This Is Interesting, Especially If You're In The Mood For Some Long Reading

The main focus of the Spiegel story is what it calls “the belief of unbelievers”—the persistence of all kinds of magical or superstitious practices among atheists or others with no avowed religious beliefs. It would appear then that there is a deeply rooted human propensity to believe in supernatural realities. The author (mercifully, in my opinion) does not ascribe this persistence to neurological peculiarities of our species or other vicissitudes of the evolutionary process. (One curiosity of the contemporary religious scene is that even some theologians find it plausible to look on religion as a variety of brain disease.) Various psychological experiments are quoted; I particularly like the one (conducted, of all places, in Helsinki), in which avowed atheists are asked to loudly petition the deity (in which they don’t believe) to burn down their house or to drown their parents: The unhappy subjects of the experiment evinced obvious reluctance and physiologically measurable stress (this can be done by analyzing the degree of sweating). The author of the story opines that this is nothing new, that it was always the case. In other words, he agrees here with what a Protestant theologian of my acquaintance has called “the eternal return of the Stone Age”.  Sweating Finnish atheists today thus stand in a long line of supernaturally terrified humans, going back to the dawn of history, uninterrupted by allegedly more Christian periods (such as the Middle Ages) or the alleged emancipations of the Enlightenment.