Is religion harmful to society?

[REASON]

Yes, as you say, we are a "pack animal." We evolved through millions of years as a small group primate. Even into Homo Sapiens, we evolved operated as small hunting/gathering groups. At no time until we developed religions did we exist in larger groups. The social theory consensus you speak of does not at all take this into account. This explanation clarifies the reason we have always had religions. They have served a function, but this line of LOGIC is unfriendly to both our religious and secular ideologies and, so, is avoided.

 

If you have any evidence or data that does not support this, please let me know. "I would be glad to assist in any questions you might have . . ."

 

My understanding is that the primary reason larger civilizations evolved from small groups of early hunter/gatherers was the development of Agriculture.

 

Wiki/Agriculture

 

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants (i.e. crops) creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and stratified societies.....

 

History

Since its development roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture has expanded vastly in geographical coverage and yields. Throughout this expansion, new technologies and new crops were integrated. Agricultural practices such as irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizers, and pesticides were developed long ago, but have made great strides in the past century. The history of agriculture has played a major role in human history, as agricultural progress has been a crucial factor in worldwide socio-economic change. Wealth-concentration and militaristic specializations rarely seen in hunter-gatherer cultures are commonplace in societies which practice agriculture. So, too, are arts such as epic literature and monumental architecture, as well as codified legal systems. When farmers became capable of producing food beyond the needs of their own families, others in their society were freed to devote themselves to projects other than food acquisition. Historians and anthropologists have long argued that the development of agriculture made civilization possible.

[charles brough]

It is rather obvious that not ALL religions are dangerous to society.

But often enough, a particular religion is in fact very dangerous to society.

And there seems to be a pattern.

Religions that are "liberal" (in the old dictionary meaning) and tolerant are very RARELY of any danger to society.

Sometimes (not always) they even appear to be good for society.

 

Religions that are "fundementalist" are frequently dangerous to society -- and the degree of danger often goes hand-in-hand with the extent of their intolerance, and the extent to which they hold that their religious laws have precedence over civil law and cultural norms.

 

The 'oddball' Baptist Church down the street from me openly promotes unregulated gun ownership. The only member of that congregation that I know is an unrepentant wife-beater, and a member of a small 'militia' with an undisclosed purpose. He was the only person to express contempt over my Obama bumper sticker, and I suspect that he had something to do with the disappearance of Obama signs in my neighborhood last year.

 

Do I consider them a 'danger' to society? You bet I do. Only the presence of a strong legal infra-structure (the long arm of the law) keeps them benign. And they're *CHRISTIANS*, for heaven's sake!

 

And yet, two blocks in the other direction is a similar church living and preaching out of the very same Bible, and they are pretty harmless and make good neighbors.

 

But religion, in the general sense, provides a means for the socially dysfunctional, the angry, the resentful, the hateful and the vindicative to band together, and religion provides them protection and "cover", and it gives them justification for their desire to reach out and smite the heathen.

 

In my own research and work, I only deal with the mainstream religions, that is those that form societies with definite territories. The includes, for example, Islam, India/Napal, the Christian-based West and the Marxist countries. Each of these have survived as they have because they had an ability to unify people enough that they can function together relatively efficiently. These systems compete with each other to survive and undergo natural selection in a way somewhat resembling the way biological organisms evolve.

 

All the other "religions" are devised, adapt, struggle with each other all in order to possibly achieve mainstream status as well but only with swarm-theory-like intent.

 

As an atheist, I have not found a single religion on Earth that is fit for these times. They are all old and obsolete. They are riddled with error and faults, in the case of East Asian Marxism. We can do better.

[charles brough]

My understanding is that the primary reason larger civilizations evolved from small groups of early hunter/gatherers was the development of Agriculture.

 

Sort of. . . But agriculture and animal husbandry goes back about 10,000 years while civilization (at least as I define it in my glossary) is only about 5,000 years old and began in Ancient Sumer.

 

Our simian ancestors lived in small groups and we lived in small hunting/gathering groups until roughly 40,000 years ago. Then, "something happened" and we moved out of simple hunting/gathering into larger groups or whole combines of h/g groups and perfected tool and weapon making. That "something happened" was, I propose, a new and more effective type of technology-based ideology. We see clues to it in the cave paintings. It was surely based upon hunting and the weapons the technology.

