Humans have always had religion. What does this say about our minds? Reza Aslan PhD, Lisa Miller PhD, and Rob Bell MDiv explain.
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Religious thinking has been a part of the human experience from the beginning
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The question then becomes, why? Studies of children have shown that we are born with this instinct for what's called substance dualism
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the idea that the body and the mind, or soul, are separate
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If religious experience is a universal phenomenon, if it can be traced about all time, then there must be some adaptive advantage
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Otherwise, it wouldn't exist. The problem is that the countless different answers that have been given for why religion fail primarily because they're functionalist answers
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What religion does, not why religion exists. we are a point and we are a wave we are magnificently distinct and unique and diverse
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and we are part of one field of life one sacred consciousness so it turns out that every single
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one of us are all born with the neuro docking station for awakened awareness together with my
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colleagues we looked at people who recovered from depression through an awakening we could see that
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people who suffered the most really derived profound support and even renewal when connecting
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to their higher power to God the universe whatever their word might be They were more likely to perceive and reflect in a profoundly spiritual way And this tendency to see life on spiritual bedrock
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was mirrored by a thickening of the cortex, offering some evidence that sustained spiritual life
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is neuroprotective against depression. And in addition, when we looked at the awakened brain
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what we saw is that universally we are drawn into an experience in which we are loved and held, guided, and never alone
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If you think about the past three, four hundred years of human history, especially the history of the Western world
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we've had this explosion, some call it the age of certainty, the explosion of scientific rationalism
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But we've had this explosion of knowledge about how the world actually works
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Weight, height, gravitational pull, electromagnetic force. And yet the same questions are still gnawing at the soul
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What's it mean? What are we doing here? This idea somehow that faith and science are in opposition
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I've always found to be complete insanity. Both are searching for the truth
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There is something in the way that our brains work more than just the sum of our material parts. Is it possible that you have been on a quest
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that you already are walking a spiritual path


