THE DEBATE OF RELIGION (previously: "why is there religion", from east.philossection)

I

IIbobII

considerfreelyfeelingscle arly
Registered Senior Member
did it start because some puffed up old men got some good ideas and began a revolution and through pomposity and evangelism word got around?
was it also then encouraged for its ability to explain away the unexplainable, to give hope to the hopeless?
why do we still have religion? for a moral/"eternal" safety net? because of being brainwashed as a kid?
will we have religion in the future? will atheists rule the world? what are the morals of atheists and can we trust them to be in charge. will life be better or worse if everyone were atheistic. how could we predict this objectively speaking? (could we find someone who is unsure whether or not he or she is atheist or theist?)

the fact that some kids get leukemia and some don't is not dependent on anything "supernatural". when you're buried (for most people-some people are buried alive, for instance) you don't "stare at the underside of a coffin". you're dead(most of the time :). corpses should be incinerated or ground up and used as fertilizer. It follows from it not mattering in the least (what you do or what is done to you after you have kicked the bucket). in a fancy coffin in the ground you'l just turn into dust and shit any way, only your nutrients won't be available for any plant life, or agricultue, to feed use living corpses!! there is so much space devoted to cemetaries. (coming soon: "what to do with dead people" in the ethics-philos.)

religion has the potential to bring order, but this would also require widespread brainwashing, because there will always be people who will think independently from religious doctrine (me, for instance). Whether or not you feel that your life has value is independent from your religion, it may have more to do with your self-esteem and life goals and accomplishments.

I agree that atheistic morals are based on the spur of the moment. so if you are president for example, then you would take oath to think and act in terms of the general vote. we don't have to have a christian president to keep from being subject to a power-hungry monster. as far as the buddhism stuff, it leaves far too many questions, and is very abstract. it's also hard to have any sort of conscious life in a religion (buddhism) that is so general.

Death is ultimate, and people are afraid to be what they have never been. since religion happened to (and was "destined" to) come before science, people grew comfortable with the idea that we would go to heaven when we die. instead of being comfortable with the fact that we just go unconscious when we die, the majority of us believe in an after existence, a "life" after death. something more. me? my ticker's gonna stop, if I'm asleep, all the better, if im in the shower, all the wetter, if im driving a car, watch the fuck out! then (my family, not knowing my wishes would probably have it otherwise): i would like to be ground up and put in a landfil. or just put me whole into a hole in the ground. I don't think i could be very picky at that point. (this is givin me some good ideas for my next thread).

I dont think that we (the WORLD!) have not had a power that is not fascist or communist ruled by an atheist. why can't a democratic society rely on atheistic ruling? if a christian ruled in a fascist government, would the dictatorship be any different? i feel it mightve been worse, contrary to some opinions. people tend to alter their beliefs to their own motives (towards materialism), or at least they justify their own actions circumventing their "beliefs". it would be best if these alterations came not from religious teaching but from historical experience and objective judgement (didn't hitler believe that god told him to carry out his infamous deed?)

theres no proof when theres possibility of coincidence. prohecies can also be lied about/not all that they seem. maybe you needed 2 grand and mysteriously someone sent you a bill with exactly two grand anonymously. did it occur to you that maybe someone read, your bills, overheard a conversation, or is your pal and works at a loan office. these are a few top-of-head-examples.

history
oral...(misconstrued almost each generation-divide years since said historical event, divide by 28, the average generation length (im guessing)) and how would any of us know anyway?

the most important, i believe, thing in considering information, is to first consider its source. but many people, especially in earlier years, were not scientifically oriented, so oral tradition is extremely unreliable, as people lie, and lying would certainly be encouraged in an oral history, to please the audience with more drama, of course!
if this is now a matter of basing religion on the occurence of prophecies coming true, i would have no part in it. what if there were a scientific experiement done to see how people act when someone predicts that something will happen to them in the future? it is a very pointing point for m e to ask: don't you think, if you believed something a prophet told you, that you would structure your life around that foreseen event, thus encouraging it to happen? what about all the prophecies that didn't come true. why don't you ever hear about those? (it's more convenient to the life of religion to only give evidence in a one sided way. this is corrupt, wrong, and ridiculous to think that people can consciously give in to these methods). a similar tragedy happened to science. if you readthe mismeasure of man you will learn of a "scientific" study done to correlate brain size with race. long story short, the data was added and specific things were disregarded to make it look like the whites were smartest, and blacks stupid, etc. etc. they also drew pictures of black men and compared them to apes. this type of data tweaking is attrocious and is probably the thing that makes me loathe.. not disagree with.. religion. i disagree with religion because of its origin. that's not the point. blacks are not apes, brain size is proportional to body size. it is probably brain complexity which accounts for "intelligence". there, now youve learned something.



