Let me begin by saying that these are my own ideas and feelings on the subject. I have not studied the Pschology, Sociology, Philosophy, nor History of the Theism vs Atheism debate. If I cover ground that has been already discussed, I apologize in advance and plead ignorance. Like the title says, I'm a first-time poster.
I, like many, was raised in a religous enviornment, Catholic in my case. As I grew older, I discovered that the more questions I asked about religion, the less satisfying the answers became. To me, they smacked of rationalizations, rather than valid explanations. I drifted further and further from my religous background, before abandoning it all together. Over the years, I have come up with my own opinions on how religion came to be born, and why it can be found in every culture.
This is a rather long post, but I would welcome any thoughful critiques. If you are an adherent to any religion or system of belief, please don't try to "convert" me, it's taken me many long years to get to this point, and it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to change my mind now. Unless you have some proof that would stand up in a court of law, or would pass hard scientific scrutiny, I would prefer not to hear how "God will change your life". Also, if the following stikes any chords with anyone reading it, and has some idea where I might find further resources that are similar in tone, please don't hesitate to let me know.
IMHO, you have to look at religion in a Historical and Psychological context for it to make any sense. Religion, in one form or another, appears to have been around even before we were. By that, I mean that it is a well documented fact that the Neanderthal had very ornate and ritualistic burial practices. Most Anthropologists agree that this denotes some form of "Religious" belief system. Imagine for a moment what the thought processes were for a Neanderthat man, living some 30,000 years ago. He looks up at the night sky, and sees thousands of stars. Even now, it's an awe-inspiring sight, if you get out of the city that is, and we know what stars are. Our Neanderthal friend does not. He can't touch them, but they are undeniably real, and they are there every night.
Now, how does he explain them? Science can explain them, but his scientific knowledge ends with fire, and he doesn't know how that works either, only that it does work.
Add to this, he knows that someday, he will die, an awareness that (as far as we know, anyway) we are alone with in the animal kingdom. Someday, he will cease to be. BTW, if you want to make the arguement that Neanderthals did not possess such higher brain functions, just change it to Cro-Magnon instead. The arguement still works the same.
The Human mind cannot concieve of nothingness. Try thinking of nothing sometime. I wish you luck, that's the sort of thing Zen masters spend a lifetime trying to achieve. But our ancestor knew Death well, the average life expectancy was about 25 years. So, on the one hand, he knew he would die, on the other, he can't picture himself dying. What to do......
There is something in the Human psyche that makes us want to find out the why, the explanations behind the facts. It is one of the things I love about Humanity, otherwise we would still be wearing animal skins. Our friend wants to know why, but he lacks the resources to truly answer the questions.
Until someone sat up one day, and invented religion. Now here was something our Neanderthal friend could sink his teeth into. It explained everything, in a way he could understand. Now he knew why the seasons changed, why the plants grew, and what happened to him after his death. Religion could explain it all. And about 5 seconds after the invention of religion, some bright boy figured out that whoever "passed down the word from on high" could have a pretty good life of plenty, not to mention power, by telling the great unwashed that was what "God" wanted. Who was going to argue with God?
I have a lot more of my own theory on this subject, but this is getting kind of long. If there is a favorable response, or at least a lively discourse, I will post more. I look forward to reading your responses.
Edward Bartlett wrote: > .... Until someone sat up one day, and invented religion. Now here was > something our Neanderthal friend could sink his teeth into. It explained > everything, in a way he could understand. Now he knew why the seasons > changed, why the plants grew, and what happened to him after his death. > Religion could explain it all. And about 5 seconds after the invention of > religion, some bright boy figured out that whoever "passed down the word > from on high" could have a pretty good life of plenty, not to mention power, > by telling the great unwashed that was what "God" wanted.....
> ... Until someone sat up one day, and invented religion.
