In the context of the Nashville Statement I would like to write a blog about how religion works in the brain.

What we see in religion is a powerful source that creates life after death.
You can believe that or not.
The scriptures are written by breathing people and human hands with the aim of controlling the flock.
The Bible is an arena without boundaries, you can make of it what you want.
The believers often define themselves with pride with what is written in the Bible, but also with the rituals and beliefs of their church, which interprets these in their own way, no matter how illogical, but the believers accept this without question.

But what happens in the minds of this LGBT group can be proven.

You see that these orthodox preachers want to blur the boundary between science and
religion with their Nashville Statement in order to gain their advantage in this way.
This stubbornness now leads to a conflict of contempt, but also to solidarity for the LGBT group. A conflict that was associated with Sodom and Gomorrah in the past and is still relevant today and in this day and age that this is no longer applicable because this comparison is incorrect.
We cannot go back to what happened thousands of years before Christ.
I also wonder whether these orthodox preachers are deceiving themselves with this Nashville statement, to mask the sexual abuse in the churches and I certainly wonder whether they themselves are so pure on the thread.

What a context; writing Nashville statements and condemning them on the basis of the asceticism of the LGBT group.
They have an extensive list of sins and virtues and they hold out the prospect of life after death under a strict range of conditions to be complied with and that is what you see again in this
statement.
These are the varying degrees of reward and punishment, the punishing flames of pain and especially no
pleasure or love. Hell, purgatory and heaven – I deliberately put them in this order – because the first two are always
still central, always the sins first and never the happiness of man, while all
sins – through the death of Christ – in the past, present and future have already been forgiven.

Catholics had wonderful methods for this and they collected indulgences for money and
people fell for it and still fall for it.
For Luther this was a line too far.

You see in these Nashville statements that desperate religious stubborn convictions are
created in order to want to cure this LGBT group, which is not possible, because this has – according to Dick Swaab
already been refuted – and scientifically recognized.
The orthodox preachers make a god of themselves, which they can never be.

We feel connected to the concept of 'Being' and to the expression of religion in
current daily life, getting married, having children, never getting divorced, staying with a partner as
church dogma prescribes, we are in a web of obligation that is rooted in the ancient past.

In this way, many of the banal - repeated rules to the point of boredom - of the church can never be
dealt with in a satisfactory way, there is always the use of power.
In fact, our brain cannot handle these theological rules and facts, because the brain is in a
person and not on paper.
Human emotion and feeling determines what is good for you.
You go and investigate - at least I do - and look for a good book or film that can make me understand the opposite
or whether I should or should not make that boring and long trek of dogmas and rules.
At least my brain needs variety, it wants change and gets a kick out of it. Thinking in the now/this time, taking your own responsibility can be a brain solace, and that
does you good, just like the LGBT group feels when they come out of the closet.

I also see that in our son, who has become a completely different person.

The brain seeks stimuli, to become yourself in a safe way.
The result is that the brain has the possibilities to draw on social
emotional/skills, with which it has been gifted evolutionarily.
In this way we can say that the brain is constantly in conflict with the sealed doctrine and dogmas
of the church and I have experienced that fight.

Now that I am out of the church there is peace.

What the legs are for the jogger is religion for the brain, with a different effect.
The legs of the joggers ensure that the challengers of Mount Everest reach the top and
in this way religion produces in the human brain a very large range of rules, dogmas, faith and
power that makes you stuck and certainly also disbelief when you find out how the
fork is in the handle.

We cannot state from the Nashville Statement that there are bad or good people.
Also those who wrote this Nashville Statement - and certainly translated it here in the Netherlands -
also have a human brain under their skull, but probably something exploded under that
roof, which forces the brain to grab this group of people.
They just assume that the LGBT group is 'bad' or sinful.
The LGBT group are honest, glorious and sensitive people who belong, a group that you
have little trouble with.

There are people who behave like a saint in public and churches and are sinners at home; this also
occurs among non-human primates.
It seems that this group of people are debauched sinful apes at home who need a referee
to act and live decently.
This Nashville Statement cannot be a position to start from, it is a false
imagination/imagination or a morality, i.e. that morality and religion overlap in practice.

This calls for renewed analysis in the churches and also legal support for
this LGBT group.

Religion is about good and bad, both privately and in the social arena and it drives people into
the confessionals and creates problems that are not there.
This allows them to formulate answers to the difficult issues of life themselves or to
the direction from which life evolves.
Religion is a self-supporting, strengthening, resolving system.
The active human brain feels, fears and sees certain problematic aspects of this world
such as evil, death, failed love, sexual abuse in those they do not expect
it from and wants to see this explained.
The brain wants to have all these questions answered.

Religions create problems that require solutions and determine necessary conditions
and we see that again in this Nashville Statement.

Religion can be a complex product for the brain and creates uncertainty, which in turn
must strengthen faith. Religion is also physiologically subject to illness, fatigue and excitement, a kind of
meteorological system within which the brain tries to control religious customs, i.e. sins of earthly
life.
It requires endless patience from believers in the disciplined suppression of
feelings and disapproval of things that are actually normal for life.
I know how this can work out and what it can do to a family.

Religion is not simple and the answer to this Nashville Statement is not obvious.
This statement is a challenging subject and has released a lot for many, to
react to it in solidarity.
It is a practical practice as the proponents like to see it.
For the opponents an intellectual exercise, which reminds them of religion.
But this way of religion is a hierarchy and that causes offense between people.
Here you also see that religions are at the center of a never-ending conflict and
you also see that in wars.

In God's eyes we are all equal, but He does not see it. While a preacher's hands are pointing upwards, they could better point and look at their own inner self.
I also sometimes wonder if God is looking down and giving his ground crew inspirations
that these riddles require even more answers.
In the Nashville Statement we clearly see that religions confront equality and inequality, that is actually the source of their power.

Karl Marx's thesis is 'that religion is the instrument for the elite to 'control the masses'.
What I see in it is that religion uses the submission of man to their gods as a mechanism
to model the patterns of subordination and dominance in the whole society.
In that sense Marx was on the right track.

Religion is evolutionarily ingrained in our brains and what does belief do to our brains, how do we
deal with it.
Do we accept everything blindly and live as a uniform sausage, or do we think for ourselves and determine
our own lives. Religion is omnipresent, and its source is our brain, and if God is a creation of our brain through the story of creation, then God's brain is also our brain.

Marianneke Beurskens
Consulted Literature
The Divine Brain
Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire