Zarathustra wrote:Mong, are you saying that religion evolved naturally as an essential process for replicating genes? I don't get the comparison.
Religion is a collection of memes. Humans invent memes. Fucking involves genes. Humans don't invent genes*. What's there to titter about?
*(Well, not until recently, through the skillful invention of the right kinds of memes.)
Z, I would say that the ubiquity, similarity, and historical force of religious ideas suggest that they possess an autonomous instinctive force that is comparable to -- though perhaps even more insidiously sublimated within the modern psyche than -- the sexual urge. You can view their emergence as an aspect of psychic evolution if you like but that is not requisite. It is this drive, this instinct that utilizes reason much in the same way that a man uses his cock to spread his seed. Reason is the object rather than the subject. What built the house: the hammer, or the carpenter's will?
It is religious ideas that are later rationalized, not the other way around. I'm ignoring of course the activities of charlatans and the like.
The catholic church is the largest pro-pedophillia group in the world, and every member of it is guilty of supporting the rape of children, the ensuing protection of the rapists, and the continuing suffering of the victims.
I think it's obvious that we have an innate, genetic drive to learn and use language. That's part of our brains' hardware. However, we still invent individual languages.
Similarly, there is an area of the brain that produces "religious feelings" when stimulated. But we still invent religions. Atheists who have this area of the brain stimulated electronically don't convert to theism, they simply interpret these feelings in scientific terms, e.g. the beauty and oneness of the universe.
I don't deny that there is something in us that drives us to seek beauty, order, understanding, connectedness, etc. That drive had a survival advantage because it caused us to start thinking of our world in higher-order mechanisms and to develop the first explanations of reality. It made us think our lives and our world were important, that they had meaning. However, the choice to explore this drive in a religious direction is entirely optional, and yes, a human invention. We started down this road because we didn't yet have any criteria between good and bad explanations, and it's MUCH easier to create bad ones. However, this feeling could (and is) explored in ways that have nothing to do with religion.
When you get down to it, I think it's simply the "awakening" that any self-conscious being would have when it realizes this is real, and then starts asking, "What is this?" It's the ability to form conjectures, which is the ability to "see" possibility (i.e. beyond the actual). Once you awaken to reality, and no longer take it for granted, you begin to realize that it could have been otherwise than it is now, which leads to the question, "Why is it this way instead of that way?" The development of an awareness of alternate possibilities leads to the development of everything else: religion, science, agriculture, society, etc. The ways in which the Possible become the Actual comprise an invisible matrix of hypothetical causes: gods, demons, forces, fields, etc. We invent all these connectors and causes because we don't experience the Possible, only the Actual. But there is a sense in which the "set of possible variations" is real, if not currently instantiated, and our ability to intuit these "ghostly" possibilities leads us beyond ourselves, beyond our current actualized state.
When we get it right, when we figure out real mechanisms that turn the Possible into the Actual, it allows us to seize control of this process, to choose which possibilities become instantiated in reality. I can't imagine anything more "magical" than that! But we usually think of it the other way around, attributing "magic" or "miracles" to a violation of the real mechanisms between possible ==> actual, coming up with the nonsensical concept of an "actualized impossibility."
Which is another way of pointing out their status as fictions/inventions.
