Origin of Religion and Superstition

[SGOS]

Here's an article that resonates for me.

http://news.yahoo.com/origins-religion-supernatural-beliefs-evolved-173454622.html

Title:  The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved

Many Catholics reveled in the pope's whirlwind visit to the East Coast of the United States last month. But as the devout return to life as usual, nonreligious Americans may be left scratching their heads, wondering what all the fuss was about.

The vast majority of the U.S. population does not belong to the Catholic Church, and a growing percentage of Americans are not affiliated with any organized religion at all, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centers. So the question then becomes, what role does religion play in today's American society? Perhaps oddly, that question can be answered by a group of people not usually associated with religion: scientists.

Despite the popular belief that science and religion (or science and the supernatural, more generally) don't quite go hand in hand, scientists have quite a lot to say about this topic â€" specifically, why such beliefs even exist in the first place. [Infographic: Views of Catholics in America by the Numbers]

The 'god faculty'

There are many theories as to how religious thought originated. But two of the most widely cited ideas have to do with how early humans interacted with their natural environment, said Kelly James Clark, a senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

â€" another idea that's often cited in discussions about the origins of religion. By attributing intention or purpose to the actions of beings that did have agency, like other people, humans stopped simply reacting as quickly as possible to the world around them â€" they started anticipating what other beings' actions might be and planning their own actions accordingly. (Being able to sort of get into the mind of another purposeful being is what Theory of Mind is all about.)

ToM was very helpful to early humans. It enabled them to discern other people's positive and negative intentions (e.g., "Does that person want to mate with me or kill me and steal my food?"), thereby increasing their own chances of survival.

But when people started attributing purpose to the actions of nonactors, like raindrops, ToM took a turn toward the supernatural. [Infographic: Americans' Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena]

"The roaring threat of a thunderstorm or the devastation of a flood is widely seen across cultures as the product of a dangerous personal agent in the sky or river, respectively," said Allen Kerkeslager, an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia."Likewise, the movements of the sun, moon and stars are widely explained as the movements of personal agents with extraordinary powers,"Kerkeslager told Live Science in an email.

Picture this: You're a human being living many thousands of years ago. You're out on the plains of the Serengeti, sitting around, waiting for an antelope to walk by so you can kill it for dinner. All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action?

"On the plains of the Serengeti, it would be better to not sit around and reflect. People who took their time got selected out," Clark told Live Science. Humans who survived to procreate were those who had developed what evolutionary scientists call a hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD, he said.

In short, HADD is the mechanism that lets humans perceive that many things have "agency," or the ability to act of their own accord. This understanding of how the world worked facilitated the rapid decision-making process that humans had to go through when they heard a rustling in the grass. (Lions act of their own accord. Better run.)

But in addition to helping humans make rational decisions, HADD may have planted the seeds for religious thought. In addition to attributing agency to lions, for example, humans started attributing agency to things that really didn't have agency at all. [5 Ways Our Caveman Instincts Get the Best of Us]

"You might think that raindrops aren't agents," Clark said. "They can't act of their own accord. They just fall. And clouds just form; they're not things that can act. But what human beings have done is to think that clouds are agents. They think [clouds] can act," Clark said of early humans.

And then humans took things to a whole new level. They started attributing meaning to the actions of things that weren't really acting of their own accord. For example, they thought raindrops were "acting for a purpose," Clark said.

Acting for a purpose is the basis for what evolutionary scientists call the Theory of Mind (ToM)
This tendency to explain the natural world through the existence of beings with supernatural powers â€" things like gods, ancestral spirits, goblins and fairies â€" formed the basis for religious beliefs, according to many cognitive scientists. Collectively, some scientists refer to HADD and ToM as the "god faculty," Clark said.

In fact, human beings haven't evolved past this way of thinking and making decisions, he added.

"Now, we understand better that the things we thought were agents aren't agents," Clark said.

The article continues with a theory of how religion benefits the group.  It's not as long as the above.  Most of us have thought about this already, but it's an interesting read, I thought.

[Baruch]

Thanks.  As long as politicians and business men behave like lion prides on the Serengeti ... I think survival thinking of that type is still relevant.

Human beings have beliefs, most of which are truth-challenged.  If I were so advanced as to realize I was a primitive hominid in an environment filled with monkey eating predators ... I would either develop a belief system (denial of reality) or I would brain myself with a rock to get the tension over with.

[SGOS]

If I were so advanced as to realize I was a primitive hominid in an environment filled with monkey eating predators ... I would either develop a belief system (denial of reality) or I would brain myself with a rock to get the tension over with.

Perhaps many of the brighter ones have.  Actually, the smartest person I knew ended up blowing his brains out.  And why not when you come to realize you're living in a sea of chaos, and that humanity is just a bunch of crazy people swimming around in the bounty of the Earth like leeches?  But then there was his wife, a sexy man crazed woman who would drive most well intentioned men to the brink of insanity.  So you can skip my anecdote if you want.

