On the Matter of Magnetic Transcranial Stimulation “Turning Off” Religious Faith

4/6/2024

Igor Chudov — a self-proclaimed agnostic who runs what I refer to as an anti-peck blog — has raised alarm bells concerning the Science’s supposed ability to “turn off” religious faith in individuals via a procedure known as Magnetic Transcranial Stimulation.

We can ask a question: can the invisible link between the faithful and God be severed by a third party armed with the tools provided by the latest scientific advances?

Disturbingly, the answer may be yes. Scientists led by Dr. Colin Holbrook at UCLA undertook a multi-year endeavor to discover ways to stop “religious beliefs and right-wing prejudice.” They attempted to apply direct electromagnetic stimulation to the brain to alter human beliefs, specifically turning off belief in God.

Dr. Holbrook has led extensive research on this topic for many years. He described how electromagnetic stimulation of the frontal cortex (frontal part of the brain) “experimentally decreased avowed belief in God."

After using a purposely made device, scientists describe a significant reduction in expressed belief in positive religious ideas:

Religious belief: We next tested the effects of TMS on the endorsement of religious beliefs following a reminder of death. In a marginal trend, overall avowed religious belief (including both positive and negative beliefs) was reduced in the TMS condition relative to the sham condition 2.95 vs 4.26. As predicted, this shift was driven by a significant reduction in expressed belief in positive religious ideas. Participants in the TMS condition reported an average of 32.8% less conviction in positive religious beliefs.

If interested, you can read the whole thing here, but I’ll offer the following summary for those so inclined: the Science can zap religious faith right out of your brain, and you can bet your bottom dollar that will strive to do so en masse very soon.

Thoughts:

First, religious faith has plummeted just dandy on its own in the West without the need for TMS or any other sort of brain-radiating lobotomy. Second, what is the exact nature of the religious faith that TMS supposedly reduced in the trial participants? Third, this whole business of clandestinely reducing religious faith by bombing an unwitting population with anti-religious gamma waves denies the spiritual reality of what religious faith is and how it can be reduced or lost.

Concerning the thoughts above -- first, reducing or abandoning religious faith is a free personal choice. Second, reducing or abandoning religious faith is a free personal choice. And lastly, reducing or abandoning religious faith is a free personal choice.

Putting the concerns of worried agnostics like Chudov aside, no technology capable of actually reducing religious faith contra an individual’s free personal religious choice can or will ever be developed.

That is not how reality operates.

Real religious faith is impervious to all external influences. Only the faithful can reduce or abandon religious faith. Any religious faith that external forces can reduce is not true religious faith.

Anyone who worries about getting their religious faith secretly zapped out of them by radiation or whatever is an irredeemable spiritual idiot.

It really is as simple as that.

10 Comments

Laeth

4/6/2024 23:17:36

i feel like there's good potential for a story here.

more to the point: this is the problem of false assumptions. it is possible to do this in the same way that it is possible to turn someone into a vegetable, rendering them incapable of any thought (in the flesh, at least) - and thus incapable of faith too. but this is ofc completely missing the point of what faith in a larger sense is supposed to be, which is much larger than mere belief or assenting to certain premises. I also think there might be a problem with the very idea of faith as understood traditionally that contributes to this kind of confusion.

ofc 'they' are just dumb and evil enough to try to inflict brain damage on people. of that I have no doubt.

David Earle

4/7/2024 00:02:06

I agree. And even if they manage to decapitate an individual's brain so much that no decisions can be made whatsoever (which is more likely what it would ultimately have to take to achieve their goal and would be akin to euthanasia), everybody still has the free choice to choose Jesus and everlasting life after death with a clear conscious with lucid recolition of all previously held understandings and awareness of self.

There is no faith switch in the brain that can be turned on and off. Such choices are inaccessible on a material level

Whitney

4/7/2024 01:06:14

So brain dramage causes loss of faith. Interesting

JMSmith link

4/7/2024 13:19:27

It would not surprise me if genuine faith could be erased or muted by physical interference. Beauty is a spiritual value and my perception of beauty can be erased destroying or disabling my sensory organs, or by removing everything beautiful from my environment. But, I grant you, in the later case I would still remember beauty and would not, I think, doubt that my former experience of beauty was real. This suggests an interesting question. Does a subject of faith erasure remember their former faith? and if he remembers it, is it with nostalgia or disgust? Does he feel he has been liberated or robbed, or does he suffer something like amnesia?