[charles brough]

Charles,

it is simplistically and trivially EASY to talk about this issue without some specific definition of "society".

The default definition, IMHO, would be something like, "the sum of the cultural, legal, economic and social infra-structures of any given region" -or- "a group of people whose everyday lives are governed by a similar set of civil, legal, economic, cultural and moral expectations and behaviors".

 

Many "societies" do NOT depend on religion to any great extent. ;)

They can be found all over Europe and Asia.

Many of the societies encountered by Europeans in the 16th Century on their voyages of discovery, were NOT based upon religion to any great extent. Until, of course, the missionaries had a 'go' at them. ;)

 

I agree with your last statement. Militant "believers" generally DO reject our secular systems (which YOU haven't defined! :) I wonder how people can talk about this issue without knowing what "secular system" is.) ;) :( :(

 

However, their rejection of the secular system is Aided, Abetted, Protected, and Justified ...

... BY THEIR RELIGION.

 

Without their religion, they would just be bandits and gangs.

Yes, you have one of the common ways the social theory consensus defines "society." It is also used to represent any "group" of more than one person. There are dozens of ways it is used, but in my work, I define it in my glossary as "the maximum size group of people bonded together by a common world-view and way-of-thinking ("religion"). This gives "religion" a FUNCTIONAL use and, so, is not popular.

 

The similar legal, economic, cultural, unity you speak of grew up alike in a society because it was begun with and evolved from a particular religion---as the Western nations are similar in ways that are not so similar to those of India or Islam.

 

Christianity is old now and perhaps the majority of Europeans do not go to church. They still live by the Christian heritage of our society and its civilization.

 

There are no people who are not bonded by a religion in that way. Even our secular beliefs only supplement our now obsolete Christian beliefs. All societies are ultimately based upon a common ideology, and that holds true of East Asian Marxism as well. It is also a "religion" and it is also a society---a defective one, but not the only defective one!

[charles brough]

Can you please support this statement, Charles?

 

I will try to answer that.

 

1. The data supports the concept that we lived in hunting-gathering groups only until about 40,000 years ago. Since then, large groups have grown larger and the hunting/gathering way of life has declined to where there are only a few such places they still exist in.

 

2. There is no tribe, group, society, nation, etc. that does not have a religion.

 

3. It is logical to believe that, therefore, we have had religions since we learned to speak languages.

 

4. It is equally logical to conclude that religion evolved to where it could bind people into the larger groups beginning in about 40,000 years ago.

 

Now, let me ask you if you have any data that conflicts with that. I don't think so because my logical conclusion is the only deviation from the consensus interpreting of all the data.

[CraigD]

I wonder how people can talk about this issue without knowing what "society" is.

A good general definition of “a society” is, I think, “a collection of individuals of the same species that cooperate to do something”. Among species capable of it, individuals in a society usually believe themselves part of it, having a sense of “cultural identity”. As there can be as many societies as there are things that can be done cooperatively, individuals may be members of many societies of greatly different sizes.

 

When qualified with another word (eg: “my school's Tolkien Society”, a club of people who enjoy reading and discussing the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien), the reference is usually to a smaller collection. Unqualified (eg: as in “is religion harmful to society”), the reference is usually assumed to refer to the largest possible collection, the entire human species, arguably excluding individuals “outside of society” who explicitly reject cooperation, such as hermits and extreme kinds of criminals.

My understanding is that the primary reason larger civilizations evolved from small groups of early hunter/gatherers was the development of Agriculture.

By the definition I offer above, “hunter/gatherer societies”, which were comprised of individuals cooperating to do something, were true societies, limited in size by the surface area of territory required to support their nutritional and other needs. “Agricultural societies”, then “industrial society” allowed for larger societies, and (noting the change in pluralization between the last two quoted phrases) the incidental emergence of long-distance communication and travel allowed all local collections capable of doing so to combine into a single “society”. Many SF writers describe a “galactic society” comprised of the people of many planets, suggesting that the definition’s conventional “of the same species” requirement is not innate, but a consequence of H.Sapiens being the only species on Earth able to cooperate with and be cooperated with by H.Sapiens.

it seems to me that religion cannot be "harmful" to society since it is the very foundation of it and since it could not exist without the religion!

