Easy to be Entreated

Our brains are amazing! We often take for granted the sensations and perceptions and phenomenological experience different clusters of neurons give us. We become acutely aware of what these neurons do when we induce fatigue in them. Here are a few examples: 1) Wernicke's area is involved in language comprehension. It is the area of the brain that allows us recognize the meaning of words. To fatigue this area, say the same word over and over and over again until the word doesn't even seem like a word anymore. There is this weird disconnect, it is like a flip has been switched and the word is now meaningless. 2) Our brains treat faces differently than other visual objects. Face recognition generally activates a different area of the brain -the right middle fusiform gyrus - than non-face object recognition. There have been some remarkable studies with split-brain patients that have shown if you present paintings of faces created out of inanimate objects such as vege...

The following is my response to mhedgpeth who posed the question on postmormon , "Is the truth about reality knowable?" My response: My everyday language would suggest that I have many beliefs which I do not. I don't believe in free will, yet I speak as if I do. I can doubt the validity of just about everything, yet my sentences are written as if I am certain about the statements I am making. I live with the ambiguity. I speak the way I do partly because that is the way English is structured, but also because our minds are trained to think as if we have free will and as if we are more certain about things than we can be. Believe me, the irony is not lost on me. I first read Rene Descarte when I was in Middle School. I think he is right in that nearly everything can be doubted. We very well could be in the Matrix in which everything we think is real is actually just computer software, or something else. If we see a table, feel a table, taste a table, hea...

Perhaps it would be helpful if we first define our terms. From wiki : " Brainwashing (also known as thought reform or as re-education ) consists of any effort aimed at instilling certain attitudes and beliefs in a person — sometimes unwelcome beliefs in conflict with the person's prior beliefs and knowledge." From phinnweb : " Below is a list of the usual brainwashing/mind control techniques used in schools, hospitals, army, religious cults, totalitarian states; with political prisoners and dissidents, mentally insane, some versions of psychoterapy, etc., etc. "Indoctrination" is a more slight and more subliminal form of brainwashing (e.g. commercials). However, these concepts are nothing short of controversial and open to various interpretations. 1) HYPNOSIS - Inducing a high state of suggestibility, often thinly disguised as relaxation or meditation. a. Repetitive Music (most likely with a beat close to the human ...

Here are some things about Mormonism that many people do not know. Anyone who would like to learn more may use the valuable links on the thread: " Resources for those investigating all things LDS ". 1) The Book of Abraham is not as Joseph Smith claimed - the writings of Abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus. In fact, the text contains anachronisms and much of the text appears to be borrowed from other authors whom Joseph confessed to be familiar with: Swedenborg, Book of Jasher, Josephus, Thomas Dick, etc. 2) Joseph Smith had 33 wives, at least one as young as 14, two were his own teenage foster daughters, and several were concurrently married to other men, and yes there is sufficient evidence (children and statements) that he had sex with many of them. 3) The text of the Book of Mormon was dictated by Joseph while burying his head in a hat with the very same peep stone he used while defrauding Josiah Stowell by claiming to be able to find buried treasure and ...

The poster Nogginus read on the MAD board where a famous apologist "declared something to the effect that they have never even once found even one shred of evidence that was damning to the Mormon church". I used to be an amatuer apologist and knew almost all of the dirt on the church, but remained a true believer. I had found a way to explain all of the data in such a way that the Church could still be true. I firmly believed that none of the dirt I then knew about threatened the truthfulness of the Church. It would only weaken the testimony of those who never bother to think of those things in the way the apologist does. But, those things don't really weaken the claims of the Church. You see, the apologist plays in the realm of what is possible, not what is objectively probable. It is technically possible that the reasons the First Vision accounts differ so much is because each time the story was retold, Joseph simply focused on different aspects of the Vision. You c...

"A new Canadian survey has found that believers are more likely than atheists to place a higher value on love, patience and friendship, in findings the researcher says could be a warning that Canadians need a religious basis to retain civility in society. The survey of 1,600 Canadian adults, led by University of Lethbridge professor Reginald Bibby, gave a list of 12 values - from honesty to family life to politeness to generosity - and asked the participants if they found each "very important." In each case, theists ranked the values as more important than atheists." ____________________ I don't have a problem with the data. I have a problem with the interpretation of the data. Further research is required to determine which of the competing explanations of the current data set best fit future data. I tend to prefer this explanation that was given at the end of the article, but only further research will tell us if this explanation accurately describes why ...

Thomas Aquinas put forward five arguments for the existence of god. Here are my responses to the first two: 1) "The Prime Mover" -why does god get to be an exception? If you truly believe that everything that moves was first moved by something else, then who moved god? Why does he get to be a special situation? It is as arbitrary as if we declared that the Big Bang is the Prime Mover, that was not moved itself. You will no doubt object to that as I object to arbitrtarily claiming that there is this special being that has the ability to not have been moved itself. Where is the proof that such a being exists? The original problem remains for both of us, meaning that we don't know how things played out in the distant past, but Thomas's "solution" only gives the illusion that he has solved the problem, it is not a solution at all, for he has to explain how it is that he can have a prime mover that violates his basic argument that everything that moves has to ha...

You may have noticed that I have added the Atheist Blogroll along the sideline on the right of this page. If you are atheist or agnostic and have a blog, you might consider adding your blog to the Atheist Blogroll. It is an excellent way to increase readership. To learn how to join, go here .