Homo Religiosus? Are are most humans stupid?
Ian Livingston
igrlivingston at gmail.com
Mon Apr 12 18:44:44 CDT 2010
> I think it has everything to do with DMT—Dimethyltryptamine—which is almost
> ubiquitous among living creatures.
Could well be, but that raises ye olde question of correlates: because
there are both objective and subjective actions in brain chemistry,
privilege of either as causal is often more telling of the theorist
than of the phenomenon. Comes down to it, nobody really knows if the
chemical causes the subjective response in naturally occurring states,
or if the the relation is more complex than that. The descriptions of
hallucinogenic experiences of DMT ingestion do not sound much like
genuine "religious" experiences, anyhow, because of the brief duration
of the perception. Rather like acid, the subject has a trip and it
affects later thinking, perhaps, but no enduring change happens. Those
hallucinations come and go, religious transformations stay with the
individual in profoundly effectual habits. It is those momentary
states of excitement that form the basis of the hysterical religiosity
of sudden converts and proselytes. Leonard Cohen speaks keenly to
those moments in his song, "The Story of Isaac":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIQOmbIMYls
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2010, at 4:06 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>
>> I haven't yet seen any definitive link between religious inclination
>> and intelligence. It does seem likely, though, that it would be a
>> later development in the evolution of cognition, rather than an
>> earlier and more primitive one. It seems likely it might have
>> something to do with the imaginative function, which is a relative
>> newcomer
>
> I think it has everything to do with DMT—Dimethyltryptamine—which is almost
> ubiquitous among living creatures.
--
"liber enim librum aperit."
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