Reddit reviews Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
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I'll let Jared Diamond explain:
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A recent interpretation among some scholars of religion is that belief in religious superstitions serves to display one’s commitment to one’s religion. All long-lasting human groups — Boston Red Sox fans (like me), devoted Catholics, patriotic Japanese, and others — face the same basic problem of identifying who can be trusted to remain as a group member. The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but who really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.
That’s why religious affiliation involves so many overt displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.
Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. They are more far-sighted, longer-lived, and stronger, travel faster, can predict the future, can change shape, can pass through walls, and so on. In other respects, gods and ghosts behave like people. The god of the Old Testament got angry, while Greek gods and goddesses became jealous, ate, drank, and had sex. Their powers surpassing human powers are projections of our own personal power fantasies; they can do what we wish we could do ourselves. I do have fantasies of hurling thunderbolts that destroy evil people, and probably many other people share those fantasies of mine, but I have never fantasized about existing only on Wednesdays. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.
Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/13/jared_diamond_its_irrational_to_be_religious/
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You may also want to read the book Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer (alluded to in the passage by Diamond) to understand religion on a deeper psychological level:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origins-Religious/dp/0465006965
>I have had some spiritual experiences that I believe are real, but I’m even doubting that
I don't doubt that you had experiences. Please read Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained.
> The academic study of Judaism/Christianity is just one part of a larger project: of revealing the naturalistic origins of religion itself. Of course, we've yet to fully flesh out a..."psychology" of ancient religion.
One book I'm still reading, but have found very enlightening, is Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer.
I was quite interested to see K.L. Noll (Brandon University) applying Boyer's anthropological findings on how religion "works" to the study of historical Judaism in "Was There Doctrinal Dissemination in Early Yahweh Religion?" (BI 16, 2008, 295-427). This seems like a useful approach to take.
Here are some books that may help.
Religion Explained suggests that friends are stored in your head as person-files: file of information linked to a facial image. Hence why death is so unnerving - the person is dead but the person-file still exists in your brain, triggering your brain to interact with them as though they are still alive.
New research shows kids with imaginary friends (imaginary person-files) are actually well-adjusted.
So what I'm saying is...
I'll try getting back into writing. If I can create enough imaginary person-files, maybe I'll feel less lonely. ;)
>I am mad at myself for not being this analytic about this earlier in my life
I had this exact feeling.
So one thing to realize is that this process takes time I mean for FSM sake u lived a lot with this Idea.keep reading whatever you do keep reading.
some sources or ideas that were helpful to me:
keep fear away and ...good luck !
I know it's a bit of pop psychology, but I can't help but think that you'd enjoy the works of Malcolm Gladwell, particularly Blink and Outliers. Blink brings forward a lot of the issues about conscious rationalization of unconscious behavior and cognition. The metaphor is that there is a locked door in our mind, behind which a huge series of unconscious processes occur. These processes evolved for specific tasks and have thus evolved, as a necessity, a specifically high accuracy in certain areas.
Described in the book is a particularly interesting psychological case study was done with gamblers. Gamblers were sat at a table with 4 decks of cards, 2 red and 2 blue. They would draw cards that would either net them money or lose them money. The decks were rigged, of course, with the red decks providing a few high payouts with a net loss, and the blue decks providing minor gains and an average positive net. By the 80th draw, on average, the gamblers knew to avoid the red decks and could consciously explain their behavior. At the 40th draw they had a hesitancy to draw from the red deck, but could not explain their behaviors beyond "suspicion". However, by as early as the 20 draw, the subjects demonstrated increased heart rate and sweaty palms when drawing from red that they were not even consciously aware of!
The book Religion Explained takes a lot of these evolved subconscious cognization theories and very convincingly applies them to the realm of religious evolution. It's dryer than Gladwell, but a valuable read nonetheless!
It would be funnier satire if, in fact, there wasn't a science on understanding the nature of religious belief and relationship with evolution. It does a pretty good job of understanding and explaining it, and nearly has a complete model of it.
