Religion & loneliness
God (and Gadgets) of the Lonely?:
I’ve been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I’ve had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I’ve heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who’ve been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the psychological origins of religion. While the final answer to why people are religious is a long, long way off, I can say with some confidence that the first of the two answers above is almost certainly wrong. People’s religious impulses stem from much more mundane sources than the mysteriousness of the world around us. That’s not to say that religion can’t serve to help explain the otherwise inexplicable, or that this isn’t an important purpose of religion, but it doesn’t seem to be one of the fundamental or original purposes of it. Instead, it seems that religion’s social functions are actually more foundational. This leads to the second answer above — the one that says religion is around to make us feel less lonely — seeming plausible. Most of the research on the social aspects of religion to date, however, has been on its function in communities. A paper in this month’s issue of Psychological Science, however, takes a more direct look at the role of loneliness in religion.
Labels: Religion
Religion could be considered as a software virus that effects those who have contact with the infection.
Also religion may help to ‘center’ the mind to avoid psychological disease such as schizophrenia.Hence it could be a coping mechanism for the lonely.
I’ve pondered whether religion is used by those to put themselves on a pedestal. It seems very arrogant to believe some higher power made you just the way you are because it loved you. I hear a lot of people talk about their destiny and the fact that their god has a plan for them. Compare this to the idea that we are random processes and I can see why people choose religion. Maybe a byproduct of the physiology of the human brain required that the view of oneself needed the idea of self-worth, and religion provides this for people.
The breakdown of religion from science has always been about humbling the human condition. Astronomy removed Earth from the center of the universe and biology tore down the notion that “man” were created in the image of its creator (I remind you, Christianity never said women were made in the image of “God”).
(I remind you, Christianity never said women were made in the image of “God”).
Actually, Genesis does say that humans, both male and female, were created in the image of “‘Elohim”. “‘Elohim” is almost always translated as “God” (even though the word was originally plural, indicating a class of gods led by the chief god ‘El — Yahweh ["LORD"] was a latter-day addition to this pantheon).
“Elohim” is cognate with “Allah”. The first Christians to reach China spoke Aramaic and used another cognate to name God: “Ilahu”.
My theory is that religion is a sort of embodiment of “the laws of society” (Durkheim), specifically insofar as these laws are arbitrary (not wrong, just conventionally rather than rationally chosen, on tricky questions which are rationally undecidable). Religion is especially needed when the laws of society or other forces (e.g. disease or famine) make people’s lives unbearable, or when society is seemingly unfair to people (individuals or large groups).
In this sense religion provides social solidarity, which can be very beneficial in sum, but it also can mask oppression.
The less unexplainable misery there is in a society, the less religion. Most secularists and atheists are people who have not lived their whole lives in misery, or suffering from inescapable wrong.
The answer is simple. Religion gives meaning and purpose to people’s lives. If there is no god, then our lives are meaningless because human existence itself is meaningless. I have heard athiests try to argue against this point, but I have never heard them successfuly argue against it.
Here is an atheist argument about needing meaning and purpose to your life. Who cares about meaning? If you so desperately need a meaning make your own. I thought religion was about not being so proud yet you have to have some meaning for you to be fulfilled.
If you think your life is pointless, then why do you care what others believe? I’ll take it one step further. If your life is pointless and has no meaning, then why do you care what you believe? In other words, why even care about what is true and what is good if there is no point to our existence?
Well, I care what others believe because our president reportedly said that god told him to invade Iraq.
If there is no god, then our lives are meaningless because human existence itself is meaningless.
no. that’s like saying that god is the first cause. it adds no substantive value to the discussion. so when theists say “god gives meaning to life” that adds nothing substantive, though in the theists mind it obviously does. just like saying “we’ve explained the origin of the universe. it is caused by x. how do we know this? well, x is by definition the cause of the origin of the universe. QED.” god gives meaning to the lives of theists because god is the entity which defines meaning. but atheists don’t find definitional arguments very persuasive; just because you anchor the feeling of meaning to a number of syllables around which have a vague idea in terms of its characters doesn’t mean that that others will believe that you are doing anything but engaging in a psychological game. one shouldn’t extrapolate from one’s own psychology to that of others; just because a word that you can’t define gives meaning to you doesn’t mean that is so for others, nor do others even believe that what you believe about that word really has the impact upon you that you think it does. and let’s chill on extrapolating introspective psychology, OK? (this is aimed at everyone) most readers of this weblog are probably atypical so it’s pretty much a retarded exercise and i find it really tiresome. there’s a fair amount of psychological research with large N’s on how people believe and what they believe, no need to air your opinions.
