This is one of several, inserts into the, our recording of this course. It represent a kind of, review of the past few lectures and then what's coming up. It's a segue, that will keep the course moving along. But first, I have to ask my colleague, Professor Hamilton, I'm going to call you Len, okay? >> Okay. >> What happened to your face? >> [LAUGH] Well, there was a full moon last night. >> [LAUGH] I see. All right. These are obviously done after the regular course. >> All right. So the, the course started out as a course on soul beliefs. Most people, around the world believe they have souls, and that their souls are going to go somewhere after they die. There's not a course that a topic that people typically talk about. But we felt that it was important to come to grips with these beliefs, and look at the causes and consequences of having these beliefs that, which is I said, multiple people believe that. A matter of fact, about 80% of students who take this course at the believe that they have a soul, and it's going to go someplace. As a matter of fact, it's more than that. It's closer to 90%. And that fits with the poll information that, polls were taken from time to time over the last, dozen or so years. And so, our figures pretty much fit that. We began the course by having students who volunteers, come to the stage and talk about not what they believe, but what they were told to believe when they're growing up. And the students were, as you've witnessed, they were fabulous, they were players, and they represented quite a number of religions. In fact, near the end, we had some non-believers come on stage. So they represented, in large part, some of the major religions. And then, we entered into a section where we looked at the deep historical roots of some of these religious system, religious belief systems. And it turns out that from what we saw people on the stage talking about, they all basically believe the same thing but variations of that. You're born. You live. You die. You go somewhere and there are certain rules that you need to follow according to the, which ever religion you're a member of, then, we backed up even further, much further, that the history of, religion, and looked at a primitive societies. And from what we know or what's been reported recently in the literature, most primitive societies were egalitarian. That means, they didn't have leaders, but they certainly had rules that they enforced themselves. And then, societies became more and more complicated and hierarchically structured, and from that emerged chieftains, priests and hierarchy of, individuals in charge of controlling the behavior of other people. Whereas, earlier, it was in the hands of individual tribe members. Now the word came down from on top, that this is the way that you must behave to be a good citizen of your group. And now, we've evolved to the point where we can imagine ourselves in the future and the priesthoods then used that to say that, well, not only are you behaving yourself for the well being of yourself and the tribe, but forever for the future. And so that was a point that was made in the early part of the course. And then, as we evolve over time, as the institutions evolve over time up until now, churches and religious organizations are, they're protecting. They protect people, they protect their members. They're very useful for social bonding, it's a critical fact that runs throughout this course. Is social bonding being connected to other people? It also has the advantage of giving people a joint purpose in life and providing them with a sense of identity. Now, as we approach the next segment of the course, we find that not everybody agrees that religion's good. In fact, some, noted authors, in the, since the turn of this century. They call themselves, scientific atheists. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris. You'll get familiar with those names in the upcoming lectures. They said religion is bad for you. Just give it up. And that's a shocker. A great deal of controversy came out of that, but it's not the first time that some, big ideas and controversies have come about. So Len, you talk about what's that feature of the next, unit. >> Yes, I think one of the things that happens is that, religious beliefs are really centered around, personal behavior, what one has to do to assure an eternity of a good being, but they very quickly meld into universal explanations of the world around us. So it's not just that you have to do this or do this to have a pleasant afterlife, but we learn that God created the Earth. That God makes it rain, that God tests us with plagues and pestilence and cures us of those plague and pestilence, and so on and so forth. So, these, religious beliefs come to be all consuming. And then, when you challenge any part of that belief, you are challenging, the whole being of the individual, both their physical survival and their psychological survival. So there's often a lot of resistance to this. But what has happened as we became better and better at figuring out, what's going on in the world around us that sometimes, the evidence that we collect about the physical world just becomes overwhelming and something that must be believed. But that didn't make it easy. And you will see that if we go back in history as we do in these upcoming lectures, that Galileo was challenged by the church for teaching that the Earth is not the center of the universe, but that it's, revolving around the Sun. And poor old Bruno had his tongue nailed to a stake and was burned at that stake for teaching the same, types of things. They were blasphemous. But eventually, with a combination of education and adaptation, we don't have very many people around anymore who don't believe that the Earth is going around the sun. But it took a long time, to accept that. Moving on then to the natural or the biological world, it was very difficult, with Darwin's Theory of Evolution, to believe that, we and other creatures all have a very long natural history. And that the, our present day humans evolved from, gradually and over long periods of time from creatures that we wouldn't even quite recognize as being humans. And a lot of people find that now to be perfectly acceptable. But, there are people who don't, and so that's, still, something that's on the horizon in terms of acceptance. And then we get into the really difficult part, our mental or our psychological world, and this world is seemingly so non-physical. And so separate from the body, getting into the whole mind/body dualism thing. And the idea that there are biological explanations for our very thoughts and behaviors, is, very much a work in project, a work in progress. And, people, are still finding that very difficult to accept. And these are going to be some of the issues that we will be talking about in the upcoming lectures. Some very important issues that have been around, for hundreds of years, and I suspect some of these will be around for a couple hundred more, you know, when we first envisioned this course, a course on soul beliefs, it's, you know, kind of innocuous. But, it devolved into our having to deal with some of the fundamental, issues of life. And in particular, the issue of consciousness, I think near the end, we'll deal with consciousness, but we had no idea of what we were getting into. But in the end, I think, you and I know, and other people will think, well, this was, worth the while to explore some issues that, we at the outset, had no way to discipline
