A Trick of the Mind: Looking for patterns in life and then infusing them with meaning, from alien...

Looking for patterns in life and then infusing them with meaning, from alien intervention to federal conspiracy.

Superstitions arise as the result of the spurious identification of patterns. Even pigeons are superstitious. In an experiment where food is delivered randomly, pigeons will note what they were doing when the pellet arrived, such as twirling to the left and then pecking a button, and perform the maneuver over and over until the next pellet arrives. A pigeon rain dance. The behavior is not much different than in the case of a baseball player who forgets to shave one morning, hits a home run a few hours later and then makes it a policy never to shave on game days.

Beliefs come first; reasons second. That's the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are "belief engines" that naturally "look for and find patterns" and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this "belief-dependent reality." The well-worn phrase "seeing is believing" has it backward: Our believing dictates what we're seeing.

Mr. Shermer marshals an impressive array of evidence from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore. Since early man had only a split second to make such decisions, Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is..."

Okay smartass. I suspect that strategerist is reacting to the thoughtless religious groupthink that we see all the time on FR. Your comment was purely an attempt to be clever.

Thoughtless religious group think would be atheism. Its a religion that is so in want of supporting argument and so overwhelmed by opposing arguments that apologists for atheism have had to stoop to trying to attack the validity of human thought itself....all while holding their own thoughts somehow transcendent to such flaws.

CS Lewis commented on it decades ago...and I still see it today all the time.

Look "balls"...promoting the idea that there is no God or gods is a religious view. People who take that view put on their pants one leg at a time like everybody else. They are subject to assuming patterns they want to see just like everybody else. They have the ability to reason or chose not to like everybody else. They have one degree or another of faith that they are right or wrong, just like everybody else.

But to the extent they accepted these realities...they lose the debate...so they invent a non sensical model where they divide thoughts into two camps:

1) Their own...which they simply "feel" are superior and reasonable and rational (even though as many have demonstrated...they are not).

2) Any "religious" view, which they "feel" is based on faith (as if their own were not) and potentially flawed or biased thinking (as if their own brains were immune).

And thus they feel comfortably intellectually superior without the hard work of thinking the issues through and finding that their view is hogwash.

Stating that atheism is a religion is twisted thinking. Some people just don’t believe in any religion, others - agnostics - just haven’t found a particular religion to believe in. Who are you to say what any other person on this planet actually thinks? It sounds like you are playing God!

You are equivocating between different meanings of religion. And I am not "playing God". You really are being silly. Calm down and try to be rational for a minute.

Think this through, and try to take words in the context of the person writing them...it will make misinterpretation easier to avoid.

Now the word religion can mean in some contexts a religious service. In some contexts it could mean a set of ethical standards, often in such cases divinely inspired. In some contexts it could mean what a person believes in terms of god or Gods or spirits or the after life and such. And still in some contexts it may mean the attitude one ought have toward gods or Gods or what not. Often it means a mix of some of these things.

Atheism can mean one of two things or a mix of both. One thing is the religious doctrine that there is no such thing as gods or any God. The other thing it may mean is the religious disposition of being anti-gods or anti-God (Atheism literally means anti-god).

Now when I point out that Athiesm is a silly religion whose apologists are so want for evidence they must make attack the validity of human thought itself in order to discredit their opponents arguments...while offering little else for themselves than an un-examined presumption that their thinking is immune to any such flaws...than I am speaking in terms of Atheism as both a set of religious doctrines about gods (that none exist) and attitude towards gods (that they are against gods). Certainly I am not talking about religion in the sense of some Sunday morning service nor Tuesday night ritual or whatever.

Now some people indeed are less religious than others in the sense that they have less developed ideas about theology, are undecided in regard to attitude, or do not like to attend religious services. However, although an Atheist might be less religious in the context of going to a service, but in the context of my argument, they are religious. Now while agnostics are not necessarily religious in such a context, I do not claim Agnosticism is a religion in regard to belief.

Hope this clears up your thinking...but then that would take some honest effort on your part. And would require you to be a skeptic in areas where you seem more comfortable simply being gullible...and being fair minded in areas where you have simply shut your mind off like a light switch.

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