Skip to main content

The Brain Cancer of Conformity

Neuroscientists have concluded that the most remarkable thing about our brains is that there is no one thing that is remarkable about our brains. They have also concluded that there is no central principal or area of the brain that governs over all the other areas.

Instead, each of the different sections of the brain work together like a congress of different cognitive perspectives, democratically deciding how to interpret stimuli from the outside world, and on what constitutes "truth."

Additionally, they have found that the 100 billion neurons in our brain, and the 100 trillion synapses that connect nerve cells in our brains, actually atrophy in the absence of diversity and grow stronger with exposure to diversity. Creativity, as a result, can only grow in the rich soil of such diversity.

Diversity, in other words, is the sunlight of creativity, while ever greater conformity tends to act like a burial shroud to such creative capacity, in the same way that keeping a flower in the closet leads it to whither and die.  

Conformity, then, is the coffin nail that actually seeks to organize a society from without, by eroding the basis for creativity from within. And in true Orwellian fashion, religions all claim to be the "light of the world," even as their quest to impose dogmatic conformity on humanity only serve to wrap the human capacity for creativity in the burial shroud of Turin. 

If religion is a linguistic mind virus, as some have argued, its dogmatisms tend to spread across a population like a brain cancer of conformity.  

   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...

Why Christianity is More Unnatural Than Homosexuality

I grew up in a family that is about as homophobic as Phil Robertson and the Westboro Baptists, only they're not quite as boisterous about it; at least not in public anyway. They have also conveniently convinced themselves  that their homophobia is really just their unique Christian ability to "hate the sin, but love the sinner" (even though these very same Christians adamantly refuse to accept that people can "hate Christianity, but love the Christian").  The sexual superiority complex necessarily relied on by such Christians is, of course, blanketed beneath the lambs wool of the Christian humility of serving "God." They interpret their fear of those who are different, in other words, as simply proof of their intimate knowledge and love of God. And the only thing such Christians are more sure about than that their own personal version of "God" exists, is that such a "God" would never want people to be homosexual - no matter how ma...

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of  our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angles and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil.  We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years.  Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...