I wouldn't doubt that many creationists won't get the satire and think this is real. They have a tendency to re-use bad quotes and refuted arguments, and they tend to be more conservative people who don't seem to understand satire.
If you want to understand why religion evolved read this book: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Tl;dr: What we call 'religion' originates from cognitive by-products of mental systems that evolved for other reasons. "Religious" views of death are influenced by our mental systems for thinking about specific people we know, for detecting agents & living organisms, and our intuitive psychology or 'theory of mind'.
I suggest Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. He's an anthropologist but he uses a lot of evolutionary psychology (he's heavily influenced by Pinker's How the Mind Works) and cognitive science. It's an excellent book.
Also Religion explained (amazon), which - although apparently controversial - was an interesting read :
>Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.
Another way to come at this, instead of abstract reasoning, is to learn the history of religions--how they evolve, what functions they serve in society and so forth. Then you see that the religion you were raised in is one in the history of these belief systems at a specific point in time, with no more validity than any of the others, some of which we think of as silly. The evolution of religion, Why Would Anyone Believe in God Breaking the Spell.
In other words, religion can be explained as a natural phenomenon, rather than because it is correct.
If you are actually interested in religion and evolution this book is an excellent place to start, so long as you can plough through the jargon. In a nutshell, it's not so much that religion is beneficial to us in evolutionary terms, but that religious ideas (memes, if you like) arise naturally out of the normal function of our innate cognitive systems, and evolve into what we now call religions as they are shaped by our social organisations (this is also an inversion of earlier ideas in which religion was thought of as an attempt to impose some form of social order). It's dense, and gets a lot more complex that that of course, but rewarding and not easily refutable. There's probably more recent stuff out there by now, it's a little while now since I was studying this stuff.
From a more science-religion perspective, Pascal Boyer's insightful book on the relationship between cognition and religion. He explains why some gods exist and why some definitely don't - and it's because of how our cognitive belief system works (p.29):
> Take for instance the claim that my right
hand is made of green cheese except when people examine it, that God
ceases to exist every Wednesday afternoon, that cars feel thirsty when
their tanks run low or that cats think in German. We can make up
hundreds of such interesting and irrefutable beliefs. There is no clear
limit to imagination in this domain. The credulity arguments would
explain not just actual religious beliefs but also a whole variety of
beliefs that no one ever had
By their descriptions, these 2 seems pretty good:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origins-Religious/dp/0465006965/ref=cm_wl_huc_item
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0195178033/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1HZOGMRHHFYH5&coliid=I3K9Q1SNLXH4Z2
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333094305&sr=8-1
pretty good read if you're really interested.
Also see Pascal Boyer's "Religion Explained": http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322743084&sr=1-1
I've read the entire Christian Bible. I'm not sure what your point is. There is not a one to one correlation of what's written in scripture and how people learn, practice and intuit religion. I can absolutely assure you of that one, as I'm in the field of anthropology of religion.
I'd recommend reading in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion as well as reading the Bible. Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer is a fantastic overview of how religion operates in the individual: http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965
When it comes down to it you just can't tell or convince Christians who are not intolerant that they are intolerant, because they are not intolerant. Whatever they justify that by, they remain genuine.
This same lack of actually acquiring empirical knowledge about the source of one's beliefs embarrassingly has a lot of atheists who "believe in evolution" getting in arguments with Christian creationists for their irrational beliefs while saying absolutely ridiculous things about evolution that aren't remotely accurate. (I've witnessed this enough times to really get to headdesking.)
The human mind isn't rational and acquires logical and critical thinking through practice. The minds of atheists and Christians aren't significantly different, and frequently make the same kind of errors.
If you are curious of how people of different cultures relate to religion and the supernatural, then I heartily recommend this book which treats these question from an anthropological perspective There are several valuable insights to be had for both the atheist and the theist.
If you wonder why people experience aliens, miracles, ghosts and things that didn't happen? Why wouldn't we? We can never rule out events to be figments of our minds or perception, nor can we entirely rule out what we believe to be impossible.