Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

…is in the brain?

I’ve long believed this – being a non-dualist I don’t believe that spiritual experiences are fully external. Yes, I do think there is a spiritual reality – but that doesn’t presuppose that our brains and genes have something to do with it as well.

Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine and his colleagues combined pre- and post-surgical personality assessments with advanced lesion mapping techniques to correlate changes in self-transcendence with brain structures in a total of 88 patients with brain tumours of different types and severity. 24 of the patients were being treated for high-grade glioma, which arises from astrocytes and is malignant; 24 had low-grade, or benign glioma; 20 were having a second operation to treat highly aggressive recurrent glioma; and 20 had meningioma, which arises in the membranes enveloping the brain but does not affect the brain itself.

Within each of these four groups, approximately half of the patients had tumours located toward the front of the brain in the frontal and temporal lobes, while in the rest the tumours were further back, around the junction between the occipital, temporal and parietal lobes. During formal interviews conducted prior to the surgery, they asked each of the patients about aspects of their religion-related behaviour and experiences. Some of the questions were designed to measure three different aspects of self-transcendency: creative self-forgetfulness, or the ability to “lose one’s self” in the moment; transpersonal identification, or the extent to which one feels connected to other people and to the natural world; and spiritual acceptance, or belief in a supernatural power.

The rest is here.

…didn’t create the Heavens and the Earth?

This grew to be my problem with Christianity, when I was still Christian. You have an ancient text written in several dead languages, with no clear authorship and no way to cleanly translate it. Anyone who watches Japanese Anime will tell you, the translation almost always leaves something out of the original Japanese. How can we truly know what the Bible says?

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”.

God is not the Creator, claims academic

…were certainly advanced. But do we really think they predicted doomsday? We’ll soon see!

SIT on the steps of Mexico’s El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza and you may hear a confusing sound. As other visitors climb the colossal staircase their footsteps begin to sound like raindrops falling into a bucket of water as they near the top. Were the Mayan temple builders trying to communicate with their gods?

The discovery of the raindrop “music” in another pyramid suggests that at least some of Mexico’s pyramids were deliberately built for this purpose. Some of the structures consist of a combination of steps and platforms, while others, like El Castillo, resemble the more even-stepped Egyptian pyramids.

The rest is here.

…apparently doesn’t work. Maybe it’s God’s way of saying that he helps those who help themselves?

The man, Dale Neumann, told a court in the state of Wisconsin he believed God could heal his daughter.

She died of a treatable disease – undiagnosed diabetes – at home in rural Wisconsin in March last year, as people surrounded her and prayed.

…”If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God,” he said. “I am not believing what he said he would do.”

The dumbass parents should be both castrated so they can’t procreate and kill other children.

Read the rest of the article here.

Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God’s perceived level of involvement in the world, God’s perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.

Statements based on God’s involvement — such as “God protects one’s life” or “Life has no higher purpose” — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God’s emotions — such as “God is forgiving” or “the afterlife will be punishing” — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements, such as “a source of creation exists” or “religions provide moral guidance,” activated linguistic processing centers.

The rest of the article can be found here.

(By the way, ignore the comment section at the bottom, unless you want your neocortex to melt. People arguing religion are like people arguing when the ‘end of days’ is going to happen – mostly just ends up being a waste of time.)