Is religion and athiesm part of a brain wiring?

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I just thought of something. If I had to do a religion, I wouldn't be very happy. There have been people out there who were depressed and not happy until they left their church and quit doing their religion and all of a sudden their depression was cured. That seems to be proof right there that some people are born athiests and some are born religious and it has to do with how our brains are wired. Some people are just freethinkers like I am because my beliefs and opinions come from information I gather, not from religion.

So do you think people choose to be religious and other people choose to be non believers?

I feel if I decided to start believing in god, I would be lying to myself and living in a fantasy world but is this a choice here I am making for even feeling this way? It's not like how people can just decide to be gay or bisexual or trans but there have been people that have came out as a religion and converted to it. Same as for people who have came out as gay or bi or trans but that doesn't mean they converted to it. I didn't convert to athiesm, I came out as one in my teens. I only believed in god because adults told me there was one, I didn't know any better. I thought you turned into a star when you die was because my mom told me so. I thought Jesus was the first born because I was told so. and so on. Kids believe anything adults tell them so that was why I believed in god, that didn't make me religious.

It can be worse or more confusing. In terms of 'Brain Wiring', I think the Left and Right hemispheres of the brain look at reality different ways, but between them have to come to a consensus.


This video discusses an extreme example of patients who's brain hemispheres have been divided and are independent of each other.

I'd like to open with God and religion are completely separate things. You don't have to go to a church to believe in a Higher Power. I learned to be Catholic and went through a period God wasn't a part of my life. I believe in a higher power whatever you call it, I just call mine God. I've heard it explained like this...which is more plausible, a random explosion created life only here or there was a God who created everything? Now assume you spend you whole life trying to do your Gods will and you die. Generally speaking you'd have made some sort of positive impact on your world and meditation/praying has been shown to be helpful to your health so win/win.While there are horrible things done "In The Name of God", that seems to be a perversion of a religion. The other HUGE thing for me is I don't always get social norms and miss right and wrong but there's a book that helps with that too. The best part is Hope, because without Hope many people leave us too soon. I once believed a woman Loved me and could prove it or so I thought. I've been wrong about a lot of things regardless of the amount of proof I have. So I believe because it makes no sense not to.

My best guess? Not exactly.

I think brain wiring might address people's handling of, approach to, etc. of beliefs one way or another but I still think ultimately the person's needs will pick up a lot on environmental queues and there are too many different ways for that to go, or really too many possibilities for one thing or another to rise as a person's top priority.

I think Freud's take on why people desire religion is quite apt. Basically, he finds that people worship gods, or observe rituals, in order to make sense of the "unknown," and to forstall the finality of death.

I have a strong fear of the finality of death---yet I have chosen the atheistic route, which precludes anything like "heaven."

I can, however, understand why people choose to follow a religion or religions. It's not a matter of logic or reason, per se, It's a matter of faith.

I think the one thing people miss if they do focus on religion as primarily a 'fear of death' thing is that it probably isn't the primary driver and quite likely, at best, is at the top of the list with many co-equal drivers. Most of those other drivers might very well amount to things more like fear of living without hope and how that could change them in undesirable ways, a quick ticket to finding oneself in a supportive community (or on the flip side - fear of alienation), ways to show reverence or 'connect with the universe' which aren't as easy to concoct or of obvious availability in other paths of life, ie. a lot of this seems to be people maintaining themselves for the long haul of life and that long haul of life might actually be the bigger issue than the death issue.

I've met a fair amount of people who live as devout Catholics, Eastern or Mediterranean orthodox who believe that when they die that's it - the lights are out forever. That tells me a fair amount about their instincts and the sense they have that if they do fully drift off and do their own thing that, without a fair amount of active maintenance, their life - as well as the life of their children - could drift off in directions that they wouldn't be particularly keen on. The question of human free will, or lack there of, also puts that in an interesting context because one does see where, without a healthy and reinforcing context of some kind for valuing certain social norms the sheer economy of effort vs. reward can start softening or even dismantling those circuits. In that sense you have to curate your habits, activities, social involvements, etc. pretty scrupulously even if you decide not to go the religious path. The religious path however offers a full civic, philosophic, etc. package that's difficult to find or cobble together from other sources.

I believe there are multifarious reasons for people to follow religion. I was merely stating a personal example, something based upon my fear of the finality and stagnation of death.

Even Freud stated, in essence, that people opt for religion in order to "make sense of the world." Freud actually believed that people had a "death wish" (subconsciously).

I have not thought of it this way, but your argument does make sense. Personally I am Catholic but was not raised Catholic. I enjoy going to church and living according to the Catholic faith. I have been told by some atheists that I have been brainwashed and various other things, but the truth is I am happy living my life the way I am right now. I tried at one time to live without ever praying or going to church, and I wasn't happy at all.

