Qilled
Ever notice how God hates everything that they don't like?
You're onto something, Quill:
For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.
Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions.
Gee willikers, I wonder why R. J. Rushdoony said disobedient children should be stoned but pork and shellfish should be legal (in other words, God wants Christians to only follow the inhumane Bronze Age laws, not the Jewish dietary restrictions that would inconvenience a fundamentalist), and why Muhammad told his followers that, whereas other Muslims are limited to 4 wives, God said Allah's Apostle can take as many wives as he wants. Sure is a complete mystery.
For contrast, when people are talking about what another person thinks, such as "Shi Huandgi believed..." or "Karl Marx argues in Das Kapital..." the parts of their brain that light up are not identical. If I tell you "Andrea Dworkin, Witchwind and BitingBeaver think PIV sex is rape," the self-referential parts of the brain aren't going to light up nearly as much:
For his final trick, Epley looked at the brains of recruits as they in turn attempted to peer into the mind of God. While sitting in an fMRI scanner, 17 people had to state how they, God or an average American would feel on a list of social issues, including universal health care, stem cell research, euthanasia, abortion, sex education and more. As before, their answers revealed a closer match between their beliefs and those they ascribed to God, than those they credited to the average Joe or Jill.
The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God’s, but lower when they considered the average American. The three images below show the differences in brain activity between the three tasks and you can see that the God’ and self’ scans had little to distinguish them.
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"The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires."
--Susan B. Anthony, 1896
