Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 2.
Introduction
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Del curso dictado por Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems
136 calificaciones
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
136 calificaciones
Conoce a los instructores
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Hello.
My name is Dan Ogilvie.
I'm one of the co-founders of a course called Soul Beliefs Causes and
Consequences, originally taught at Rutgers University.
Now that it's in the hands of Coursera a platform for a MOOC course.
It's been divided into three units.
And my job right now is to introduce unit two.
And I'll have a couple comments about,
what the focus is on in these units?
The unit is called Belief Systems as Part of Our Lives.
Just give you all the lectures here and
then go through one by one or no skip around a bit.
Thinking and Feeling, that's one of my
favorite topics because there's a general notion that we think up here.
Our brains are there for thinking an act that pretty much ignores
the rest of our body, but there is a connection in the brain and in the body.
And that we feel our feelings
are integral part of our thinking.
This demonstrated in, I think maybe it's in that lecture.
There's a tape of somebody named Marvin, and Marvin had suffered a stroke.
So that feelings and
emotions and there's signals coming into the brain and
they would fall into a gap, which meant he couldn't make any decisions
because he was not aware of how he was feeling.
Our feelings kind of guide our decisions.
There's this marvelous image of him, rack of cards.
Various kinds of birthday, holiday cards.
And he was looking and looking and looking.
You ever been looking for a card for a specific person.
You reduce it down to three, we'll say, and
they you look at them and all the sudden, that's the one.
And that's because, I don't know how else to say it.
It feels right.
You can't justify it just like we speak about that milieu,
internal milieu of the body.
It just relaxes.
We don't know why?
But somehow there's an interaction between thinking and
feeling that allows us to get through the day and we have no access to our feelings,
it's very difficult and maybe impossible to make up our minds.
Look at the Lecture.
We have some guest lectures in three of them in this unit.
The second guest lecture is Professor Solomon.
He's from Skidmore College.
And he's quite well-known for
being involved in the creation of a theory called terror management theory.
What in the word does terror management do?
Basically, it's how we manage the dread of thoughts of our dying?
And it's a very productive area of research.
He and his colleagues, I don't know they've been at it for about 30 years.
You're going to enjoy his lecture.
He's articulate, he's fun, and
he's upbeat, and he's very serious.
Then I give a couple of lectures on Internalized Beliefs.
How do we Internalize Beliefs?
How do we part of our system?
Well in part, we are exposed to beliefs
by hearing them, by observing what people do.
And here are some.
Quotes from people, I've recently just run into in preparation for this introduction.
This all have to do with after life beliefs and soul beliefs.
The question we're approaching is how did we develop these?
Where did we get them from?
They're stories!
These are stories, folks.
And until I was auditing a course,
but Professor Qualls, I never thought as seriously about stories
in his course.
Salesman, one large factor,
my belief the soul continues to live after death because without belief.
What would be the point of life?
What would be the point of life without believing
in a soul that continues after death?
One of the books we read in Professor Quall's course was Uncle Tom's Cabin.
And Uncle Tom is said in the Harriet Beecher Stowe,
talks about Tom saying, a very religious man,
if it turns out is what I believe is not true,
my life is not worth living, and
here's a man whose a slave.
His life is incredibly difficult.
For all slaves lives were incredibly difficult.
And there was a lot of religious belief that, particularly through the mouth
of Tom, that I can survive this as long as I know I will get my rewards.
And that helped him get through the day.
It seems cruel to me to think that you'd spend many years on Earth,
living your life and then boom, that's it.
Life is over.
You're lowered in the grave and the book is closed if that's the case.
I don't think we would strive to be our best or be kind to others or
do good in the world, if there was no promise of life after death.
We would be trying to have as much fun as
we could, as much fun as possible.
I guess this belief is preventing people of having fun.
It's an incredible statement.
I could have fun, if I didn't have this belief hanging over my head.
20 year old college student.
Without God, why would we live moral lives?
Here's that line.
We live moral lives because somebody, a very powerful somebody or
something is observing us.
Otherwise without that observation, who knows what we would do?
God keeps us on track.
If it was not for the idea of a life after death,
morals would be tossed out the window.
Isn't that amazing?
You hear it quite often, that's why
we need to believe this because and
I won't go through every one of these but
because we without a bang,
we will not reap the rewards and later on.
There's a quote here, we will not be able to be with our family.
A lot of that.
In Heaven soul be reunited with my family and we live happily ever after.
Very common belief.
Similarly, death is not the end of existence.
The soul of the wicked are not destroyed by death but
they are tormented by demons of their own creation.
However, good people are resurrected and reunited with their loved ones.
