X-Message-Number: 32226
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: Re: Grim story on cryonics
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:50:48 +0100
References: <>

On 17 Dec 2009, at 11:00 AM, CryoNet wrote:
>
> With regards to
>
>>>>
> The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional
> Psychosociological Conditions
>
>
> The nonuniversality of strong religious devotion, and the ease with
> which large populations abandon serious theism when conditions are
> sufficiently benign, refute hypotheses that religious belief and
> practice are the normal, deeply set human mental state, whether they
> are superficial or natural in nature. Instead popular religion is
> usually a superficial and flexible psychological mechanism for coping
> with the high levels of stress and anxiety produced by sufficiently
> dysfunctional social and especially economic environments. Popular
> nontheism is a similarly casual response to superior conditions.
> <<<
>
> I suspect it means this:
>
> <begin>
> Distressed people's dependence on religion
>
> When good conditions prevail, a majority of people lose interest in  
> going to religious ceremonies. This suggests that performing  
> religious ceremonies are not normal deeply set behaviour. Instead,  
> these ceremonies are a superficial and flexible psychological  
> mechanism for dealing with threatening situations. In good times,  
> atheism is more prevalent.
> <end>

This misses the point of the article. The question being addressed is  
whether religion is a neurological built-in or a function of social  
conditions. If it is the second, then it is a psychological process,  
not an evolved brain function.

The lesson here is that much theorizing in the social sciences sounds  
like something that anyone can come up with, since it uses everyday  
language. However, there are precise, usually mathematical models  
behind the words. You find this out by reading the entire article.

This confusion doesn't come up with the hard sciences, such as  
physics, chemistry, genetics, etc., since they have special words for  
what they study, like boson, fermion, tensor, etc.


dss


David Stodolsky
  Skype: davidstodolsky

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