Fear of God - It's what makes us nicer: Study

[fta]

Belief in punitive deities key factor in more co-operative society, study finds.

Scientists have found a long-awaited explanation as to why humans have for centuries maintained orderly societies: the fear of an angry god.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

That explains why Christians are so underrepresented in prison populations.

 

[Malintent]

They found people who believe their god is more punitive and knowledgeable behave more honestly and generously towards others who share their beliefs.

fixed it... Well, duh.

 

[fromderinside]

They found people who believe their god is more punitive and knowledgeable behave more honestly and generously towards others who share their beliefs.

fixed it... Well, duh.

Think acceptance circles. Its not about external pressures its about internal acceptance of risk. If you can convince yourself that a relative unknown is not to be avoided you might be building an acceptance circle. OH MY!

 

[bleubird]

The nuns told us "fear of god"is the fear of hurting god. WTF!
like making him have a bad day.

 

[ronburgundy]

They found people who believe their god is more punitive and knowledgeable behave more honestly and generously towards others who share their beliefs.

fixed it... Well, duh.

That isn't a fix. They found that specifically belief in a God who knows and punishes wrong behavior give more (coins in a fake game) to hypothetical members of their religion.
Notice this says nothing about how they treat people outside their religion, or treat anyone in real world situations with real consequences and opportunities for gain by finding excuses to treat others badly.

An advantage to God's who have tons of rules is that it allows for finding many excuses to find a person in violation of those rules and thus not considered part of the same religion, and thus can be treated badly.

 

[Angry Floof]

What are they calling "fear"?

If I recall (and I might get ambitious enough later to look it up), it's the belief in a presence that watches everything you do and is with you observing you all the time that has an effect on behavior.

Fear, on the other hand, can and does affect cooperative behavior, or at least conformative behavior, but not necessarily nicer behavior. Fear hijacks a brain's resources and the frontal lobes have the brains, not the brawn, and so it can't just take back from the limbic system the blood, oxygen, etc., it needs to do its problem-solving thing.

Fear makes problems worse, makes divisive beliefs stick, can paralyze to inaction or misfire action... a state of fear is not your friend unless the danger is physically imminent. If you're in a perfectly safe office or living room or bean bag right now, there is nothing for the flight or fight response to actually respond to, so it just sits there, turned on medium to high, scanning the virtual imagery for threats that might come true right out of our monitors at us, and there's not much energy for intelligent analysis.

 

[ronburgundy]

What are they calling "fear"?

If I recall (and I might get ambitious enough later to look it up), it's the belief in a presence that watches everything you do and is with you observing you all the time that has an effect on behavior.

They examined the combined belief that God has knowledge of everything you do and that God punishes "wrong" behavior. IOW, the type of God likely to evoke fear of punishment.

Fear, on the other hand, can and does affect cooperative behavior, or at least conformative behavior, but not necessarily nicer behavior. Fear hijacks a brain's resources and the frontal lobes have the brains, not the brawn, and so it can't just take back from the limbic system the blood, oxygen, etc., it needs to do its problem-solving thing.

Fear makes problems worse, makes divisive beliefs stick, can paralyze to inaction or misfire action... a state of fear is not your friend unless the danger is physically imminent. If you're in a perfectly safe office or living room or bean bag right now, there is nothing for the flight or fight response to actually respond to, so it just sits there, turned on medium to high, scanning the virtual imagery for threats that might come true right out of our monitors at us, and there's not much energy for intelligent analysis.

This is true. It is relevant to the limitations of the study I pointed out earlier. They asked only about in-group generosity toward hypothetical people from whom they had nothing to fear (real or imagined), while people were in a neutral relaxed state. That means the people with this God concept only had God's punishment to fear, which likely applies only to being kind to other people with the same God. Have those people react toward outgroup members or even in-group members in a context with potential threats and the results are likely to be different.

 

[Lion IRC]

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm careful around sharp objects because I fear getting stabbed/cut.
I fear plenty of things for good reason.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm careful around sharp objects because I fear getting stabbed/cut.
I fear plenty of things for good reason.

But when you lose the fear, you lose the motivation to be careful.

A lot of anti-drug programs exaggerate the dangers of drugs, hoping to scare the kids into keeping clean.
But that only works until the kids meet users who cast doubt on the program's claims. Then they not only reject the exaggerated claims, they reject ALL the claims made in the program.

