Notes
Listen to this episode on Youtube
Religious fundamentalism can cause all types of problems to the human psyche. In the broadcast, you will see how. Reference article: How Religious Fundamentalism Hijacks the Brain
Chapters:
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:30 Intro music
- 0:52 What is a fundamentalist?
- 1:34 It’s better to be a “lose Christian”
- 2:55 The start of the article
- 4:47 A mental parasite
- 5:56 Ideas are like memes
- 7:18 How religion spread
- 8:38 Irrational, bias, delusional
- 9:23 Religious people are not stupid *
- 10:06 Parasite religions and worms
- 12:05 Intolerant to competing ideas *
- 12:34 Magical thinking
- 12:57 Science denial and reality
- 13:57 How to fix this
- 14:30 The host is no longer in control *
- 15:01 End of the article + summary
- 16:20 Outro and music
Transcript
What’s up, good people?
This is your host, Neil Real, and this is the Apostate Apple broadcast.
Today I’ll be talking about Christian fundamentalism and how it hijacks the brain.
I’ll be reading from an article written by Bobby As Iran, a PhD.
And this is from the website Psychology Today.
This is written in October 10, 2018 and you can find that article at psychologytoday.com.
But before we read that article, we’re back.
We’re talking about fundamentalism.
And a fundamentalist is a person that adheres strictly to the sacred text.
So they look at the sacred text and they follow them to the t.
And because of that, they run into a whole bunch of problems in their mind and in their life.
I was a fundamentalist Christian and I took the Bible literally as it was taught to me.
And because of that it caused me a lot of stress and misery in my life.
But there are other Christians who loosely followed the Bible and most of them didn’t even read the Bible.
And they had, I would say, a better life because they didn’t follow this thing to the teeth.
So it’s better for you to be a loose Christian.
I would say it would be better if you don’t even be a Christian at all.
But for those people who just didn’t follow the Bible that much, didn’t read it that much, and just did what they wanted to do without guilt, and they were better off.
But the more you follow the Bible, the more you really accept what is saying and the more you conform your life to it, the more pain and misery and suffering it causes you.
So there are a lot of fundamentalists out there and oftentimes they criticize these churches today that are a little bit lax when it comes to sin.
And they call them hypocrites and some of them call them heretics.
And as you can see in my previous broadcast, I said the same thing, hypocrites and heretics.
But that’s what the Bible calls people who don’t follow it.
But the mainstream churches, they understand that they can’t be so strict because they won’t be able to retain followers.
Most people just ain’t going for it.
So they want to keep the numbers up, they want to keep people coming back.
So they relax off the rules of the Bible.
They let people do what they want to do and kind of explain it away.
And so those people are better off for not following the Bible to the seed because there’s definitely some things that’s going to happen to your mind if you do.
So let’s get into this article here, How Religious Fundamentalism hijacks the Brain.
I’m not going to read everything here, but just the parts that really stuck out to me in regards to this.
You can find this on the website PsychologyToday.com.
He goes on to say, and this is by Bobby Azaran, PhD.
The title is How Religious Fundamentalism hijacks the Brain.
Subtitle.
Fundamentalist ideologies act like mental parasites.
He says in moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person’s life and mental well being.
And that’s what I totally agree with.
And that’s why I don’t knock religion completely, because there are things that people do that’s called religion.
That’s not even religion.
It’s a spiritual practice.
If it works for you and it’s not hurting your life, keep doing it.
I’m not against you.
He goes on to say but religious fundamentalism, which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders.
And that last part, or leaders, is when you have these cults where there’s some guy saying he heard from God and you need to follow me and everything I say is gold.
And kind of like the Pope, he’s the vicar of God.
He can pretty much change the Bible.
If the Bible say one thing and he says something else, that’s in contrary, he can overwrite that.
That’s how it’s set up in the Catholic Church.
So it goes on to say but religious fundamentalism, which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders, is almost never good for an individual.
This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.
And there it is, right there.
He goes on to say it is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system.
But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as a mental parasite.
A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival.
Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence.
By understanding how fundamentalist ideologies function and are represented in the brain using this analogy, we can begin to understand how to inoculate against them and potentially how to rehabilitate someone who has undergone ideological brainwashing.
In other words, a reduction in one’s ability to think critically and independently.
Okay.
It goes on to say similar to how organisms and their genes compete for survival in the environment, and gene pool ideas compete for survival inside brains and in the pool of ideas that inhabit them.
The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time.
In his influential 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as memes.
