some interesting reading
Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise?
Consoledreader recommended The Origins of Religious Disbelief to a very naive thinker on my last post. I clicked on the link and read the first page. It looked interesting, but my attention span doesn’t go much beyond 300 words these days. Anyway, I do like the idea of the article and thought that other readers might find it particularly interesting. I notice among my atheist blogging buddies that there is a tendency to pretend that we are the default ‘normal’ state of belief for humans, when the entire history of the human race tells us otherwise. Theism is a natural consequence of the organisation of our fearful superstitions. Doesn’t make it anything other than an evolutionary trait, but it’s tedious to pretend humans are generally born without this tendency. I suspect this article will clear things up nicely and hope to get round to reading it in its entirety when the fog has lifted.
Your conflating, again, belief with its true origin, fear. Fear is the natural state; anxiety. The colourful cultural strata that get piled on top of this bedrock condition in an attempt to smother it, or at least make it less threatening, is essentially meaningless. You need only look to societies to see the truth in this. A society that is wealthy and has little fear is less religious, while the poorer and less secure are frightfully more religious. You’re looking at the effect, not the cause, and getting all muddled in the process, my Pictland friend.
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D’oh! You’re, not your
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If I was nice, I’d correct that. 😉
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You can always blame it on the hormones 😉
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I’m not. Because living in a state of fear is natural so far in the history of humans.
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Precisely, and the less fearful we are the less religious we become. By “less” i also mean how much credence we might put into something. The cultural trappings of religion can be quite pervasive (schools, hospitals etc), but just yesterday i was reminded of a survey taken in Ireland where 10% (TEN PERCENT) of respondents who identified as being Catholic didn’t believe in a god.
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Just because we’re in a time and place of increasing atheism, doesn’t mean it’s natural. It’s just cultural. It’s natural for children to believe in Santa Claus until they work out he’s not real, and that’s not always when someone tells them, but when the child culture around them convinces them. Our default stance is fear – life is precarious and still very much not understood. That makes superstition and theism (if it’s around) natural belief systems to humans. Atheism only comes with a variable combination of security and information.
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Believing in Santa Claus is the result of parental coercion and persuasion…. which is to say, lying. Belief is an effect, the result of some performed and reinforced cultural magic that was inspired by the root: fear. True, this dance seems inevitable for us (most of us), but we should try and get the order of events correct. I know you’re not trying to say there’s any truth in any of these colourful expressions, but if we look at it as primarily a response to fear then we can clear our heads and get down to the business of finding clever ways to alleviate that fear without conjuring ever-greater expressions of my-dad-is-better-than-your-dad voodoo.
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I know we essentially agree, but I just don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that atheism is a default stance. We need input to get there. If almost every society conjures a god or two as a result of superstitious beliefs become more organised along with co-operative societies, then we must concede that theism is natural. Both theism and, as a result, atheism are leaned through our natural social interactions.
My problem with taking this route is that ignores the entire history of the human race, which then in some ways gives strength to the theist/religious/superstitious argument. When we concede that theism is natural in a state of fear or ignorance, we can build a more convincing case that the development of atheism is the removal of fear and ignorance (the natural state of humans). It’s real progression in our species, not some base state.
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No, we don’t need input. We don’t need anything to get to a-theism. If you don’t do anything to a human, if you don’t program it with anything, it will remain a-theist, just as it was when it was born. We need input, in the form of deprogramming, to get back to a-theism once it’s written over by theism.
I’ll certainly grant you that theism (in its broadest possible magical sense) is inevitable, but this doesn’t make it the natural state of a human being at rest. It just makes it more likely than not as the culturally acceptable way we’ve devised to best head-butt the awkward facts of fear and paranoia. If you’re going to try and say theism is natural, then you should qualify the word to mean “amnesty”…. a longing for immunity from nature and all its unpredictable ghastliness, which is what it really all boils down to.
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“If you don’t do anything to a human, if you don’t program it with anything, it will remain a-theist” Disagree, it will invent something approximating a powerful, invisible force controlling everything ie a god.
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You’re being stubborn for stubbornness’s sake, aren’t you?
