Religion: A lowest COMMON denominator?

[InfiniteNow]

Man should have more faith in himself than looking for Gods to answer the questions he hasn't found answers for yet.

Let me try to clarify my intent, as I completely agree with your comment about humans above.

 

I am proposing (and perhaps incorrectly or not even the first to do so) that perhaps those traits which have been evolutionarily selected have led to, for many, a genetic predisposition to search for religion and a god concept. Certain traits are selected for, and perhaps religion and the god concept are emmergent properties of that selection.

 

I'm just trying to figure out why, in so many millenia, it exists with the density it does across cultures and continents. It seems less social and more predisposed, but again, I may be wrong. Just trying to pull apart the layers of this onion to better understand it's center.

 

 

Cheers. :hihi:

 

 

We search for meaning in everything. We seek to understand the world. We describe it, and share the description with others. Perhaps religion is just a lowest common denominator for it all. Our evolved tendencies as described above, coupled with our evolved search for meaning, finds overlap in the ideas of others… resulting in shared belief, shared stories, and shared religion (for many).

[Turtle]

Let me try to clarify my intent, as I completely agree with your comment about humans above.

 

I am proposing (and perhaps incorrectly or not even the first to do so) that perhaps those traits which have been evolutionarily selected have led to, for many, a genetic predisposition to search for religion and a god concept. Certain traits are selected for, and perhaps religion and the god concept are emmergent properties of that selection.

 

I'm just trying to figure out why, in so many millenia, it exists with the density it does across cultures and continents. It seems less social and more predisposed, but again, I may be wrong. Just trying to pull apart the layers of this onion to better understand it's center.

 

 

Cheers. :)

The evolutionary/genetic predisposition is to greed & accumulation of power, which constitute human survival strategies. Religion is just a convenient tool for achieving those ends. What better argument than an apparently unassailable one?

If we take Mark Twain at his words, common sense is not common, therfore we have no end of people accepting religion.

The center of the onion is like every other layer, just at a different scale.:hihi: Holy Book Chapter 6 Verse 3 Remember ye therfore that I say unto you, the middle is not the center.

[InfiniteNow]

The evolutionary/genetic predisposition is to greed & accumulation of power, which constitute human survival strategies. Religion is just a convenient tool for achieving those ends.

This makes sense. Would you suggest we try to pull out the predisposition toward greed and accumulation of power (I think on a deeper level, it's a predisposition toward survival and passing on our genes, and that the above two characteristics have tended to increase that likelihood) as the driving force, and not the predisposition toward religion itself which has led to it's commonality?

[InfiniteNow]

I would like to thank Tormod for posting a link to a book review (more below) of "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel Dennett in another thread. Interesting thoughts indeed, and have helped me to add to the palette of my understanding of this colorful concept.

 

I think on a deeper level, it's a predisposition toward survival and passing on our genes, and that the above two characteristics have tended to increase that likelihood... as the driving force, and not the predisposition toward religion itself which has led to it's commonality...

 

 

From the book review:

Primitive folk religions occurred almost spontaneously thanks to the human tendency to attribute beliefs, desires and intentions to, as Dennett puts it, "anything complicated that moves." Certain sets of practices, particularly those that successfully encouraged shared public rituals, tended to survive and spread. These ancestral religions developed into their more sophisticated and elaborate descendants over time, "as people became more and more reflective about both their practices and their reactions." For various reasons, including but not limited to the straightforward benefits they tended to provide their hosts (emotional comfort, social cohesion, encouraging trust between individuals, and so forth), some religious memes outperformed others...

[paigetheoracle]

You might like to consider the anthropological angle. At some stage human beings were hunter-gatherers, living nomadic lives. They would have had scouts (prophets) leaving information for the main body of the tribe to find (See the language of tramps as a modern form of this i.e. markings to indicate good or poor reception) - that is the women and children, old, sick and injured. This would have warned of danger ahead or provisions.

 

Then there's tribal elders to collect and pass on the amassed wisdom of the ages (The oral tradition). Thrown into this melange would also be medicine (witchdoctoring), storytelling and the mystic side (the dark side of nature/ the mystery of existence). Bind all this together and you have the start of education and the first books, including The Bible, which in the form of the old testament. the Jews will tell you is mostly supposed to be history.

