Lecture: Religion Flashcards
What is pascal Boyer’s counterology theory?
- We have subsystems for understanding different things in the world: contagion, persons, living things, tools and physical objects. These form “ontologies”
- We find fascinating things that belong to one category but have one (or close to one) thing from each other (A ghost or god is a person with no body, A zombie is a person with no mind, A crying statue is an object with one biological property)
- Studies show that people find these one-violation concepts the most plausible (Barrett)
- Jim davies theory of the living dead. How different combinations of intuitions give rise to different person concepts.
What is person permanence?
- Our belief that people still exist when we can no longer perceive them.
- It seems that this does not shut off immediately when someone dies, leading to beliefs that their minds still exist
- Studies show that most people, even self-described atheists, attribute mental states to the dead.
Is person permanence learned or innate?
- If something is learned, we predict that it gets stronger during enculturation
- The opposite happens with attributing mental states to the dead. Kindergarteners were more to do this than older children.
- This suggests that there is an innate component. Are we natural dualists?? Just because its natural doesn’t mean its right but it seems to be a natural belief that minds are separate from bodies
What is the old brain vs. the new?
- The old brain is intuitive. We are conscious of its outputs, not it’s processing
- People’s implicit reasoning about the supernatural can be at odds with what they say they believe
- A lot of people think you get morality from religion, turns out you don’t. In one study, they showed that people tend to believe that god believes the same thing as them.
How are dead bodies counterontological?
We are fascinated with corpses because they bring up
intuitions from different systems that are contradictory.
Religion comes in to fill the gaps.
-Our contagion system makes us fear it.
-Our theory of mind make us think the person is still around, and we might feel love.
-Our biological system tells us it is dead and can’t move.
-As a result, all religions have prescriptions with what to do with corpses.
-Whereas things like gods or magical objects have to be, in some sense, invented (either by persons or by cultures), corpses are universally compelling
How can we explain dual funerals?
- According to anthropologist Pascal boyer, these are common: the body is buried, and then sometime later it is disinterred, and something else is done.
- Boyer says this is to make sense of our changing intuitions about the status of the dead person
- The first ritual is to remove the body, even though we believe the person still exists
- And the second is to mark the change of our acceptance of the person being gone and only existing in our memories (about 3 months after someone dies you accept the person is gone and their spirit is too, you don’t expect calls etc.)
What is the theory that religion encourages pro social behaviours?
- Imagine how a monkey’s reputation could be hurt in a pack. Without language, your reputation can only be hurt in the minds of those who directly see you
- With language, a reputation can spread, and affect someone for years.
- One theory says that humans evolve to have beliefs in supernatural agents (such as gods) to keep us behaving even when nobody’s watching. Gods care how you treat other people
- This requires group selection which is very controversial.
What is the evidence for this theory?
- People are more prosocial when primed with supernatural concepts
- People think gods have strategic knowledge. Gossip is theorized to have a similar function, and it also focuses on strategic knowledge
What are the origins of religious belief and ritual and mental illness?
- In traditional societies, schizotypal and epileptics are often perceived to be blessed and set the society’s religious tone:
- Mania, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, Temporal-lobe epilepsy. All of the above correlate with religiosity.
What is OCD?
- Characterized by compulsive rituals: Checking, cleaning, entering and leaving spaces, hoarding, numbers. Affects about 2% of people
- Hyper-religiosity is a major feature of OCD
- Orthodox religions are replete with food and body cleansing, repetition of mantras, numerology, and portal rituals.
- Failing to engage in the ritual causes a feeling of dread in OCD patients
- Participants of religious ritual and OCD patients alike do not know the mechanism that connects the ritual to future events
- People with OCD are attracted to religions, particularly ritualistic ones such as Catholicism
What is Schizophrenia and Schizotypy?
- Schiztotypalism affects 3% of people (hypersensitivity to things people normally wouldn’t notice)
- Features of hallucinations
- People who experience delusions tend to have more religious beliefs
- Because schizotypal are likely to be treated as having been blessed, their hallucinations can become accepted as divine truth
- Amped up pattern detection (more sensitive to patterns, can actually see things other cannot but the problem with this is they make more mistakes the other way too, they see faces when they are not there)
dopamine and pattern detection
Experiment in which Skeptics are given l-dopa (dopamine related to pattern detection- religious people are more likely to see patterns that aren’t there and if you give skeptics l-dopa they also see more patterns and feel more religious)
Why are individuals religious?
- As with most things psychological, religiosity is about 50% genetic and 50% environmental
- Specifically: Genetics 47% and Environment: family upbringing 11%, nonfamily environment: 42%
How do we create or call upon religious ideas when we encounter something out of the ordinary
- Unfortunately, human beings constantly see patterns in truly random processes
- The termite collapse (there were termites in a house that collapsed on people, religious people ask why did it fall on those people at that moment? Science cant answer this question and religion uses this as evidence because they can attribute it to god or moral)
- The fishing people and the lagoon
- karma