If you think your life is pointless, then why do you care what others believe? I’ll take it one step further. If your life is pointless and has no meaning, then why do you care what you believe? In other words, why even care about what is true and what is good if there is no point to our existence?
people don’t ground their lives through such intellectually masturbatory ontological reflections. that’s an empirical fact. this is like all those evangelical xtians i’ve known who assume that if they didn’t believe in a religion they’d go around murdering people for fun. well, not really, but they’ll never really know that their ethical sense is independent from their belief in jesus christ.
My theory is that religion is a sort of embodiment of “the laws of society” (Durkheim), specifically insofar as these laws are arbitrary (not wrong, just conventionally rather than rationally chosen, on tricky questions which are rationally undecidable).
right, but this sort of study is tunneling down to a lower level of explanation. the basic psychological building blocks have to be there before one can organize on a sociological level. one could use the analogy that there’s a social superstructure around which religious concepts are scaffolded. this reinforces the structure, but it also gives religion an important functional role which perpetuates its existence.
The less unexplainable misery there is in a society, the less religion. Most secularists and atheists are people who have not lived their whole lives in misery, or suffering from inescapable wrong.
i think there’s some social science data to support this contention.
I don’t think that the existential search for meaning motive is important. In Europe people still do the search for meaning thing, but religion is a very weak factor in most countries (except Poland and Ireland). Certain individuals turn to religion to escape the ambient hedonism and cynicism, but most are fine with the H&C.
I don’t think that the existential search for meaning motive is important.
…for most people. of course, there are individuals such as soren kierkegaard. they became psychological exemplars, and because intellectual history is written by and for intellectuals the existential search for meaning gets a lot of attention. one of the problems with discussing religion is that religious professionals, philosophers and those of an analytic bent conflate their own emphases when it comes to religion with those of the typical person. many professional atheists who have read summa theologia go around talking to the typical religionist and getting nowhere because they don’t on a fundamental level comprehend what religion means to most people (hearth, home and community, etc.).
I am inclined to think that it’s not only loneliness specifically but pain in general that leads people to become religious. It is not a coincidence that it has been called “the opiate of the people”. The more miserable the adherents, the more emphasis is placed on ecstatic and mystical experiences (in my experience).
That’s doesn’t account for the entirety of the phenomenon, but I don’t see why we should expect it to. The hydra would not be so hard to kill if it only had one head.
That’s doesn’t account for the entirety of the phenomenon, but I don’t see why we should expect it to.
there are 1,000 “explanations” for religion. right now it is more important to falsify every other person’s pet theory. and since religion encompasses A LOT one assumes there would be many upstream parameters which shape its ubiquity.
A rather contrary case is cheerful, conventional, accepting people who were born into a given religion. As long as it doesn’t cramp their style too much they’ll stay in, because it’s what everyone does.
A rather contrary case is cheerful, conventional, accepting people who were born into a given religion. As long as it doesn’t cramp their style too much they’ll stay in, because it’s what everyone does.
right, and that’s actually modal. most people are born into a religious tradition. the USA is peculiar because a large subculture of radical protestants maintain the stance that individuals have to choose of their own free will once they are in a position to make a knowledgeable choice (adult baptism, etc.). but if you know evangelical christians you also know that it isn’t as if the parents of children who aren’t “christian” yet (i.e., they haven’t accepted jesus christ as their personal lord & savior) don’t strongly the load the die in terms of their offsprings’ religious affiliation.
I agree that most people do not think about the existential meaning motive for their religion in any serious or conscious way, but I think that humans need meaning for their lives intuitively and unconsciously. I think that this is a basic psychological need in humans and that religion serves this purpose. This is why I think my meaning and purpose argument relates to the loneliness argument. Being connected with something helps give their lives meaning whether they realize it or not.
A rather contrary case is cheerful, conventional, accepting people who were born into a given religion. Well, yes. But finding a reliable way to distinguish between genuinely happy people and people who are very good at presenting a facade of happiness is difficult.
Even normal people like to indulge themselves in things that they don’t have to think about, things that they can just feel instead of analyzing, and most especially things that make them feel good.
but I think that humans need meaning for their lives intuitively and unconsciously. I think that this is a basic psychological need in humans and that religion serves this purpose. This is why I think my meaning and purpose argument relates to the loneliness argument.
i’m confused. if people need things intuitively and unconsciously why do they address with them explicit verbal affirmations? anyway, “meaning for their lives” is too vague to discuss in any detail. how would you test this claim? “Being connected with something helps give their lives meaning whether they realize it or not” is also totally vague. most people are “connected” with a shit-load of things in their life (family, friends, civil society, hobbies, etc.). that doesn’t explain why belief in supernatural agents is a human universal. there’s also a good deal of evidence that the supernatural agents people conceptualize are closer to the bounded and non-omnipotent deity of the mormons than to the ultimate ground of being which other christians notionally believe in.
also, the “god gives meaning to our lives” is the kind of rationale which is really only appropriate to a post-industrial society. in most cultures people are busy trying to survive in the malthusian trap; i really don’t think they give a shit about “meaning” when there’s a non-trivial chance that they’ll die of starvation due to famine. religion as a form of psychotherapy is a luxury. functional (i.e., cultural adaptation) or psychological (i.e., extrapolations from agency detection) are plausible because you can transfer them to the circumstances of the typical peasant 2,000 years ago. it seems likely that angst or concern about purpose in your life is really not going to be much of an issue when you’re hungry a lot of the time and trying to claw your way out of the pit of marginal existence.
I have known some very happy conventional Christians. I just can’t see any reason to doubt their happiness. They are by and large not very inquisitive or curious or analytic or self-critical, and they aren’t even even necessarily very strenuous Christians, but I’m convinced that they’re happy.
They are by and large not very inquisitive or curious or analytic or self-critical
i.e., they’re normal people.
Religious practice meets a wide variety of basic human needs. I’m only familiar with the Judaeo-Christian traditions so I’ll focus there.
Religious practice brings communities together–for service, for meals, for funerals, weddings, etc.
Religious practice formalizes and grants authority to important human institutions–especially marriage, and family life.
Religious practice is dramatic. Even the most puritanical fundamentalist sects might have a fire and brimstone preacher, or a snake handler. Think of the splenid vestments of a Bishop in Medieval times. In fact, it can reasonably be argued that theater in the west began in church.
Religious practice may or may not explain the mysterious, but it provides us with the opportunity to revel in mystery–to contemplate miracles, to see the Virgin in a piece of toast. It all may be hooey, but I think we need or at least enjoy experiencing awe.
Certainly, religion provides an opportunity to explore great intellectual questions, but I think we are religious for more prosaic reasons. In college we used to go to a particular Bible study because several hot chicks attended.
There’s some evidence that religious people are actually happier than non-religious people, overall. I’ve heard researchers explain this as having something to do with having a meaning for your life, but I suspect it really just has to do with the fact that if you accept the dominant social and cultural narratives, you’re just gonna be a happier person all else being equal.
What happens if such skepticism and suspicion is applied to the search for objective knowledge. What does “knowing” things really do for a person?
Razib,
I have a suspicion that, if there had been sociologists of religion and evolutionary psychologists in pre-Conquest Mexico, they would have been churning out treatises explaining why ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism were inevitable in any sufficiently advanced human society as a necessary means to serve fundamental human needs.
The social psych folks have established that humans have a strong tendency towards ?hindsight bias,? towards re-interpreting accidental, contingent events that have already occurred as somehow being absolutely necessary or inevitable. (For discussion and references, see Tetlock?s ?Unmaking the West.?)
There is a simple, obvious, and parsimonious historical explanation for the current prevalence of religion across the world, as well as for its recent dramatic decline in most of the ?advanced? nations.
Prior to Darwin, the argument from design made the ?God hypothesis? more than plausible: it?s hard to see how else one could explain the existence of complex organisms if one did not know about natural selection.
And, if there is good reason to believe in a ?Big Dude in the Sky? who created everything in the universe, it makes perfectly good sense to integrate respect for the Big Guy into society, everyday life, etc. So, you end up with religion deeply embedded in human society. Of course, just as Starbucks is multi-functional ? it serves as a place to hang out, a place of employment, etc., as well as a place to get a cup of coffee ? once religion is widespread, it too will be used to serve various other purposes (most notably, the priests and the rulers of the state are likely to find that they can be of mutual service to each other).
