If it is scientifically true…
That analytical thinking?
Erodes supernatural belief.
[via New Scientist] Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein famously did not believe in a supernatural God, and
neither do some scientists today. It now appears there may be a good reason for this: thinking analytically dims supernatural beliefs, apparently by opposing the intuitive thought processes that underpin them.
The vast majority of people believe in a supernatural god or gods, says social psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of atheists and agnostics who do not. While scientists have begun to study the psychology of belief, we know little about what causes disbelief.
Humans use two separate cognitive systems for processing information: one that is fast, emotional and intuitive, and another that is slower and more analytical.
The first system innately imputes purpose, personality or mental states to objects, leading to supernatural beliefs. People who rely more on intuitive thinking are more likely to be believers, while the more analytical are less likely. This doesn’t necessarily mean analytical thinking causes disbelief, but activating analytical thinking can override the intuitive system – and vice versa. [Read More]
Then the claim can be made…
It is just as true?
That the denial of the intuitive thought process that is the belief in the supernatural can be overridden…
By emotion.
[via DailyMail]‘Hi Daddy, I love you’ – Engineer ‘talks’ to his dead teenage daughter after
developing paranormal detection devices
A grief-stricken electrical engineer believes he has found a way to communicate with his dead daughter eight years after her death.
Using his expertise to design and build a series of electromagnetic detection devices, Gary Galka claims to have even recorded his eldest daughter Melissa saying, ‘Hi Daddy, I love you.’
Devastated by his girl’s death in a car accident on her way home in 2004 at the age of 17, Gary and his family claim they started to experience unexplained phenomena at their Connecticut home days after the fatal accident, according to the Hartford Courant.
‘She started doing things like ringing the doorbell, changing TV channels, turning lights on and off,’ said Gary who runs D.A.S. Distribution Inc. in East Granby and lives with his wife Cindy and two other daughters, Jennifer and Heather.
‘There were situations when my wife would start to make lunch with Heather and Jennifer and all of sudden they’d feel someone come into the room,’ Gary told his local Patch.
‘I’ve been lying in bed and felt someone come down on my side of the bed and felt a weight on my chest, like someone’s head.
‘It evolved into things like feeling a tap on the shoulder, someone calling out our names and it felt like someone was kissing our foreheads.’
Convinced these were after-death communications (ADC’s), Gary set about creating specific devices so that he could talk with his eldest girl.
Using his knowledge of electromagnetic sensors systems, Gary created the Mel-Meter 8704, named after his daughter, the year she was born and the year that Gary believes she passed into the spirit realm.
Developing additional devices, such as a ‘Spirit Box’ , Gary has recorded his daughter saying, ‘Hi Daddy, I love You.’
The Galka family insist that these experiences are real and that the instruments that electrical genius Gary has created prove it.[Read More]
Can you think of anyone possibly MORE analytical than an engineer, and yet?
No matter how stalwart some might think their analytical mind might be…
Intuitively?
There IS comfort to be had in belief.
To believe is a human foundation.
It is, science says, inherent…
And to the point that it is definitely?
Genetic.
At the turn of the century, a gene called VMAT2 was discovered. This gene eventually became known as the God Gene. The God Gene predisposes people to have spiritual experiences. Department of Defense scientists used this information to create a vaccine against religious fundamentalism. It was a viral vaccine that spreads via air and is designed to inhibit the expression of the VMAT2 gene causing people to become less religious.
-Rudolf Steiner: Fall of the Spirits of Darkness Lecture 13
“A longing will arise (and become) general opinion: Whatever is spiritual, whatever is of the spirit, is nonsense, is madness! endeavors to achieve this will be made by bringing out remedies to be administered by inoculation just as inoculations have been developed as a protection against diseases, only these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refuse to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul. People will be inoculated against the inclination to entertain spiritual ideas. Endeavors in this direction will be made; inoculations will be tested that already in childhood will make people lose any urge for spiritual life.”
[page 199, 200] Steiner:
“I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people’s souls when they are very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinate against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life ‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.”
