RE: The Long and the Short of it.
May 16, 2010 at 2:24 pm
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2010 at 2:25 pm by Paul the Human.)
Watson Wrote:Careful there, by the way, when you suggest it might be neuro-psychological; you are one step away from the "It's a mental illness to believe/have faith" idea, which is one that I'm none too fond of for it's extreme presumptions and...well, it's a wholly different issue.
I did not mean to imply that belief (or non-belief, for that matter) is the result of any mental disorder or anything like that. I mean that belief or the lack thereof could be the direct result of brain chemistry and the mind's interpretation of it. The part of the brain that generates feelings of religious faith might be more clinically dominant in some people that it is in others.
That's the point. I'm curious as to what causes that difference. At times it seems that a very conscious choice to believe (or not) is being made, but that belief (or lack thereof) also seems far more deeply ingrained than that in most people.