Despite its present lack of support in this thread, I believe Charles’s claim of a link between religion and human society is not without merit.

1. The ability of humans to cooperate appears to be greatly enhanced by our unusually strong (compared to other animals) ability to use language and symbols
   
2. A cognitive feature that appears to be key to this ability is the idea of self, what cognitive theorist and people in related disciplines call a self-model
   
3. A key feature of self-models is the idea of persistence of the self – that “I” am the same person today that I was a minute, hour, day, or years before
   
4. An apparent consequence of the idea of persistence of the self is that humans have difficulty with the concept of the end of the self – death – and tend to imagine explanations in which the end of the self doesn’t exist
   
5. Faced with nearly undeniable evidence that every physical embodiment of the self does end in physical death, explanations in which the end of the self doesn’t exist necessarily require the invention of a non-physical self (ie: an “immortal soul”)
   
6. Belief in a non-physical self is, IMHO, the root of all significant religious thought and religions (excluding “strange” religions with few adherents and little influence)
   

Thus, it’s reasonable to conclude that almost as soon as we humans were able to talk, we talked about souls, spirit realms, eternity, etc – in short, we talked religion.

 

Paleoanthropology appears to support this conclusion, as language, inferred by an increase in elaborateness of artifacts, hunting, and environment-modifying practices, appears to have appeared at about the same time as elaborate burial practices, which are believed to have been evidence of the belief that physical death is not the end of a “self”.

 

The conclusion I reach from all this is that, rather than being a detrimental and unnecessary aberration among language and symbol-using beings (of which humans are the only unarguable example), religion is an unavoidable consequence of our language and symbol use. The simple rejection of religion to prevent social ills arising from it is, I think, as ineffective as the teaching of sexual abstinence to prevent unwanted pregnancy and the spreading of STDs, because humans are driven to engage in both religious thought and sexual behavior on levels beyond our conscious awareness.

 

This is not to say that the explanations arising from religious thought are realistic, or even morally useful, or that it’s impossible for many or even most people to be atheists. It is to say, I think, that nearly every human will always, on some cognitive level, have a tendency to believe that she or he is immortal, despite all evidence to the contrary, a belief that makes her or him susceptible to accepting religions.

 

Rather than striving to eliminate religion, I think we can better serve society by striving to educate people in ideas that address our deep-rooted drive to believe ourselves immortal, without encouraging us to do bad things.

[InfiniteNow]

Do non-human primates exist in societies?

 

If yes, then religion has zero to do with society, and (as I previously stated) is simply an emergent phenomenon resulting from other traits and characteristics which reinforce the aforementioned societal grouping tendencies.

 

I'd go so far as to suggest that FAR more animals (besides just humans and non-human primates) exist in societies (and are easily described as lacking religion), but YMMV.

[freeztar]

Do non-human primates exist in societies?

 

If yes, then religion has zero to do with society, and (as I previously stated) is simply an emergent phenomenon resulting from other traits and characteristics which reinforce the aforementioned societal grouping tendencies.

 

I'd go so far as to suggest that FAR more animals (besides just humans and non-human primates) exist in societies (and are easily described as lacking religion), but YMMV.

 

That's a good point. And yes, all sorts of animals live in what we would call societies, presumably free of religion. :)

 

Off the top of my head, meerkats and baboons have what would be considered by most people to be social interactions typical of a 'society'.

[charles brough]

A good general definition of “a society” is, I think, “a collection of individuals of the same species that cooperate to do something”. Among species capable of it, individuals in a society usually believe themselves part of it, having a sense of “cultural identity”. As there can be as many societies as there are things that can be done cooperatively, individuals may be members of many societies of greatly different sizes.

