Thursday, August 14, 2008

Religion and Health

Via MR.
"SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things.

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive."
Read full article here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

definitely agree on the 'response to disease' thing.
interesting study

Anonymous said...

Right. Many rely on religion out of purely selfish and narcissistic reasons then, right? At least according to the article....

Sra said...

Maybe they're both right.

Anonymous said...

Dawkins' fervor is borderline 'religious' too.....