Because it took me 10 years all told to break free from a rather rabidly-believing Christian to Atheist (I went through Judaism and Agnostism in that 10 years first) but looking back, I think of things I questioned when I was small and almost think, as painful and hard as it was to undo the brainwashing, it was almost inevitable that I would. The irony is reading the Bible to get closer to God and understand him better was what started the process. But, even that, though sincere was a sign. Why did I feel I needed to understand God better if I didn’t have a subconscious problem with him?

Like I said above, it’d be more interesting to see the skeptical mind versus the trusting.

My mother went the other route, even more extremely religious than my grandmother (grandfather died before I was born) who believed in the pretty strict Dutch Reformed faith but was nowhere near the holy roller my mother was and I’ve never once heard her voice judgment or disapproval of even nonbelivers. She died when I was 17 so I’ll never know how she would have reacted to my loss of faith but she was nowhere near as extreme as my mother.

In my case I think my brain could not reconcile the differences between science and math logic versus Christian logic.

But why does my brain even identify the differences and attempt reconciliation resulting in the rejection of Christian logic?

That is something I have wondered about because de-converting and admitting to Atheism is not a fun process. There was much discouragement and anger from family.

Single neurons in the ventral striatum of primates carry signals
that are related to reward and motivation.

The ventral striatum is deep in the brain, a phylogenetically old structure. I’m a little dubious of making inferences about elaborate cognitive functions based on activity down there.

What other implications do you see from this research?

Water still wet, sky still blue.

One thing struck me too. Is this entirely left out skeptical thinking. Let’s face it. Some of us naturally question everything and some of us just don’t.

Skeptics may accept science as fact but only because we hear the research on it. When we learn about gravity in grade school, we’ll ask but how exactly does that work? Personally, I was one of those kids who said uh uh, I can jump in the air, forcing the teacher to also have to explain thrust.

Others don’t. They’ll accept what’s told them unless it’s shown to be false in some manner.

I think a more interesting study would be why are some of us natural skeptics and others naturally trusting.

This is how people kill doctors and stand up before people being proud of their actions, among many other things.

If the brain functions in this way does it not make you stop and wonder what beliefs you could hold that have been accepted as fact to you, but may not be? I am not talking about religious stuff, but it does seem to suggest the need for more vigilance when doing things like jumping to assumptions about what other people are thinking, or motives behind what they do.

Sorry, but studying 15 people who describe themselves as “committed Christians” and 15 nonbelivers, then claiming to have found any kind of general conclusions about how people think about religion, seems like pretty sloppy science.

Sorry, but this sample size is normal for fMRI studies. Do you have any idea how expensive they are?

Sorry, I don’t buy the results — they’re too sweeping and they deal only with assertions (statements, propositions) in ordinary language — not with reasoning.

And, you can change minds with reasoning, marshaling of evidence — it’s done in law courts every day. Why even some fundies can learn how to reason and deprogram themselves.

Statements in ordinary language get treated by the brain in one manner, using mathematics (reasoning with mathematical symbols) in another. Reasoning in ordinary language also differs from acquiring so-called propositional knowledge, but not to the extent that reasoning in mathematics does. (See: J. Aitchison. The Seeds of Speech. Cambridge. 2000. p. 90)

Assume ’2+2=4′is presented as a fact — that is, it gets treated by a parent as a statement in ordinary language, ‘two plus two is four’.

Then, it will be no different in kind from some empirical statement of fact ‘Water boils at 100 celsius’ or some false statement like ‘God is good.’ When one is young or very credulous, the statements are all believed to be true based merely on authority — what xians call ‘faith’.

Reasoning in mathematics using symbols (not geometric constructions) is a very late invention — neither the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks nor Romans managed it.

We owe that advance to Indian and Moslem geniuses who beginning about 800 CE created the concept and symbol of zero, the decimal system notation (0,1,2,3…) and algebra (the ‘al’ tells us the name itself is arabic.)

So, no one knew that ‘a+0=a’ was true for all a in ordinary arithmetic — that is 0 is the additive identity element — until there was a system rich enough to make its expression possible.

the anti_supernaturalist