 

When qualified with another word (eg: “my school's Tolkien Society”, a club of people who enjoy reading and discussing the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien), the reference is usually to a smaller collection. Unqualified (eg: as in “is religion harmful to society”), the reference is usually assumed to refer to the largest possible collection, the entire human species, arguably excluding individuals “outside of society” who explicitly reject cooperation, such as hermits and extreme kinds of criminals. By the definition I offer above, “hunter/gatherer societies”, which were comprised of individuals cooperating to do something, were true societies, limited in size by the surface area of territory required to support their nutritional and other needs. “Agricultural societies”, then “industrial society” allowed for larger societies, and (noting the change in pluralization between the last two quoted phrases) the incidental emergence of long-distance communication and travel allowed all local collections capable of doing so to combine into a single “society”. Many SF writers describe a “galactic society” comprised of the people of many planets, suggesting that the definition’s conventional “of the same species” requirement is not innate, but a consequence of H.Sapiens being the only species on Earth able to cooperate with and be cooperated with by H.Sapiens. Despite its present lack of support in this thread, I believe Charles’s claim of a link between religion and human society is not without merit.

1. The ability of humans to cooperate appears to be greatly enhanced by our unusually strong (compared to other animals) ability to use language and symbols
   
2. A cognitive feature that appears to be key to this ability is the idea of self, what cognitive theorist and people in related disciplines call a self-model
   
3. A key feature of self-models is the idea of persistence of the self – that “I” am the same person today that I was a minute, hour, day, or years before
   
4. An apparent consequence of the idea of persistence of the self is that humans have difficulty with the concept of the end of the self – death – and tend to imagine explanations in which the end of the self doesn’t exist
   
5. Faced with nearly undeniable evidence that every physical embodiment of the self does end in physical death, explanations in which the end of the self doesn’t exist necessarily require the invention of a non-physical self (ie: an “immortal soul”)
   
6. Belief in a non-physical self is, IMHO, the root of all significant religious thought and religions (excluding “strange” religions with few adherents and little influence)
   

Thus, it’s reasonable to conclude that almost as soon as we humans were able to talk, we talked about souls, spirit realms, eternity, etc – in short, we talked religion.

 

Paleoanthropology appears to support this conclusion, as language, inferred by an increase in elaborateness of artifacts, hunting, and environment-modifying practices, appears to have appeared at about the same time as elaborate burial practices, which are believed to have been evidence of the belief that physical death is not the end of a “self”.

 

The conclusion I reach from all this is that, rather than being a detrimental and unnecessary aberration among language and symbol-using beings (of which humans are the only unarguable example), religion is an unavoidable consequence of our language and symbol use. The simple rejection of religion to prevent social ills arising from it is, I think, as ineffective as the teaching of sexual abstinence to prevent unwanted pregnancy and the spreading of STDs, because humans are driven to engage in both religious thought and sexual behavior on levels beyond our conscious awareness.

 

This is not to say that the explanations arising from religious thought are realistic, or even morally useful, or that it’s impossible for many or even most people to be atheists. It is to say, I think, that nearly every human will always, on some cognitive level, have a tendency to believe that she or he is immortal, despite all evidence to the contrary, a belief that makes her or him susceptible to accepting religions.

 

Rather than striving to eliminate religion, I think we can better serve society by striving to educate people in ideas that address our deep-rooted drive to believe ourselves immortal, without encouraging us to do bad things.

 

Your attaching religion to fear of death is, I say, much to limiting. All the theories of science and all our secular ideals and beliefs are ideology and they tend to unite people, enabling them to exist in huge numbers on huge territories just like any other mammal except in much larger space and numbers. Islam, Christian-WEst, Hindu, Marxist, are all mainstream, territorial pseudo-organisms. They have territories just like any other primate and they will defend their territory! This is their function, so since Marxism and now defunct Nazism, etc. are/were serving such a function, it is hardly necessary to point out that neither a belief in "God(s)" or "life after death" is at all relevant.

 

What they all have that has enabled them to come into existence is that they all provide answers to 4 questions that every group has to have answers to in order to function:

 

"what is our origin, our goal(s), our means (moral system) and what stands in our way?"

[charles brough]

That's a good point. And yes, all sorts of animals live in what we would call societies, presumably free of religion. :)

 

Off the top of my head, meerkats and baboons have what would be considered by most people to be social interactions typical of a 'society'.

 

Not so . . Most mammals live in groups that they are evolutionally fitted to or evolved to, We evolved to live in hunting/gathering size groups of perhaps 35 up to almost 200 in size and when it is exceeded, tension builds until the group breaks up. We still have a few hunting gathering groups being studied in remote areas of the earth.