 

I think awe is a necessary part of existence, especially as a child and science itself came from this quest to find out the truth. Speaking from my own experience and beliefs, I believe life is a journey (The Tao) and the only thing we can ever do is codify what is known. Fighting over what is true or not is pointless because it is all dogma in the end, that will pass away and is only relative to the time it is found in - sometimes being ephemeral (last years fashion)and others long term, lasting centuries in man's time but not even being a blink in the eye of universes.:)

[maikeru]

We search for meaning in everything. We seek to understand the world. We describe it, and share the description with others. Perhaps religion is just a lowest common denominator for it all. Our evolved tendencies as described above, coupled with our evolved search for meaning, finds overlap in the ideas of others… resulting in shared belief, shared stories, and shared religion (for many).

 

This is my first attempt to articulate these thoughts, and the above is, by no means, a complete description of my approach or concepts on the topic, but it’s a start. I hope it stimulates some thought and discussion.

 

 

Cheers. :eek:

 

Good thoughts. As I mentioned in another thread, I think that religion may be an "outgrowth" of how the mind works.

 

Somehow, I think religion is connected to symbolic activities. To me, there's a strong relationship between the arts, storytelling, and religion. These are all highly symbolic and intensely interpretive, expressive, and meaningful activities. Jung's studies of archetypes fit rather well with Joseph Campbell's idea of the "Hero's Journey," a basic story formula that lies at the heart of most myths and stories. This he also calls the "monomyth." (Let me also note the monomyth idea is not scientifically proven or universally accepted. There are criticisms of it.) The monomyth seems to be a "miniature" of life (the quests, tests, and challenges we face), and a way the mind understands the world and life's experiences, translating these into "psychological truths"--that is, they "click" or "ring" true in a deep and meaningful fashion in the mind. Maybe religion taps into this pathway or process too to explain what is unknown or unseen, and religions evolve stories and beliefs that accord greater identification of and with "psychological truth." It's more powerful to believe that "Jesus lives in me, because I have suffered and suffered with Him" than to believe "Hades took Persephone down to the Underworld, and that's why we have winter" (Greek myth).

 

I'll freely admit this is speculation, based on my readings and thoughts.

[maikeru]

So you're saying that not only physical characteristics are subject to natural selection, but also the ideas within the mind?

 

If the brain is made up of physical characteristics which affect mental characteristics, can't natural selection shape the mind and its creations and possessions (ideas) to some extent? If the architecture is changed, then the ideas that are held, processed, and understood can be influenced. Consider a disorder known as specific language impairment (SLI), which manifests itself as language impairment (odd or nonsensical grammar) in otherwise normal, intelligent people. It seems to be caused by defective genes in a family of important genes (FOX family).

 

Here's a study which discusses SLI:

 

A Genomewide Scan Identifies Two Novel Loci Involved in Specific Language Impairment*

 

If such a basic, universal human trait as language is due to certain genes that direct the brain's development & maintenance, what excludes religion from the same possibility of influence from genetic factors?

[InfiniteNow]

To me, there's a strong relationship between the arts, storytelling, and religion. These are all highly symbolic and intensely interpretive, expressive, and meaningful activities.

Absolutely. :cup:

 

Religion, for me, seems to break into a few key pieces:

• Generational sharing of information (i.e. learning through stories).
  
• Modelling behavior (i.e. lots of others are doing it, maybe I should too).
  
• Grouping of individuals (i.e. community and interpersonal support, as well as assistance during times of need).
  
• Population & mind control (i.e. by those in religio-leadership positions).
  
• Inherent drive to understand the unknown (and further, to understand ourselves and our relation the vastness).

 

 

The world is less lonely when we share ideas with others. The unknown is less scary if someone tells us a story to help understand it.

 

Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.

[maikeru]

Absolutely. :teeth:

 

Religion, for me, seems to break into a few key pieces:

• Generational sharing of information (i.e. learning through stories).
  
• Modelling behavior (i.e. lots of others are doing it, maybe I should too).
  
