Why do Intelligent People still Believe in Religion? 12: Using the psychological mechanisms | GinaConspiracy
One of the things the few criticizer of this series has been is that they felt like it gave too many excuses for stupid thinking and beliefs While its true that people enjoy exploiting excuses to be lazy and receive special treatment, The purpose of a psychological diagnosis is not to give someone an excuse but to make one aware of their own situation so that they may come up with a game plan for overcoming it
I had the same discussion with kellyjones00 about how she claims that men are better than women There are things that each sex will be more likely to fall prey too in terms of health and psychosis however knowing that means that you can have a game plan to overcome and empower yourself If psychologists treated knowledge of anything as a special privilege nothing would ever get done All new knowledge would be responded with, “well thats how it is”, and we can't do anything about it, now we have an excuse for what we've been doing for the past 5 centuries, which is yet another form of rationalization In engineering there are no good or bad attributes
There are bad for a certain situations, but no mechanism or trait is inherently bad Now a person like kellyjones00 would argue that men and women are bad in some situations and better in others using these arguments Unfortuantely she fails to comprehend the wonder that is the brain The amazing thing about the brain is that it can change and constructs can be devised to overcome naturally predisposed traits Just as math is not something inherent to us, we utilized our ability to memorize and assign symbols to concepts that allowed us to very successfully utilize mathematics to gain a clearer and more accurate understanding of our world and universe
The brain can change, adapt and overcome in ways that would take millenia of generations to evolve genetically Skeptcism is a mental construct that tends to go against our common sense Our first reaction is to have blind faith in something told to you by someone we trust and be xenophobic of things told to us by someone who disagrees with us This us-vs-them mentality of course had many advantage but is also very damaging and counter productive in terms of understanding and progress Fortunately we discovered and crafted the scientific method which we can now train ourselves suspend emotional faith or xenophobia of a new idea, and let it filter through the scientific method construct to be a standard of what to believe than let out faith or xenophobia take over
This extra step in out mental process can assure that if something untrue did happen to get through the filter we can run out own ideas back through the filter when stated by the person you trust the most, You, and the scientific method will have a chance to filter it out again Without this filter you would end up being hypocritical in the way you analyses what you are to believe as what you have been told by someone you trust may give you the warm fuzzies, while something someone else tells you may just sound dumb If you compare the two things said without emotion or preconceived nothing they may both sound equally silly but with emotion blinding you to this you would never know Now to claim that all people with stupid ideas are doing so by choice, is judgmental at best Remember we were not given any handbook on the world or bodies or our minds as I said in my god is NOT love video
We as a species have had to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps blindly stumbling around grasping onto one mental construct and clinging to it until our children finally accepts the next one that works better, paradigm shifts tend to come in the next generation and not in an individual We are all in an asylum, Planet earth is our cell and it is hardly padded We all have inherently passed delusions and confusions about reality We are the wardens, the pharmacists, the doctors and the patients Some use brutal methods and others have learned to use counseling methods
As each generation goes by we will continue to build new mental constructs that will allow us to enjoy this planet and be free of all of our delusions It is possible that if there is intelligent life out there that they know that interfering is a bad thing and they have to wait for us to figure out our own mental construct system that works for our species and planet for us to all live in peace, before they contact us There is misinformation, natural paranoia and confusion throughout the world People have been taught not to trust smart elites because they are from the devil The scientific community tends to make it confusing and the education system rarely gives us the tools we need to think critically
Something people may fail to understand is that religion is also a set of mental constructs just like critical thinking is, but it is much more primitive and doesn't really explain reality in a logical and unbiased way To drop that mental construct requires replacing it with another mental construct, and to give up religion entirely requires replacement of all mental constructs given them by their religion which are usually much more complicated to understand than their religion had The purpose of this series is not to let religious people off the hook entirely, but to lay out the problems we skeptics have face, in ways of education and awareness of human psychological error Until we know the precise problems we can't begin to work on a solution We will have to figure out ways to attack each mechanism piece by piece and help replace it with a better and healthier mental construct, something a good psychologist does
After this series is over and I've had a break from the subject and time to mull things over in my head, I hope to begin figure out ways fix these problems in people, as opposed to using harsh tactics like ridicule and insult that many people resort to Ridicule is fine for the people who you know will never change like ray comfort, pat robertson, geerup or nephlimfree, those people will probably never change, as people like that almost never change unless reality bitchslaps them into wanting to change Right now they have every motivation to stay in their beliefs as they bask in the glow of their adoring fans However using these harsh methods will just be more damaging on people who just have a genuine confusion and ignorance of themselves and the world around them An ignorance awareness campaign might be useful, because the problem with ignorance is that you tend to not know what you don't know
While talking with my shrink I learned all sorts of things I had no clue that there were, especially when it came to mental constructs such as coping mechanisms Good education in all fields in a way people can understand is really the only way we will move forward as a society We have to use the traits our brain has and engineer new mental constructs that do not cause destruction and suffering on oneself and others I intend to continue to try and do this
Source: Youtube
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