And so I default to my natural position, which is that unless anyone can prove that religious feelings are caused by anything more than society and chemicals in our brain, I can not believe that it is true.
Yet, and I say this on the assumption you don't have a PhD in Neuroscience, you didn't investigate the matter yourself and just took the word of others as fact. How shocking that you would accept something without proof!
I might be exaggerating a little bit but I do think that Jesus would be much more in line with socialistic thinking than with capitalistic thinking. Taking care of the least of us and the poor and the sick aligns much more with socialism than it does with pure unregulated capitalism.
I think it goes along with Charity more than either, to be honest.
I do have an M.S. in psychology and do know a bit about the cognitive distortions that are a result of our evolutionary past. I do know that there are certain chemicals that can cause people to experience very religious experiences while under their influence. The main ones being, psilocybin and psilocin, lsd, DMT (which you should totally watch the spirit molecule though they get the point wrong) and mescaline. Why is it that our brains are programmed so that they experience these intense reactions under the influence of a chemical? If this was a true experience from god, it shouldn't be able to be manufactured in our brain. Much less the experience of the schizophrenic, who hears the voice of god. Our brains can be mumped with in too many ways to trust a purely emotional reaction and belief without proof.
We can believe in all kinds of mumped up crap if we don't follow that belief with proof for its existence. I could believe in stupid things like astrology or homeopathy, but I know that there is no rational proof for those things, and so I don't waste time with them. There are all kinds of things you discount in your daily life as lacking proof, yet you accept Christianity on faith alone. For what reason? you were raised that way, you rationalize it, you have a feeling? All I ask is that one of you rough ridin' prove it without resorting to a work written by men 2000 years ago. If you can prove it, I will fall down on my knees and beg forgiveness from the one true God.
Edit: and also, the beauty about science is that you don't have to have a Ph.D. to study it or to understand it. You can investigate any claims made by a scientist on your own. All you need is a bit of effort and a bit of time. And when you get done, you may wish that you had the Ph.D. to go along with it.
Edit 2: Yes, a scientist wishes others to know about their knowledge and you can read about science through non-technical sources. However, science makes no claims to special knowledge or special understanding of the true meaning of things. Any claim that a scientist makes must be backed up by evidence, and all that evidence is available for people to critique whether they are scientists or not. And trust me, scientists get off on proving others wrong because it gives them recognition. If someone comes up with evidence that disproves a current theory and supports a new theory, then that person will become very well known within that field. The reason that we know of Darwin so well is that he pushed a theory that has yet to be disproven despite all the best attempts to do so.
And too, what it comes down to is that things need to be testable, we can't test for God. In fact, if you tried to pin people down on ways to test for the existence of God you will get a great variety of reasons why they can't, or why those particular tests failed.
