Sunday, March 08, 2009

Rigo's Church

I watched this episode of W5 last night on The Dominion Christian Centre in Hamilton, Ontario last night.

You can watch it too, if you follow the link and click on the video links on the upper right.

It once again solidifies my belief that extreme sects take advantage of people who are on the edge of mental health.

It makes sense to me that someone who is mentally fragile would seek extreme religious sects because the "church" can dictate how they should be living, and thinking. Therefore a person can lift their hands from taking responsibility for their own lives.

Believing in God can help block anxiety and minimize stress, according to new University of Toronto research that shows distinct brain differences between believers and non-believers.

In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task - a well-known test of cognitive control - while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.




Now, while it's enticing to have less stress about your mistakes...the problem with that is that without the stress, there are more mistakes to be made...that's where the con comes in.
You can get your sheep to do all kinds of things that are damaging to society and mankind...I dunno...war comes to mind...

Opiate of the masses, indeed.

Don't get me wrong.
I believe in a higher power...I just don't believe that some con taking money from people on the premise of 'spreading God's word' is something that is good, or needed.

Faith is free.

Being a zombie in the name of religion is not.