Now go on and admit it, you liked my line about ‘amnesty,’ didn’t you? 🙂
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I just read blah blah blah. I considered googling to see what you’re on about but I’m really tired today. You know I’m right though, YOU just don’t want to admit it. It’s an interesting defensive point for atheists that I think often loses them the argument. Obviously in isolation no-one would dream up the same religion or god, but everyone (or society) would come to a god-like conclusion in the absence of any other information. It’s just, em, natural. Like it’s natural for European swallows to head down to Africa, in the absence of anyone giving them directions to the Caribbean.
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Sounds like English, but I’m having trouble understanding a word you’re saying…
Hey, did you ever teach your Argie students IELTS?
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No, mainly Cambridge courses – First Certificate, Advanced, Proficiency.
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Damn. I’ve agreed to help a guy prepare for the exam and need material. Google is my friend, Google is my friend, Google is my friend…
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Yeah, there’s loads of stuff online for the all the English courses. Just have a look at a test exam to get the idea.
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British Council pages are usually good, there’s some tests here too: http://takeielts.britishcouncil.org/prepare-test/how-prepare-ielts-test
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You’re a shiny, precious, rare gem 🙂
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This is really interesting and will finally change your mind!
http://www.science20.com/writer_on_the_edge/blog/scientists_discover_that_atheists_might_not_exist_and_thats_not_a_joke-139982
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Seen that before. It doesn’t change the equation at all. Prescribing agency to natural events is a consequence of mind trying to get a leg-up on nature. Internal monologues are just slow thought processes. The root remains the same, and unchanged: fear and paranoia. Everything else is a coping mechanism… some more ingenious and creative than others.
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“It’s natural for children to believe in Santa Claus until they work out he’s not real” – Not really, there are cultures in the world where children have never heard of Santa Claus, they have no “innate tendency” to invent him. their parents seem to however, they call him “god,” and it might be a cultural tendency to believe in him, until they work out that he’s not real.
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There is an innate tendency to invent god-like beings and it’s natural to believe in them.
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If you were to tell a child in my village about Santa, you will be met with blank stares and as arch says above, they don’t invent one.
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Oh I know, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant it to illustrate our basic gullibility. It’s natural for us to invent all sorts of supernatural stories and it’s natural for us to believe them.
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Well yes, once a story is invented, there will be no shortage of believers
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“living in a state of fear is natural so far in the history of humans”
That was especially true if your health and safety depended on deciding whether or not there was a predator hiding in the underbrush. Assigning agency thus became a natural tendency as well, even where there was none, resulting in the first Pascal’s Wager, eons before Pascal – how much better to believe a predator in the thicket, and be mistaken, than to believe there not to be any, and be wrong? So fear and assigning agency became natural survival traits – taught, not necessarily genetic in origin.
There are far fewer predators hiding in the underbrush today. As Neuro has pointed out repeatedly, religion rates are highest where people feel the least secure.
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Not sure if you agree or disagree with me here. Atheism is not a default stance in humans. It only comes with education.
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“Not sure if you agree or disagree with me here. Atheism is not a default stance in humans. It only comes with education.”
Sorry, I can’t. It is my firm belief that if a child were raised on love and educated as to the science of how the world works, and no concept of religion was ever mentioned, it would never occur to that child to consider a god.
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Sorry you can’t? Then you echo what I’m saying by agreeing they need to be educated with science? Scratching my head.
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“Sorry you can’t? Then you echo what I’m saying by agreeing they need to be educated with science? Scratching my head.”
Scratch no more, fair-maid-with-a-bun-in-the-oven – I read it wrong, I thought you said, “Atheism IS a default stance in humans.”
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OK – let’s start all over again. Ignore everything I said in my last comment, I had to wake up at 4 am, my time, and drive kids to places all over hell by 5:15, and I wasn’t thinking straight, but I have since had my coffee transfusion.
I disagree with what you said: “Atheism is not a default stance” – I believe it is. I further disagree that “It only comes with education.”
What you seem to be scratching your head about, is your first statement, with which I disagreed, which included the term, “only, whereas your next merely said, “they need to be educated with science”
ALL children need to be educated with science, and while I agree that the answers that come naturally from a good education, removes the need to assign agency where there is none, I still can’t accept that without the mention of a god or gods, a child would be naturally inclined to invent one.
This time, I’m sure of what I said, sorry for the confusion, and yes, I’ll take more coffee, if you please.
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It looks like I left out a quotation mark to the right of “only,” but I’m sure you understand what I’ve said. THIS time.