 

The only way we have managed to live in such large groups is by using language-speech to devise common world-view and ways-of-thinking systems. In old times, we had to make them up with myths and gods. Now, that is no longer needed, but we still need to have common beliefs. Otherwise, our societies break down---as have all the older civilizations in history---and we evidence growing social problems, as we are now. . .

[CraigD]

Do non-human primates exist in societies?

Defining “society” as I did in post #346 as “a collection of individuals of the same species that cooperate to do something”, yes.

I'd go so far as to suggest that FAR more animals (besides just humans and non-human primates) exist in societies (and are easily described as lacking religion), but YMMV.

I agree. Placed on an axis of count of neurons in a typical individual’s nervous system, we find social behavior over practically the entire range, from human’s [math]10^{11}[/math] to typical insects’ [math]10^{5}[/math], and even, strongly arguably, in organisms without nervous systems, such as bacteria. Although it’s conventional to refer to a collection of microorganism as a “colony” rather than a “society”, in this context, I believe they’re effectively synonyms.

 

Despite the applicability of the term “society” to many species, it’s very important not to take this as suggesting that profound differences between societies of different species do not exist.

If yes, then religion has zero to do with society, and (as I previously stated) is simply an emergent phenomenon resulting from other traits and characteristics which reinforce the aforementioned societal grouping tendencies.

I find this statement self-contradictory, and also non-sequitor.

 

Non-sequitor, because it jumps from the previous paragraph’s reference to non-human societies, to religion as an emergent phenomenon, which is conventionally held to occur only in human societies.

 

Self-contradictory, because if religion is an “emergent phenomenon” resulting from something which reinforces something associated with society, religion and society have something to do with one another. Perhaps, IN, you mean to claim “religion does not cause society, but is caused by a collection of factors that also cause society?”

 

Setting aside analysis of cause in favor of empirical analysis, and restricting “society” to refer only to large collections of individuals (ie: a village or a nation, rather than a club), we find effectively no instances of a society without religion.

 

Consider a example of a large society commonly considered one of the least religious, the nation of Denmark (see the wikipedia article “religion in Denmark”). 23% responded to a 1999 poll about belief in God "I don't believe there is a God", vs. 21% "a personal God". 31%, responded "a spiritual force". This suggests to me that, even in a society in which a majority of people reject organized religious dogma, most, perhaps nearly all, cling to the belief in “spirit” of some kind.

 

The reason for this, I believe, is the cognitive difficulty humans have with conceiving of the end of the self, which, as I explained in post #346, appears to me to be an innate consequence of the “self-model” feature that allows us our extraordinary (among other animals) ability to use language and symbols.

 

By consider that the tendency to believe our selves incarnations of immortal souls – a belief conventionally termed religious – is a major human cognitive trait, arising from the same self-model trait responsible in large part for the ability at language which is the key distinction between us and our closest ape relatives, I believe an important insight into individual human psyches and society as a whole can be had. Considering this “religious” cognitive trait to have “zero to do” with human society, and by extension, the human psyche, because of negative associations with religion, is, I think, a bad idea.

[charles brough]

Defining “society” as I did in post #346 as “a collection of individuals of the same species that cooperate to do something”, yes. I agree. Placed on an axis of count of neurons in a typical individual’s nervous system, we find social behavior over practically the entire range, from human’s [math]10^{11}[/math] to typical insects’ [math]10^{5}[/math], and even, strongly arguably, in organisms without nervous systems, such as bacteria. Although it’s conventional to refer to a collection of microorganism as a “colony” rather than a “society”, in this context, I believe they’re effectively synonyms.

 

Despite the applicability of the term “society” to many species, it’s very important not to take this as suggesting that profound differences between societies of different species do not exist. I find this statement self-contradictory, and also non-sequitor.

 

Non-sequitor, because it jumps from the previous paragraph’s reference to non-human societies, to religion as an emergent phenomenon, which is conventionally held to occur only in human societies.

 

Self-contradictory, because if religion is an “emergent phenomenon” resulting from something which reinforces something associated with society, religion and society have something to do with one another. Perhaps, IN, you mean to claim “religion does not cause society, but is caused by a collection of factors that also cause society?”

