Moorad Alexanian wrote:
>
> WEDNESDAY AUGUST 29 2001
>
> Religion, Pascal Boyer argues, is nothing more or less than a by-product of
> the human mind
>
> Religion Explained
>
> By Pascal Boyer
> Heinemann, £20; 448 pp
> ISBN 0 434 00843 5
> Times offer: £18 (p&p 99p) 0870 160 80 80
> Buy the book
>
> There are many theories about the origins of and the reasons for religion.
> Faith has been described as an antidote to mortality, an attempt to make sense
> of puzzling phenomena, to account for evil and suffering, or to discover how
> things came to be. The enemies of religion see it as a failure of rationality.
> Pascal Boyer dismisses all these explanations as inexact.
>
> Religion, he argues, is nothing more or less than a by-product of the human
> mind. It is a side effect of having a particular kind of brain. By far the
> most fascinating part of this highly accessible and informative book is
> Boyer’s description of the way our minds work. We have an inbuilt set of
> ontological expctations and a tendency to dwell on intuitions which violate
> these, such as mountains that float or companions whom we do not see. From the
> dawn of modern consciousness, men and women have focused on certain imaginary
> personalities that transcend the norm, convinced that they can help them in
> strategic ways. These supernatural agents link with other mental systems, such
> as our moral intuitions and social categories, for which we can find no
> conceptual justification.
>
[Hammond]
Boyer is obviously another frustrated run of the mill pseudo
intellectual dilettante who can't understand what Religion is
so has decided to burn all the Churches in a belligerent juvenile
protest hopeing that he can politically force someone to explain
it to him.
Like all negligent amateurs he has failed to observe that the
real mental difference between people is not what they "think"
but what they can "see". The enormous difference in intelligence
between a 5 year old and a 10 year old has nothing to do with
education or "thinking". It is caused by the enormous impact of
5 years of brain growth (mental age).
Biology teaches us that mental age stops growing at age 18, IOW
we all ideally have the Intelligence level of an 18 year old. Problem
is, not all people ever actually reach the mental age of 18. Some
are left with the "mind of a 10 year old", or perhaps more commonly
the mind of a 16 year old. This is the biological cause of "God".
What you "believe" or what "ideas" you may have has nothing to do
with existence of God. In fact, the existence of God is therefore
an uncontrollable biological fact of Life, hardly a matter of "belief"
or "opinion".
Fact is, there are people who know this as a practical matter, since
it is in fact visible to the naked eye to astute observers. People who
know it, and therefore know what "God" is, are the people who preach
to you on Sunday, who croon to you on Television, who write poems about
Waggonwheels and Windmills in order to try and explain it to you.
However, it is an old axiom of seamanship that you should never
try to save a drowning man without a life ring because he will simply
drown you trying to save himself. This likewise is an axiom of
Religion, and is why no one who knows what God is can talk to someone
like Pascal Boyer. At least not until he is "converted".
-- Be sure to visit my website below ----------------------------------------------------------- George Hammond, M.S. Physics Email: ghammond@mediaone.net Website: http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ghammond/index.html -----------------------------------------------------------
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