Frivolous Subject: “Religious fundamentalism” or “legal fundamentalism”
FALSE STATEMENT:
What I believe or what God or even the government or a lawyer commands will not be influenced by evidence, law, science, or even reality. I cannot be persuaded to change my mind.
REBUTTAL:
This post will discuss a third-party article appearing at the end of it entitled “A neuroscientist explains how religious fundamentalism hijacks the brain”. Using that article, we will establish that “fundamentalism” is the problem, it’s found everywhere, and especially in government, it’s nurtured by Dunning-Kruger, and that those who attack it from the legal profession or the government should attack themselves for doing it before they attack anyone else such as religious fundamentalists, which seems to be their favorite method of “cancelling” or slandering their opponents.
The conclusion of the third-party article appearing at the end of this post is that religious fundamentalism “discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive”. By that standard, we and this religious ministry may be Christian but we are not fundamentalist, because we:
- Always take a scientific approach to the subjects we cover.
- Do not permit anything but law and evidence as a reasonable basis for belief.
- Scour the internet for evidence on either side of the thing we are analyzing.
- Invite lively debate on this site of our materials.
- Expect and even require those who find factual or logical errors in our materials to notify us so that they can be promptly fixed.
- Entertain NO ONE as an expert or information source who presents no or little evidence to support their claims. They are just political advocates and their opinions are not admissible as evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence t10.
Any organization, whether religious or political, that doesn’t do all the above seems to us to be a mere dysfunctional cult that uses compartmentalization and disinformation to manipulate and abuse its members to do things that benefit mainly the usually authoritarian leaders. It is also evidence of solopsism within the group.
We also emphasize that the main secular thing we oppose in this ministry is “fundamentalist STATISM”, which people usually practice without knowing it, and which leads them to impute superior or supernatural powers to political rulers or governments. See:
Socialism: The New American Civil Religion, Form #05.016
https://sedm.org/Forms/05-MemLaw/SocialismCivilReligion.pdf
The “virus” as the article at the end of this post calls it, which spreads fundamentalist ideology is the Dunning-Kruger Effect described below:
Secular Praise of the Main Virtue of Christianity: HUMILITY–why your mind is closed and how to open it.
https://sedm.org/secular-praise-of-the-main-virtue-of-christianity-humility/
Fundamentalist STATISTS who this ministry opposes suffer the Dunning-Kruger Effect and are literally STUPID. They suffer from the “nice guys always finish last” proverb. The etymology of the word “nice” means STUPID. Thus, fundamentalist Statists always finish LAST and are abused by politicians to further elitist political agendas because their own legal ignorance makes them ripe for exploitation.
Therefore, you could say that this website and ministry is ANTI-fundamentalist, not fundamentalist.
This may be a religious ministry based on the Bible, but we are still always open to any and all feedback that might inform and calibrate our beliefs with the real world so they are at all times realistic and directly applicable to the real world. And by “feedback”, we mean law and evidence, and not belief or opinions. We don’t care about opinions in the context of law and government because they aren’t useful in litigation per Federal Rule of Evidence 610 and our forums are structured as a mock court. Our favorite proverb on this subject is:
“Minds are like parachutes: They only work when they are OPEN.”
