How the mind deals with ceasing to exist

Read an interesting article over at Scientific American today, here's the link.

Here are a couple blurbs that will sum it up, although I recommend reading the full article:

And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

I've been thinking along that route for some time now. An afterlife myth is more or less common to every culture (correct me if you know one that is without one). In anthropological terms, that means we may be able to find a prevailing structure in the mind that gives rise to these beliefs.

On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.

There are many ideas that have arisen as similar by-products. Old views that the we on the earth were the center of the universe were handy for our ego-centric minds. Astrology might have been birthed of the mind's incessant need to provide structure and predictability to an otherwise stressed and unstable existence. Marriage is almost certainly a by-product of sexual selection mating behaviors.

Much of Evolutionary Psychology is still fairly young research, I can't wait to see where this all goes.

Fundamentalism and Exclusion

Fundamentalism is all about exclusion, not inclusion. Let's disregard for a moment the obvious exclusionary views of the Old Testament, and focus on the teachings of Jesus in the New. Actually, we'll have to go farther than that, we'll have to disregard various remarks from Jesus about saving the Jews only.

But let's assume the teachings of Paul, rather than Jesus, stand true. That Jesus Christ came to save mankind. Why do Fundamentalists make such an effort to exclude the rest of mankind? They are not to befriend unbelievers, and are never to even so much as think about entering a relationship with "heathens," as it was put so kindly by a Fundamental Preacher that I once met.

As a Fundamental, the most you can do is to "reach out" to unbelievers with your preaching, a manner which is hardly going to persuade the larger percentage of the population that your God is a loving God. So why the barrier of exclusion?

Speaking as a former follower of Baptist Fundamentalism, those barriers exist to protect an entrenched mind, to keep a belief system in place that is no longer compatible with the world we live in today.

If your God really has the power to sway minds, to make himself obvious to the "hearts of men," why be so scared of befriending unbelievers?

This is all just part of the philosophy of Fundamentalism that I could no longer agree with. The literal take of the Bible just doesn't work, with the numerous contradictions within the texts.

There's a time when everyone is forced to come face to face with reason; they can either abandon it by several methods, or they can embrace it and deal with the consequences that come to them. However, due to the nature of our imperfect world, not everyone will be forced to have the same bout with reason. One person may have a much tougher struggle with it than the next person.