Agreed. But since your solutions tend to have to do with removing things - pathways, neurons - baby and bathwater issues come to mind. Pretty much all facets of brain capability have negative example, including even rationality.
Right, but you specifically drew parallels between sex and religion having a focus on an entity that is not real. but the focus of much sexual fantasy is on real people. If the two activities are really parallel, then perhaps religious fantasy is about something real. If the one is focused on not present real entities - the sexual fantasies - and the other is focuses on entities that do not exist at all - then the two processes are not so parallel. I Think you expressed the way you originally did to strengthen the seeming parallel. I don’t Think there is much of a parallel. I also wonder what it says about your judgments of religion - which are very very strong in the negative - and what, it would seem, must be your less negative but still quite negative judtments of sex.
If it really makes sense to see them as equivalent as you argue here and elsewhere, are you thinking it would be good in the future to also neurologically minimize sexual attraction, say?
Memory, reasoning - things like philosophical thinking - dreaming, planning, even much of what we consider perception is mental and neural activities in the brain. Once we are dealing with that large category, we cannot draw any conclusions. It seems like you want to draw conclusions via comparing sexual fantasy and religious fantasy or being religious. You defend the analogy or identifitication by saying they are both mental activities in the brain. Well, so are activities you obviously Think of as positive, so I do not see what we are Learning from the analogy.
Anger and fear and joy, are in fact different emotions, they don’t just seem to be, and they do not follow the exact same pathways and have quite different patterns in the body and are easy to physiologically distinguish. Scientists can tell, using MRIs, which emotions you are experiencing BECAUSE the different emotions have different, recognizable neural patterns. Of course thing like the limbic system and the orbitofrontal cortex will both be involved - given arousal and valence are involved in all emtions to varying degrees, but the neural patterns different in quality, not just degree and if you google mri differentiation of emotions, you can see that even a lay person can see the different patterns, and probably could quickly learn to say what emotion a person was experiencing by looking at the images.
I really don’t Think this conflating of things helps your cause or the interests of understanding.
We can focus on the problems of emotion without trying to argue they are the same as sex. This adds nothing to a moral or practical critique of religion. It does nothing to prescribe ways of reducing the problems of religion, which as far as I can tell you hope goes away, but probably do not feel the same way about sex. Unless you are trying to demonize sex, it also comes of odd to conflate it with religion.