{"id":549,"date":"2022-09-16T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blubrry.com\/apostate_apple\/89635359\/how-religion-hijacks-the-brain\/"},"modified":"2022-09-16T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T16:00:00","slug":"how-religion-hijacks-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/how-religion-hijacks-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"How Religion Hijacks the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Religious fundamentalism can cause all types of problems to the human psyche. In the broadcast, you will see how. Reference article: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/blog\/mind-in-the-machine\/201810\/how-religious-fundamentalism-hijacks-the-brain\">How Religious Fundamentalism Hijacks the Brain<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>0:00 Introduction<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>0:30 Intro music<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>0:52 What is a fundamentalist?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>1:34 It&#8217;s better to be a &#8220;lose Christian&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>2:55 The start of the article<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>4:47 A mental parasite<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>5:56 Ideas are like memes<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>7:18 How religion spread<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>8:38 Irrational, bias, delusional<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>9:23 Religious people are not stupid *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>10:06 Parasite religions and worms<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>12:05 Intolerant to competing ideas *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>12:34 Magical thinking<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>12:57 Science denial and reality<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>13:57 How to fix this<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>14:30 The host is no longer in control *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>15:01 End of the article + summary<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>16:20 Outro and music<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"acf":{"file_name":"aa-ep12-hijacks-the-brain","duration":"17:57","ep_num":12,"file_size":16,"transcript_content":"What's up, good people?\n\nThis is your host, Neil Real, and this is the Apostate Apple broadcast.\n\nToday I'll be talking about Christian fundamentalism and how it hijacks the brain.\n\nI'll be reading from an article written by Bobby As Iran, a PhD.\n\nAnd this is from the website Psychology Today.\n\nThis is written in October 10, 2018 and you can find that article at psychologytoday.com.\n\nBut before we read that article, we're back.\n\nWe're talking about fundamentalism.\n\nAnd a fundamentalist is a person that adheres strictly to the sacred text.\n\nSo they look at the sacred text and they follow them to the t.\n\nAnd because of that, they run into a whole bunch of problems in their mind and in their life.\n\nI was a fundamentalist Christian and I took the Bible literally as it was taught to me.\n\nAnd because of that it caused me a lot of stress and misery in my life.\n\nBut there are other Christians who loosely followed the Bible and most of them didn't even read the Bible.\n\nAnd they had, I would say, a better life because they didn't follow this thing to the teeth.\n\nSo it's better for you to be a loose Christian.\n\nI would say it would be better if you don't even be a Christian at all.\n\nBut 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.\n\nBut 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.\n\nSo 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.\n\nAnd they call them hypocrites and some of them call them heretics.\n\nAnd as you can see in my previous broadcast, I said the same thing, hypocrites and heretics.\n\nBut that's what the Bible calls people who don't follow it.\n\nBut the mainstream churches, they understand that they can't be so strict because they won't be able to retain followers.\n\nMost people just ain't going for it.\n\nSo they want to keep the numbers up, they want to keep people coming back.\n\nSo they relax off the rules of the Bible.\n\nThey let people do what they want to do and kind of explain it away.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nSo let's get into this article here, How Religious Fundamentalism hijacks the Brain.\n\nI'm not going to read everything here, but just the parts that really stuck out to me in regards to this.\n\nYou can find this on the website PsychologyToday.com.\n\nHe goes on to say, and this is by Bobby Azaran, PhD.\n\nThe title is How Religious Fundamentalism hijacks the Brain.\n\nSubtitle.\n\nFundamentalist ideologies act like mental parasites.\n\nHe says in moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person's life and mental well being.\n\nAnd that's what I totally agree with.\n\nAnd that's why I don't knock religion completely, because there are things that people do that's called religion.\n\nThat's not even religion.\n\nIt's a spiritual practice.\n\nIf it works for you and it's not hurting your life, keep doing it.\n\nI'm not against you.\n\nHe goes on to say but religious fundamentalism, which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nAnd kind of like the Pope, he's the vicar of God.\n\nHe can pretty much change the Bible.\n\nIf the Bible say one thing and he says something else, that's in contrary, he can overwrite that.\n\nThat's how it's set up in the Catholic Church.\n\nSo 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.\n\nThis is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.\n\nAnd there it is, right there.\n\nHe 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.\n\nBut fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as a mental parasite.\n\nA parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival.\n\nInstead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence.\n\nBy 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.\n\nIn other words, a reduction in one's ability to think critically and independently.\n\nOkay.\n\nIt 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.\n\nThe famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time.\n\nIn his influential 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as memes.\n\nHis idea of memes is the mental analogy of a gene which he has defined as self replicating units that spread throughout culture.\n\nWe are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various custom myths and trends that have become part of human society.\n\nAs 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.\n\nFor example, an ideology such as religion that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others.\n\nSuccessful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self replicate go extinguish.\n\nIn this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nIt goes on to say it is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged.\n\nWhen humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality.\n\nThe realization that one's self and all of one's loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying.\n\nAnd this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety reducing ideas like ones that offer a never ending afterlife.\n\nBut religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.\n\nHe 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.\n\nAs consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced which generate different types of behavior.\n\nAs such, there are often good and bad variations or variants of any given religion.\n\nSo 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.\n\nThis is where sexual repression comes from.\n\nSo this is the harm that came out of that.\n\nSo 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.\n\nThese ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, I.\n\nE.\n\nThe religious practicing individual.\n\nAt 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.\n\nAnd that is the mindset of many so called Christians and Muslims irrational, biased, delusional.\n\nAnd I just want to say this, that they didn't want to be this way.\n\nThey got a parasite in their brain.\n\nIt's not like these people are stupid and often see memes from atheists making fun of people who are in religions.\n\nWhen you don't understand how they got that way, it's not like they didn't have a brain.\n\nIt was hijacked.\n\nTheir brains were hijacked, especially when you're a child.\n\nI was born in this into Christianity when I was five years old.\n\nI got hijacked at five.\n\nSo what am I supposed to do about that?\n\nSo 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.\n\nIt goes on to say there are various types of viruses and parasites.\n\nAnd viruses are themselves parasites.\n\nWhile biological viruses are infectious agents that self replicate inside living cells.\n\nComputer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs.\n\nOne 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.\n\nSimilarly, and before I go, we know these things.\n\nIt might be some wallpaper that you like, and then you double click on it, and boom.\n\nNow you got a virus on your computer, which is why virus protection is so important on your computer.\n\nSimilarly, 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.\n\nThere you go.\n\nThe ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own fitness.\n\nI.\n\nE.\n\nThe ability to survive and reproduce while hurting the fitness of the host is known as parasitic manipulation.\n\nOne particular intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hair worm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain.\n\nIn order to survive and self replicate, this parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into the brain.\n\nEssentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self copying machinery.\n\nLook at that.\n\nYou become a d*** zombie for some d*** creature.\n\nS***, I can't even call them creatures.\n\nDo I want to call them creatures?\n\nWere they created?\n\nLet me go on here.\n\nIt 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.\n\nThat was how my mind was.\n\nThat's how my parents are still that way to this day.\n\nYou can't tell a religious person nothing, okay?\n\nAnd you have to understand that something has hijacked their brain.\n\nIt 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.\n\nWithout magical thinking, the religion can't survive, nor can it replicate itself.\n\nAnother 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.\n\nSince 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.\n\nDenial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence.\n\nIn other words, the denial of reality.\n\nThat's what's happening, I hear.\n\nNot 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.\n\nIf we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain.\n\nWe got to get this knowledge.\n\nWe can't look at people like they're crazy.\n\nIt 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.\n\nAnd defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one.\n\nWhen a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a whole's brain, the organism's brain is no longer fully in control.\n\nThe ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival.\n\nThis analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive functions in areas like analytic reasoning and problem solving.\n\nOkay, so I think that article would be insightful to some people.\n\nIt would be definitely helpful for me.\n\nAnd this is what's happening to the brain.\n\nThere's a parasite in there from religion, and this is where people think and act the way they act.\n\nPeople are not stupid.\n\nPeople have been infected, basically.\n\nThat's why it's hard for them to kick what they believe.\n\nIf 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.\n\nOkay?\n\nI remember when I was a Jehovah's Witness, they never wanted you to go to a therapist.\n\nPsychology was somehow evil.\n\nSo here they are even blocking you from people who could kind of give you insight to wait a minute.\n\nYour thinking is irrational.\n\nThis is not analytical reasoning.\n\nWhat are you doing?\n\nSo 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.\n\nSo my next broadcast will specifically talk about all the different programs that come from religion, basically through scriptures and concepts in the Bible.\n\nAnd I'm going to share those with you to show you how they change the mindset and hijack the brain.\n\nAnd so stay tuned for that.\n\nOnce again, I appreciate you for listening.\n\nThank you for listening.\n\nLike share subscribe rate this podcast comment if you can or email me at aa@nealreal.com.\n\nUntil next time, have a blessed day.\n\nBye.","youtube":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LTMRVcZ8ebA"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}