5 replies to this topic

[outlawpoet]

Insofar as I am aware, the majority of text on religion consists of whether or not it's valid, and how to live your life if it is, or isn't. One thing i would love to have, but haven't come across or been reccommended to yet, is a basic primer on the why of religion. Why do humans believe such things? What mechanics govern the survival and change of religions?

A primer to my view, should be basic but correct, with a nuetral tone, and all the details neccesary, but no more. It should be more general than specific, and should allow the reader to take it as a baseline, and use the knowledge to make further decisions, rather than simply present factoids.

Is anyone aware of such a primer?

[mike2050us]

I think you should look at how the various world religions differ. The major religions of Middle Eastern origin--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--do indeed make claims about their validity based on supposedly divine revelations. Many Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, take a more practical approach, advising instead that people practice certain disciplines (such as meditation) and inspect their own psychological experience.

The Middle Eastern religions all proclaim the existence of a supreme God whom we must worship. Buddhism asserts that whether God exists or not is irrelevant, because we must each work out our own salvation.

You could spend many years reading the literature of these religions. Perhaps a better approach might be to read the scientific literature about the brain states that have been correlated with meditative/prayerful states of altered awareness (e.g., feelings of unity with all existence, or of the presence of an invisible being, etc.). For the latter, read books such as Michael Persinger's THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL BASES OF GOD BELIEFS, Matthew Alper's THE GOD PART OF THE BRAIN, James Austin's ZEN AND THE BRAIN.

[wall]

This doesn't directly answer the question at hand, but is somewhat related, take it for what it is....

The following is a quote from "The Story of Philosphy" by Will Durant.

It is part of the chapter on Plato. Plato is describing is vision of a utopia and one of the aspects of this utopia is for the leaders to create a religion. Plato wrote about the utopia around 387 BC.

Now since men are by nature aquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade them to behave themselves? By the policeman's omnipresent club? It is a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and that is by lending to the moreal requirments of the community the sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion.
Plato believes that a nation cannot be strong unless it believes in God. A mere cosmic force, or first cause, or elan vital, that was not a person, could hardly inspire hope, or devotion, or sacrifice; it could not offer comfort to the hearts of the distressed, no courage to embattled souls. But a living God can do all this, and can stir or frighten the self-seeking individualist into some moderation of his greed, some control of his passion. All the more so if to belief in God is added belief in personal immortality: the hope of another life gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones; we are twice armed if we fight with faith. Granted that none of the beliefs can be demonstrated; that God may be after all only the personified ideal of our love and our hope, and that the soul is like the music of the lyre, and dies with the instrument that gave it form: yet surely (so runs the argument, Pascal-like, of the Phaedo) it will do us no harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good.

The similarities between Plato's concept of a utopia and modern day life are all over the place, its amazing to read Plato's work while keeping in mind how long ago it was written. He came up with things like education for all children until the age of 20, teaching art, music, and physical education along with more standard knowledge - he also described different stages of weeding out students. The first one being at the age of 20, were everyone would take a test and the majority would fail and those who failed would then be sent off to work as physical labor type workers, while the smaller percentage who passed would go on to higher schooling - then take another test at 25 - the majority would again fail this test and go on to work as higher professions, and the ones who passed would attend even more schooling and eventually become the government, or the leaders of the land. Of course the government hardly consists of the brightest people now days, but the idea of going to school till around 20, then some going on to college, and others going to graduate school seems to be bassed on his model. I believe that most western religions were put into place by past government or republic leader orginizations bassed on Plato's utopia vision. I believe that one man has changed the world more then anyone else by simply writing down his thoughts.

Perhaps religion was created by the want of people to create a utopia to live in. They wanted to create paradise. Religion as described, lying to people in order to get them to behave may seem like a negative and harsh thing to do, but then again the alternatives back then were either living in a chaos with no order and no production - or living in an orderly and productive society but having the draw back of the population always being in fear of and hating its leaders, because they would have to use physical force and punishment in order to get them to behave. So Plato's concept of controling the public with religion seemed to be a much better route. However I don't think it was ever as successfull as Plato thought it would be, because there were always those who would reject it and would still need physical force and punishment in order to behave. But then again it was successfull in controling a large part of society. So it did result in more imediate freedom then not having any religion at all. But not total freedom of course, because any way you go about it, these people were being controled by fear, whether it be fear of the club and physical punishment or fear of the higher mystical power - fear is the main factor in how populations through out history have been controled. Then again religion works on different levels for different people, it may have controled some by fear, but others may have followed suite bassed on the want to go to heaven, or the want to please their creator. As now days it seems the want aspect is the only power religion has, as people who would of in the past might of been controled by the fear of religion probobly now days don't believe in religion - so instead are controled only by the fear of punishment, or maybee not controled at all.

Regardless I think the answer to "why" religion exists, is as a method of controling the population. Free will has been the worst enemy of governments and kings through out all of history.

[wall]

I once read somehwere that there are two ways to get someone to do something, you can get them to want to do it, or get them to fear not doing it. After thinking about that statement though, I don't agree with it. Pro-active people will do something just because they want to do it, but re-active people won't do anything until they need to do it. That is also a third way to get someone to do something, get them to need to do it. So then there is still two ways to get someone to do something, but it would be need and fear instead of want and fear. To control people by need is a tough thing to do. I can't think of any universal method. But religion has its advantages of working for all types of people in theory (if they believed that is) because of the fear factor, the devil and hell and sins and so forth, wich would be needed to control the re-active types, and giving the pro-active types the ability to be controled by want instead of fear, which is one step up from a purely phyiscal punishment style of control which would attempt to control everyone by simply using fear.

[Deslaar]

Insofar as I am aware, the majority of text on religion consists of whether or not it's valid, and how to live your life if it is, or isn't. One thing i would love to have, but haven't come across or been reccommended to yet, is a basic primer on the why of religion. Why do humans believe such things? What mechanics govern the survival and change of religions?

A primer to my view, should be basic but correct, with a nuetral tone, and all the details neccesary, but no more. It should be more general than specific, and should allow the reader to take it as a baseline, and use the knowledge to make further decisions, rather than simply present factoids.

Is anyone aware of such a primer?

Pascal Boyer's recent book Religion Explained might be a good start. He begins by rebutting the typical answers to the purpose of religious conviction by establishing universal elements contained in religions throughout the world. The usual trap for many atheists is to suggest that people believe in God because:

1. Religion provides explanations eg. origin's, puzzling experiences and phenomena, good and evil.

2. Religion provides comfort eg. mitigates fear of mortality, anxiety, etc

3. Religion provides social order eg. morality

Boyer goes about refuting these claims by offering up examples in non-Western cultures where these things are non-present in religion and in fact in many cases religion 1)adds unnecessary unexplainable complexity; 2) Increases anxiety and leaves mortality as a on going concern.

He then proceeds to rebuild a picture of religious inclination by explaining it in terms of counter-intuitive concepts adopted by specific cognitive inference devices susceptible to do so (memetics plays a part here). An aspect of this is the realisation that religion is not about death or dying; it's more about the experience of encountering the counter-intuitive idea (cognitively speaking) of a dead person and the difficulties reconciling such an object with phenomological inference devices.

A brief and terribly inadequate synopsis but I recommend you pick up a copy.