Hi Edward... Interesting post, and I've no doubt you're right in almost all of what you say, except that perhaps the 'invention' of religion was rather more of a gradual haphazard process than the word implies. People can invent a religion from scratch today for entirely cynical reasons (apparently Mormonism and Scientology fall into that category) but in the beginning it was probably just a very long groping towards some kind of explanation for all the things that humans had no other way of understanding at the time. I would guess it was probably only later that some people realised they could use religious feelings to manipulate and take advantage of other people.
> Until someone sat up one day, and invented religion. Now here was > something our Neanderthal friend could sink his teeth into. It explained > everything, in a way he could understand.
Oh, man, I know you didn't *mean* to equate religion with Neanderthals, but.... Damn, I wish I'd written that. Seriously, good job all the way. You've captured the symbolic nature of religion. Unfortunately, theists get tangled up in there, mistaking symbolism as literal truth. That's what really separates us from them, IMO. Most of us probably don't have issues with most of the symbolic content of, say the Bible; we just don't take it as "gospel."
I've been background processing here, trying to come up with some witty retort along the lines of "too bad the Neanderthals didn't go on to completely digest religion, so we wouldn't be stuck with it now." Nice post.
Ah yes, religion. While it's possible to see how a religious belief could arise in the first place, I like to think such an enduring feature of human society would not have stuck around unless it brought some tangible benefits. Carl Sagan had a similar notion on how a God was invented on the basis that: 0- humans observe order in environment. 0- humans change portions of environment (through tools, or as tools,) to suit purposes of survival. 0- humans begin to associate order with design. 0- order more sophisticated than human tools implies grander designer. God is born. But while the notion of a creator who fashioned the entire Cosmos exclusively for your benefit is very comforting (you're obviously the most important portion to start,) it's difficult to imagine how it ballooned into the vast bloated theocratic monolith we see today all on it's own. So consider an extension of the tale, and I would appreciate all rejoinders. There was one major difference between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon hominids. Cro-Magnons could talk. Language, the great bridge across the gulf of generation gap and personal space, gave us such an edge because it allowed collective intelligence. Not just pack behaviour, which is an instinct, or an aquired skill within a lifetime, but the genuine growth of a supermind within the tribe which outlasted any of it's component parts, like the shift from unicellelar to complex life during the Cambrian. A racial memory and internal organisation of the new beast, Hobbe's own Leviathan, brought the same specialisation and explosion in complexity in our societies that was seen half a billion years ago in organic life. the mechanics are a little different, but the analogy does extend further. The first thing a superorganism has to impose on it's components is to tightly control their reproductive strategy. But the Leviathan reproduces quite differently from lifeforms based on evolution. What is the act of reproduction, but a window of opportunity for the modification of the genetic code? In a conventional beast, spontaneous mutation is most likely to result in cancer and death, since the DNA spiral is complex enough that any spanner thrown in will likely wreck the works. A certain amount of redundancy aside, reproduction needs to be a concentrated event, where a mutation unravels from the beginning of the sequence, and even if fatal to the newborn, does not destroy the parent. But the memetic code of the Leviathan, encoded as ideas, reproduces through the change of ideas, something it can suffer without the need for a physical zygote as neural networks are much more fault-tolerant than linear reference machines i.e genes. But, to control the reproductive urges of it's component mentalities, a supermind must curtail original thought. it's something of a stretch, but consider. If the superorganism is to survive, discipline must be imposed on it's parts, they need to fulfill certain roles. Religion evolved as a means of tying the desire to avoid death- one of the most powerful of human instincts- to suit the needs of the society, where church and state were closely allied: like a chemical receptor on the surface of a cell that tells it when and if to split or even self-destruct, or the pheremone cocktail that keeps wayward soldier ants in order. Apoptosis- Like skin cells that march upwards to dessication, jihad arose like a means of fending off foreign societies, as individual souls were duped into believing that their single deaths were beneficial. It's also interesting to note that many religions advocate priest celibacy, and that in the body, most neurons can't reproduce. It's a rough and ready analogy, but I think it does explain various things. I would be interested to hear arguments in favour of original thought being more beneficial to the society than inner organisation and stability, how, under what circumstances, and if so, why it hardly predominates.
