Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
There are two problems with this notion.
First, if someone believes in a God who created not just this universe, but also a vastly superior and more interesting universe, which they expect to go to when they die, and spend an eternity in, it is perfectly natural for the human brain, with its finite resources, to conclude the superior universe, where they will spend far more time, is more important, and more worthy of study.
Second, the more important a belief is to someone, the more the brain will seek to protect that belief from inquiry, in all sorts of subtle and not-so subtle ways. If one’s goal is to understand ideas, it is logical to scientifically examine important ideas, but the human brain often doesn’t see that as the most important goal. Instead we tend to view some ideas, particularly religious ideas, as social tools, where belief in these ideas makes us part of an important social group – and strong belief makes us respected members of said social group. The human brain naturally views the social gains from strong belief in such an idea as much more important than the gains in understanding that might come from understanding the idea. To make matters worse, our social decisions are strongly driven by parts of the brain whose inner workings are not accessible to the conscious mind – so we often don’t know we are making that calculus, and following it. (And probably, the parts of the brain that make most of our social decisions for us can’t access the inner workings of the conscious part of the brain, and thus can’t know that gains in knowledge would come from questioning an idea.)