When it turned out, thanks to Darwin, that the ?God hypothesis? was not necessary after all, one would expect to see religion slowly fading ? ?slowly? because, after all, any long-established institution interpenetrates society in so many different ways that removing all of its tendrils will be an extended affair.
One would expect that first scientists, then other intellectuals, and finally people in general would gradually learn that the ?God hypothesis? is not needed and would slowly disengage from religion.
This is not an ex post facto prediction ? many people in the nineteenth century (including many religious believers, who feared these events) predicted just this.
I know this explanation is ?simplistic,? ?unicausal? and all that. This is a good thing. The theory that gravity holds the earth in orbit around the sun, holds the moon in orbit around the earth, and makes apples fall is also simplistic and unicausal. That?s one of the most important reasons why it is such an excellent scientific theory.
Let me emphasize that this explanation does not deny for a minute that religion has been used to serve multiple human needs ? companionship and social interaction, for example. But if our society had a tradition of, every Sunday morning, going to hear tapes of Sagan, Dawkins, Hawking, Watson, Feynman, etc. and then ?fellowshipping? afterwards, that too would serve the purposes of companionship and social interaction. And we could comfort ourselves by realizing that the misfortunes that befall us are not due to demons nor an irate God but are merely the accidental results of non-malevolent mechanical forces.
Humans will always seek social interaction and support, comfort, etc. That this happens to often be tied in our own society to religion is surely an historical contingency.
Incidentally, as an anarchist, I notice that people behave the same way in discussions of the state as they do in discussions of religion ? i.e., they assume that a historically contingent institution is an inevitable consequence of human nature. The state was only invented a few thousand years ago, and even a millennium ago, most habitable areas of the earth were not under the jurisdiction of a state. Anthropologists are aware that the vast majority of human societies that have existed were stateless.
(I am using ?state? in the standard usage: a distinct organization that claims and exercises a ?legitimate? monopoly in controlling the use of force within a given territory. Of course, if one defines ?state? so as to include informal dispute resolution mechanism, then all societies would have ?states? and even anarchists would advocate ?states.? But this would result in the peculiar usage that defines your friendship with your neighbor as part of the ?state?!)
When I point out to people that the state is just a bunch of guys who carry out actions in broad daylight (large-scale theft, mass murder, etc.) that most criminals feel constrained to carry out under cover of darkness, they get unhappy. And they start explaining that the state is inevitable given the facts of human nature, which is especially strange given the historical and anthropological evidence that the state is not inevitable at all.
Just yesterday, I had an argument with a family member about whether it was inevitable for a state to have one single figure, such as the President who stood at the apex of power ? he insisted that this had to be, even though the US itself was not structured this way under the Articles of Confederation (and the replacement of the Articles by the Constitution was very much a contingent matter ? Massachusetts nearly failed to ratify, which would have killed it, Washington seriously considered not participating in the Convention, etc.).
?Hindsight bias? rules. It is extremely difficult for humans to see that the current structure of their own society was not inevitable, was not historically universal, and will not govern human beings through the eternal future.
All the best,
Dave
These two articles may be of interest:
Religion, Hypnosis, and Music: An Evolutionary Perspective
And especially this one:
Why Is Religiosity So Hard To Cure?
Here are a couple quotes from the second article:
“While the particular details of religion are transmitted verbally by culture – our substitute for instinct – I submit that the religiosity of Homo sapiens can be considered to some extent instinctual. That there could be such a thing as a religious instinct becomes plausible, I think, when we consider the implications of the fact that we evolved as a social species, not a solitary species. We evolved as social animals – herd animals. We evolved as wolves, not foxes.
In the evolution of big-brained social species there must arise a conflict between the desire for autonomy – self gratification – and the group need for integration and subservience. In many social species, autonomy and separation from the group produces anxiety. A lost sheep is not a happy animal, and many Christians separated from their congregations, priests, and pastors experience profound Angst. (This is why excommunication and shunning can be so devastating to certain people.) It appears to be one of the functions of religion that it allows people to ?escape from freedom,? as the psychiatrist Erich Fromm once put it. When we do what our priests tell us to do, we avoid the anxiety that comes from having to make our own decisions – anxiety that arises from painful knowledge of our own inadequacies and proneness to make mistakes. Religion serves as a vehicle for discharging anxiety by connecting isolated individuals to the group and making them feel as though somehow the power of the entire group flows through them. In doing so, I shall argue, religion employs the neuronal circuitry evolved in prehuman social animals for non-verbal communication within the group.”
