sábado, 3 de fevereiro de 2018

O contributo da psicologia para o ateísmo: Deus, a grande projecção

    Sim, é verdade, todo e qualquer deus é uma projecção. Desde que sou estudante de psicologia que tenho esta opinião.
    Fiz agora uma pequena revisão de um artigo sobre esse mesmo tópico (God - The great projection, publicado no Atheist Republic). Este é o excerto que considero mais importante:

«Psychological Projection

Psychological projection, as it is popularly known, refers to the projection of personal attributes or qualities onto people and our surrounding environments. To give you a basic idea of this psychological phenomenon, an angry person may erroneously accuse another of being angry, or a rude person may falsely charge another with being rude. These are very simplistic examples, but prior to Freud’s formalization of psychological projection, the ancient Greek writer, Xenophanes (570 ~ 475 BCE) described the kind of projection relevant to this post. In his words:

“…the gods of the Ethiopians were inevitably black with flat noses while those of the Thracians were blond with blue eyes. ” (3)

This kind of observation was later reflected in the words of a famous Socratic philosopher, Aristotle, who remarked:

“Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.”(4)

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that this form of projection would be formalized into a systematic critique of all religion by the Hegelian philosopher and humanist, Ludwig Feuerbach. In his ‘Essence of Christianity,’ he remarked:

“…the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God.”(5)

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As sentient and social beings, we are great projectors. We project onto our loved ones, onto celebrities and politicians and also onto inanimate and, as noted by Feuerbach and our two ancient Greek witnesses, onto non-existent beings. Most of what we think we know about anyone is but a pale reflection of the reality of that person, a shadow reflected upon our cave walls, as Plato might have put it. A large portion of what we believe we know about someone is merely a projection of our own internal model of that person, an edited reality constructed by a series of neurological and psychological mechanisms. The same, as noted, is true of the gods and here we arrive not only at the link between pareidolia and psychological projection, but the psychological basis for intelligent design theory.

As far as I am aware, there has not been a single paper published from a single proponent of intelligent design, that argues for the existence of a creator who created the world on the back of a tortoise, or a creator who, like Marduk of ancient Babylonian myth, slayed the angry goddess and split her body in half, creating the heavens and the earth, with her dissected carcass. No, most, if not all of the proponents of intelligent design, argue for the biblical version of creation, the familiar model of reality present within their own culture, their own religion and most revealingly, their own minds. Their scientific theory is merely the subjective projection of an egocentric religious worldview relative to the proponent’s own religion. Being this is the case, we cannot help but conclude that intelligent design, and the creator they seek to drag from the depths of un-falsifiable superstition and assemble in a noise of otherwise random data or lack thereof, is a very expensive grilled cheese sandwich, a great projection.

References:

Leonard Zuzne & Warren H. Jones. ‘Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking.’ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., (1989). p. 77.
Steven Novella M.D. Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills. The Teaching Company, (2012). Lecture 5: Pattern Recognition—Seeing What’s Not There.
Arthur Fairbanks. ‘The First Philosophers of Greece: Xenophanes – Fragments and Commentary.’ K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, (1898). p. 79.
Aristotle. Politics. (Trans. Benjamin Jowett). Oxford at Clarendon Press, (1916). p. 28.
Ludwig Feuerbach. ‘Essence of Christianity,’ 2nd Ed. Calvin Blanchard, (1857). pp. 32-33.»

O meu comentário: I finished my degree in psychology in 2017 and I've been thinking the same. That's also the reason why they feel attacked like it was personal when they criticize theoir beliefs - It's the same when people hold on to their pets (usually to dogs) and then get mad or annoyed when other people do not like them, compliment them or simply won't put up whith everything they do.

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