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Author Topic:   What is religion good for?
Primordial Egg
Inactive Member


Message 5 of 40 (252326)
10-17-2005 4:41 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by nwr
10-17-2005 12:36 AM


There was an interesting article on this question (as applied to God, rather than religion) in last week's Guardian over here:
Why do we believe in God? | Religion | The Guardian
Written by Professor Robert Winston, who presents Science shows on the BBC.
Basically, the article provides 3 potential reasons (if we ignore the "people happen to believe in God because he happens to exist" reason).
1. Religion (or God) is a memeplex that has taken host in the brains of individuals, much like a virus. One can extend the analogy by talking about Lamarckian processes, competition for resources in Belief-O-Space etc. After all, just because something happens to exist, it does not necessarily imply that it confers some survival advantage, for us. Religions may simply exist because they provide survival advantage for themselves. Dawkins is a big advocate of this approach as is Susan Blakemore.
Center for the Study of Complex Systems | U-M LSA
There's a lot that makes sense to me in this approach.
2. Some anthropologists do take the view that religion had to confer some survival advantage to humans and see religion as existing primarily as a comforting mechanism, which would reduce stress and thus enable individuals to act more effectively. I guess this could be poorly phrased as "its nice to have a sky daddy", but I'm not even going to go there
3 there are also social benefits to belonging in a particular (non-familial) club, where individuals would have able to help and defend one another. From the Guardian article:
The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation.
I guess another potential reason (not in the article) for the existence of religion is as a control mechanism for tyrannical leaders (or witchdoctors) to subjugate people with, but I'd imagine that religion came before the existence of those claiming a divine right to lead. Maybe not, though.
IMO, why religion existed at all is primarily through reasons 2 & 3. Why it survives to this day is probably 1 & 4.
PE
This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 10-17-2005 04:43 AM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by nwr, posted 10-17-2005 12:36 AM nwr has not replied

  
Primordial Egg
Inactive Member


Message 14 of 40 (252592)
10-18-2005 2:45 AM


religion vs xenophobia
Religion, as I would define it, is characterised by ritual and a belief in magic / the supernatural. Whilst its easy to see how social cohesion (good or bad) may have arisen through religious structures, its not apparent to me why the supernatural would be required for it to be cohesive. Saying that religion may have been a useful trait for societal bonding doesn't cut it for me, as surely there are other non-supernatural systems (xenophobia?) which would do the same?
PE
This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 10-18-2005 02:47 AM

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 Message 17 by Ben!, posted 10-18-2005 6:48 AM Primordial Egg has replied

  
Primordial Egg
Inactive Member


Message 22 of 40 (252718)
10-18-2005 11:02 AM
Reply to: Message 17 by Ben!
10-18-2005 6:48 AM


Re: religion vs xenophobia
It doesn't matter if something else MIGHT have worked just as well; if religion is what provided social cohesion for a group of people in the past, then religion provided that benefit.
No, this would just mean that the benefit was coincidental to religion and not as a direct consequence of it. Xenophobia (which I would not consider a religion) can also lead to social cohesion. Therefore religion is not necessary required for social cohesion (aside: is the social cohesion brought about by xenophobia, or religion, necessarily a good thing?)
This also means that we cannot rightly say if religion has been good because of its social benefits, it may even be that religion is a coincidental side effect of something altogether more fundamental (the human pack instinct for example).
I don't think the supernatural part is necessarily important either. But if religion is what provided social cohesion, then that was a good aspect of religion. Heck, evein if religion COULD provide social cohesion, it's a good aspect of religion.
As I said, my take on religion is that it necessarily involves the supernatural and ceremony, so the topic can be rephrased: "what survival benefits would an organised system of supernatural beliefs have, if any?". If the same benefits can be achieved without religion, then we're not really specifying what it was that religion brought to the table.
PE

This message is a reply to:
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