And
“Analogous to hypnosis, religion distorts perceptions, rendering them resistant to correction. Often, strong emotions must be evoked before the spell can be broken: it is like using ice-water to awaken a hypnotized person. The neural circuitry of religion is intimately intertwined with that which distinguishes us as herd animals, as a social species. Surgical attempts to remove the harmful, religious components of this circuitry are quite naturally resisted – as though they were attempts to deprive people of their group identity. Loss of religion produces more autonomy, but this again can increase anxiety levels. Illusions that reduce anxiety will not be given up easily. Not withstanding all I have said here today, fear remains the soil in which the roots of religion feed. Unless better means are made available for reducing fear, religion will continue to feed upon our neuroplasm.”
TG,
I am sorely tempted to offer a satiric re-write of ?Why Is Religiosity So Hard To Cure?? in the form of ?Why Is the Belief that Kurt Cobain Was a Great Musician So hard to Cure??
E.g., I?d rewrite:
>If, as now seems indisputable, there are parts of the brain that mediate religious experiences and are the cause of our delusions of divine communion, we must ask why they exist.
as
> If, as now seems indisputable, there are parts of the brain that mediate experiences of Kurt Cobain?s music and are the cause of our delusions that Kurt Cobain was a great musician, we must ask why they exist.
Of course, any human behavior ? whether going to Starbucks, believing in religion, enjoying Kurt Cobain?s music, or believing in phlogiston ? must somehow be consistent with human nature.
But the idea that religion is a special case that requires unique forms of explanation is simply anti-scientific. The kind of ?just so? stories that this enterprise evokes are a classic example of the ?cargo-cult? science that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name.
People have believed in religion for a long time because they thought it was true. Before Darwin and before the scientific revolution, the belief in God, etc. was more than plausible. It is now less than plausible.
But social change takes time.
We know that, even though Copernicus had published the truth about the earth moving around the sun in 1543, more than a half-century later intelligent, educated men refused to believe it (as Galileo found to his sorrow). How many centuries was it before the average peasant in Copernicus?s own country, Poland, took for granted the fact that Copernicus had uncovered?
Back in the early ’70s, my kid brother happened to mention to our grandmother that material objects were all made of tiny little atoms. She was shocked ? she?d never heard of the idea, and was sure he was teasing her. He never managed to convince her. Yet, she was a high-school graduate, and the atomic theory had been developed almost exactly a century before her birth.
The ?modern synthesis? in evolutionary biology, a fully satisfactory explication of Darwinism, dates to shortly before I was born.
Of course, it has not yet fully displaced the God hypothesis!
Everything takes time.
All of this silliness trying to gin up some complicated explanation for why religion has not yet died ignores the simple, straightforward explanation: time.
It just takes a long time for outdated, unnecessary, disproven ideas to die, especially if those ideas have, understandably, been deeply intertwined with many aspects of the social structure.
Dave
PhysicistDave,
>Of course, any human behavior ? whether going to Starbucks, believing in religion, enjoying Kurt Cobain?s music, or believing in phlogiston ? must somehow be consistent with human nature.
>But the idea that religion is a special case that requires unique forms of explanation is simply anti-scientific. The kind of ?just so? stories that this enterprise evokes are a classic example of the ?cargo-cult? science that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name.
There is a big difference between religion and these other things: Religion, as far as we can tell, has been around for as long as we have been human. Kurt Cobain, thankfully, has not.
You might like to read the entire article. The author, Frank Zindler, is a smart, impressive guy and shouldn’t be dismissed so blithely.
I’ve always thought that the presence of religion needed no explanation. That what really needs explaining is the existence of people who claim not to have religion.
TG,
I did read the article. I found it silly.
You wrote:
>Religion, as far as we can tell, has been around for as long as we have been human.
I think you are mistaken: we know of evidence for religion for five millennia. That?s as far back as history goes. The ?evidence? for religion before that point is rather speculative. I know that prehistorians constantly claim to have valid conclusions based on very slender evidence, but I am old enough to have seen those ?conclusions? change, more as a result of academic fashion than any new evidence.
I do not deny that there are a whole slew of different reasons why different people are religious, just as there are a whole slew of reasons why different people go to Starbucks, why various people watch the SuperBowl, etc. Humans are complex beings with a wide variety of motives and purposes.
But the only thing that really makes religion distinct and mysterious compared to other human activities is that it involves beliefs which now strike most intelligent, well-educated people as clearly false.