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Really? And yet in every society without access to the science that can provide physical answers to our physical world, humans have created gods or something like them. I really feel it’s a counter-productive argument for atheists to pursue. Atheism is not natural in the absence of these scientific answers, and these scientific explanations have taken some time to become available to us.
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I fear you’re failing to take into account the value of word-of-mouth advertising, not only from culture to culture, but from father to son.
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“It is fear that first brought gods into the world.”
~~ Petronius ~~
“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”
— George Santayana —
“If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”
— Baron D’Holbach —
(cited in Jonathan Miller. (2004). “A Brief History of Disbelief“)
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Lovely!
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If by “evolutionary trait,” you mean something passed down by word of mouth through countless generations, then I might agree, though I suspect it wouldn’t be easy to establish though the fossil record.
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No, I mean as in predisposition to imagine and believe in supernatural entities that invariably evolve into looking like something we would describe as gods.
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“No, I mean as in predisposition to imagine and believe in supernatural entities that invariably evolve into looking like something we would describe as gods.”
I suppose Superman and the Flash might qualify.
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Our ability to reason improves. The Enlightenment was a new way of seeing the world. Deism moved to atheism; scientific method and inductive reasoning developed; people revolted against the control of kings.
Seengs I’m feeling brave, I will say we are now in a new Enlightenment, where mysticism of the many helps us be in the world better. Chuck the trawl net, and run…
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I don’t know what that means. Where’s the mysticism?
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All over my facebook feed. For example,
”
Positive change most often evolves slowly, like a watershed brought into being by raindrops falling one drop at a time, until the volume of water eventually gathers into a crescendo and forms rivers that flow on to create the ocean. It is the Bodhisattva’s challenge and opportunity, as an enlightened leader and heroic spiritual activist, to contribute to the ocean of enlightenment one thought, one word, one deed, one prayer, one smile at a time, day by day, moment by moment.”
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Oooh, I don’t come across that type of thing much. Ever. Do you think it’s increasing in popularity? All sounds very 1970s.
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You can’t be asking The Universe for it. I come across it all the time, and we are not all middle aged! Try asking the Universe…
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Are you having a shift in belief system or was that always part of your Quakerism?
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It is a non-Quaker way of putting into words ideas which are not central to my Quakerism.
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Well, as you may imagine, it’s all mumbo jumbo to me! 🙂
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Belief and unbelief have the same root: human rationality.
The religious impulse is not reducible to fear. The human mind wants to knit together its different experiences into an overall narrative, a comprehensive story that makes sense of it all; this is the beginning of the religious vision. But the same rational impulse will also find flaws in the narrative, and reject it if it proves unsatisfactory: unbelief.
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The human mind wants to find an explanation for everything. We want answers because we’re scared (fear).
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Well, that is annoyingly flippant.
Fear is the driving force of human inquiry? Really? The ancient cosmologists, the pre-socratics, the prophets, the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the medieval scholastics, Copernicus and Newton, all a bunch of scardy-cats because they wanted general explanations of reality? Awe, wonder, curiosity and a pure desire to know had nothing to do with it?
See, over here on the Dark Side we have a higher opinion of human endeavors.
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“Well, that is annoyingly flippant.” – Projecting again, DP?
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LOL. Thanks, I needed to laugh this morning.
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What’s wrong with fear? I know it doesn’t have a good reputation but it is the driving force behind many of our actions and the grander motivations you imagine. Fear of failure (the drive for success!), fear of the unknown (curiosity!), fear of the mundane (awe, wonder!). I think you’re afraid of fear.
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“I think you’re afraid of fear.” – that’s why he carries a big gun and advocates killing animals – it’s an effort to conquer that fear that you so correctly diagnosed.
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.22 rifle is not a big gun.
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Dpmonahan, why do you think belief is rooted in rationality?
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My comment above would suggest that, wouldn’t it.
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Sorry, I read your comment wrong. Will elaborate shortly.
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Part of human rationality is the creation of explanatory narratives. Even a scientific theory is a sort of narrative about the natural world. A religious narrative attempts to bring large portions of human experience into a story, a myth. Ancient mythologies are an attempt to systematize all the explanatory myths into an overall cosmology.
