the god need, a myth?

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People here in the west claim that "there is a part of peoples' brains that makes them dependent on believing in a god". But, there are tons and tons of people living in asia who do not believe in a god figure, most of them are budhist or taoist, or zoroastrian, or something of that nature.... Also soviet russia was atheist.
My conclusion is, that people only "need" this imaginary friend because they are conditioned to need it. It is keeping the masses to mentally weak and gullible to think for themselves.
I say this not trying to attack peoples' beliefs so much as I am attacking the long and still going rap sheet behind religious abuses, the wars, the murders, the oppressions, that have all went down in the name of "god", when in fact we have evidence to support evolution.
Yeah, there are a few good people in every religion, but often those few good people aren't enough to suppress the evil intents of the waves who will misuse their religion.... And, like I just stated, the literal interpretation of them in the very least, are proven incorrect. Perhaps there are other ways of interpreting those religions that might still hold some water, theoretically, though.

I'm really not trying to make this an offensive thread, I'm just trying to get some other peoples' perspectives on what I had stated.

Nobody says that there's a "God Need" there's only a genetic predisposition to supernatural belief. Meaning you can have the God gene in you but you can still be an atheist just like you can have genetic predisposition to getting cancer yet never get cancer.

i think that as our brains grew, one of the side effects was to believe in the supernatural. part of wich makes us human i think.

do monkeys observe a pirticular god or religion? nope. brains too small

That's not how the theory works at all. Our brains allow us to survive by connecting cause and effect. Monkeys get burned, they learn not to touch fire. The problem is, for humans, that the attribution of causality can become hyperactive. Our brains cannot understand things that do not have a readily explainable cause; therefore one had to be invented, 'god'.

Point is, most religious people who believe in a god feel as though they NEED to believe in a god, this is what scientists and psychologists have noted yet, do we really need to believe? The Asian nations don't, neither did the russians in the soviet empire, when we're born we are agnostic. If you could even call us that.

:star:

I think people are conditioned to need a god, it's like a giant cult that has taken way too much power and has always welded it irresponsibly, even to this day as I sit here and type this message somebody is a victim somewhere in the name of god, a man-made god.

There is no "god" in Japan, well actually there are some christians there now but theyr a minority and it's treated as more of an alternative religion over there. But that was within recent times, it still does not cover hundreds of years of their history.

It seems to me that everybody has to speak for themselves. I have never needed or wanted a god and find no use for one in my life. It seems some people do. Personally I find this unfortunate.

People in a culture will always be conditioned to live a certain way. Of course, you're welcome to break away from the rest of the sheep, but only if you can accept being labelled an outsider or wierdo, or outcast. And I think that's why everyone in a particular culture always ends up being a sheep, because they really, really fear being labelled as such. You need not explain this with genetics, as it does seem to be environmental. Perhaps the "god gene" just makes it easier to indoctrinate young kids if they have it. Or perhaps it makes people irrational.

However, I don't think Christians or people of other religions should be using that as an excuse to say that everyone inherently believes in God, but consciously denies it. They would be contradicting themselves because they don't ascribe to science, and it is through science that the "god gene" was discovered, and when they started throwing around that argument, they didn't know why everyone inherently believed in God; it's just wishful thinking.

However, there are certain things you can blame religion for and other things you don't blame religion for. People using religion for their own means should be blamed, and not necessarily the religion itself. But when religion tells you to do something that doesn't benefit society or displays religious intolerance, then it is religion's fault. In some cases, it is both the religion's and the person's faults.

Please see my explanation for this in my reply to your thread " logical argument for religion"! I have one and it explains exactly this issue!!
In brief, and not half as well expressed as on your other thread (! !);
Wheat and dairy. Gluten and Casein; opiate-similar food-opioids only eaten by people in the West.
Wheat was a new plant which appeared for first time after last ice age (12,000 BC approx)in only one place on earth; the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East ! ! And dairy farming started soon after in same place.
In China and Japan did not have wheat or dairy until very recently. ( rice does not contain gluten)
God/a Religion in which believe in "a God who created the world" was perhaps an aspie invention as antidote to the alienation of food-opioid effect in which the aspie brain cried out for meaning and for solid reality. Juxtaposing an unreality against the hazy/uncertain/unsteady reality of the world made it seem more real. The unreal exists, as powerful counterpoint to the real. Unfortunately god is now "dead" in the West, but we still eat wheat and dairy , perhaps why in plight we are last 100 years!!
And in Japan and China have now introduced both wheat and dairy. ( uh oh)

i had completely forgotten about this thread.
But in fact it is exactly these theories about the development of certain cognitive functions in our brains in the last 50,000 years or so being responsible for religious belief which i was reading recently and suddenly fitted for me.
In the thread where i refer to this theory, ("Believe in Aliens instead of God"), I decided that it clearly canNOT apply to everyone. Because many/MOST people do not feel any need to believe in god.
So i suggested that in fact it may only be the case for a minority of the population, those with high level fluid intelligence; that is pattern recognition, the capacity to find meaning in confusion, tendency to constantly and creatively attribute agency and cause, etc, at the same time as low/poor/impaired "Theory of Mind" ( depending on what that is exactly). And that i fall into this group. And that i feel this need.

And yet my idea about gluten and casein is not necessarily disqualified , because it is apparently the case that food opioid consumption in infancy does have an effect on brain development in those who can not break the opioid proteins down in the gut, and theistic religion did emerge first and most potently in those geographical areas where gluten containing grains/cereals first appeared. Hmm.

However i just realised today that not all religions need to be connected to same neurological condition. For instance christianity might be linked to entirely different cognitive tendencies!! Why it makes ME feel worse, whereas theism suits me.

Just remembered reading somewhere actually that the asian races have higher frequency of some gene connected to brain development which has effect of increasing a certain kind of intelligence. Forgotten what. Grey thinking i believe. More skilled/competent at relative judgements, whereas are poorer at absolute judgements, compared to western whites particularly, who are poorer at relative etc.. In which case their different religious tendencies might be explained by that.

Last edited by ouinon on 26 Jan 2008, 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah..... Now I am beginning to think that SOMETHING does exist, some sort of god(ess)-like figure, but I doubt if any of our religions are anywhere near hitting the mark because it's probably such a large universal force of energy that anything derived from our minute little world is next to irrelevant. That being said I can't quite say if it's male or female or neither one for that matter (maybe it's an it rather than a he or she), and I do not know much about it.....

In USSR traditional religions were replaced by dogmatic Marxism (I respect social philosophy of Marxism but I think it must not be a dogm). Belief in communism/"light future" is simular to religion.


But not every religion has One God. Some of religions may have several gods, and some have no god as personality. I think, that "imaginary friend" or hierarchical instincts are not the main reasons of religion - its main reason probably was the curiousity of people and their need to have a "picture" of the whole world.

Philosophy and science have some common things with religion. E.g. in science we believe, that there are matter and natural laws, which can be explored by human mind.

The example of the USSR doesn't really work because Russia was made atheist on purpose. It was the state belief that there was no god because the communists felt it was a threat to their system. The same also applies in China; it puts in people's minds that if there is no God, then the highest possible order is the government itself, so they cannot be defied. The Huns also were atheistic bcause they believed that religion would only hold back their cause. As for taoism, zoroastrianism, and buddhism, you can say that they don't believe in a god, but they most certainly do have faith in something metaphysical, or beyond the simple material world, so it's hard to categorize them in the same area as atheism. At base, people seem to want to know where we came from, why we're here, and where we're going.