Thus “fundamentalism” is really the problem, not “religious fundamentalism”. Other terms are also used to describe it, like “closed minded”. This problem infects ANY and EVERY field, and not just religion. The article at the end of this post limits itself to “religious fundamentalism” but it could easily be renamed to “legal fundamentalism”. Legal fundamentalism exists when:
- Anyone, and especially a statist, imputes or enforces superior or supernatural powers to any civil ruler or government. This turns the government into a religion in violation of the First Commandment and the central theme of FREEDOM itself, which is equality of ALL under REAL law. See:
Socialism: The New American Civil Religion, Form #05.016
https://sedm.org/Forms/05-MemLaw/SocialismCivilReligion.pdf - People in the legal profession or government believe things about the law that simply are not true and refuse to entertain evidence that what they believe is untrue. This happens often and even mainly because they have been DECEIVED, suffer similarly with the Dunning-Kruger Effect, or because they benefit commercially by perpetuating deception as described below:
Legal Deception, Propaganda, and Fraud, Form #05.014
https://sedm.org/Forms/05-MemLaw/LegalDecPropFraud.pdf
We include “legal fundamentalism” as a subject in this article because the government or legal profession scour our website for chinks in our armor and might try to use this article against us. They have an affinity for maliciously attacking religious ministries like us for filthy lucre’s sake by accusing us of being “religious fundamentalists”. However, they and their socialist and statist friends and benefactors refuse to look at the moat in their own eye FIRST as Jesus requires, because they are HYPOCRITES just like Jesus accused them of being for not considering their OWN “fundamentalism”:
Do Not Judge
7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye [RELIGIOUS fundamentalism], but do not consider the plank [LEGAL fundamentalism] in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
6 “Do not give what is holy to the dogs [ignorant, presumptuous, or narcissistic people who are hypocrites]; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
[Matt. 7:1-6, Bible, NKJV]
Ironically, the government promoting of “legal fundamentalism” is how most people are roped into government idolatry and servitude. We also call it “sophistry”.
The chief symptom of fundamentalism is a LOSS of curiosity:
“Curiosity cures: anxiety, ignorance, selfishness, extremism.
Curiosity creates: empathy, compassion, knowledge, growth.
Curiosity prevents: arrogance, judgment, stagnation.
Curiosity is the foundation of science and the scientific method.
Loss of curiosity: Causes burnout and often happens because overspecialization leaves little left to actually be curious about in one’s chosen profession.
Practice curiosity.”
BEGIN ARTICLE:
A neuroscientist explains how religious fundamentalism hijacks the brain
Opinion by Bobby Azarian, Raw Story, 8/25/23
In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person’s life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual. This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.
It is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease, because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system. But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as mental parasites. A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival. Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence. By understanding how fundamentalist ideologies function and are represented in the brain using this analogy, we can begin to understand how to inoculate against them, and potentially, how to rehabilitate someone who has undergone ideological brainwashing—in other words, a reduction in one’s ability to think critically or independently.
Similar to how organisms and their genes compete for survival in the environment and gene pool, ideas compete for survival inside brains, and in the pool of ideas that inhabit them. The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time. In his influential 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as “memes” (the mental analog of a gene), which he has defined as self-replicating units that spread throughout culture. We are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various customs, myths, and trends that have become part of human society.
As Dawkins explains, ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another. For example, an ideology—such as a religion—that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others. Successful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self-replicate go extinct. In this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.
It is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged. When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality. The realization that oneself and all one’s loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying, and this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety-reducing ideas, like ones that offer a never-ending afterlife. But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.
Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or “cultural software,” that is running on the brain’s hardware. Esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett insightfully described how ideas can control minds when he said, “The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” In this regard, it is often not the brain that controls the mind, but the memes that compose the mind that control the brain. This is especially the case when the meme is a religion.
Religions Mutate
Like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated—or passed from one person or group to another—it undergoes mutations. As a consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced, which generate different types of behavior. As such, there are often good and bad variants of any given religion. For instance, there are moderate versions of Christianity and Islam, that promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior. These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, i.e., the religious-practicing individual. At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity—specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions— that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional.
Ideological Viruses and Mental Parasites
There are various types of viruses and parasites, and viruses are themselves parasites. While biological viruses are infectious agents that self-replicate inside living cells, computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs. One particularly nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a “Trojan horse,” disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own “fitness” (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as “parasitic manipulation.”
One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.
In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call “magical thinking,” which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can’t survive, nor can it replicate itself. Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought, which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic.
We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.
If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain. An ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self-replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus, and defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one. When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a host brain, the organism’s mind is no longer fully in control. The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival. This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive function in areas like analytic reasoning and problem-solving.
Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American.
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