To Lou/Geri Jenson – I am booting up my prefrontal cortex and I commend Karen and Pat on being more accepting and less judgmental of their religious neighbors “who turn off their thinking caps.” Does Geri really believe that Christians avoid adult responsibility to reason out how to control their lives?
Geri’s comments about Professor Schjoedt’s study remind me of when my teen-age daughter brought to my attention a study that showed that electrical activity between the two hemispheres of a woman’s brain was significantly greater than that of a man’s brain. She concluded that this proved that women “used all of their brain, while men only used part of their brain.” She believed that this was why women were more intuitive than men, since they dealt with more details, which obviously requires more brain activity.
I agreed with her that these were possibilities but pointed out the report’s conclusion, which used the words “hypothesize and speculate,” which meant it wasn’t caste in concrete. It was not yet an established fact.
I suggested other possibilities, perhaps for a man, less activity across hemispheres indicates fewer distractions, permitting his mind to focus more on whatever he was thinking about. Atheist men are more focused and critical than atheistic women? Right? Hope I haven’t started a family fight!
Schjoedt’s study “…hypothesize that a mechanism similar to that of hypnosis may facilitate charismatic influence” and “…a subject’s recognition of charismatic authority” (any authority figure) may “…influence their susceptibility to charismatic authority by down-regulating their executive system.”
The study’s charts show lower activity for the charismatic students—not shutting off or shutting down or turning off their thinking caps. Not avoidance of critical reasoning as previous writers suggest.
I ask our atheists who is their Atheistic Authority? What website supplies facts for their letters? At best, their conclusions are not good examples of “critical thinking.” Their conclusions seem to be evidence of applying “an atheistic set of standards” to both sides of a question or possibility. The “sound evidence” they demand of Christians is sadly lacking in their letters to date. Their “certainty” of the atheisticposition, seems based on what to them is sufficient evidence, just like anyone else’s religion!
Chuck Flickinger
Hovland
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