Just to verify, I don't think I've ever claimed that complex systems are driven by single causal forces. But I do claim that religious doctrine is often the sole common factor tying together beliefs and behaviors across many generations, locales, and cultures.
Yes; not inherently a bad thing(helps keep peace), but not inherently good, either (the stuff you mentioned).
Also, for thousands of years we've heard the religious declare that they do what they do "in the name of" their religion. Is it soft bigotry on our parts to disbelieve them?
No, but it's soft bigotry to equate all religion under that umbrella. Much of what you describe is actually quite contemporary, a lot of it due to relatively recent (read: past few centuries) socio-political upheaval that threatened the power of religious institutions like the Catholic Church.
Besides, much of what was done "in the name of their religion" was the basis for modern sciences. Humanity's collective knowledge simply wouldn't be anywhere
near as vast as it is now, if it weren't for monks and scholars trying to better understand their God and God's creation.
In fact, you owe your well-deserved love for critical thinking
directly to the Catholic Church.
Again, we hear from Christians that stem cell research goes against their faith. Who am I to tell them that they are misinterpreting their own faith?
Well, you can question
where they may have gotten that from their faith. Which passage in the Biblical canon, for instance. You might also question how many Christians even have this interpretation. Such questioning is part and partial to critical thinking, and religious faith
can be challenged on its own turf even by non-believers.
After all, I hear from
plenty of Christians that stem-cell research is perfectly fine. Clearly the interpretation you cite is not universal by a long shot.
Christianity is not a microcosm for all religion everywhere, anyway. (And neither is Islam; nor Christianity/Islam together). Christianity is simply the one with the most visible cultural influence in the West right now, and Islamic countries (from what little I've admittedly seen) are going through a major crisis right now, similar to what happened in Europe after the Protestant Reformation.
The Zeigarnik effect is pretty google-able. But to summarize, back in the 1920s (I think), Zeigarnik did studies that indicated that incomplete activities are better remembered than complete ones. E.g. waiters remembered customer's orders until they were fulfilled. In other words, the brain puts effort into keeping current those things that are unresolved.
More recently cognitive scientists have determined that most (if not all) cognitive processes draw from the same store of glucose in the brain. So, for example, something as seemingly innocuous as "having a little willpower" drains brain glucose.
Thanks. I mostly asked for entirely personal reasons that have nothing to do with religion.
My claim puts those two findings together: Usually if you have a religious worldview, you have to constantly filter what the world presents you through this worldview. When presented with a situation, you must ask yourself "what does the scripture say about this, if anything?". This filtering can never be resolved, it is ongoing.
Similarly, if you have a critical thinking worldview, you will filter what the world presents to you. You might ask yourself "Is this new thing consistent with what I've learned about how the world works?". This is also an ongoing process.
If you are a religious person who ALSO employs critical thinking, you are supporting two sets of filters (a cognitive drain), AND you must resolve those situations in which the two worldviews conflict (a very expensive cognitive operation.)
So the Christian Parkinson's disease researcher is constrained from using stem cell research based on dogma, while simultaneously her critical thinking functions argue that stem research could further her work.
This might seem like an unusual case in the West, although we see millions of Christian parents spending lots of cognitive resources fighting against science curricula. Now zoom over to Pakistan or Afghanistan. These folks are aware of the outside world and most of them probably want a better life for their families. But again, their dogma - which is in conflict with modernity - constrains, confuses and depletes them cognitively.
How about a Christian healthcare worker in AIDS-torn Africa? She knows scientifically that condoms would reduce the spread of the disease, but her pope tells her that condoms are counter to her dogma.
One might argue that such cognitive drains are apart of normal life, and of course such drains are inevitable. But the reality is that cognitive resources are sparse and easily depleted. Extra cognitive load can make the difference between learning a complex new idea and being confused. The best teachers understand the importance of this idea and do everything they can in their teaching to reduce cognitive drains. (Google "intrinsic cognitive load" and "extrinsic cognitive load".)
Ah, I believe you're specifically talking about the negative effects of cognitive dissonance.
The thing is, we all basically have no choice but to filter what the world presents to us based on our worldviews, whether that be one of cautious questioning or preconceived notions.
In an earlier post I made this claim, though I didn't word it exactly like that. It's based on a realization that I recently had, which is largely based on my experience (and is unstudied, so I would absolutely be most disappointed if you, at least, believed this just because I said it ^_^): there are two basic types of reality: subjective reality and objective reality. All humans, and likely all living organisms capable of experience, can
only experience subjective reality; truly experiencing objective reality is beyond our ultimate grasp, no matter how far we reach. This is because of the nature of what objective reality is (or rather, how it can be expressed with the vocabulary I possess): a bunch of values interacting. That's not how we can experience the world. All we have is our subjective experience, because by our individual perceptions, we are the
subject, not the
object. Everything that we label as "reality" is ultimately part of subjective reality.
Now, that said, there are worldviews that are
closer to objective reality than others. Say two people perceive a rock. One person perceives a rock as a lifeless piece of hard material, while the other perceives it as breathing and talking (quite literally, by the way; feels the breath on skin and hears the words audibly). Both of these are subjective experiences, very real to both, but the one can be independently verified not only by other people but also by non-human instrumentation, while the other cannot be. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the former's subjective reality is closer to objective reality than the latter's.
However, that doesn't mean the presence of subjective reality is in conflict with known objective reality. If I walk off a cliff, I will fall and most likely die. While factual (beyond any reasonable doubt), this still qualifies as subjective reality, due both to the nature of what's going on, and the language we use to express it. It's equally valid to describe this phenomenon, not as falling, but as being pulled to the Earth's core. Or flying in space through a material consisting mostly of nitrogen, with a trajectory influenced by a massive body that is in very close proximity. Even the very act of hitting the ground is subjective; on the atomic level, nothing is
actually touching, after all; it's mostly just empty space. All of these are in agreement with objective reality, but still different based on the subject that's describing it. Each wording also comes with different connotations of where the subject is in relation to the phenomenon, either physically, cognitively, emotionally, or some combination of these.
What all this has to do with religion is dependent on the religion in question, and how it perceives the divine (assuming its presence). Literalistic readings of a given religion's Lore will generally have you believe in supernatural entities and phenomenon as if they were as real, and objectively verifiable and measurable, as trees, and often used as an explanation for some otherwise unexplained phenomenon. On the other hand, there's another approach that I don't think a lot of atheists are aware of, and that is the interpretive conception of the divine. The Gods are not the
cause or
reason for a given phenomenon that currently lacks explanation, but a way to look at the phenomenon. The Modern English word Thunder derives from the Old English Thunor, which is both the name of the same phenomenon, as well as the God associated with it. In other words, Thor isn't the God
of Thunder; Thor
is Thunder. Or at the very least, the presence of a storm indicates the presence of the associated divinity (Thor is also a fertility God), even if the divinity didn't
cause the storm.
Nothing in my religion calls for me to disregard anything the scientific consensus agrees upon, nor is there anything in my religion that disagrees with it directly. I'm a theist, but I don't use the Gods to explain away the stuff that "science can't explain". If any aspect of my religion turns out to go against something the scientific consensus agrees upon in the future, I'm trusting that consensus first.