In one way mechanical faith erasure suggests desperation on the part of anti-religious freethinkers. The tools of rationalist argument and propaganda have not caused universal apostasy, so they are looking at more brutal methods, To emphasize the brutality of this method, I suggest we revert to it as "spiritual lobotomy."

Francis Berger

4/7/2024 19:11:06

@ JM - A clandestine spiritual lobotomy is not a lobotomy at all. I would say it's akin to being taken out by a sniper's bullet. The physical/material consequences would be very real and perciptible, but the bullet would not really accomplish its expressed spiritual aim. However, if, as Wm notes below, we can be persuaded into believing that our faith can be zapped out of us at will, then we might be persuaded into believing that our faith depends on nothing more than physical/chemical reactions in the brain; hence, our faith is not really spiritual at all -- just brainwaves that can be hacked and manipulated without our knowledge or consent.

William James Tychonievich

4/7/2024 15:27:17

It's pretty clear that physical interventions can affect a person's thoughts and beliefs -- "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man" -- so this isn't really anything qualitatively new.

It might be worth looking up the original study and seeing exactly what was demonstrated, as Igor Chudov has a history of <a href="https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/07/reports-of-depopulation-of-taiwan-may.html">misinterpreting</a> things in a sensationalist way.

4/7/2024 17:22:21

@ Wm - I remember his Taiwan article and your critque of it. Yes, Chudov does have a tendency of misinterpreting things in a sensationalist way -- this is no exception.

It is extremely clear that physical interventions can affect a person's thoughts and beliefs. A bullet to the brain definitely reduces one's religious thinking...and everything else for that matter...but that kind of misses the point here. Evil needs your tacit consent when it comes to spiritual matters like these, you need to willingly consent to the faith reduction, which is why I don't believe this sort of technology -- assuming such technology exists -- would be employed clandestinely to reduce faith. It would defeat the whole spiritual purpose of reducing someone's faith and degrade it to mere political/societal considerations. I'm not saying some apparatchik may not try it, but I assume his higher ups won't be overly amused by the attempt.

WJT

4/7/2024 17:35:35

Frank, agreed. I suspect the primary “value” (for the enemy) of this technology is not its actual application but rather sensational news stories like the one being discussed, which are intended to make people conclude that faith is after all just a chemical reaction in the brain and doesn’t mean anything.

4/7/2024 19:05:04

@ Wm - Yes, that puts it well.

Henri

4/7/2024 23:01:22

Out of curiosity, I noted some things about the underlying paper:

It says there were 38 study participants, evidently Californian college students (average age 20.9). It also mentions "prospective participants were carefully prescreened to exclude 'hardliners' with respect to both political orientation (strong liberals or conservatives) and religiosity (committed believers or atheists), leaving a sample of relatively moderate individuals". As far as "religious beliefs" were concerned, there was no specific religion mentioned, but in describing the demographics of participants it mentions at least 50% were Asian (37% East Asian).

The assessment of beliefs was through a survey where a brief series of statements were rated 1-8 shortly after the EM stimulation, with '1' being 'strongly disagree' and '8' being 'strongly agree'. There were three "positive statements" - e.g. "There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God" - and three negative statements - e.g. "There exists an evil personal spiritual being, whom we might call the Devil".

Taking the average of the average 1-through-8 response for each individual, the control group averaged 4.54 on "positive" statements (i.e. the control group was almost completely agnostic), while the recently-zapped group averaged 3.05 on the "positive statements" (which means they leaned more toward mild disagreement with the statements). Results were similar with the "negative" statements.

It doesn't seem any more detailed info was provided, and I didn't see anything on distribution of individual responses. There was also no before/after test applied to any given individual, just a "treatment" group and a control,

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On the Matter of Magnetic Transcranial Stimulation “Turning Off” Religious Faith

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