***I have moved this thread because the responses have been lackluster and unsatisfactory. i have copied most of my replies to supplement the start of this new thread. for the full thread, see the east philos section, but please dont comment there, but here
 
Last edited:
The various theories that explain religion are, in brief:
  1. A given theistic belief of the hundreds, if not thousands, of individual theistic worldviews that are either extant or extinct, is correct.

    This explanation only works for one religion, however, and fails to take into account what motivations other religions have for their existence. Of course, it could rightfully be argued that each of the religions' believers think theirs is the correct religion, but, logically, the answer must actually be only one or none is correct. Some do argue that all religions are correct and their focus is on the one "true" God and that it is their individual methods or practices that are diverse, yet this doesn't explain the diversity –some of which is significant enough to be contradictory between religious cults.

  2. Religion is the human response to anxiety, fear, desperation and dissatisfaction and provides comfort to humanity.

    This explanation has been around for some time and is very plausible. It has been proposed by intellectuals like Freud, Hume, Spinoza, Marx, and Malinowski. Freud is quoted as having said religion "must exorcise the terrors of nature" and "reconcile men to the credulity of fate, particularly as it is shown in death." Hume noted that "the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear." These opinions are supported by the work of Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands where he found that the Polynesian inhabitants had varying degrees of magic for varying degrees of risk in their daily activities. If the natives were going to fish in their local lagoon, no magic was required; but as they ventured further from shore to the deep sea, the amount of ritual and magic involved increased proportional to the risk involved. This theory also supposes that people in all cultures fear the finality of death and the unpredictable forces of nature and therefore find comfort in religious beliefs of an afterlife or rewards/punishments in the form of bountiful seasons or catastrophes like floods and volcanoes.

  3. Religion creates and maintains solidarity and social cohesion.

    This is a theory of religion for which Emile Durkheim was a strong proponent (Durkheim 1965), but it was variously proposed by others such as Auguste Comte and even as early as Polybius of first century BCE Greece. Freud and Malinowski also commented on this theory as did anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown. Durkheim, however, was the most influential proponent of this theory and his position was that religion couldn't be actually about gods and deities (since they don't actually exist) and must therefore be about something else entirely. Durkheim asserted that religion seeks to divide the universe into two realms: the sacred and the profane. The sacred, being that which is devoted to the illusionary gods, and the profane, being everything else, sets apart the two realms. In ancient Greek religion, this was often a physical barrier at a sanctuary called the temenos, often just a low wall that surrounded the temple grounds. The temenos wasn't designed to restrict access but rather to demarcate the point at which the sacred began and the profane ended. According to Durkheim, the believers considered the "sacred" to be set apart from the "profane," but what really occurred was that the society was setting itself apart and thus providing a cohesive unity or a solidarity between itself and all else, such as other religions. The problem with this theory is, of course, that there are many religions, extant as well as extinct, in which there is no separation between the sacred and profane. The Navajo along with most Native American cultures view everything as sacred, albeit in varied degrees.

    This theory also makes "perpetuation of the society the purpose of religion (Guthrie 1993:17)," but there are religions that have destroyed their societies such as the Xhosa, whose beliefs caused the "cattle killing" in South Africa; and the inhabitants of Easter Island, who decimated their forests in their beliefs that included the giant monuments. Likewise, it can be argued that the Maya destroyed themselves because of ritual warfare and deforestation due to temple construction.

