Disprove the parable of Eve and the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
I don’t know ’bout no Eve and fruits, but I do know something about the “god-shaped hole”. It doesn’t actually require religion to fill, although it is commonly associated with religion and religious irrationalities. Essentially, religion is just one way to activate something known as a “core state” in NLP.
Core states are emotional states of peace, oneness, love (in the universal-compassion sense), “being”, or just the sense that “everything is okay”. You could think of them as pure “reward” or “satisfaction” states.
The absence of these states is a compulsive motivator. If someone displays a compulsive social behavior (like needing to correct others’ mistakes, always blurting out unpleasant truths, being a compulsive nonconformist, etc.) it is (in my experience) almost always a direct result of being deprived of one of the core states as a child, and forming a coping response that seems to get them more of the core state, or something related to it.
Showing them how to access the core state directly, however, removes the compulsion altogether. Effectively, it’s like wireheading directly to the core state internally drops the reward/compulsion link to the specific behavior, restoring choice in that area.
Most likely, this is because it’s the unconditional presence of core states that’s the evolutionary advantage you refer to. My guess would be that non-human animals experience these core states as a natural way of being, and that both our increased ability to anticipate negative futures, and our more-complex social requirements and conditions for interpersonal acceptance actually reduce the natural incidence of reaching core states.
Or, to put it more briefly: core states are supposed to be wireheaded, but in humans, a variety of mechanisms conspire to break the wireheading.… and religion is a crutch that reinstates it externally, by exploiting the compulsion mechanism.
Appropriately trained rationalists, on the other hand, can simply reinstate the wireheading internally, and get the benefits without “believing in” anything. (In fact, application of the process tends to surface and extinguish left-over religious ideas from childhood!)
Explaining the actual technique would require considerably more space than I have here, however; the briefest training I’ve done on the subject was over an hour in length, although the technique itself is simple enough to be done in a few minutes. A little googling will find you plenty on the subject, although it’s extremely difficult to learn from the short checklist versions of the technique you’re likely to find on the ’net.
The original book on the subject, Core Transformation, is somewhat better, but it also mixes in a lot of irrelevant stuff based on the outdated “parts” metaphor in NLP—“parts” are just a way of keeping people detached from their responses, and that’s really orthogonal to the primary purpose of the technique, which is really sort of a “stack trace” of active unconscious/emotional goals to uncover the system’s root goal (and thereby access the core state of “pure utility” underneath).
In the harsh world that prevailed up until just the last few centuries, religion provided people comfort. Happy people are less susceptible to disease, more ambitious, and generally more successful. Atheism has always been as true as it is today. However, I wouldn’t recommend it to a 13th century peasant.
Anyone who knows how to access their core states has the ability to call up mystical states of peace, bliss, and what-not, at any moment they actually need or want them. An external idea isn’t necessary to provide comfort—the necessary state already exists inside of you, or religion couldn’t possibly activate it.
I don’t know ’bout no Eve and fruits, but I do know something about the “god-shaped hole”. It doesn’t actually require religion to fill, although it is commonly associated with religion and religious irrationalities. Essentially, religion is just one way to activate something known as a “core state” in NLP.
Core states are emotional states of peace, oneness, love (in the universal-compassion sense), “being”, or just the sense that “everything is okay”. You could think of them as pure “reward” or “satisfaction” states.
The absence of these states is a compulsive motivator. If someone displays a compulsive social behavior (like needing to correct others’ mistakes, always blurting out unpleasant truths, being a compulsive nonconformist, etc.) it is (in my experience) almost always a direct result of being deprived of one of the core states as a child, and forming a coping response that seems to get them more of the core state, or something related to it.
Showing them how to access the core state directly, however, removes the compulsion altogether. Effectively, it’s like wireheading directly to the core state internally drops the reward/compulsion link to the specific behavior, restoring choice in that area.
Most likely, this is because it’s the unconditional presence of core states that’s the evolutionary advantage you refer to. My guess would be that non-human animals experience these core states as a natural way of being, and that both our increased ability to anticipate negative futures, and our more-complex social requirements and conditions for interpersonal acceptance actually reduce the natural incidence of reaching core states.
Or, to put it more briefly: core states are supposed to be wireheaded, but in humans, a variety of mechanisms conspire to break the wireheading.… and religion is a crutch that reinstates it externally, by exploiting the compulsion mechanism.
Appropriately trained rationalists, on the other hand, can simply reinstate the wireheading internally, and get the benefits without “believing in” anything. (In fact, application of the process tends to surface and extinguish left-over religious ideas from childhood!)
Explaining the actual technique would require considerably more space than I have here, however; the briefest training I’ve done on the subject was over an hour in length, although the technique itself is simple enough to be done in a few minutes. A little googling will find you plenty on the subject, although it’s extremely difficult to learn from the short checklist versions of the technique you’re likely to find on the ’net.
The original book on the subject, Core Transformation, is somewhat better, but it also mixes in a lot of irrelevant stuff based on the outdated “parts” metaphor in NLP—“parts” are just a way of keeping people detached from their responses, and that’s really orthogonal to the primary purpose of the technique, which is really sort of a “stack trace” of active unconscious/emotional goals to uncover the system’s root goal (and thereby access the core state of “pure utility” underneath).
Anyone who knows how to access their core states has the ability to call up mystical states of peace, bliss, and what-not, at any moment they actually need or want them. An external idea isn’t necessary to provide comfort—the necessary state already exists inside of you, or religion couldn’t possibly activate it.