Jan 20, 2021 07:39 PM
Are the brains of atheists different to those of religious people? Scientists are trying to find out
https://theconversation.com/are-the-brai...out-153007
EXCERPTS: The cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what they’ve found, I will focus on three key snapshots.
The first one, from 2003, is probably the most photogenic moment of “neuro-atheism”. [...] In this BBC Horizon film, God on the Brain, a retro science-fiction helmet was placed on Richard Dawkins head. This “god helmet” generated weak magnetic fields, applied to the temporal lobes. ... With Dawkins, though, the experiment failed. As it turned out ... Dawkins’ temporal lobe sensitivity was “much, much lower” than is common in most people. The idea that the temporal lobes may be the seat of religious experience has been around since the 1960s. [...] Despite the exciting possibility of testing this hypothesis with a larger sample of atheists, it remains to be done.
The second snapshot takes us to 2012. Three articles published by labs in the USA and Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking style to unbelief. [...] They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than people who hadn’t seen the image.
In the same year, a Finnish lab published the results of a study where their scientists tried to provoke atheists into thinking supernaturally by presenting them with a series of short stories [...] They did this while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The more the participants suppressed supernatural thinking, the stronger the activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus was. We know this area is involved in cognitive inhibition, an ability to refrain from certain thoughts and behaviours.
Together, these studies suggest that atheists have a propensity to engage more in analytical or reflective thinking. If believing in gods is intuitive, then this intuition can be overridden by more careful thinking. This finding certainly raised the possibility that the minds of atheists are simply different from those of believers.
Replication crisis. So how robust are the findings? In 2015, a “replication crisis” hit the field of psychology. It turned out that the results of many classic studies couldn’t be achieved when running them again. The psychology of religion and atheism was no exception... (MORE - details)
Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/...bout-jesus
EXCERPTS: One of Thomas Jefferson’s aims seems to have been to demonstrate—to himself, if to no one else—that, contrary to the claims of his political adversaries, he was not anti-Christian. As Peter Manseau, a curator at the National Museum of American History, points out in "The Jefferson Bible: A Biography” (Princeton), the puzzling reference to “Indians” in the subtitle may be a joke about the Federalists, and their apparent inability to grasp Jefferson’s true beliefs. His opponents often labelled him a “freethinker,” or an outright atheist; milder observers came closer to the mark, pegging him as a deist who largely thought of God as a noninterventionist. But Jefferson did not openly claim the deist label. “I am a Christian,” he insisted in a letter to the educator and politician Benjamin Rush, “in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, & believing he never claimed any other.” In order to establish that this was the actual limit of Jesus’ claims, one had to carefully extricate him from the texts that contain nearly all we know about his life and thought. That might sound like impossible surgery, but, to Jefferson, the fissures were obvious. What was genuinely Christ’s was “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill,” he wrote in a letter to John Adams. Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” Jefferson was no lamb, and no follower, but he considered himself a good hearer.
[...] Even in his youth, Jefferson had bridled at the core metaphysical claims of classical Christianity. Jefferson had no use for original sin, or salvation by grace alone, or the insistence that Christ—or anyone else; stand down, Lazarus—had risen from the dead. ... One of Jefferson’s first, and most lasting, points of dissent ... had to do with the Trinity, the doctrine affirming that although there is only one God, the godhead is identified as three distinct but inseparable “persons” ... To Jefferson, this was all too fuzzy to be true in any real sense—an “incomprehensible jargon.” Jefferson was a follower of Jesus in more or less the way that Plato was a follower of Socrates: he found his morals high, his wisdom excellent, his philosophy sound, his observations true.
[...] Jefferson tended, in his letters, to portray Jesus as a modernizer, more clarifier than Christ; he called him a “great reformer of the vicious ethic and deism of the Jews” ... For Jefferson, Jesus was to Judaism what Luther was to the Catholic Church. And Jefferson, in turn, after digging through Christianity’s burial heap, would rescue those of its tenets which accorded with reason—his reason—from the vicious ethic that had grown up around it.
