"... and quite frankly they are credited with supernatural powers of retaliation."
Sayfa 32
Strong faith in God is associated with emotional well-being and low death anxiety. Additionally, after a reminder of their mortality, people report being more religious and having a stronger belief in God. Death reminders make people more confident that God exists, and that God answers prayers; they also make people more interested in, and accepting of, supernatural phenomena in general. (This is also true for atheists, who, following death reminders, make more rapid connections between the word “real” and words such as “God,” “heaven,” “angels,” and “miracles,” which psychologists use as a measure of “implicit” or unconscious religiosity.) Moreover, reminding devoutly religious people of their faith enables them to think about death without reacting defensively.
Evolutionary theorists such as Pascal Boyer and Paul Bloom propose that supernatural beliefs originated because humans are predisposed to attribute mind and intention to living things. According to this view, our ancestors projected their own subjective experiences of feeling, wanting, and willing onto their surroundings; trees and rocks spoke to them with power and purpose, and rain and lightning were both the language and the playthings of invisible gods.
We may no longer believe in miracles, but anything that hints at strange, unworldly, even supernatural powers will create charisma. The psychology is the same: you have visions of the future, and of the wondrous things you can accomplish. Describe these things in great detail, with an air of authority, and suddenly you stand out. And if your prophecy—of prosperity, say—is just what people want to hear, they are likely to fall under your spell and to see later events as a confirmation of your predictions. Exhibit remarkable confidence and people will think your confidence comes from real knowledge. You will create a self-fulfilling prophecy: people's belief in you will translate into actions that help realize your visions. Any hint of success will make them see miracles, uncanny powers, the glow of charisma.
Sayfa 104Kitabı okudu
Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings - Henry Maudsley
.. attaching to the operations of the sound mind is the exceeding activity of imagination, which is a prolific faculty or function always eager and pleased to exercise itself. The quick way in which it hastens to fill the voids of knowledge with fictions and theories affords a remarkable contrast to the slow, toilsome, and comparatively unwelcome work of observation and reasoning.
116
Zafer tüm ağırbaşlılığıyla,
Ölümün ordusunu koruyor.
Askerler dinleniyor sessiz çadırlarında,
Her yan ölüm kokuyor.
ArtemisKitabı okudu
It makes you wonder, after all things that we hunted, how many of them existed just because people believe?
Supernatural 1/17
Psilocybin specifically activates the areas of the brain concerned with processing signals. A common occurrence with psilocybin intoxication is spontaneous outbursts of poetry and other vocal activity such as speaking in tongues, though in a manner distinct from ordinary glossolalia. In cultures with a tradition of mushroom use, these phenomena have given rise to the notion of discourse with spirit doctors and supernatural allies. Researchers familiar with the territory agree that psilocybin has a profoundly catalytic effect on the linguistic impulse. Once activities involving syntactic self-expression were established habits among early human beings, the continued evolution of language in environments where mushrooms were scarce or unavailable permitted a tendency toward the expression and emergence of the ego. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western civilization
Joseph Conrad
“the belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness,”
Authority is a particular type of domination; and it is legitimate. Max Weber distinguishes 3 types of authority:
Traditional authority: Authority based on the belief in long-running traditions is traditional authority. In other words, traditional authority is the power legitimized through respect for long-established cultural patterns. There should be a belief in the ‘rightness’ of established customs and traditions, and ‘traditional status’ of the traditional authority is inherited. In the modern world, traditional authority is increasingly replaced by rational-legal authority.
Rational-legal authority: Those who possess rational-legal authority are legitimated on the basis of legally enacted rules and the right of those with authority under those rules to issue commands.
Charismatic authority: Charismatic authority is based on the devotion of followers or subordinates to what they define as the exceptional characteristics of a leader. These characteristics are mostly seen as “supernatural, super-human, or at least exceptional compared to lesser mortals”.
Sayfa 93Kitabı okudu