While the wicked will be excluded from this reunion.
Folks, it's a very, very common belief,
probably not just a Christian belief.
I think it's more pervasive that in other religions as well.
I want to go through at least one way that these beliefs are internalized.
And that combines my thinking with the thinking of Sheldon Solomon.
That gentleman who gave a lecture on Terror Management.
How do we manage our fear of death?
What are the strategies?
One of the strategies is basically a foundation of religion.
Religion tells us basically that yes you will die but not really.
There's something in there that's called a soul that will last forever.
If you behave yourself,
if you follow God's instructions usually given through His prophets.
So here's a young man named Derek, he's featured in a book called Gods Harbour.
It's a small college, it's not actually called God's Harbour, but
it's a small college in Washington D.C.
and it's a very conservative school and
Derek, when he was six years old, this is how he says he became a Christian.
He recalls his father reading to him, and his sister,
a book about Absalom, who was stabbed to death by Joab.
I'm not familiar with this story.
And Derek recalled feeling a great sense of dread.
The idea that life will not always continue,
the idea of death, oftentimes occurs around the age of four to six.
That's when the kids have the ability to project themselves into the future.
It's about that.
Before that, they can't even remember what happened yesterday,
let alone project themselves into the future.
He had a great sense of dread.
And he says to his father, will he go to Heaven?
And that's probably Absalom.
His dad said no, I don't think he will.
Here comes the killer.
Dad, will I go to Heaven?
This is a surprise.
Well, no.
Not unless you accept Jesus Christ as your messiah.
Derek and his dad knelt and recited the sinner's prayer.
This is the Sinner's Prayer.
I had to look it up.
Heavenly father, I know that I am a sinner and that I deserve to go to hell.
I remember it, when I was growing up.
How did everybody become a sinner?
What was that all about?
I mean it was really concerning.
I believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins.
I do now receive him as my Lord and personal savior.
I promise to serve you, to the best of my ability.
Please save me, in Jesus name.
Amen. Now comes the killer.
Derek felt a great sense of peace and joy.
What am I talking about?
The internal milieu.
The internal milieu is feelings that are inside.
And it's dis-confident when they tighten up and you feel bad and something's wrong.
You might not be able to put your finger on it, and then something happens and
bingo, it's relieved.
Now, I think that's a formula for a belief that then
becomes permanently installed deeply, what we call, could call psyche.
And that is when you feel the dread of death.
Then that story becomes prominent too.
So that's one of the messages of this unit of the course.
And now I want to have
Stephanie Anglin, she's not a professor yet, talk a little bit about her research.
I would like this course, the entire course to be researched based.
It's not, but I love the idea that some research develops out of this.
And Stephanie could you come up here and briefly talk about what you did?
Or do you want to sit there and use the microphone?
>> So I developed a measure of people's implicit soul and afterlife beliefs.
And one reason I developed this measure,
is because I was interested in examining, what the source of those beliefs might be?
And what I found was that people's scores
on this implicit measure of their beliefs were more strongly
related to their childhood beliefs than to their current beliefs.
Which suggests that people's beliefs that they form early in childhood, become
internalized and may not correspond to the beliefs in adulthood.
>> Great.
Thank you. So what that means?
This is the only study of its kind, so it needs to be replicated and moving further.
But it's at least creating a foundation.
So one message I take, you correct me if this is incorrect.
And that is, we're not conscious of all our beliefs.
There are some there that we're not even aware of.
The brain can do that and they can
actually interfere with or be different from our conscious beliefs.
Is that correct?
And that's a kind of research that I
certainly want to see more of because it's
a very important aspect of what we're up to.
Thank you, Stephanie.
An instructor who came to the course is named Julien Musolino.
We typically, I'm soft hearted.
I don't typically push things as hard.
What I want people to do is think about this issue and talk about this issue.
Musolino, you saw his lectures, wouldn't you say he's kind of in your face?
Yes, Musolino is in your face.
He says there's no such thing as a soul, and there's no evidence whatsoever for it.
And he has written a book that will be out by the time this is released.
I think it's 2015 called the Soul Fallacy.
So this course pushes things, pulls back.
But a number of people who observe Musolino,
felt offended and that's okay, with me.
That was okay, that he really pushed the issue
of what he called the fallacy of belief and soul.
There are other wonderful lectures in this portion of the course.
Professor Hamilton is involved in that and you'll notice the difference between
Professor Hamilton and me, because he's tall,
he's good looking, and most of his sentences actually end in a period.
I have a hard time coming to the end of a sentence.
So I hope you enjoy this unit and carry on.
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