At the College of William & Mary, Jefferson fell under the tutelage of a professor named William Small, who introduced him to John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, shining paragons of Enlightenment thought. [...] In a real and profound way, the Enlightenment seems to have been the creed in which Jefferson most deeply believed. ... And Jefferson’s relationship to them was more like that of the apostles to Jesus than he may have realized...
Another youthful influence on Jefferson was the English parliamentarian Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who wrote witheringly of the God of the Scriptures, in both the Old and the New Testaments. Bolingbroke argued that, at most, “short sentences” culled from the Bible might add up to a plausible but not especially coherent system of ethics and morals. For Jefferson ... the only God worth serving was one whose powers accorded precisely with the powers on display in the visible world. Later, in the Declaration, Jefferson insisted that all people were “created” equal, but he also made sure to invoke “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” a favorite phrase of the deists of his day...
[...] in the eighteen-tens, after he had left the White House and had withdrawn almost totally from public life, Jefferson began working on ... “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.” He had tried, once again, as he put it in a letter to a young acolyte, to separate “the gold from the dross.” Jefferson’s Jesus is born in a manger, but there are no angels, and no wise men; at age twelve, he speaks to the doctors in the temple, and everyone is impressed, but he doesn’t say that he is “about my Father’s business.” When Jefferson’s Jesus suddenly has disciples, it is not clear why they have decided to follow him. Jefferson includes Jesus’ encounter with a man with a “withered” hand, and his argument about whether it is “lawful to heal on the sabbath days”—the gold in this story, apparently, is the idea that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” The dross is the part where Jesus turns to address the poor man directly, like a real person instead of a prop for conjectural argument, and heals his hand.
Even at this late date, some who knew Jefferson believed that publishing such a text would tarnish his name.[...] Nearly a century passed before the “wee-little book,” as Jefferson once called it, came fully into public view. Manseau’s story skips ahead to that discovery—a thrilling mixture of accident, fine timing, and diligent public-museum curation—but it’s worth pausing, for a moment, at the time in between... (MORE - details)
https://theconversation.com/are-the-brai...out-153007
EXCERPTS: The cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what they’ve found, I will focus on three key snapshots.
The first one, from 2003, is probably the most photogenic moment of “neuro-atheism”. [...] In this BBC Horizon film, God on the Brain, a retro science-fiction helmet was placed on Richard Dawkins head. This “god helmet” generated weak magnetic fields, applied to the temporal lobes. ... With Dawkins, though, the experiment failed. As it turned out ... Dawkins’ temporal lobe sensitivity was “much, much lower” than is common in most people. The idea that the temporal lobes may be the seat of religious experience has been around since the 1960s. [...] Despite the exciting possibility of testing this hypothesis with a larger sample of atheists, it remains to be done.
The second snapshot takes us to 2012. Three articles published by labs in the USA and Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking style to unbelief. [...] They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than people who hadn’t seen the image.
In the same year, a Finnish lab published the results of a study where their scientists tried to provoke atheists into thinking supernaturally by presenting them with a series of short stories [...] They did this while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The more the participants suppressed supernatural thinking, the stronger the activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus was. We know this area is involved in cognitive inhibition, an ability to refrain from certain thoughts and behaviours.
Together, these studies suggest that atheists have a propensity to engage more in analytical or reflective thinking. If believing in gods is intuitive, then this intuition can be overridden by more careful thinking. This finding certainly raised the possibility that the minds of atheists are simply different from those of believers.
