would be like looking at all the death by stabbing and saying, "Knifes are a powerful dangerous weapon, they must be banned from use".

That's ridiculous. Every kitchen in the world has knives and most people use them peacefully.

If anything all that Dr. Andy has truly shown is that religion can indeed be a powerful motivator (for good or bad). So why argue to eradicate it? Why not just argue that it should be used for good?

Also, which "religions" is he referring to?

Does he have any examples where pantheism has been used to incite people to do horrible acts in the name of "god"?

If his bone is with the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, and the extremists of those groups then why not say so?

He should know better than to shotgun blast religion in general.

And finally, like Sky has pointed out, where's the practical solution? To spread the word for everyone to become an atheist? Surely Dr. Andy isn't that stupid. That's not going to fly.

If atheists have any hope at all at converting the world to atheism, the only prayer (if you'll excuse the pun) is to first convert all the Abrahamic religions to a pantheistic type of spirituality.

Then, maybe, the atheists might have a chance at trying to get the panthesist to finally give up all hope altogether and accept that life is just a meaningless accident.

But you're never going to get the Christians, Jews, and Muslims to just quit religion cold-turkey. That's not even realistic.

I personally think the first thing that needs to be done is get the Christians to realize that Jesus was a victim in the biblical history and not a participant. They can slowly begin to realize that Jesus actually denounced the mythology of Yahweh and was most likely preaching the ways of Buddha.

This way they can retain a sense of spirituality, and even keep Jesus too (albeit as just a mortal man like the rest of us).

But at least that's a pathway to get them weaned off the absurdities of Yahweh without ripping their sense of spirituality from them altogether.

Besides, the Muslims and Jews are never going to give up their religions whilst the Americans are preaching to them that they must believe that the Bible is the word of Yahweh and they need to ask his son Jesus to save their sinning butts.

If we're going have any hope of convincing the Jews and Muslims to give up their versions of "Yahweh" (or whatever they call him) we must first get the Christians to realize the folly of their version of the myth.

But they aren't going to be easily swayed to just drop everything and become atheists. It's like Linus with his blanket in the old Peanuts cartoons. They "need" their Jesus. And they need to believe in some kind of spirituality.

One possible way to achieve that is to get them to recognize that Jesus truly was crucified for blaspheme because that's precisely what he did! He blasphemed against Yahweh because he didn't believe in Yahweh himself. He most certainly wasn't Yahweh's son sent as a sacrifical lamb.

One they start to realize that the New Testament was actually a ploy to use Jesus as a patsy and that Jesus was actually preaching the same things that Buddha preached, and Deepak Chopra currently teaches, then this would be a major move forward.

Whether you can ever convince them of atheism after that I don't know. The spiritual picture that Deepak Chopra presents is not easy to refute. Nor is there any 'arguments of violence' that could be used against it. It's too pantheistic. How can pantheism be used to incite suicide bombers when the very crux of pantheism is that all is god?

Look at the Abrahamic religions. You're either on God's "side" or you're on the side of "Satan". It's a war-mongering religion from the word GO.

It even starts out with the commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me!", which automatically implies that anyone who isn't worshiping this God must necessarily be worshiping the enemies of this God.

It's just totally false to say that religion is a powerful motivator for violence.

I mean look at what you wrote:



Religion?

Which religion?

Sky voiced an objection to this before also.

This is just a shotgun attack that's taking a blast at any and all ideas of spirituality, which is totally unwarranted.

That's my objection.

This whole thing just sounds like atheistic evangelism attempting to use a few bad apples to denounce any and all beliefs in spirituality.

That's insane.

Sky wrote:


If you watch/listen to the lecture carefully (I did 3 times) Dr. Andy is saying that belief in the mysticism and superpowers is an error we make because of our inability to understand our own nature – specifically innate survival capacities. Therefore, if everyone totally understood how we could develop such beliefs – we would not have them. Let me explain how Dr. Andy presents it.

One example Dr. Andy gives he calls:
The Problem of Dead Bodies
>Theory of mind vs. Natural kinds<
>HADD / Hyperactive Agency Detection Device<
Using theory of mind and HADD (still controversial to biological science) it is pointed out that through ‘theory of mind’ we understand the difference between dead and alive. We grasp the concept of our own nature as living physical beings and that of a dead body. But we still persist in treading the body with care and even in talking to it. We even talk to the dead long after they’re gone – but that does not change the fact that we understand the person is gone/dead. Now HADD (Guthrie, Barrett, et el) where many studies have shown that that it’s just this kind of ambiguous stimuli that can be manipulated or bring on beliefs in mystical – “unnatureal” agents.

Since that tendency to misunderstand our own survival capacities exists it can be ‘hyjacked’ (manipulated) by others to create/instill various other beliefs which are claimed to be related to the first one. If you need an example: A friend is telling another about a dream they had in which they were discussing a problem with their dead (mother, father, spouse…). Amazingly when the person woke up he/she had a solution to the problem. Now the friend might begin by “praising the lord” and then sharing with the other person that they had experienced ….. (get the point?) Each step into a religious belief is one more commitment made to that state of mind. The further we allow others to take us, the harder it is to back out – why? For the same reason we have people on these forums who refuse to admit they are wrong (it’s simply because no one wants to be proven wrong, and it’s worse when its religion because you must also deny part of your identity, part of your social connections.) It’s a pit, easily fallen into, given the explanations of Dr. Andy.

Sky wrote:


Religion is organized, it does involve a group and leaders. A lone individual with not connection to organized or a religious community can still develop beliefs – based on HADD (described above). But as a lone individual that person is not likely to be a threat – of course that person can develop a self-doctrine and late ‘indoctrinate’ their children and others into their beliefs and hence the cycle begins.



This wast posted prior to my replies and it is a continuation of a faulty thought process – because I don’t think you quite understood all that Dr. Andy was saying. I hope my previous posts make it a little clearer.

Gotta go for now – homework, ‘I’LL BE BACK’