 

[Angry Floof]

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm careful around sharp objects because I fear getting stabbed/cut.
I fear plenty of things for good reason.

I make a distinction between fear and caution, and also between fear and reflexive responses.

The kind of fear in "God-fearing" is the kind that is meant to ignite the sense of self preservation and hijack the nervous and limbic systems. Indoctrination and habituation of this kind of fear can result in a lifetime of things like anxiety and addiction.

Experiencing the mere presence of another person (magical, imaginary or otherwise) who may be witnessing does have an impact on behavior, and need not have anything to do with fear.

Derren Brown got in on this one, too, but I can't find the video. He had people perform a counting task, I think it was, with no one in the room with them, and promise of reward if they did well. Not knowing they were on hidden camera, a bunch of them cheated. When Derren put a chair in the room and told people that the chair was thought to be haunted, the honesty rate went way up.

Even those who didn't believe in ghosts cheated less. In other words, the mere suggestion of someone watching reduced the cheating.

As a social species, the most powerful drivers of our individual choices and behaviors involve others, others' reactions, others' judgments, others' well being, others' presence. From a neurotic fear of being judged to altruism and cooperation, this is how we operate.

Fear is not this. Fear is something added to the equation for control, or for sadism, or unwittingly.

Ted Haggard's a good example. If he really believed in a God watching his every move, how could he have had the nerve to rent a male prostitute after moralizing so adamantly publicly against precisely that? Whatever Ted fears, it ain't an all-powerful, all-seeing God. Ted did what he did because he thought no other humans would see or find out.

 

[ronburgundy]

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm careful around sharp objects because I fear getting stabbed/cut.
I fear plenty of things for good reason.

Good reason is the key. There is no good reason to even think God exists, let alone fear him. If you had a fear of an imaginary sharp object, you'll be busy reacting to that fear and not notice the real sharp objects you should be careful of.

 

[Lion IRC]

...or maybe people can and do determine for themselves what constitutes a threat.

You say they ought not fear God because in doing so they might inadvertently overlook something more fearsome.

But what if the person comprehended all the sharp objects that constitute a potential threat and and came to a rational decision about their relative danger. I don't see anything in your scenario to justify the claim that fear of one thing necessarily blinds a person to a second fearsome thing.

What if God alleviated fear?

 

[ronburgundy]

...or maybe people can and do determine for themselves what constitutes a threat.

You say they ought not fear God because in doing so they might inadvertently overlook something more fearsome.

But what if the person comprehended all the sharp objects that constitute a potential threat and and came to a rational decision about their relative danger. I don't see anything in your scenario to justify the claim that fear of one thing necessarily blinds a person to a second fearsome thing.

The human mind is not capable of comprehending all relevant facts (threats or otherwise) about their environment. Mountains of experiments demonstrate this, along with the fact that humans limited ability to attend to multiple stimuli, inherently means that any attention toward one thing will reduce attention to others. Thus, attention to an imaginary God reduces attention to real threats from real things.

What if God alleviated fear?

God doesn't exist, so cannot alleviate anything. Belief in God could and does alleviate fears, and that is a bad thing. Those fears of real threats should be feared, as you pointed out before. Alleviated fears of real threats by inserting an imaginary thing that your pretend can protect you but in fact cannot is dangerous and makes one more likely to be harmed from those threats. That is exactly what happens when people rely upon faith rather than medicine or on careful prevention of harm.

Whether God himself is viewed as a punishing threat or as a protector from other real world threats, it is a harmful concept that makes optimal attention and response to real threats less likely and harmful response to unreal imagined threats more likely.

 

[Angry Floof]

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm careful around sharp objects because I fear getting stabbed/cut.
I fear plenty of things for good reason.

Good reason is the key. There is no good reason to even think God exists, let alone fear him. If you had a fear of an imaginary sharp object, you'll be busy reacting to that fear and not notice the real sharp objects you should be careful of.

I agree. Good reason is key also because the process of reasoning works better when the sympathetic nervous system is not activated by fear. Even invisible underlying general anxiety can steal resources from the reasoning brain.

To explore the kind of behavior and choices described in the OP article, all you need is a presence other than self (or even just the suggestion that there is a presence nearby to watch) and a cultural value belief about that behavior/choice. The punishment is in the social consequences.

"Punishment," though, is a rather ham-fisted term for what might better be described as complex and subtle socially programmed consequences.