Replication crisis. So how robust are the findings? In 2015, a “replication crisis” hit the field of psychology. It turned out that the results of many classic studies couldn’t be achieved when running them again. The psychology of religion and atheism was no exception... (MORE - details)
Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/...bout-jesus
EXCERPTS: One of Thomas Jefferson’s aims seems to have been to demonstrate—to himself, if to no one else—that, contrary to the claims of his political adversaries, he was not anti-Christian. As Peter Manseau, a curator at the National Museum of American History, points out in "The Jefferson Bible: A Biography” (Princeton), the puzzling reference to “Indians” in the subtitle may be a joke about the Federalists, and their apparent inability to grasp Jefferson’s true beliefs. His opponents often labelled him a “freethinker,” or an outright atheist; milder observers came closer to the mark, pegging him as a deist who largely thought of God as a noninterventionist. But Jefferson did not openly claim the deist label. “I am a Christian,” he insisted in a letter to the educator and politician Benjamin Rush, “in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, & believing he never claimed any other.” In order to establish that this was the actual limit of Jesus’ claims, one had to carefully extricate him from the texts that contain nearly all we know about his life and thought. That might sound like impossible surgery, but, to Jefferson, the fissures were obvious. What was genuinely Christ’s was “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill,” he wrote in a letter to John Adams. Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” Jefferson was no lamb, and no follower, but he considered himself a good hearer.
[...] Even in his youth, Jefferson had bridled at the core metaphysical claims of classical Christianity. Jefferson had no use for original sin, or salvation by grace alone, or the insistence that Christ—or anyone else; stand down, Lazarus—had risen from the dead. ... One of Jefferson’s first, and most lasting, points of dissent ... had to do with the Trinity, the doctrine affirming that although there is only one God, the godhead is identified as three distinct but inseparable “persons” ... To Jefferson, this was all too fuzzy to be true in any real sense—an “incomprehensible jargon.” Jefferson was a follower of Jesus in more or less the way that Plato was a follower of Socrates: he found his morals high, his wisdom excellent, his philosophy sound, his observations true.
[...] Jefferson tended, in his letters, to portray Jesus as a modernizer, more clarifier than Christ; he called him a “great reformer of the vicious ethic and deism of the Jews” ... For Jefferson, Jesus was to Judaism what Luther was to the Catholic Church. And Jefferson, in turn, after digging through Christianity’s burial heap, would rescue those of its tenets which accorded with reason—his reason—from the vicious ethic that had grown up around it.
At the College of William & Mary, Jefferson fell under the tutelage of a professor named William Small, who introduced him to John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, shining paragons of Enlightenment thought. [...] In a real and profound way, the Enlightenment seems to have been the creed in which Jefferson most deeply believed. ... And Jefferson’s relationship to them was more like that of the apostles to Jesus than he may have realized...
Another youthful influence on Jefferson was the English parliamentarian Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who wrote witheringly of the God of the Scriptures, in both the Old and the New Testaments. Bolingbroke argued that, at most, “short sentences” culled from the Bible might add up to a plausible but not especially coherent system of ethics and morals. For Jefferson ... the only God worth serving was one whose powers accorded precisely with the powers on display in the visible world. Later, in the Declaration, Jefferson insisted that all people were “created” equal, but he also made sure to invoke “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” a favorite phrase of the deists of his day...
[...] in the eighteen-tens, after he had left the White House and had withdrawn almost totally from public life, Jefferson began working on ... “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.” He had tried, once again, as he put it in a letter to a young acolyte, to separate “the gold from the dross.” Jefferson’s Jesus is born in a manger, but there are no angels, and no wise men; at age twelve, he speaks to the doctors in the temple, and everyone is impressed, but he doesn’t say that he is “about my Father’s business.” When Jefferson’s Jesus suddenly has disciples, it is not clear why they have decided to follow him. Jefferson includes Jesus’ encounter with a man with a “withered” hand, and his argument about whether it is “lawful to heal on the sabbath days”—the gold in this story, apparently, is the idea that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” The dross is the part where Jesus turns to address the poor man directly, like a real person instead of a prop for conjectural argument, and heals his hand.
Even at this late date, some who knew Jefferson believed that publishing such a text would tarnish his name.[...] Nearly a century passed before the “wee-little book,” as Jefferson once called it, came fully into public view. Manseau’s story skips ahead to that discovery—a thrilling mixture of accident, fine timing, and diligent public-museum curation—but it’s worth pausing, for a moment, at the time in between... (MORE - details)