 

Setting aside analysis of cause in favor of empirical analysis, and restricting “society” to refer only to large collections of individuals (ie: a village or a nation, rather than a club), we find effectively no instances of a society without religion.

 

Consider a example of a large society commonly considered one of the least religious, the nation of Denmark (see the wikipedia article “religion in Denmark”). 23% responded to a 1999 poll about belief in God "I don't believe there is a God", vs. 21% "a personal God". 31%, responded "a spiritual force". This suggests to me that, even in a society in which a majority of people reject organized religious dogma, most, perhaps nearly all, cling to the belief in “spirit” of some kind.

 

The reason for this, I believe, is the cognitive difficulty humans have with conceiving of the end of the self, which, as I explained in post #346, appears to me to be an innate consequence of the “self-model” feature that allows us our extraordinary (among other animals) ability to use language and symbols.

 

By consider that the tendency to believe our selves incarnations of immortal souls – a belief conventionally termed religious – is a major human cognitive trait, arising from the same self-model trait responsible in large part for the ability at language which is the key distinction between us and our closest ape relatives, I believe an important insight into individual human psyches and society as a whole can be had. Considering this “religious” cognitive trait to have “zero to do” with human society, and by extension, the human psyche, because of negative associations with religion, is, I think, a bad idea.

 

Unlike all the other animals, we are the only one that has language-speech-ideology ability to bring unity to us and enable us to imagine a huge society as "ours" and feel it as being still in the hunting-gathering groups we evolved in. In reference to grouping in other animals, we do not find that. They do not live in language-based larger-than-natural groupings. Thus, they live in "herds" "swarms, groups, etc. Each lives in size groups that they evolved in. We do not, and that is why we need to give our grouping a different word for a different concept, that of "society."

 

A better way to deal with this concept than neurons and micro organisms is to study the behavior of other primates, of which there is a wealth of information.

[CraigD]

Your attaching religion to fear of death is, I say, much to limiting.

I believe I understand this objection, Charles.

 

There are many bodies of philosophical thought that are categorized as “religion”, not all of which necessarily dedicate as much attention to the fear of an thwarting of, to borrow stanza from a traditional Christian hymn, “death’s victorious boasting grave”. Such “religions” are what I excluded from relevance as insignificant and “strange” when I wrote

Belief in a non-physical self is, IMHO, the root of all significant religious thought and religions (excluding “strange” religions with few adherents and little influence)

Religions of significance to human society are restricted, I believe, to a few well-known families of religions, as described in various sources such as the wikipedia article “major religious groups”. All of these religions appear to me to provide a well developed explanation of the immortality of individual human souls/selfs.

 

My “humans have difficulty accepting the impermanence of the self” theory predicts that any philosophical school of thought that fails to provide this explanation can’t attract adherents, so can’t form the basis of a significant religion.

 

Per the above link, about 14% of humans are “irreligious or atheists” (I am an atheist). For my thesis to stand, it must explain why so many people don’t subscribe to religious “immortal self/soul” claims/explanations.

 

I think most of the irreligious/atheistic fall into a few categories with regards to how they address the innate human cognitive difficulty with the concept of an impermanent self.

• Some, like most religionists, believe in an objectively real immortal self/soul, disagreeing with religionists only over the nature or existence of God or gods. According to these beliefs, after physical death, the immortal part of a person goes to heaven, is reincarnated, is reabsorbed by the godhead, etc, as described by the various religions, but without the presence of or need for any greater or supreme being – what might be termed an egalitarian or anarchistic afterlife
  
• Others define self in terms other than neurological continuity of consciousness. Examples include the belief that, if one’s ideas, via books, etc, remain popular among even with a few, ones self lives on in them, or that the self is genetic in nature, and that one lives on through ones descendents.
  
• Others believe that their self will cease to be when they die, and are distressed by the belief. Classical existentialists are in this group. Some resolve to do something to correct the situation, though such approaches as preventing physical aging and death via medical therapies, or simulating humans on computers. Extropians are in this group.
  
• The last group consists of people who believe that their self will cease to be when they die, but are not distressed by it.
  