And that one facet of mystery involving religion is, as I said above, quite easily explained.
Religion strikes intelligent, well-educated people today as clearly false because intelligent, well-educated people today know stuff ? notably about evolution and natural selection ? that most of our ancestors did not know. Given their ignorance, their belief in God was not mysterious. The argument from design was rational and made sense if you did not know modern science.
And the fact that many Americans still believe in religion is quite easily explained by the time factor ? many have not yet learned about natural selection, and it takes a while for social institutions to change and adjust to new realities.
I?ve read a lot of the stuff produced by the current academic industry that aims to probe the evolutionary origins of religion, and I realize I am insulting the workers in the field by saying that they are wasting their time.
Too bad. They are obviously wasting their time. Religion is simply an understandable vestige of pre-scientific ignorance. That?s why Europe is now largely de-Christianized and why Christianity is slowly declining in the US.
I know that acknowledging this obvious fact would mean that a lot of academics would have to search out new lines of research.
But some things really are as simple as they seem. Sometimes, it takes a Ph.D. to obfuscate the simple solution to a problem (and I have a Ph.D. ? I know whereof I speak).
Dave
TG:
Dave gave you a summation somewhat incomplete. We’re speculating here. Dave’s speculation is superior to one you’d advanced–it took more proper account of what we know of history. Now, I’ll provide one that subsumes his in one even more comprehensive.
The “men” of which I speak are modern men–in circumscribed respects: ability to communicate in words or language; able to discern “cause and effect.” I don’t assume restriction of these to such as we’d call “modern” men–merely that, at some time, those whom we’d recognize as “men” had man-like abilities in such respects. It is likely (and perfectly reasonable to suppose) that whatever similar predecessor forms might have existed prior to the emergence of men, to the extent that they were physically similar, disappearance was a “done deal” with appearance of the improved variety competing for similar-niche survival.
In that dawn, man was already social. But to the complex of causes leading men to live in groups instead of as solitary denizens, the “modern” appreciation of “cause and effect”–what we call “reason“–now enabled them to think clearly and substantively (whether correctly or not is less important) about the nature of their relationships with others of their kind and to adopt behaviors intended to achieve certain specific results seen either as specifically individual advantages or (what is pretty much the same thing) “best-to-be-hoped-for, in view of the similar desires and expectations of others.” To put it in other words, for as long as man has been a thinking, social animal, he has been a “moral” animal. Morals are behaviors based on thinking about requirements of social life.
Maturation of the human is one consistent with a relatively lengthy period of moral development. Many lessons necessary to survival in society (and for survival of society itself) are slow to “sink in,” require repetition, illustration, reinforcement through reward and punishment, and, moreover, are dependent on being learned in progression both of content and complexity. In these processes, through which all humans go, parents, other adults, and sometimes peers participate. The end result is never perfect but some variation on acceptable. An unavoidable complicating factor in the process is an ability of a normal human to deceive others in many respects even though those others are very proficient at detecting such behavior and avoiding or offsetting most important or costly effects.
Among humans, some emerge, even before maturation, as “leaders”–those who are effective in influencing the behavior or even the thought of others. In other animals, some are “dominant” due to some indwelling combination of size, strength, and aggressiveness; characteristics of human leaders are diffuse and subtle: superiority in some respect is a requisite but, by itself, is insufficient. Human leaders possess political strength: an ability to combine with others in society (including potential rivals)in such fashion as to combine advantages for themselves not obviously to the disadvantage of the other society members.
Though no one can know just when religion or curiosity about origin, or belief in the supernatural arose, the necessary elements are present in the very beginning: an area of opportunity for the exercise of a very powerful form of leadership based on nothing more than an ability to deceive: to construct a lie or story impossible of falsification and to persist consistently. “There is a God who made everything and He talked to me! He told me everything He wanted me to tell you to do. And the most important thing you’ve got to do is to believe in Him (which means believing that what I’m telling you is the truth). And, of course, even if I can’t tell whether you’re lying when you tell me you believe (even if you chip in to support me), He’ll know it and can make you sorry” (even if we haven’t yet invented heaven, hell, etc.).
