Stress and Religion

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Inside the Believing Brain
When Michael Shermer hears about a new medical cure, fad or folk legend, he’s probably going to ask a few questions. He’s the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, which he created in 1992 to help people think more critically about pseudoscience and superstitions – everything from Holocaust denial to belief in Bigfoot. Shermer says we’re hardwired to form beliefs, even when those beliefs don’t make much sense. 
Michael Shermer, author of "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths"

From...  http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-believing-brain/
Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.
Dr. Shermer then bores deeper into the brain, right down to the neurophysiology of belief system construction at the single neuron level, and then reconstructs from the bottom up how brains form beliefs. Then we shall examine how belief systems operate with regard to belief in religion, the afterlife, God, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, politics, economics, and ideologies of all stripes, and then consider how a host of cognitive processes convince us that our beliefs are truths.
 
Physicist F. David Peat in his article, Chaos: The Geometrization Of Thought, writes on the subject of Chaos Theory: "It suggests that when we are forced to give up control over our lives we may be giving ourselves to a deeper form of wisdom and guiding principle. It implies that within the heart of chaos lie new forms of subtle order."

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