Posted: Aug 14, 2017 2:12 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:John Platko wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:John Platko wrote:
Much of the "shit" is being secularized. Many people engage in mindfulness meditation, CBT self talk, etc. without thinking they are borrowing ideas that religions have evolved. Sadly, most can't connect the dots of how their practice relates to religious practice and both sides seem to have strong biases which make it hard for them to see the linkage between the different forms of essentially the same human activity. In fact, when I brought up the linkage between prayer and CBT self talk some time ago it was an idea that seemed to cause many members to.
Sadly, I think your idea is a bit too advanced for most in 2017.
One can only try. It's so damned important that we get this right now that I have trouble shutting up about it.
I applaud your enthusiasm for the subject. And I certainly think it's helpful to understand this. When I think about the religious figures from the Bible (JC etc.), and being Catholic, saints of all flavors, that I learned about when I was young, it changes the way I interpret those stories now that I'm aware that these psychological processes were driving the experiences of those people. No supernatural sauce needed. Just normal, albeit sometimes extreme, human psychological processes at work and the dynamics of how humans interpret and deal with such things.
So the message is 'no sauce needed'. It takes a long time to get all this across to a believer. I must say that I have actually won a few believers and agnostics over on all this. Not by denying they have a religious experience but by carefully getting them to imagine the naturalist psychology of the mechanism.
You've had more success explaining this to people than I have. It will be interesting to see how well you do here. It's amazing how much resistance there is, from all sides, to the simple idea that religion has some useful core mental practices which are usually overshadowed by mistaken ideas that people who didn't understand the basics added to the process.
BTW. That avatar pic you have is the same cat I used to have back in the Sixties! He would only come out when we partied though.
My cat comes out a lot.
