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Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds (cnn.com)
A new study published in the journal Social Neuroscience finds through functional MRI scans that religious and spiritual experiences can trigger reward systems like love and drugs. "These are areas of the brain that seem like they should be involved in religious and spiritual experience. But yet, religious neuroscience is such a young field -- and there are very few studies -- and ours was the first study that showed activation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that processes reward," said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah and lead author of the study. CNN reports: For the study, 19 devout young adult Mormons had their brains scanned in fMRI machines while they completed various tasks. The tasks included resting for six minutes, watching a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial reports, reading quotations from religious leaders for eight minutes, engaging in prayer for six minutes, reading scripture for eight minutes, and watching videos of religious speeches, renderings of biblical scenes and church member testimonials. During the tasks, participants were asked to indicate when they were experiencing spiritual feelings. As the researchers analyzed the fMRI scans taken of the participants, they took a close look at the degree of spiritual feelings each person reported and then which brain regions were simultaneously activated. The researchers found that certain brain regions consistently lit up when the participants reported spiritual feelings. The brain regions included the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with reward; frontal attentional, which is associated with focused attention; and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, Anderson said. Since the study results were seen only in Mormons, Anderson said, more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or Muslims.
Think 60s/70s. Went twice on Sunday, then Wed night. I was 10 or 11 when I started asking questions that got answered by "ya gotta have faith". Um, if I had faith I wouldn't be asking these questions.
Older I got the more I hated church. Not gonna lie, there were a lot of days when I thought about opening the car door and jumping out of the car. On the freeway. To this day I don't dress up, nor do I sing in public.
Then Wizard of Oz was shown on Wednesdays for a few years in a row. I'd heard a lot about it, never seen it, wanted to see it. But no, I had to go to church Wednesday nights, cuz reasons.
Moved out when I was 18. Only time I've been in a church since was when mom died 4 years ago. Dad keeps asking me to go to church with him, I demurr, he doesn't understand why I won't go.
During my 20's and half my 30's, whenever I found someone was religious I'd goad them. Actively tried to piss them off. I grew out of that.
I think if you have a rational, questioning mind, church is either a social thing or pure BS.
I grew up in a Mormon (LDS) family, and don't remember too many significant feelings of the sort mentioned in the article. I eventually concluded the church was pulling my leg and dropped out.
However, I once was visiting Utah on an informal tour of "important" LDS buildings, and had a strange feeling that brought me back to the days when I did believe. It was sort of euphoric relief that an omnipotent father figure "has our back" and that we, the LDS, are on the good team. It's roughly comparable to your town's sports team winning a big game where the crowd feels a togetherness and collective strength.
I thought to myself, "Why am I having this feeling, I don't believe any of it." After pondering it for a while, I concluded that the tour triggered memories AND feelings of my younger days when I did believe.
There's also negative experiences related to it, the reverse of the above, but they are kind of personal. Religion is a crazy mind-game either way. If you grew up with it, you can never get it out of your head: it shapes your thought process in that your mind-model of the world uses idioms from the religion. These idioms become a kind of meta language of the mind.
For example, when I think of user usage log files, it triggers the concept that "God knows your every move, thought, and action". I don't actually believe that, but my mind uses that as the conceptual idiom for what log files do.
Hierarchical file systems remind me of the church hierarchy. LDS-ers talk a lot about their organizational structure; sticking portraits of leaders on their walls. God is into org hierarchies I guess. I suspect it's actually an fringe ego benefit because most leaders have zero or small salaries from the church: it's largely volunteered "labor". The top leaders are usually wealthy by other means.
The idea of other planets is natural to LDS-ers because of the concepts like planet Kolob (which is not official doctrine actually, long story). Thus, an enjoyment of space sci-fi came natural.
I like to document rules, procedures, and assumptions; which may be traced back to scriptures, commandments, and rule lists like what LDS calls "Words of Wisdom", which the "coffee is bad" concept derives from. It also says oats are bad, but for some reason that's not enforced and barely mentioned. Go figure. (I almost typed "barley mentioned").
Buddhism Without Beliefs is where I started...
Ultimately, the pairing of classical reward responses when hearing music with learning a smattering of music theory may indicate a brain mechanism for greater music appreciation. So what?
That's not "bypassing rational centers of the brain and creating a loop." It's simply "these people had a positive experience and there were ideas that were associated with that positive experience." If anything, the fact that brain regions which are active in moral reasoning were especially active in these people suggests the opposite of "bypassing rational centers."
You've conveniently ignored the actual data and results of their study entirely and instead taken a couple of speculative comments ("here's an idea, please fund us") out of context and twisted them.
The old baloney about religion being a primary cause of violence is a ridiculous urban legend. Ultimately you can trace the exaggerations back to centuries-old partisan tracts. Actual historians (e.g. Encyclopedia of Wars) find religiously motivated wars to be roughly 2% of the total death count.
If what you get out of the Shoah is that Hitler was right on both counts - Judaism is a disease, as is Christianity - there's something fundamentally wrong, not just with your understanding of history but with you.
The Inquisition killed about 3,000 people over the course of 350 years. (Secular courts, of course, killed people at a much faster rate.) For some perspective, the Great Leap Forward killed 30,000,000 people in 3 years.
So they discovered that participating in what they have been brought up to rejoice and be in awe of actually causes them joy. I'd be more surprised if the result were the opposite.
That's why people sign up and most never get rid of these delusions because it makes them feel good about themselves. They realize that santa and the easter bunny are not real, somehow they can't do the same thing with their deity and it's prophets.