But the attempt to make myths into coherent narratives always fails, (again, because people are rational, and can see the contradictions and pointless complexities). Historically, there are three reactions to the irrationality of myth: mysticism, that myths are vehicles for encountering a deeper reality (Hinduism); rationalism, that myths are allegories but not literally true (ancient Greeks); and prophetic monotheism, don’t believe the myths, the real one true god is speaking to you now (Judaism, and maybe Zoroasterism.)
But you see, the original impulse to have an overall story that explains human experience and the world is a rational one. The impulse to criticize the story is also rational, and the different historical results of the criticism are also rational.
Saying the impulse to understand the meaning of life is irrational, that is rooted in fear or lust for power, strikes me as being anti-human. What else are we supposed to do with our minds?
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Well you’re a Christian and you to a make-believe god, DP and then rush to the woods and shoot squirrels in your free time.
If this is what you consider rational behavior then you are already well and truly fucked.
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genuflect to … ( among other things)
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“Saying the impulse to understand the meaning of life is irrational, that is rooted in fear or lust for power, strikes me as being anti-human.”
You seem to be saying, DP, that pursuit of religion involves the impulse to understand the meaning of life, which may will be true, which is NOT to say that all who pursue the meaning of life, need be religious. Further, that pursuit is CERTAINLY not the original cause of religious impulse, but fear of the unknown quite likely was. For some, it may well have evolved into an effort to understand the meaning of life, but there have been many, from ancients to Steven Hawking, who have chosen to pursue the meaning of life with out the benefit – or the hindrance – of religion.
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Search for meaning is “certainly” not the source of the religious impulse? Then why bother with the question of meaning at all? If someone claims to have idea about the meaning of life and the universe, why think he had some secret motive of fear? Why not assume that he really was just thinking about the meaning of life?
It is possible to philosophize like Plato about the meaning of it all. Plato did that with a sort of religious awe, by the way.
I would not invoke Hawking, who is a physicist. Physics asks HOW things came to be the way they are, not WHY they are.
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Thanks, I enjoyed reading your response and agree with most of what you are saying. The only thing I would criticize, and I hope this is not semantic, is whether the impulse to create these stories should be categorized as rational or irrational. There is a third category: non-rational which means without respect to rationality. It seems there are many aspects of human experience that are non-rational and a religious impulse (i.e., desire for meaning or ultimate explanation) might better fit here. Like when I feel hungry, I don’t think that’s rational or irrational, it’s just a mental state that provokes me to seek food. Similarly, the religious impulse to me at least is non-rational, although my beliefs are constrained by rationality. There is a difference in being constrained by rationality from being entirely constructed by rationality. An example is I find belief in a Creator to be highly intuitive by observing nature and considering consciousness. So, I don’t believe because of arguments. On the other hand, my belief is constrained by rationality so that I cannot think that God is anything finite and relatively powerless as the creatures we observe on earth.
Also, many philosophers would similarly disagree with you by drawing a strong distinction between the rational mind and the emotional mind. They would place religion in the latter category because the desire to find meaning or have an ultimate explanation seems to them emotionally motivated. I think this kind of distinction is too simplistic, but I thought I should mention it anyhow.
Do you think I’m way off base or misunderstanding something you said?
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We are probably in broad agreement.
The semantic issue is probably around the word “rational”. Faith is not rational in the sense that it is the conclusion of a syllogism.
On the other hand, the search for an overall, internally coherent meaning for the cosmos and human existence is rational in the sense that it pertains to human reason, animals don’t bother. It is rational in the sense that you are looking for structural principals of human existence that render life intelligible. I can’t think of anything more rational.
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Is there really anything much to say?
The report describes it well enough.
In the stripped-down no nonsense version one can simply say:
Ignorance=religion
Enlightenment=no religion.
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Oh I don’t know, I didn’t read beyond page 1. Brandon liked it.
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I’ve been thinking about where to jump in on this conversation. There is seemingly a million places to jump in.
As far as human nature, I don’t think the “default position” exists. If anything, the natural state of belief for children is one of unknowing just like a child born in Europe will not know that China exists until they learn about it. There is no reason to reject an idea that has not entered the mind for consideration.
Arch seems to agree up to this point but says that children are not likely to invent gods. Maybe statistically this is true, but certainly not the norm of cultures throughout world history. Some members of society will invent religion and others will accept it. Future generations will inherit this culture. They will accept religion because of the widespread religious impulse. But, don’t let that bother you, Arch! Why? Because, the religious impulse is not universal and religious skepticism is also probably naturally in societies and supported by psychology.