[Baruch]

You get it.  We are simply hominids who have developed pants.  We didn't stop being hominids, but we did become caricatures of ourselves.

Like Mel Brooks said ... it is good to be the king (leach).

Sorry about the man's breakdown.  Having been around women all my life, I understand ... just as I suppose you do as well.  Unfortunately life does seem too much at times.

[jonb]

https://youtu.be/jjQCZClpaaY
Haven't you all seen this?
These scientists in the OP seem to be behind what has been spoken about in academic circles and on the BBC for years.


With the recent discoveries in the Dinaledi Chamber in the Rising Star cave in South Africa. The bones of these very early beings with brains about the same size of that of a gorilla had to be carried in some way through very slim tunnels to a particular place deep in a dark cave system that is a very strong pointer at some sort of spiritual belief system.

[jonb]

Oh and I did not think I could find this, but here it is

https://youtu.be/C5RiHTSXK2A

Questions for theists there about the special place of man in the Universe.

[SGOS]

Hard to say what's going on in the mind's of animals, but they seem to take an interest in things we do.  I enjoyed these short videos very much.  We tend to see ourselves as having taken a huge evolutionary leap from our closest relatives, but I wonder if it's all that far.  We say it is, but we don't see it in the DNA.  Quite the contrary.  Anyway, I get mesmerized by waterfalls too.

[Baruch]

One reason why it is hard to find the "missing link" is that we killed off our less successful hominid competitors.  One must also beware of anthropomorphism ... thinking that we can project our humanity onto animals, like so many cartoons.

[jonb]

Anyone who has had conversations with fundamentalists will note how much they don't seem able to see what they don't want to see.
When we think of all the vested interests there are promoting a fundamental difference between humans and other animals, it is not hard to understand why accusations of anthropomorphism can be thrown about.

However I know I am an unreliable narrator, when I hear all the information about the underclass (British equivalent of trailer trash), of fecklessness, ignorance and an unwillingness to learn I can see how my feelings are just not as refined or as deep as those are of my betters.



I wonder if my betters of the educated/wealthy classes could think up an experiment that could quantify how superior their emotions are, so that I could understand my inferiority. But they say of my kind

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

So I do understand why they do not bother.

[Baruch]

This is why it is necessary for adult children to leave home.  And sometimes even to go to another country ... so they can escape the accidental historical foibles of their own birth.  I have nothing against class division ... except that it is divisive ... from both ends.  But the rich and powerful and famous ... have more to answer for.  The bloke dying at Dunkirk had less to answer for than Churchill.

Confirmation bias is necessary ... that is why it is so powerful.  To overcome what is necessary is either genius or mad.

The experiment at Stanford many years ago, about human brutality, should be all the proof anyone needs.  Every society is a kind of prison ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Some play guard, some play prisoner, and some play stool pigeon ;-)

[jonb]

Yes and a driver is that those others do not feel in the same way as we do.

[Baruch]

Yes and a driver is that those others do not feel in the same way as we do.

I think you are being ironic ... that we imagine that those others are different from ourselves.  Comes down to ... if you are so kind as to not murder your father or mother ... then why would you ever seek to murder someone else's father or mother?  Every human being is someone else's child.  Compassion seems easy, but people have bad dreams and act them out.

[Sal1981]

I think you are being ironic ... that we imagine that those others are different from ourselves.  Comes down to ... if you are so kind as to not murder your father or mother ... then why would you ever seek to murder someone else's father or mother?  Every human being is someone else's child.  Compassion seems easy, but people have bad dreams and act them out.

I'm not sure, but I think it has a lot to do with how military training is done, even in language, like instead of shooting another solider in another army, you're shooting "targets" and "taking objectives" and whatnot. It seems to me, very dehumanizing, if that's an apt word.

[jonb]

We are evolved from animals, I see no sign in the history of that evolution of a sudden all embracing change, as such the emotions working in our larger brains is in all probability working to the similar patterns as those animals that came before us.

This is not me saying I know what an elephant is thinking, but when looking at how they manipulate that dead elephant's body parts in the video it is clear to me there is more going on than traditional academic behaviourists would have it, that the animal is a mere robot without self awareness and that I am only anthropomorphising.

For me the notion of mankind being special, is a failed theory that only came from the influence of some religions in the last centuries and has no place in evidenced driven study.

[jonb]

I'm not sure, but I think it has a lot to do with how military training is done, even in language, like instead of shooting another solider in another army, you're shooting "targets" and "taking objectives" and whatnot. It seems to me, very dehumanizing, if that's an apt word.

Yes It I think is a very well know process to de humanise the other, or not want to even admit our cheep bacon sandwich is produced by sending the most intelligent animal in the farm to distraction in places like this.

https://youtu.be/L_vqIGTKuQE