From here:
Why have companies like Apple and Google grown so explosively in the past few years and why do the brands garner such loyalty from their customers?
A team of neuroscientists scanned the brain of an Apple fan and it showed that the brand was stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.
This goes to show that mankind’s innate need to have faith in something is so strong that, when we stop believing in God, we will substitute any convenient banality.
If Richard Dawkins’ brain were scanned while thinking about Darwin, I’m sure we’d discover that his brain was being similarly stimulated.
Surely G K Chesterton’s words are in your mind, David (“When a man ceases to believe in the real God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything”). I particularly think that environmentalism/ecologism is the principal religion-substitute of our materialist age (environmentalists/ecologists – like New Agers – are, of course, materialists when their ideas/values are examied thoroughly)
It’s disturbingly morbidly fascinating…