That’s worth stewing on. The religious impulse may be either absent in some people (corresponding to mindblind atheists) or suppressed by reason and science (corresponding to analytic atheists). Here is me admitting something I’ve long not wanted to admit. Reason and science are at odds with religious belief, but I cannot tell if this is real or an artifact. Regardless, the truth is scientists in the US mostly identify with atheism and the general population mostly identifies with religious belief. Here’s what should blow your mind: what impulses make someone interested in reason and science? Maybe the counterpart to the religious impulse is something like curiosity about nature, natural skepticism, or other things.
These psychological states can prime us to either belief or disbelief.
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I agree with a lot of what you say here. But the natural state for children is not simply unknowing, it’s imagination, it’s dreaming up patterns and stories to explain what we don’t understand. Think of all the crazy things you believed as a child – some of them fed from your upbringing and some of them, like with every child, just some random nonsense notion they dreamed up. In the absence of any cultural input a child isn’t a blank slate, a child will come up with their own ideas, and the absence of any scientific education, these answers will be as bonkers as any of the millions of superstitions and religions we know about. The strongest of these get refined and developed and become the big religions we know today.
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Yeah, imagination must play a huge role in this process! And, I wish I knew more about ideas of social evolution of religion which you seem to be suggesting here. It’s an interesting idea.
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God belief and religion have to be inculcated. Period. You are a product of this inculcation that has been established within society for millennia.
And if you( or anyone else) believe you are in communication with a god on any level then you are psychotic.
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“Here is me admitting something I’ve long not wanted to admit.” – sounds as though you just may have moved a step closer to mental health.
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I was the someone who recommended the article to Native.
The biggest problem with the tabula rasa view as you suggested (in your response to Arch) is there is no such thing as a child who exists outside of culture. Some of the discussion about fear being the cause of religion is oversimplifying matters. Fear, yes, but predictability and orderliness as well. Certainly lack of predictability might lead to anxiety and fear, but I suspect our desire for predictability is an emotional need that is larger than just a matter of fear. We may have a natural desire for predictability and order for its own sake, not just because lacking it might cause us fear, and this desire for predictability and order can also lead to a desire for religion, which can provide those things.
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I’ve credited you. The desire for predictability certainly leads to the majority of us following the religion of our culture, or another that seems more comforting. But the creation of gods, the act of imagining superstitious forces must come primarily from fear and the need to explain and understand the world around us. The argument with John above is about whether theism is natural – I would say it is. Humans make up religions under any circumstances, usually resulting in something resembling a god, this is natural. The stage we’re at now where we have natural, physical explanations for our existence and most of the unknowns about our world, is something we’ve evolved into, not our natural state. Therefore atheism, in the absence of this knowledge, isn’t generally natural.
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Thanks!
Fear may cause some religious belief, but I doubt it is the primary force. Or at least, I have strong doubts that it is the only one at play. After all, the study offered four different reasons for disbelief and consequently four different reasons for beliefs, not just one. The need to explain and understand the world around us may arise from fear (i.e. what are those magic bolts from the sky that blasted the life out of Ted), but it also could come from simple curiosity.
Your knowledge as cultural evolution model is interesting. But I wonder did we evolve culturally or is it more a matter of building knowledge up over long periods of time and developing new solutions to new problems that arise? Are these the same thing?
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I’ve wondered the same. I’ve always wondered what was the order of religious innovations in the conception of, say, the God of Abraham. Everything is almost there already in the story: Creator, interested in human moral behavior, responds to prayer, values our trust, divine election, prophecy, etc. These are many innovations and it’s conceivable that they all appeared in one lifetime (maybe a historical Abraham), but it seems more likely that they did not appear that quickly and were drawn together somehow. These individual items may even be or pagan origin even if pagans did not join them together as did Abraham or Moses or someone.
And, perhaps more importantly, what determines whether a religious idea survives cultural selection or is forgotten? Biological evolution is determined by survival and reproduction, but what about religious ideas?
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Well, I suspect we don’t possess the “original” versions of Abraham, but rather have carefully edited stories that took the form they did through accretion over long periods of time and selection.
Time and situations change, which usually leads to new religious ideas forming or re-interpretation of old ones, to deal with new challenges and broader cultural changes.
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