Religion spares us from existential angst, research shows. Humans want it.

[lindysalsagal]

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believe.aspx

Good read on the human brain's use of religion for adaptation and survival.

In other words: Religion is all in your head.

Researchers who study the psychology and neuroscience of religion are helping to explain why such beliefs are so enduring. They’re finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the way our brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, to anthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.

Religion has survived, they surmise, because it helped us form increasingly larger social groups, held together by common beliefs.

“If we’re on the right track with this byproduct idea — and the findings are really getting strong — it’s hard to then build the case that religion is a pathology,” says psychologist Justin Barrett, PhD, director of the cognition, religion and theology project in the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at Oxford University.

[Warren DeMontague]

1. I didn't need a study to tell me that.

Hell, Michelangelo knew it, and put it right there on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

[lindysalsagal]

2. Cool! I never heard of that before!

Thanks!

[Curmudgeoness]

3. Well, hell.

That does look like a brain....and I even had to go to a photo of the painting. I don't know if it is just that someone had an ink-blot moment, or if Michelangelo was really making a statement.

I find it hard to believe that he was making a statement, since I had heard that he was religious and took that painting very seriously.

[Warren DeMontague]

5. I suspect everybody had to be "religious" back then, didn't have much choice.

But he also knew anatomy.

The evidence is fairly compelling, AFAIC.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-sistine-chapel-a-juxtaposition-of-god-and-the-human-brain/

[SCantiGOP]

4. Thanks for the post

Had read a page long article on this in The Economist and glad to get the full article.

[lindysalsagal]

7. Yeppers. We created the big guy in the sky

And long ago he was good for our survival. Now that we know the seasons change because the earth revolves on a tilted axis, and that bacteria, viruses, bad genes and cancer and heart disease are the real causes of illness and early death, we should be able to let go of the voodoo and superstitions.

And yet, you still see little Christian saints on car dashboards, and people with ashes on their foreheads.

People need magic. They trust magic over their own eyes, ears, memories and critical thinking.

[progressoid]

6. Marking this to read in couple days when I have more time.

[olddots]

8. religion is a drug

with a huge amount of side effects on all of society .

[lindysalsagal]

9. Chiefly, it allows us to shirk responsibility for the planet and the poor.

After all, everything is God's will, right? If god needed a better ozone layer, he'd fix it.

Eternal childhood with a huge side of global sibling rivalry: "Daddy (in the sky) loves me best."

[RussBLib]

10. the Pope feeds into that

If you are poor, be happy, because it's all part of God's plan.

Don't rock the boat. Just be happy.

Curious why some people can ditch the religious BS and go on with life, while others seem either unwilling or unable to accept reality.

I agree religion served a purpose, but I'm not so sure that was a beneficial purpose or not.

It's time is passed.

[Freelancer]

11. Religion is the result of natural selection, or presursor to natural selection...

Either those who had religion, for whatever reason, survived, and passed on the positive trait, or the entire human race fell victim to a virulent neural cognitive construct, languished as hosts to it for ages, and only now are producing some offspring with a modicum of resistance to it.

If something akin to the latter is true, it seems, quite likely that there ARE individuals who would have a genuine need to remain hosts. What comes to mind are the findings in recent years that some auto immune diseases are the result of our ancestors systems being flooded with immune suppressant secretions of parasites, and the slowness of our counter adaptation in cleaner times. Our bodies attack themselves today because the parasites our ancestors carried are no longer in us. Something similar could be going on in the minds of many people that cling to theism so hard.

The question that people who throw off religion need to ask may be whether, in fact, they've thrown off an infection, or simply become hosts to a newly mutated form that is content to operate in the background of cognition -- sans idols.

Did we really step out of the matrix, or are we still in it?