> > ... Until someone sat up one day, and invented religion.
> Hi Edward... Interesting post, and I've no doubt you're right in > almost all of what you say, except that perhaps the 'invention' of > religion was rather more of a gradual haphazard process than the word > implies.
Thank you for your input, I really appreciate it. I have to admit, I was being rather flip in that paragraph. Your phrasing is much more accurate, and I'd be willing to bet, much closer to what actually happened. We as a species have always tried to discover the truths in our lives, it's just that today I believe that we are much better equiped for the task. Science has been able to answer many of the questions that our ancestors were unable, or unwilling, to answer.
Unfortunately, Science cannot, by it's very nature, answer what I like to call "The Big 3", the three questions that form the basis of what draws people to religion in the first place;
1. Where did I come from? 2. Why am I here? 3. Where am I going?
For Question #1, I'm not refering to evolution or fertilization, science explains those quite well. I mean the essence of what makes each of us unique, whether you call it conciousness, spirit, soul, or what have you. Science can't answer those questions, because the answers are different for everyone. These are the same questions that philosophers have debated for thousands of years, and will continue to debate for thousands more. In fact, I like to refer to Religion as "Philosophy with an attitude".
> So consider an extension of the tale, and I would appreciate all > rejoinders. There was one major difference between Neanderthals and > Cro-Magnon hominids. Cro-Magnons could talk. Language, the great > bridge across the gulf of generation gap and personal space, gave us > such an edge because it allowed collective intelligence. Not just > pack behaviour, which is an instinct, or an aquired skill within a > lifetime, but the genuine growth of a supermind within the tribe which > outlasted any of it's component parts, like the shift from unicellelar > to complex life during the Cambrian.
snip
Your view is very, very common, that Modern Man is significantly superior to Neanderthals. However, this prejudice is just another example of the old us/them slander.
The improvements in voice communication, which you allude to, allowed vowels to be spoken by the new man, nothing more. Neanderthals were speakers, social beings, tool-makers, almost indistinquishable from the fresh interlopers at the time. Modern man lived for about 50,000 years with no real development beyond the Neanderthals. That is, until the invention of writing. The vast improvement that you argue for should be writing, not speech. Notice, also, that writing happened WITHOUT a change in man. We do not owe our technology and knowledge to the split from Neanderthals. There is a good possibility that writing could've been discovered by the earlier man.
-- Ron Hammon. Remove "y" from "nyet", if present, from my address to reply.
I would say that the development of vowels is pretty much essential for coherent speech. Otherwise you are reduced to a series of hissing rasps. There is some evidence to support the view that the development of language was as much a cultural innovation as a genetic one, but as the Neanderthals don't seem to have caught on and were promptly wiped out by the new superorganism, I think it can be concluded they didn't have the capacity for language or large organised society as we know them. Neanderthals did coexist with humans up until about 14 thousand years ago as far as I know, but only in remote locations, for wherever we get the spread of culture, we see art, musical instruments, significantly more sophisticated toolmaking and guess what? A total abscence of Neanderthals. This happened significantly earlier than the invention of writing some 8000 years ago, which moreover was initially a far from flexible means of communication, being largely used to store tallies of goods and records of production, later being used by a priestly caste or for purposes of administration, and only finally settling into the niche of replicating language. Language existed first, and was responsible for our, for want of a better word, humanity. I still don't see how you've addressed my main argument though. I still would like to know, why, if original thought is such a good thing, why it is not encouraged. Given the large administrative cost of religions, societies with smaller or weaker theocracies would presumably have triumphed over others more hidebound, simply from the saving in resources. Is religion a parasite, or a symbiote, is what I'm saying?