Reacting to subconscious mental imagery of your naked body boiling in hot oil on Satan's veranda because the presence you believe is watching you judged it to be appropriate (as absolutist religion loves teaching consequences that are painful, violent, eternal, and depraved) is entirely optional, and not necessarily recommended during times when an ethical or moral choice must be made. (Can be fun for horror film night, though.)

 

[fromderinside]

Good reason is the key. There is no good reason to even think God exists, let alone fear him. If you had a fear of an imaginary sharp object, you'll be busy reacting to that fear and not notice the real sharp objects you should be careful of.

I agree. Good reason is key also because the process of reasoning works better when the sympathetic nervous system is not activated by fear. Even invisible underlying general anxiety can steal resources from the reasoning brain.

To explore the kind of behavior and choices described in the OP article, all you need is a presence other than self (or even just the suggestion that there is a presence nearby to watch) and a cultural value belief about that behavior/choice. The punishment is in the social consequences.

"Punishment," though, is a rather ham-fisted term for what might better be described as complex and subtle socially programmed consequences.

Reacting to subconscious mental imagery of your naked body boiling in hot oil on Satan's veranda because the presence you believe is watching you judged it to be appropriate (as absolutist religion loves teaching consequences that are painful, violent, eternal, and depraved) is entirely optional, and not necessarily recommended during times when an ethical or moral choice must be made. (Can be fun for horror film night, though.)

symathetic/parasympathetic NS are not oppositional. They're staged and nuanced IAC with evolutionary adjustments to reason capacity. Fighting fish and Talipia are essentially go-nogo whilst four legged mammals are more or less jittery depending on size and cortical proportions. This stuff is 50 years old ferchissake.

 

[Angry Floof]

I agree. Good reason is key also because the process of reasoning works better when the sympathetic nervous system is not activated by fear. Even invisible underlying general anxiety can steal resources from the reasoning brain.

To explore the kind of behavior and choices described in the OP article, all you need is a presence other than self (or even just the suggestion that there is a presence nearby to watch) and a cultural value belief about that behavior/choice. The punishment is in the social consequences.

"Punishment," though, is a rather ham-fisted term for what might better be described as complex and subtle socially programmed consequences.

Reacting to subconscious mental imagery of your naked body boiling in hot oil on Satan's veranda because the presence you believe is watching you judged it to be appropriate (as absolutist religion loves teaching consequences that are painful, violent, eternal, and depraved) is entirely optional, and not necessarily recommended during times when an ethical or moral choice must be made. (Can be fun for horror film night, though.)

symathetic/parasympathetic NS are not oppositional. They're staged and nuanced IAC with evolutionary adjustments to reason capacity. Fighting fish and Talipia are essentially go-nogo whilst four legged mammals are more or less jittery depending on size and cortical proportions. This stuff is 50 years old ferchissake.

I never said they were opposites. But fight-or-flight mode is very different from relaxed sense of well being, which is the optimum state for making reasoned decisions. Sympathetic responses work best when reflexive reactions are needed, but doing so takes resources from the frontal lobes and the brain works differently from when the parasympathetic system is active. It's not only accurate to make a distinction, but useful in understanding.

And I'll reiterate: sympathetic NS responses are easily, even effortlessly, triggered when someone feels they are in mortal danger, and death cult religions such as Christianity, which uses as its most sacred symbol one of the most heinous and depraved acts possible in our species - human sacrifice - is rife with teachings about death, hell, torture, burning, and being forever separated from anything loving or kind.

Hell, my fight or flight response wants to jump up and take over just writing about this inhumane ideology.

 

[fromderinside]

Hey visera wake the fuck up. So how is that connected to arousal or nucleus acumbuns activation? Tell me something about chemicals I don't know that explains things rather are just so. Wrapping ourselves around a hypothetical axle just doesn't get the job done. If emotions were easy we'd already have decent theory. Just sayin'

 

[Eric H]

The law of the land is there for a purpose, if the laws are fair, then we should obey them willingly. For some people, the fear of getting caught and punished, is the main deterrent for not committing a crime. Some criminals have no fear of the law, or think up devious schemes to evade capture.

God's laws hang and depend on the greatest commandments, we show our love for God by obeying his commandments, and we love our neighbours as we love ourselves. It would be better if we did this freely and willingly, but if not, then the fear of God should stop us committing crimes against our neighbours.

 

[fromderinside]

applying forefinger across thumb. Ready. Stroke.

Morality has very little place in society. Observe, Evaluate. Decide. Act. Individual or group. Works for me.