(May 11, 2016 at 10:25 am)Emjay Wrote:(May 10, 2016 at 1:33 pm)robvalue Wrote: Going back to the OP, I would say that my confidence that the specific god characters mentioned in the Bible/Quran etc. are fictional is as close to 100% as makes no odds. I'm as confident about that as I could reasonably be about anything.
I'd wager my life against a donut.
Trying to get back into the thread now, I agree with that but you come from a very different perspective... well almost very different. I'm like you are for every other religion other than Christianity... can just dismiss it out of hand as a bunch of silly, made-up characters... but since I have a background in Christianity I can't do that here so much, though I wish I could, believe me. If I hadn't grown up with it I'm pretty sure I'd see it just as you do, and just as I do about other religions, but as it stands it's too deeply entrenched to be able to treat it like that, and needs something more. Tbh I think it probably needs a psychological intervention - somehow - to defeat rather than reason alone. The question of how to unlearn something... the brain moves forward so (imo) when you forget something, you only forget how to trigger it, not the actual thing... so it's still laying there dormant even if you no longer think about it.
Part of the problem here is how ideas and beliefs are 'stored' in the brain. Ideas don't have to be logically coherent, and most of the time aren't, to be associated with each other... they just have to coincide in time... we're natural coincidence detectors (and associators). So a belief system is just a bunch of associated ideas, made stronger essentially by how interconnected they are (as a result of neural network dynamics of bias and feedback). So the question remains how to attack such a context. Merely stopping thinking about it just deactivates it, but it doesn't destroy it. And it's made worse by the fact that emotion is also associated with these ideas, and that acts as an irrational pull to ideas, so another question is how to neutralise that emotion. So basically defeating a highly emotional and highly interconnected context of ideas such as religious indoctrination is a major ask, and I haven't got a clue, but it's a very fun and interesting question trying to figure it out