His idea of memes is the mental analogy of a gene which he has defined as self replicating units that spread throughout culture.
We are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various custom myths and trends that have become part of human society.
As Dawkins explains, ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another.
For example, an ideology such as religion that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others.
Successful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self replicate go extinguish.
In this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.
And if you study church history, you’ll see that people had some weird beliefs and it just never caught on and their followers died and nobody followed that.
It goes on to say it is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged.
When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality.
The realization that one’s self and all of one’s loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying.
And this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety reducing ideas like ones that offer a never ending afterlife.
But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.
He goes on to say here, like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated or passed from one person or group to another, it undergoes mutations.
As consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced which generate different types of behavior.
As such, there are often good and bad variations or variants of any given religion.
So let me give you an example before he shares his I just talked about this in my last broadcast about how sex became the sin.
This is where sexual repression comes from.
So this is the harm that came out of that.
So he goes on to say, for instance, there are modern versions of Christianity in Islam that promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior.
These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, I.
E.
The religious practicing individual.
At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity, specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional.
And that is the mindset of many so called Christians and Muslims irrational, biased, delusional.
And I just want to say this, that they didn’t want to be this way.
They got a parasite in their brain.
It’s not like these people are stupid and often see memes from atheists making fun of people who are in religions.
When you don’t understand how they got that way, it’s not like they didn’t have a brain.
It was hijacked.
Their brains were hijacked, especially when you’re a child.
I was born in this into Christianity when I was five years old.
I got hijacked at five.
So what am I supposed to do about that?
So I would hope that people begin to understand how religion works and how it spreads and how it takes over the mind and stop looking at people like they’re stupid.
It goes on to say there are various types of viruses and parasites.
And viruses are themselves parasites.
While biological viruses are infectious agents that self replicate inside living cells.
Computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs.
One particular nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a Trojan horse, disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it.
Similarly, and before I go, we know these things.
It might be some wallpaper that you like, and then you double click on it, and boom.
Now you got a virus on your computer, which is why virus protection is so important on your computer.
Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others.
There you go.
The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own fitness.
I.
E.
The ability to survive and reproduce while hurting the fitness of the host is known as parasitic manipulation.
One particular intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hair worm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain.
In order to survive and self replicate, this parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into the brain.
Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self copying machinery.
Look at that.
You become a d*** zombie for some d*** creature.
S***, I can’t even call them creatures.
Do I want to call them creatures?
Were they created?
Let me go on here.
It says, in much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way, a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas.
That was how my mind was.
That’s how my parents are still that way to this day.
You can’t tell a religious person nothing, okay?
And you have to understand that something has hijacked their brain.
It goes on to say, we know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call magical thinking, which refers to making connections between actions and events where no such connections exist in reality.
Without magical thinking, the religion can’t survive, nor can it replicate itself.
Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought, which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions.
Since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic, he says, we also know that in the United States, christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial, since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing.
Denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence.
In other words, the denial of reality.
That’s what’s happening, I hear.
Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.
If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain.
We got to get this knowledge.
We can’t look at people like they’re crazy.
It goes on to say, finally and ideology was a tendency to harm an ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus.
And defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one.
When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a whole’s brain, the organism’s brain is no longer fully in control.
The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival.
This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive functions in areas like analytic reasoning and problem solving.
Okay, so I think that article would be insightful to some people.
It would be definitely helpful for me.
And this is what’s happening to the brain.
There’s a parasite in there from religion, and this is where people think and act the way they act.
People are not stupid.
People have been infected, basically.
That’s why it’s hard for them to kick what they believe.
If you are listening to this podcast and you have an issue with me talking about religion, that’s because this thing is working on your brain.
Okay?
I remember when I was a Jehovah’s Witness, they never wanted you to go to a therapist.
Psychology was somehow evil.
So here they are even blocking you from people who could kind of give you insight to wait a minute.
Your thinking is irrational.
This is not analytical reasoning.
What are you doing?
So there’s going to come a time where we’re able to break this from people, but until now, we just need to understand it and try our best to heal and go from there.
So my next broadcast will specifically talk about all the different programs that come from religion, basically through scriptures and concepts in the Bible.
And I’m going to share those with you to show you how they change the mindset and hijack the brain.
And so stay tuned for that.
Once again, I appreciate you for listening.
Thank you for listening.
Like share subscribe rate this podcast comment if you can or email me at [email protected].
Until next time, have a blessed day.
Bye.