Why do intelligent people still believe in religion? 27 Cognitive Dissonance and free will | GinaConspiracy
Cognitive dissonance is a phenomena that pertains to all of us It occurs when our perceived values, morals, beliefs and actions do not match with our actual actions
It happens when something out of the ordinary occurs, and you will say I would always or I would never about a situation and then you do the opposite Just like a soldier who believed they would be so brave in the face of battle, and talked a big game, but in the face of actual danger reacted in a completely cowardly fashion Cognative dissonance is extremely stressful It shakes us up about everything we think we know about ourselves, it damages our sense of identity and can destroy our self-confidence if we let it Identity is a serious importance to us and is one of our our more important advanced drive after acceptance that we have
We will change our identity in place of acceptance many times Psychologists have discovered in studies that when a situation that is uncommon occurs, we do not actually think, we only react These reactions depend on pre-programmed reactions to uncommon or stressful situations Many situations such as heroism are never something we had to program into ourselves because we were never confronted with the need to do so This is why a soldiers first encounter with danger can be quite traumatic but a seasoned soldier can shrug off danger like its another day at the office
The difference is that one has had more exercise in processing that kind of stress, fear and danger The reason why boot camp is made to be so stressful is to give the brain an introductory experience at coping with stress All reactions we have to things are determined by prior experience What psychologists found was that people assume that things are done purposefully because they react and then try to rationalize what and why they did it the way they did and since memories are constantly being rewritten, they assume that they had a choice in the matter This rationalization is why people can do and believe things that go completely against their own moral code and not bat an eye
Since we are empathic and social creatures, we will do this for other people as well, as I discussed in my 3rd video in this series Hypocrisy and guilt are rampant in churches because instead of realizing that their actions were reactions that can be altered by building new mental constructs, they seen them as sinful actions, or they rationalize them away as being perfectly fine and nothing they are doing is wrong, while at the same time judging someone else for the exact same action Jesus gets the credit for helping them when they create a new mental construct to overcome a problem, addiction for example, just because they used Jesus as a focus point to build self-control This is occurs often among christian apologists who attack atheists or even more liberal Christians for doing the exact same thing they are doing, such as dishonesty, taking out of context, blind faith in evolution, strawmanning and biased studies and they cannot see that they are doing those very things while their opponent is using none of these Memetically this turns out to be very useful because from a debate standpoint, if you can make the accusations first, then that immediately puts them on the deffensive and when they try and tell you that you are doing these things, it will look like they are just trying to shift blame to an uninformed and biased crowd
Politicians will use these arguments, especially the republican party and fox news, considering they were the ones who doubled the debt with every presidency and then accuse democrats of raising the debt to get us out of the problems they caused and balance the budget The gay scandals are other examples of this blind hypocrisy Its amazing how fast many people who shouted drill baby drill suddenly completely swapped positions and made claims that they were always against drilling, when the oil spill occurred Many of them I am sure completely rewrote their own history in their memories because or their cognative dissonance that this massive spill caused and they completely believe that they were always against off shore drilling even though we have video evidence of it otherwise Projection is when you assume your own flaws and intentions onto others
It has been found that liars assume everyone else is lying and the honest people assume that people around them are honest You go with what you know Solipsism is when you assume that everyone thinks the same way you do which I find funny that it is considered one the the Levayan Satanic deadly sins This is why it took forever for John Locke to emerge and say “Hey, maybe we don't all think alike” This naturalistic study for the understanding of issues like cognitive dissonance is why it is difficult for many scientists like myself to support the concept of free will as an innate property of the brain
If we are just reacting to things based on prior conditioning, then where is the free will in that? Some of us happened to have the right experience to realize that that we could self-reflect and alter our conditioning, so some of us change to better ourselves and many do not and will just continue to react the way they were conditioned by experiences This is the concept of the ID, ego and superego The Id just reacts based on its prior conditioning, the ego just takes a combo of experiences emotions and concepts and picks the best one based on which one weighs up more I would say that no one chooses to do bad things, when they weigh the options at hand, they are making the best choice that they know at that time, even if it is a horrible idea, many times through rationalizing Emotions play a huge part in this type of situation as they can seriously twist your perspective of reality and make you certain you are doing the right thing
It is these people that rely on religion so heavily and for whom religion was made However the super ego requires the time to learn, self-reflection as well as problem solving to change our own conditioned responses to how the id and ego react Perhaps free will is not inherent to all people, but is something to strive for by obtaining the experiences and memories needed to have a fully functioning super-ego The theory of emergence has many layers, where the parts are just parts but when the parts are put together in a particular arrangement the whole becomes much more than the sum of the parts In nature every process of the human brain is used through divergent evolution in other animals but what makes us special is the blend, combination and compilation of all those parts that make us more in a sense than any animal
It is perhaps true that until the super ego is attained, people really do have no free will and if they never achieve it then they will be a danger to themselves and society, because they are at the mercy of their conditioning and experiences and have not attained the ability think beyond these things and to self-reflect when cognitive dissonance occurs instead of rationalizing it, and to problem solve to design ways to change your own conditioning and to desire to learn as a virtue of how to explore themselves and the planet around them We did not have to free will to get the right experiences, we did not have the free will to genetically get the brain we did We did not have the free will to have the emotions we have Some of us got lucky some of us did not However I think instead of assuming that everyone has free will we should all have the right to attempt to attain free will and the tools to do so
Just like how enlightenment is viewed in buddhism It is something inherent in all of us but if we don't give ourselves time for self reflection, unbiased honesty about ourselves, and the understanding of ourselves to create new mental constructs, we will never achieve enlightenment or free will
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