For my theory to work, this last group must be small, and explained by the idea that the human psyche is able to repress distressing beliefs so that they are not consciously experienced. Support for such an explanations awaits improvements in neuropsycology, as we currently have only a vague idea of how the human psyche actually, physically, works.

A better way to deal with this concept than neurons and micro organisms is to study the behavior of other primates, of which there is a wealth of information.

I agree that empirical studies, such as of human, primate, and other social animal behavior, are valuable, but just as the best scientific understanding of chemistry came from an understanding of its underlying atoms and subatomic particles, a sound scientific understanding of the psyche and social phenomena must ultimately come, I think, from understanding its underlying physical mechanism, which appear to be neurons.

 

I agree that knowledge about “societies” of microorganisms is likely to be less useful to the study of human social behavior that the study of other primates.

[InfiniteNow]

Craig - I'll just summarize my point thusly, and leave it to you and other readers to decide for yourselves whether you agree or disagree.

 

Society is a precondition for religion, not the other way around.

 

 

The point about religion being an emergent property of societal grouping is peripheral to the actual argument, so can be ignored in context of this point. I intended that comment to be supplemental, not foundational.

[CraigD]

Craig - I'll just summarize my point thusly, and leave it to you and other readers to decide for yourselves whether you agree or disagree.

 

Society is a precondition for religion, not the other way around.

If what’s meant by “society” is “society similar to present-day human society”, and by “religion”, “religion and all the trappings”, such as churches and congregations, I agree. Without society, one couldn’t build a communal shed, much less a church.

 

Defining “religion” in a more fundamental way, as “religious thought”, I disagree.

 

Trying to summarize as succinctly as IN, my point is:

• human language is a necessary condition for human society
  
• a cognitive self-model is a necessary condition for human language
  
• a cognitive self-model is a necessary and sufficient condition for human religious thought
  

Thus, human religious thought and language either appeared at about the same time, or religious thought before language. Only language is necessary for human society, but religious thought is an unavoidable side effect.

[freeztar]

If what’s meant by “society” is “society similar to present-day human society”, and by “religion”, “religion and all the trappings”, such as churches and congregations, I agree. Without society, one couldn’t build a communal shed, much less a church.

 

Defining “religion” in a more fundamental way, as “religious thought”, I disagree.

 

Trying to summarize as succinctly as IN, my point is:

• human language is a necessary condition for human society
  
• a cognitive self-model is a necessary condition for human language
  
• a cognitive self-model is a necessary and sufficient condition for human religious thought
  

Thus, human religious thought and language either appeared at about the same time, or religious thought before language. Only language is necessary for human society, but religious thought is an unavoidable side effect.

 

Craig, I like your "self-model" philosophy, but I find your logic in the above bullets to be lacking in "deductive strength".

 

Why does it necessarily follow that "a cognitive self-model is a necessary and sufficient condition for human religious thought"? Iow, how did you make the leap from language/society/self-model to religious thought? There seems to be a massive disconnect there.

[CraigD]

Craig, I like your "self-model" philosophy, but I find your logic in the above bullets to be lacking in "deductive strength".

Summarizing as I did in post #355, I omitted the numbered chain of logic in post #346. See that for a more detailed explanation.

Why does it necessarily follow that "a cognitive self-model is a necessary and sufficient condition for human religious thought"?

It’s a necessary cause, because without a self-model, a psyche has no concept of self. Without a concept of self, it can’t have a concept of an immortal self, otherwise known as a soul. Based on a survey of the major religions, and my personal experience, I begin with the assumption that all significant religions must have a concept of the soul.

 

According to my theory, it’s a sufficient cause, because for a self-model to be effective – allow the psyche to plan, act disadvantageously with the expectation of future advantage, etc. – it must necessarily assume persistence of the self – that “I” will be the same “I” in the future, as now. The key assertive leap of my theory is that the self-model assumes persistence of self too strongly and inflexibly, decreasing the psyche’s ability to conceive of its opposite, impermanence, or death, of the self, otherwise known as mortality. This disability results in a strong tendency toward wishful thinking (AKA magical thinking), which is manifest by creating and accepting explanations of reality in which the self never dies. Thus, the presence in a psyche of a self-model requires that the psyche believe, on some cognitive level, in an immortal self/soul, a religious though.