zorathruster
January 18th 2005, 03:24 PM
I have recently been reading books and many articles on consciousness. One of the issues has to do with emotions. People with brain damage to their emotional part become stimied by the inability to make decisions. They will stand in front of the peas section in the grocery store and be unable to commit to which brand of peas to get.
It appears when humans are confronted with tasks that are too complex or they don't have enough information, they resort to making a timely decision by using emotion to guide them and keep them from stagnating. This appears to come into play on issues that have so many variables that to weigh and balance all the issues would take more information than is available or has too many variations to adequately make a proper assessment.
Choice of mate, career, children and religion all are so complex and require decisions to be made on very little verifiable information. Or it is possible the small amount of information that comes to bear has so much variability that the choice becomes unmanagable by rational means, complexity. We get our emotional choices from watching other people decide similar choices. Thus emotional choices are more likely to be made in accodance with your community standards than made by logic.
Religion in particular uses "group think" as one of it's strongest points of validation: "If religion is wrong, why do so many humans do it?" This means that the invalidating and rational information just needs to pile up until theists finally see the light. Like a bad marriage. Walking down the aisle everything looks peachy, its only after years of suffering, poor financial responsibility, poor interpersonal skills, and poor responsibility that most legitimate partners finally call it quits.
If this is true, non-theists should just keep presenting the facts. Keep the slow and steady presentation of rational information countering prayer, and creationism and all other theistic arguments used to bolster the theistic position. They are making their choice on emotion not rational information. It is up to the few and dedicated to keep presenting the facts.:argh:
It appears when humans are confronted with tasks that are too complex or they don't have enough information, they resort to making a timely decision by using emotion to guide them and keep them from stagnating. This appears to come into play on issues that have so many variables that to weigh and balance all the issues would take more information than is available or has too many variations to adequately make a proper assessment.
Choice of mate, career, children and religion all are so complex and require decisions to be made on very little verifiable information. Or it is possible the small amount of information that comes to bear has so much variability that the choice becomes unmanagable by rational means, complexity. We get our emotional choices from watching other people decide similar choices. Thus emotional choices are more likely to be made in accodance with your community standards than made by logic.
Religion in particular uses "group think" as one of it's strongest points of validation: "If religion is wrong, why do so many humans do it?" This means that the invalidating and rational information just needs to pile up until theists finally see the light. Like a bad marriage. Walking down the aisle everything looks peachy, its only after years of suffering, poor financial responsibility, poor interpersonal skills, and poor responsibility that most legitimate partners finally call it quits.
If this is true, non-theists should just keep presenting the facts. Keep the slow and steady presentation of rational information countering prayer, and creationism and all other theistic arguments used to bolster the theistic position. They are making their choice on emotion not rational information. It is up to the few and dedicated to keep presenting the facts.:argh: