Study Finds Link Between Brain Damage and Religious Fundamentalism

The Big Think ^ | 05/09/2017 | Paul Ratner

[Mr. K]

So, is this step one in diagnosing that an actual lobotomy can ‘fix’ them.
Make nice new liberals out of them?

[Grampa Dave]

Shown below is a brain scan of the social justice warrior who concocted this fake news:

[Tucker39]

Sounds like it to me. Also strikes me that libs and ragheads have exponentially more brain damage than ANYbody else.

[FrankR]

So, they’re trying to say that religion is a mental disease?

[HiTech RedNeck]

In general more suffering tends to nudge people away from a drab earthly existence and towards God. That’s nothing new. Even the bible says so.

[BwanaNdege]

Next they will try to mandate frontal lobotomies for those of us who have examined the evidence, come to a conclusion and remain faithful to it.

You know - like those “closed minded individuals” who are convinced that other fundamental concepts are true, such as Water is Wet and Gravity Works, no matter how much the learned elites work to convince us that Wet Water and Gravity are only racist constructs of the Privileged Class.

[Louis Foxwell]

Quite the opposite, of course, is true. A belief that there is no right or wrong, only the priority of feelings, is a clear indication of mental disease.
A firm moral conviction is central to mental health. I do not doubt that certain forms of brain damage may generate healing to overcome that damage.
Certainly, the ability to compensate for brain damage by making a serious attempt to hold firmly to fundamental truths is a sign of extraordinary mental health.
Once again the atheists have tried to demonstrate that the cart is pushing the horse.

[BwanaNdege]

One can understand a lot of viewpoints and still choose one over the others.

Excellent!

[Rapscallion]

Many years ago my mother fell on ice and slammed her forehead into the cement sidewalk. She was never the same after that injury. She became a religious fanatic in a short while, seeing angels and hearing what she thought was god’s voice. Later diagnosed as seriously mentally ill.

[Steve_Seattle]

"The researchers define fundamentalism as a cognitive approach that “embodies adherence to a set of firm religious beliefs advocating unassailable truths about human existence.“

If you omit the word "religious," they could be talking about any narrow-minded person, not just those thought of as "fundamentalists." The word "fundamentalist" seems to be a very slippery and loaded word, very unscientific. This seems like bigotry masking as science.

[sayfer bullets]

Environmentalism... Exposed... Cooked data. No change in belief.

Moving on.

[smokingfrog]

If you had a more or less random group of 150 Vietnam veterans without head injuries, how many of them would have fundamentalist religious beliefs?

[litehaus]

Diversity = BALKANIZATION = VIOLENCE = etc etc

Homogeneity = relative peacefulness (comparatively)

[HiTech RedNeck]

A lot of spiritual voices are out there, not all of them good.

[teeman8r]

how about a correlation between gender identification and delusions...

[KosmicKitty]

Pretty small sample size - just saying

[Steve_Seattle]

"Many years ago my mother fell on ice and slammed her forehead into the cement sidewalk. She was never the same after that injury. She became a religious fanatic in a short while, seeing angels and hearing what she thought was god’s voice. Later diagnosed as seriously mentally ill."

People with schizophrenia or brain damage can have illusions about all sorts of things. In some cases, these illusions take a religious form, especially in a culture in which a person might have had religious training as a child. Those memories are stored in your brain and can be "unleashed" by various sorts of trauma.

The mother of a friend of mine recently had hallucinations of angels and of ordinary people (little girls); the hallucinations were caused by a severe urinary infection. But I am very hesitant to use the abnormal as an explanation for the normal.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I notice that they didn’t say “fanaticism”, as that would implicate both Muslims and communist idealists.

Though it might be good to examine communism as a “fundamentalist ideology”.

[bar sin·is·ter]

You mean like muslims and climate change activists?

[Quickgun]

You nailed it. In a roundabout way, they are saying that if you aren’t an atheist, raving homosexual liberal lunatic, then you must have brain damage. And I’m saying, should we have another civil war next, or a Crusade.