That is the reason why people do conspiracy theories. To make sense of something. I am sure everyone does one. Who doesn't form opinions and come up with speculations?

There seems to be some genetics involved in religiosity. Mono-zygotic twins are more often the same (either both atheist or both religious) than (same sex) di-zygotic twins. But of course it's not only genetics. People with religious parents are also more often religious than people with atheist parents.

Plenty of children of atheist parents rebel, and become religious.

I think what happens with people, going back to the points I made in my 'Humanity 2.0' thread is that genetics and brain wiring set the particular type of crazy that you'll have to guard against, work around, etc. and I think environment (ie. religion, lack of religion, sciences, arts, philosophy, sports, consumerism, etc.) offers you which coping mechanisms you'll pursue to manage the things about yourself that you don't really have control over. Similarly betrayals and disappointments, as kraftworkie stated above, tend to send people toward exploring the opposite of what disappointed them.

Genetics is just the framework of the building; the entire building is made up of accumulated life experience. Life is like a cathedral in the process of being constructed.

The same with autism. We might have a weird framework---but it could be just as solid as a conventional framework.

That's true only up to a point. Your wiring, which comes typically by way of your genetics, has a lot to do with how you'd interpret those experiences, how they get stored, the degree to which a negative experience can either be cast aside without too much negative impact vs. having all kinds of other possible cascades of trauma and their various outcomes ensue, and if you have a natural predisposition to anxiety or depression you could be having a rough time whether your life is a load of external trauma or virtually none at all. Twin studies seem to be controversial because their n is apparently too small in some people's books for the profundity of the claim they make but it seems to push the idea that to a large degree both the resilience people have as well as the vulnerabilities and needs they have are largely preset. Being in a nightmare scenario, like war refugee or political prisoner, is a strong enough environmental prompt to impact anyone but it's still a thing where people's degree of negative reaction or collapse would go back to that same piece - ie. natural resilience.

I think that's where I'd maybe draw my distinction here with the topic - I tend toward maybe a 2/3 vs 1/3 nature vs nurture outlook (you can dig deeper with nurture but it takes heroic efforts in my books - like initiatic rights and ritual self confrontation). I still see worldview and choices to be a theist, atheist, pantheist, deist, emanationist, etc. as belonging to a different category which is largely independent - in some sense coping mechanism but the other sense it'll also matter which facts in your environment are in which order of salience, and clearly family influence either greatly expedites you toward such beliefs or it reveals nearly every flaw in a given belief. I think a person with a given vulnerability though, whether they go atheist, theist, agnostic, deist, etc. will approach their belief set in a similar manner (or at least as far as the contents of that belief will allow) and that's where I think the genetic or wiring component shows up - the way they practice or act a belief out.

People have certain dispositions, yes....but, sometimes, they don't realize there's free will; they can transcend the "wiring."

I have only transcended my "wiring" to a certain extent.....for various reasons both beyond and within my control.

But to ascribe "fate" merely to genetics is something which I find to be quite confining.....and not correct.

We should always seek to use what free will we have to our greatest possible advantage.

I think that's likely the one place we'd disagree emphatically. There's no evidence that we have any way to make a choice, given we have a finite set of facts at any given choice point with one option which will ultimately calculate as optimal, that leads to a different outcome than the data we had to work with at that given point. I think what confuses us is that our subconscious minds are a bit of a black box to us and that it seems like intuitions can tell us things we didn't know before but I can peel into that in a few ways - a) the intuition provided you new information to make a new choice, without that intuition you wouldn't have made that choice b) that intuition was brain processing, in sequential time thus its as non-ephemeral as a ball rolling down a hill c) whether it's just neurons creating intuitions, whether it's the Universe experiencing itself through you and the white light is telling you what it wants you to do next, whether its spirit guides nudging you, it's information received in time and in that block of time you had a choice to make - which was determined by your available understanding of options, your mood, your energy levels, all of these things are locked in place, at that moment, and baked into your decision.


That's another place where I think the free will side of the debate get confused on what the determinist side is saying. Almost all of us as human beings have internal gears that grind against each other and as we get older, by sheer experience and pragmatic need to function as well as possible, increasingly learn how to accomodate that grinding or work around it. I don't think you'll find a determinist, genetic or otherwise (although IMHO nature and nurture are just as frozen in time and equally deterministic), claiming that if you had a problem at birth that you'll be suffering from it - just as badly - until the day you die.


Hopefully I cleared up this fundamental confusion as to what the determinist or at least non-free will stance is. It's not a claim that progress or self-improvement are impossible. If anything the determinist view would suggest that, unless you're a for-lifer in a mental institution, you can't not improve - you won't survive your environment otherwise and if the outward punishments for not growing and improving don't get you your own internal sense of your heightened vulnerabilities most likely will.