Korbus wonders: "Is religion part of human nature? Why do people need religion? Do we have any quality that makes us believe? Is it a natural state for man to believe in the supernatural?"
As you must have guessed, there is no answer to these kinds of questions, if only because there is no agreed upon definition either for religion and certainly not for human nature. Seemingly, it is difficult to find a common denominator for tribal religions that worship living plants or rocks and for monotheistic religions that have a complex theology at the center of which is an abstract God who, in the words of the Rambam, "has no essence other than his being". Yet. There is no human culture that has not developed some religion. Anthropologist Scott Etern concludes that in every human society the following 4 conditions are met:
1. Widespread belief in supernatural beings (gods, demons, spirits...).
2. Expensive public expressions (sacrifice of material resources, labor and time) of commitment to those supernatural entities
3. The supernatural beings are always attributed control over the foundational events in the lives of the believers (birth, health, success, death)
4. Worship: coordinated rituals of groups of believers rhythmic repetition of agreed upon texts, melodies or movements.
A huge abundance of explanations for the religious phenomenon appears in the writings of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. The debate, by its nature, mainly attracts atheists because for a believer, religion is not part of human nature but the opposite: human nature was created according to a divine plan revealed in religion. It is agreed that we do not have "religious genes", but it is impossible to dismiss such a universal phenomenon as coincidence: something directs us to religious belief and something preserves religions despite the heavy price they exact from their believers. The wealth of psychological and social phenomena associated with religions makes it difficult even to compare the explanations offered by scientists for the phenomenon. Those who see religion first and foremost as a belief system explain it as a byproduct of the mechanisms by which we interpret the world for ourselves. Those who see community religion explain religion as a way to create social cohesion, and there are those for whom religion is mainly a story we tell ourselves about the world and asks why they prefer to remember and tell others the religious story.
A solar eclipse that decided a battle in ancient Greece
In 430 BC, the Athenian fleet was about to sail to battle against Sparta and the journey was almost stopped in the home port due to panic caused by a solar eclipse among the sailors. The historian Plutarch tells how Pericles, the leader of Athens, succeeded in resuming the voyage "When Pericles saw that the captain was panic-stricken and at a loss for advice, he removed his mantle from him and held it in front of the man's eyes so that he would not see anything and asked if he thought this was a great disaster or a sign of disaster. When the captain answered in the negative, he said to him, "Well, what's wrong with you because you're afraid? After all, the whole difference is that the thing that caused the darkness is greater than the glory."
The seemingly strange story: why would a fleeting and harmless astronomical event cause panic? And why is it necessary for the captain to understand the cause of the eclipse in order to sail? The evolutionary path that shaped the human brain created in us mechanisms for processing information and understanding what is happening in our environment. Such an essential mechanism is the linking of phenomena to each other in cause-effect relationships. An occurrence that does not have a "logical" explanation, i.e. one in which we can identify causality (like the solar eclipse in the eyes of the Spaniards) will be perceived as dangerous.
Sensitivity to environmental noises
According to the researchers of human evolution, the source of the desire for order and causality lies in the heritage we share with many animals. An environmental hum like a rustling in the grass can allude to a venomous snake coiling there or just the swaying of stems from a breeze. Since the price of a mistake that will get us hurt is much higher than the opposite mistake that will only cause excessive caution, the result of evolution is that we are programmed to look for ambushes. Religion is an unparalleled reliable provider of causal explanations for phenomena. For the believer there is no ambiguity, every external event: rain or drought, health or illness has a clear cause and effect and therefore the world is mysterious and less threatening. Another and unique tendency of the human consciousness is the ability to "read minds".
This way of thinking that allows us to imagine ourselves as we are seen by others and project from our inner world onto our friends is essential to our success in the social environment we have created around us. An important part of our understanding of other human beings is that we always attribute to them desires, thoughts, feelings and intentions. The religious belief that sees everything that happens as the result of the action of forces with awareness and will seems to fit like a glove to the way we look at the world anyway. All that is required is the extension of the principle of will and intention from human society to the physical environment. God, meaning a being with great powers and knowledge of our actions is a natural continuation of factors that exist in consciousness.
Already at the age of infancy we learn to attribute the most significant actions of the people around us to intangible and almost abstract factors such as thoughts, feelings and intentions. This ability to create abstract entities and act upon them in thought is an important evolutionary development of which religion is a byproduct. The philosopher Descartes, for whom "I think means I exist" is the only primary certainty, saw our concept of an infinite, unlimited and perfect being as evidence for the existence of God because there is no object in us or in the environment that can create such a concept in the mind. What Descartes does not take into account is that the first people we see around us in infancy are all-powerful and all-knowing to us.
By the age of 3-4 children are sure that what they know is also known to every other person and especially to father and mother and indeed, father and mother figures are very common images of gods in many religions. It seems that in the process of psychological development we do not need to create a concept of an all-powerful and all-knowing being, but on the contrary: exclude from this category those who turn out to be capable of making mistakes and being deceived. In an experiment in which 5-month-old toddlers were shown a video showing the movement of an object, the observers were able to notice a situation in which the object's movement contradicted the principle of continuity of movement: a video in which the object "skipped" over part of the track received a more careful examination. On the other hand, the same break in the continuity of the movement in the video in which Adam was shown did not seem strange to the viewers. It seems that the distinction between externally activated objects and human beings (whose movement is voluntary) is embedded in us so that the baby does not attribute physical limitations to the human body even when it is supposed to behave as an object for everything.
According to those who see religion as the "Louis phenomenon" of the development of the human brain, the religious ideas are "sticky", that is, easy to remember and internalize due to their adaptation to the way we were trained to absorb and process information. Heresy, on the other hand, requires thinking against the intuitions and mechanisms that dictate our worldview.
But there are those for whom religion is not just a product of human consciousness but a mechanism that improves our chances of survival as individuals or as groups just like our ability to walk on two feet or create tools. We will deal with these theories next week.
Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? sent to ysorek@gmail.com
More of the topic in Hayadan:
4 תגובות
You don't know much about religions and their mystical origins...
What are the initials Ea?
God willing?
It should be remembered that religion gives a person the ability to control (even if control is limited) phenomena that are not under his control as it is written in Leviticus XNUMX: "If you walk in my commandments and keep my commandments and do them, I will judge your rains in their season, and the earth will yield its crops, and the trees of the field will give their fruit, and I will get you the threshing floor of the harvest, and the harvest will bring the Sow and you ate your bread to the full and you sat safely in your land..." - and if not - oh my.. to this is added humanization - anthropomorphism in Leaz (which is a common phenomenon when two dots and a curved line - an emoji form a face) of nature: God can be benevolent, benevolent or angry - And it's better to please him.
Yes, yes, yes, only the main thing is missing here,
First of all, tribal religions are indeed "temples of plants, animals or rocks"
But contrary to what is implied, they are not attributed with "supernatural" powers
But qualities that benefit the "believers", if it is a given tree
to use all its parts, an animal whose importance the "believers" understand
For the environment and life in nature or even a rock that serves as a hideout,...
"Modern" religions and the belief in a higher power that individuals of virtue are able to communicate with him and sometimes even influence his actions were developed and "given"
By G. who recognized the need to control groups of ignoramuses in order to develop
A series of do's and don'ts in groups that have turned from family groups into large and dense crowds,
If the parallel development of science and social systems
that are controlled and governed by systems of laws, religion has become unnecessary,
But since the ignorance and the hatred of the government have not disappeared, they continue
When it is not enough to control masses of ignorant people mainly by perpetuating ignorance,