Sklansky's Intelligence Weighting as it Relates to God

[benkahuna]

For me, it's not what they believe, but why they came to believe it. I try to respect anyone's faith-based beliefs. Sometimes I fail. Self-consistency and honesty are what I respect when it comes to faith-based beliefs. Really, it's a matter of a person's character in that situation. If you grew up in a family with a particular belief, it's not very self-honest to claim that your belief is so good or strong that you would have come upon that belief had you not been exposed to it in your family. In some cases it could be true, but the stronger likelihood is that it's not. After the fact, people may find the best defenses for their belief, but I don't get the sense that a lot of people go "belief shopping" first when it comes to religion.

The idea that intelligent people don't believe in G-d or shouldn't is, to me, simplistic, unfair, and unintelligent. I'm an agnostic and by every estimation I'm aware of intelligent (and humble :P ) and I still think that.


There's a fantastic article out there that I think sheds light on this particular issue as regards human nature.

J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 1997 Summer;9(3):498-510.

The neural substrates of religious experience.

Saver JL, Rabin J.

UCLA-Reed Neurologic Research Center 90095, USA.

Religious experience is brain-based, like all human experience. Clues to the neural substrates of religious-numinous experience may be gleaned from temporolimbic epilepsy, near-death experiences, and hallucinogen ingestion. These brain disorders and conditions may produce depersonalization, derealization, ecstasy, a sense of timelessness and spacelessness, and other experiences that foster religious-numinous interpretation. Religious delusions are an important subtype of delusional experience in schizophrenia, and mood-congruent religious delusions are a feature of mania and depression. The authors suggest a limbic marker hypothesis for religious-mystical experience. The temporolimbic system tags certain encounters with external or internal stimuli as depersonalized, derealized, crucially important, harmonious, and/or joyous, prompting comprehension of these experiences within a religious framework.

Publication Types:
Review

PMID: 9276850 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


The article makes it very clear that it does not seek to replace G-d with brain and that any god would have given us physical structures with which to appreciation religious experience. It remains agnostic, but respectful to religious belief.


I glean from this article that one can experience some sense of meaning in existence and that such experience is localized in particular brain regions. From my own experience, it would seem that such experience is necessary to live comfortably with oneself and is thus a part of human nature. Religion is just one way to produce such an experience, but not the only one. I'm not suggesting that people just choose the first such method that comes along either. I don't think it's fair to treat other people's most deeply held beliefs so flippantly.

I believe a need to find some faith (not necessarily a religious faith) is part of human nature. From
Broken Saints , "Everyone needs to believe in something."

[RJT]

[ QUOTE ]

I believe a need to find some faith (not necessarily a religious faith) is part of human nature. From
Broken Saints , "Everyone needs to believe in something."

[/ QUOTE ]

Or listen to the Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed".

[Cyrus]

I suspected as much from the way he relates poker games, but in this forum I was convinced that one of David's strengths is his ability to assign "attributes" (even very complex) to "persons", store the information and recall it effortlessly as needed.

For example, after a few posts, he assigns a certain set of beliefs (accurately too, i.e. without prejudice, without altering them) to say NotReady, and henceforth he refers to "NotReady's position", which signifies something very specific. Of course, as NotReady's positions change, through the poster's continued posting of ideas, so does the significance of the term "NotReady's position" in Sklansky-an use. Then, the usefulness of antithetically pitting a number of positions ("BluffTHIS, you are challenged by BossJJ and Udontknow") is easy to see.

Many people do this, of course, but not with the required objectivity in describing everybody's position or readiness to change one's opinion.

One could go out on a limb and say that, technically, and although unintentional, this meminds one of Gödelian arithmetic.