Spectrum wrote:Many atheists may turn to drugs, pain-killers and secular pursuits and ideologies to suppress that psychological angst. Communists will cling to their leaders and dictators as pseudo God, note North Koreans Kim Jong Un, Stalin, Mao, etc.
Firstly while it is a fact that very people are comfortable with mortality and even fewer have little to no survival instinct while at the same time most are well aware of the inevitability of death. That is about where I largely stop agreeing with you.
Btw, you have wrongly reference "Eduk" in your reply, it should be "Spectrum".
You missed my point;
There are two levels as I had mentioned;
1. General conscious level.
At the general conscious level, humans has evolved with a natural inhibitor to suppress the fear of death. Otherwise if all humans fear death consciously all the time, they will not be able to function.
Those who has a weakness in their conscious inhibitors suffer what we called Thanophobia, literally fear of death.
https://en.w:k:pedia.org/w:ki/Death_anxiety_(psychology)
2. Subconscious level.
Now what is suppressed by the evolved inhibitors are not contained totally but the dissonance leaks through various channels in other aspects of life as psychological angst which are difficult to nail.
At times it surfaces as a conscious fear of death.
This is what drives the majority into religion to seek soteriological ease.
You need to somehow demonstrate that this one conclusion leads to the rest of the conclusions you are making and to the types of behaviours you are proposing in the quantity you are proposing. Personally I would say it is very unlikely that such a huge sweep of human action and thought can be summarised in a sentence and given whole explanation. Everything you have mentioned has many, convoluted, complicated factors to bring about the whole.
It is like a large river system with thousand of large & small rivers and a hundred miles wide delta and they all are traceable to one main source.
Other than sexual matters [a different neural channel], the majority of other human activities are driven by that cognitive dissonance as the root and main spring.
Btw, I have done a lot of research on this topic.
To pick up one example. Many atheists turn to drugs. As do many theists. Do people turn to drugs because they are atheist or because they are theist?
People do not turn to drugs because they are theist or atheists.
Many people [addicts] turned to drugs to ease the pains manifesting through different channels from the same root of the existential crisis from deep in the psyche.
There are religious believers who turned to drugs to ease the existential pains because they were merely born into a religious family and not because they are religious.
Some may convert into religion to deal with their existential crisis but soon if the religiosity looses its strength they may turn to drugs or other pursuits.
In my, admittedly anecdotal, experience the vast vast number of people who turn to drugs do so out of social pressure. As in their mates are doing it. It is for the majority no less or more complicated than that. Again I've not done a worldwide study of drug use and reasons and it's no doubt a very complex topic. I doubt very much I could do justice to the topic without approaching PHD levels of work on my part. I very much doubt you have any expertise on the subject. Also anecdotal but as a child I had a fried who turned to hard drug use. In this I believe it was due to psychological pain. Not because he was scared of confronting his own mortality though but simply because he was abused by his, drug taking, mother. Something from which the physiological trauma is well recognised.
If one study the use of drugs by various people, there are obvious reasons on the surface, e.g. social pressures, stress, fun, poverty, parental influenced whatever is observable but the proximate cause of the problematic drug use [addiction] is traceable to the existential crisis at the subliminal levels.
One need to dig deep to get to the proximate cause.
It is the existential crisis that loosen the last 'brake' that drive a person to take drugs.
One clue which is observable is you will note upon fear [trigger by threat of mortality in various degrees] people will do anything to relieve that fear. Generally, a person who is threaten with a gun to the head will do anything the gunman demand. Such fears are quite obvious.
But primal fears driven by an existential crisis from the base of one's is very strong and will effect many aspects of one's life driving the majority into religion and theism.
Many who turned to religion [convert or born again] will give all sorts of reasons but they do not have the intellectual capacity to trace their actions to an existential crisis arising from a cognitive dissonance.
Many believe in theistic religions because they fear what will happen after death and they have psychological insecurity. The proximate cause for such the final decision is traceable to the proximate root causes I mentioned.
The fact is 80% of people in the world at present are theists and they are driven by the resultant existential crisis I hypothesize.
Theoretically if we remove the primal and other superficial neural circuit that generate fears in all humans [amydala and related neurons], I believe the number of theists will be reduced to 5% or likely none as they is no reason to invent a God to believe. The new danger is many will become reckless and risk death in the absence of the death and fear deterrence.
Not-a-theist. Religion is a critical necessity for humanity now, but not the FUTURE.