  4. Religion is whatever a given set of believers think it is and provides explanations valid for a given culture.

    Boyer (Boyer 2003:10-12) summarizes this theory quite well by pointing out that people created religion to explain puzzling natural and mental phenomena as well as the origins of things like plants, animals, humans, the world, etc., and that religion explains evil and suffering. Guthrie (Guthrie 1993) also calls this theory the intellectualist and rationalist theory, and compares it with science (though, clearly Guthrie is not a proponent of this theory) as a means of explaining the world. He cites Bernard Fontenelle, a 17th century intellectual: religion started when lighning, wind, and other natural phenomena made people imagine human like agents, "more powerful than themselves, capable of producing these grand effects." People imagine these agents as like themselves because they think analogically. Fontenelle's recognition that analogy and metaphor are universal makes possible a naturalistic and rationalistic account of religion."

    E.B. Tylor was one of the first to assert this theory with his study of Australian Aboriginals and his hypothesis that primitive religions begin with animism. Few who study religion today consider his work to have provided a valid or concise theory, but his discussions about animism bring up good points that relate to anthropomorphism, a concept that may well tie into each of the theories (except the irrational first in this list). Tylor proposed that early people contrived the notion of a soul or "spirit" after experiencing dreams or hallucinations about deceased loved ones and assuming that the reason these people could be "seen" after death was that there is something that survives the body when it stops living. This "life-force" can find its way into non-human things as well, such as crows, bears, rocks, etc. Tylor asserted that these "spirits" that inhabited various things by "animating" them, evolved into polytheistic religions then, finally, were reduced to a single god.



    [*]Religion has its origin in some biological or cognitive predisposition.

    Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist from the University of California-San Diego discovered that an individual's religiosity may be heavily influenced by the electrical activity of a specific region of the brain. Ramachandran evaluated 3 groups of people: 1) patients of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) who had religious "preoccupations;" 2) "very religious" people who were not TLE; and 3) non-religious people without TLE. He found that the first group had the highest response to religious words and icons, significantly more than the control group (Ramachandran et al 1997; Ramachandran 2003). There are other theories and suggestions that religiosity in humanity is an evolutionary advantage and is passed on through DNA. It could very well be that the willingness to "believe" is just the right addition to intelligence that allows us to develop technology. The technology of agriculture may have developed from the propensity for belief: procedures for food production and water management show up in the archaeological record as having "ritual" significance that varies in intensity and frequency from culture to culture. Undoubtedly, early humans applied magical thinking to the availability of food, rain, predators, etc.



References:

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Durkheim, E. (1965). The Elemental Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.

Guthrie, S. (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ramachandran, V., Hirstein, W., Narmel, K., Tecoma, E., & Iragui, V. (1997). The Neural Basis of Religious Experience. Annual Conference of He Society of Neuroscience, 23(Abstract #519.1).

Ramachandran, V. (Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California (San Diego)). (2003). Audio Q&A: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese. In Reith Lectures. Oxford University.
 
was this a thread that you made previously, or a paper you wrote for fun, or what?
numbers 2 and 4 ive thought of myself, but unlike you i lacked the previous literature to support it.
numbers 3 and 5 i had thought at vaguely.
thanks, it answers many of my questions.
i would still like to wonder about what would happen if the general public understood these ideas about religion.
what might it be like if we lived in an atheist, not christian, america? what would your opinion be if an atheist ran for president? would you vote for him or her? don't say that atheists don't have any morals and would screw us all over. I'm an atheist, and i know, if i were president (don't worry i hate america's politic policy), then i would judge for my people what i thought was the best for them actually i wouldnt want to be president anyway because i think the voters should be people with doctorates and masters degrees. a kindergarten teacher should be head moderator of the educated few, and the teacher would be chosen by people with PHDs in psychology. (i think ill try this in the gov section too).
 
A religious group, or cult, is not good for society, because it discriminates by itself.

But the religious teachings from many cultures are very usefull if one wants to know about our spirit, our life-source, life-energy; and even the nature of the Universe.

Also, I believe meditation is the only way to truly understand oneself, like the old latin saying I keep quoting:

"Homo nosce te ipsum!!"
 
Sorry, I didn´t address your question.

I find it quite simple: Religion exists because of people´s ego.

For example, I find it hard to believe that Jesus wanted Christianity to arise. But it was inevitable, like it has been with the true teachers of mankind.

Like Jesus tought unity, love. But His followers, by listening to His teachings, thought themselves to be better than the people that didn´t. That is how it all starts, people´s Ego.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top