The God Delusion

RE: Salon interview with biologist Richard Dawkins

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/index.html

While I've also noted that on occasion religion may well be a form of child abuse, I do enjoy a good rain dance. I see Dawkins as the ultimate scientific rationalist, which leaves him blind to the subtle interactions of energy. If he was a musician, a physicist or a sociologist, he would recognize the importance of resonance, musical intelligence, in the development of human social coherence. Of course the rain dance is not a useless idea. It brings the community together.

What I call the "Prayer Principle", Dawkins recognizes in some sense. It seems obvious that the brain and mind have evolved a predisposition to ___recognize the effects of coherent concentration and mutuality of purpose___ (my emphasis, italics intended)

This predisposition must, in my view, be the skeleton on which the superstition of external deity is hung. By concentrating the social energy through "prayer" the effects of directed purpose are more clearly manifest. But the "prayer" has nothing to do with propitiating or beseeching either an invisible or dangerous being (spirits or grizzlies or killer whales). Votive offerings at the grizzly's territorial scratching tree help to instill respect for a dangerous fellow creature, and to focus the shared attention and shared concentration of the community on its imminent presence. The step over into superstition is when the community believes that the Bear (or Apollo or Jesus ) "provides" or "punishes".

Peter Fraterdeus

Galena, Illinois

plone.fraterdeus.com

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Excerpt:

Q: You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?

A: A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.

Q: So why do we insist on believing in God?

A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.

Q: You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

A: What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.

comments:

pagans unite! --amici, Sat, 30 Apr 2005 15:12:41 -0500 reply
bustin ya

ultimate scientific rationalist? --kernelkole, Sun, 01 May 2005 09:45:26 -0500 reply
....or, just another ignorant biggot who was taught the use of a typewriter. I mean, the poor guy isn't even worth the argument. For example: "in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality."

duh - the religions have already thought about that one, Rick! They got Confirmation in Christian churches. Just an uninformed statement. Here's another:

"We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child."

man, Rick....you must never have had any Marxist friends with kids! (Almost) Everybody labels their kids, in an effort to mold them into mutants of the parents' dreamworld. And then, he really screams "I'm an idiot" with the next line:

"And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child."

And so, since this is part of an argument to de-construct theism.....