Humans 'Predisposed' to Believe in Gods and the Afterlife

[Justtristo]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...103828.htm

This article is reporting research project which was done to find out whether to find out whether concepts such as gods and an afterlife appear to be entirely taught or basic expressions of human nature. The results were that humans have a 'inbuilt' tendency to believe in gods and an afterlife. Also it found out humans are in general natural dualists.

Although in spite of these scientific findings, it does not give us any evidence whatsoever whether god/s exist, it is just that a lot of humans have a natural tendency to believe in the existence of god/s and an afterlife.

I will promise find a link to the paper for this particular research project.

[The Grand Nudger]

Surprise surprise, god is a sub-routine of the machine that creates such sub-routines as a means of its very survival. Almost rapturous.....

[Anomalocaris]

Not me. I never felt inclined to believe in any supernatural entity. Always saw that as repulsively ignorant, cheap, infantile and disgracefully dishonest.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, Chuck, I don't do gods either, but I understand the human tendency to sense the presence of the numinous, especially under certain circumstances. Maybe I just feel inhuman dread, or peace of mind, no god attached, but I do have a concept of the experience.

[Judas BentHer]

I figure it comes from the ancient ancestors who gazed in wonder at their own reflection, watched women bleed and not die once a month, while later bringing some squalling thing out of her body after swelling up for 9 moons, and then being able to sustain it from her own body through breast feeding.
Those things, combined with light breaking across dark skies, heavy winds ripping tree's out of the ground, rain falling and making puddles, streams, where there was none before when the groups of nomadic people were otherwise dying of thirst, probably all combined to make the ancient ancestors of today's humans think they had to fear what they didn't understand about each other and placate what terrified them about nature that they otherwise couldn't control save for when it appeared things calmed down if they danced, or gave a sacrifice, or some other ritual act that they then equated served to appease what they really didn't understand at all.

And maybe, when they watched the first women give birth and not die, after all that blood and fluid spewed forth from between their legs and a little something that looked like them appeared, that when they stopped living and making sounds it only made sense to return that dead person to a womb like environment from which they'd initially been brought forth.
Which may be why burial pits have been found who's walls are covered in red ochre and the dead person is laying in a fetal position with all their worldly goods around them. Sending them back to the environment from which they arrived. Sympathetic magic, sympathetic ritual. Often practiced today by Pagan peoples and "new"/neo-pagan religious.

It all reminds me of that TIME article, the god particle. However, I don't think we were first pre-programmed to believe in deity and the after life. I think over the centuries it's something that's evolved in our DNA, as like unto muscle memory when we're athletes. Psychic memory maybe it is, when we're what amounts to humans still scared about what we don't really know is responsible for our reflection as a race or our universe, galaxy, solar system, as a home our science explores, theorizes exists for a certain reason only to find out as the science delves further out, that even the laws of physics don't have the answer anymore.

[The Grand Nudger]

We have a gene for god, that doesn't have a better use? I find that extremely difficult to believe. Sounds like Junk DNA to me.

[Judas BentHer]

We have a gene for god, that doesn't have a better use? I find that extremely difficult to believe. Sounds like Junk DNA to me.

Are you questioning the reporting of TIME? (Click image to read)

[The Grand Nudger]

"Although it is always difficult to determine the many interacting functions of a gene, VMAT2 appears to be involved in the transport of monoamine neurotransmitters across the synapses of the brain. This is a long way from a "God Gene", as PZ Myers notes:
"It's a pump. A teeny-tiny pump responsible for packaging a neurotransmitter for export during brain activity. Yes, it's important, and it may even be active and necessary during higher order processing, like religious thought. But one thing it isn't is a 'god gene.'"[4]
Carl Zimmer claimed that, given the low explanatory power of VMAT2, it would have been more accurate for Hamer to call his book A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.[5] However Hamer notes that the importance of the VMAT2 finding is not that it explains all spiritual or religious feelings, but rather that it points the way toward one neurobiological pathway that may be important."
bolding is mine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene

Is more where I'm coming from. (thats a nice cover, the folks in the art dept managed to make that less than creepy, also, they added a quiz, which is sweet of them, was reading about this a ways back, not sure if it was before Oct '04)

Not making these distinctions leaves the door open for some douche to come wash this thread in his voodoo blood, claiming this gene is proof of god, and his design. Just regard my comment as a preemptive strike on idiocy.

[TheAtheistTroll]

tl;dr - Humans are pretty fucking stupid