FOOD FOR PROVOCATIVE THOUGHT

What makes a Christian, Moslem or Jew? What makes a Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox Jew? What makes one a Sunni or a Shiite Moslem? As a child you are taught how to act like the thousands of religious sects before you knew how to spell them.

But whatever religion one belongs to, it is the same process of conditioning that the scientists Pavlov and B. F. Skinner explored in their laboratories.

Conditioning his dog the Russian scientist Pavlov gave his dog food at the same time he rang a bell. He repeated this action many times, pairing food to the sound of the bell (behaviorism). At some point he rang the bell with no food just the sound of the bell made the dog salivate with hunger. When he continued to ring the bell with no food, in time this conditioning began to wear off.  No food no salivating. The hunger response became extinct.

This part of Pavlov's experiment is interesting because it affects man and beast alike. As I said before, that the pairing of food and bell was over an extended length of time.

When the hunger response was completely extinct, it took only one pairing of the food and bell to revive the conditioned response to full force all over again.

Man and beast are conditioned by the same process as Pavlov's dog. The conditioning for man and beast works by the same principles. One might pray a thousand times for God's intercession without response and might weaken over time, but let one prayer come to fruition and the prayer response comes back full force all over again.

If you think about the process of conditioning since childhood and the strong neuron connections of religious thought, action, feeling, behavior and experience, one is religious out of habit (conditioning). Those who are religious are for the same reason Pavlov's dog salivated by the sound of a bell, not a particularly noble reason to embrace one's religion.

Newton Joseph, Ph.D.