• Grouping of individuals (i.e. community and interpersonal support, as well as assistance during times of need).
  
• Population & mind control (i.e. by those in religio-leadership positions).
  
• Inherent drive to understand the unknown (and further, to understand ourselves and our relation the vastness).

 

This is a great list of characteristics, and it makes a lot of sense.

 

The world is less lonely when we share ideas with others. The unknown is less scary if someone tells us a story to help understand it.

 

Definitely. To communicate, to fear, to wonder, and to undertand are fundamentals of our psychology. Stories which fulfill these fundamental psychological needs speak truly to us.

[InfiniteNow]

I am proposing (and perhaps incorrectly or not even the first to do so) that perhaps those traits which have been evolutionarily selected have led to, for many, a genetic predisposition to search for religion and a god concept. Certain traits are selected for, and perhaps religion and the god concept are emmergent properties of that selection.

 

I'm just trying to figure out why, in so many millenia, it exists with the density it does across cultures and continents. It seems less social and more predisposed, but again, I may be wrong. Just trying to pull apart the layers of this onion to better understand it's center.

 

We search for meaning in everything. We seek to understand the world. We describe it, and share the description with others. Perhaps religion is just a lowest common denominator for it all. Our evolved tendencies as described above, coupled with our evolved search for meaning, finds overlap in the ideas of others… resulting in shared belief, shared stories, and shared religion (for many).

 

Religion, for me, seems to break into a few key pieces:

• Generational sharing of information (i.e. learning through stories).
  
• Modelling behavior (i.e. lots of others are doing it, maybe I should too).
  
• Grouping of individuals (i.e. community and interpersonal support, as well as assistance during times of need).
  
• Population & mind control (i.e. by those in religio-leadership positions).
  
• Inherent drive to understand the unknown (and further, to understand ourselves and our relation the vastness).

 

The world is less lonely when we share ideas with others. The unknown is less scary if someone tells us a story to help understand it.

 

Unfortunately, there are too many stories out there that are not only wrong, but create internal psychological conflicts and confusion.

 

Cheers. ;)

[clapstyx]

Picking up on Infinitenow's original post.

 

My own sense of the concept of divinity came from the repeated exposure to experiences that were so ridiculously improbable that the simplest way to account for them was to attribute them to the influence of some sort of more universal consciousness that I was in tune with. For instance if you walk outside and say to a friend "there is about to be 3 falling stars" and then there are, and you do that sort of thing several other times you have to make sense of it somehow. I personally have trouble with the "God" concept because I prefer absolute certainty as an ideal but maybe next time I am just going to have to give in and accept it. At the moment I put it down to a divine fluke because that gives me a bit of room to move at a philosophical level. I still wonder though if its actually possible to manifest something of divinely flukey dimensions..which is weird I suppose because logically God would have thought of that before they started happening..that is of course unless they started happening before he came to full consciousness that he was actually God...but then how could you possibly resolve the fact that you were...I know I will try and pull off a divine fluke!! lol

 

"On the 7th of July 2007 a new star will appear in the sky"

 

OK so thats a billion to one chance..and a divine fluke if it happens and that I predicted it in advance. This should resolve the issue because if there is a God he now has a way of proving his existence..so we can get onto more important intellectual problems than spending the next 2000 years wondering about the existence of God and the nature of the ultimate religion.

[ughaibu]

Clapstyx: Have you considered the possibility that the border of time, the present so to speak, might be a fuzzy region? There are some problems defining the present, as it seems to include elements of both the future and the past, if the present is more of a region than a location, these problems might be resolvable. This would also allow for immediately prior examples of apparent precognition.

[InfiniteNow]

Picking up on Infinitenow's original post.

<...>

OK so thats a billion to one chance..and a divine fluke if it happens and that I predicted it in advance.

Even broken clocks are correct twice a day.

 

My original post maybe would have been better suited for social science or biology. I am attempting to understand how such myth can be carried on with such frequent. When viewed retrospectively, religion has slowed us down as a species to a great extent. I want to know why we've let it continue for so long, and offered some postulates on this subject herein.

 

 

:love::doh: