Faith in religion is fueled by confirmation bias. It feeds off the the knee jerk human reaction to our experiential reality by affirming unsubstantiated claims with positive emotional responses in our own minds. If you allow for the experiences of others to be factored into your assessment of this common practice for justifying individual belief, you will start to find a monumental divide in the disparent claims of others using the same methodology. You can ignore this reality and crawl back inside the comfort of your blanketed perspective, or you can allow new information to bring a realization that such thinking is antithetical to arriving at the truth. The challenge here is that many of these claims, such as the assertion of the existence of a God, have long historical entrenchments in our respective cultures that can seem to provide a validity to the idea of the divine, when, at the heart of the idea, it is merely a widely accepted placeholder for factual information that provides psychological comfort against fear of the unknown or inexplicable phenomenon. This new way of thinking is not what we are naturally wired for, and nostalgia for the old ways will, for the present time in our evolutionary venture, be an active impediment to our advancement as a species, but not one that is irreparable. This is why education is so important and why it is vital to reinforce the basics of critical thinking and the scientific method in our classrooms as young as possible; not so that we can teach our children what to think, but rather how to think, so that they can learn to discover this world and each other with open eyes instead of closed minds. Maybe then they can start to build a better world and even repair the damage we have caused in our ignorance while casting aside the superstition that infects us with fear and works against the progress of science and the transcendence of our consciousness to the next step in the evolution of our minds. Then and only then will we begin to gain the perspective we need to think even bigger than we have before, and dream further than our ancestors could have ever imagined. Timothy L. Havener
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:24:48 +0000
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