Nothing to it that a reasonably proficient “con artist” couldn’t conceive (and plenty have). The trick is to make it seem respectable (as opposed to looney) and, as much as possible, to integrate it with the normal, recurring problems of socialization by allying its overshadowing power with that of society. No longer must we tell the young recalcitrant “Your friends won’t like you.” or “The grown-ups won’t like you.” but can promise that, not only will God not like him but will see him every time he does the forbidden thing, even if no one else does and no matter how many people believe him when he said he never did it.
My own guess is that it’s been around quite a long time before history began to be recorded.
It’s just not that complicated a “con” and doesn’t even require much in the way of preparation, props, or sleight-of-hand. Of course, as time wore on, it’d have to develop much more to satisfy the faithful–cosmology, ritual, etc. The strongest part of it is the same as always: as long as you keep a-lyin’, nobody can ever prove it and better yet–there’s plenty who’ll believe you and pay you well for the privelege!
Here’s an observation about “atheists and loneliness.”
I notice that, in most discussions of the meaning of religion, atheists tend to focus on theology in their answers to questions like, “What do religious people find in rellgion?” Atheists tend to examine religious and look for theological contradictions.
But what I have observed (as a non-Orthodox Jew, mired somewhere in the middle between cultural and secular Jews and Orthodox Jews, with friends in all camps) is that what religious people really find in religion is ritual.
I often observe very religious Orthodox Jews who are extremely critical of aspects of the theology, yet follow the ritual to the T.
I also see a lot of the Orthodox who embrace the theology, yet quietly ignore a lot of the ritual. As the Israei political scientist Schlomo Avineri said, “The schul I don’t go to is Orthodox.”
What I think that religion does for religious people is, it says exactly what you should do in a ritual sense. There is always some ritual you could be following even more rigorously than you are. People seem to find comfort in ritual, in knowing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Howard Metzenberg
An earlier poster observed that God brings neaning and purpose to our lives.
In that vein, the connection between God, and justice, has been one that could use some examination. It is a handy way for us to ‘balance the books’; it seems to pervade all religions; and I find myself hoping there is a God when people, mostly politicians and red light runners, get away with things here.
There has been much speculation and learned writing about the paradox of our times. In an era which should be the flower of the Enlightenment, where reason reigns supreme, there have surged a variety of ?fundamentalist? religions, characterized by a belief in one or another of ?one, true? divinities, the inerrancy of whatever writing a particular divinity may be asserted to have inspired/revealed, and, most importantly (despite its obvious illogic), the conviction that belief in any other divinity, or no divinity at all, is not only wrong, but somehow evil in intent and/or effect. How could this be?
The answer may lie in a modern application of Gresham?s Law, which we will recall is the observation that, where two forms of currency are required to be honored as legal tender, the ?bad? or debased currency will inevitably drive the ?good? currency (that whose market value more nearly approximates its commodity value) out of circulation.
The universal need of humans to search for an explanation of their origin and destination serves as the ?legal tender? requirement in this analogy. (The need itself can be explained by a Darwinian wiring of the human brain). Any such explanation which cannot be disproved qualifies for consideration ? i.e., is ?legal tender?. The vast majority of humans cannot and do not (yet) achieve the level of intellectual training to examine the issue dispassionately. The ?religion(s)? of the more educated will tend to depart from their dogmatic attachment to a literal supernatural, and from the rituals associated with those dogmas. This departure, while causing less of a cognitive dissonance in the believer, tends to make these religions less emotionally satisfying. Those left behind, the less educated, will adhere to the simpler explanations of the fundamentalists. Hence the gradual transfer of the center of gravity of religion to the more ?fundamentalist? versions.
For examples, one can consult the recent history of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches ? both Churches have suffered a huge loss in adherents among the more educated. (Europe, as the Pope has often lamented, is a religious wasteland, and the Anglican Church is self-destructing, with its fundamentalist dioceses ?adopting? those parishes which reject modern tolerance ? i.e., which accept instead the good/evil dichotomy insisted upon by the fundamentalists). Here in the United States, the fastest growing religions are the most fundamentalist in outlook ? the Evangelicals. (This, of course, should not be seen as a criticism of the good people in those religions, nor a denigration of their good works. It is not the skeptics who see evil in those who disagree. Our analysis does not focus on values, but on logic).
The conclusion is that the hoped-for result of the Enlightenment ? the spread of what used to be known as Freethinking ? will be delayed, but remains inevitable as the world?s level of education rises. And we will, in the meantime, have to remain on guard against the intolerance and violence associated with the exclusivist tendencies of the fundamentalists and their good/evil world view.