Because religion evolved to thrive in us.
It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.
Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.
Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.
This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.
This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
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Because the lowest common denominator is much MUCH lower than you think it is.
This means it’s easy to indoctrinate and easy to maintain that for a massive number of people.
Scientific illiteracy is extremely high, and actual “6th grade reading comprehension” is the highest level of literacy for > 50% of a country like the U.S. and ~20% are low literacy or actually illiterate.
This means that half of everyone in the U.S. can read and understand what they read at or below a 6th grade level. This isn’t “reading big words”, it’s “tell us about what you read”, “what is the relationship between x & y” type questions.
This comment for example, up to this point only, would be difficult to understand & comprehend for > 50% of people in the U.S. (it demands an 11th grade reading comprehension). And may be misread, misunderstood, or not understood at all.
People are driven to religions to cults and alt conspiracy theories when they don’t understand how the world works around them. They latch onto extremely simple often misleading or incorrect ideas of how the world works because they can understand it and it “makes sense” within their sphere of ignorance (we all have one, this isn’t meant to be a disparaging term).
This means that the problem is that humans are just not smart enough to escape religion yet. It’s the simplest answer, and it appears to be correct.
Alternative ways of explaining the world have been around for like a century and a half, and religious conversion is slow.
Why we did religion in the first place instead of just “I dunno where stuff came from or why” is a much more interesting question IMO.
I think that for most people it’s nothing more than a social club. I have always been skeptical ever since hearing absurd stories about arks and being eaten by whales, but every once in a while (especially after sobering up) I went into various churches to see if I might have been missing out on something. Invariably I just found a social club of people just looking for excuses to feel better about themselves. Anything good that happens is a direct blessing from a doting god; anything bad is always the devil…personal responsibility is never part of the answer. Many are just uneducated and dont know how to think; they accept whatever Grandpa says as truth without any consideration, and this extends to pastors. I am atheist; my wife is a devout believer…but more and more she sees something horrible happen and can’t deny it when I point out that religion did that. She still has her higher power but is starting to see the brainrot and brainwashing in her friends and family and can’t understand why they do what they do while calling themselves ‘christians’. It’s not faith; it’s just social self-service.
I’m an effort to get you an answer that isn’t dismissive:
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Youth indoctrination, social conformity, and cultural isolation. If your parents, friends, and most of your community tells you something is true, you are unlikely to challenge it for a variety of reasons including trust (most of what they’ve taught you works for your daily life), tribal identity, etc
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People naturally fear death, and one coping strategy for the existential fear of death is to convince yourself that the death of your body is not the end of your existence. Science does not provide a pathway to this coping strategy so people will accept or create belief systems that quell that fear, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Relieving the pressure of that fear is a strong motivator.
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Release of responsibility. When there is no higher power to dictate moral absolutes, we are left feeling responsible for the complex decisions around what is or isn’t the appropriate course of action. And that shit is complicated and often anxiety inducing. Many people find comfort in offloading that work to a third party.
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The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.
Because there is no downside. I mean, the only thing that atheist think is appealing is that they can reason themselves out of religion. What makes you think that ‘reasoning yourself out of religion’ is attractive, desirable or a worthy goal? It just isn’t. It leads to existential crisis in most if not all cases. And then atheist take pride in surviving that crisis. Which, sure, admirable… But attractive? Of course not.
You can be religious and do anything in the world. Literally. I know that atheist love to focus on dumb fucks and literalists, and on how religions are being abused. But the truth is that religion is deeply personal and peoples relation with religion is completely their own. It’s extremely simple to pick and choose from the myriad of options within religion. Most religious people are not literalists.
And then you get connection with people, see them regularly, participate in rituals, celebration days, rules for engagement with life.
Plus, don’t forget, an extremely old and mystic piece of human history. The attempts of people to live in a world that has a God. Their struggles, their victories. In essence a reflection on the human condition. And you get to be part of that. Atheist are often too fast to explain religion as a sort of ‘failed science’, while it’s absolutely not. And of course if you can’t figure that out you’re going to ask why people want to believe in something like that.
There will never be a rational reason for the human condition. Religion will never ever not be part of humanity. As the only way in which the human condition can be contextualised is in a world that is created, and religions are the keepers of that knowledge.
Because we are convinced it is true.
The vast majority of people believe whatever the fuck they’re told to believe.
I don’t. My religious beliefs are something I came to myself. There is lots of evidence for a very early church, and the core story around Jesus hasn’t changed much, unlike other legends that evolve through history. The New Testament is pretty reliable as a historical document and many times atheist critics have been wrong, and their arguments are usually very easy to debunk.
How did you come to your faith?
In short, I evaluated the arguments, then realised that the arguments for Christianity were far better than the arguments against. The main argument for atheism is the standard of proof, but anyone can present them with all of the proof they’d like and they can still say “not enough”. There were people around in Jesus’ time who still didn’t believe yet saw the miracles and His resurrection
I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.
I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.
Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”
I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.
And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.
But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.
These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.
All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)
Just some followup thoughts:
- Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
- There are a ton of good books on these topics. “Stealing Fire” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal is a good place to start if you’re interested in the science of it or The Science of Enlightenment if you want to get a little deeper into the practice.
- If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don’t matter. Personal experience does. “But do you believe god exists?” Honestly it’d take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let’s go with “neither yes nor no” for the short version.
- Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.
Thanks, I had the same hunch but I didn’t yet put into proper words and ideas.
Do you think, should we extrapolate those experiences to something beyond or just accept it as part of human nature?
There’s a western meditation guy named “Daniel Ingram” who I have a certain amount of respect for. He readily answers questions about the risks and benefits of meditation-related things as well as the subjective experience of them. But any time he is asked about the “real world” (like, the metaphysical implications of these experiences), he responds that he’s “a pragmatist” and won’t speculate about the nature of reality or the existence/nonexistence of entities or powers.
(That said, there is one and only one story he tells that seems to have made him believe certain supernatural claims about the real world. He was “practicing magic” and drew an amber pentagram in the air and someone who hadn’t been present at the time later walked into the room and said “you just drew an amber pentagram in the air right here.” Or at least that’s roughly how he tells the story. And he does seem to believe there’s something to that beyond the natural.)
I’m not quite the purist he is. I don’t think it’s necessary to straight up refuse to believe anything about the real world or the nature of reality. And I don’t think that there’s nothing that can/should be gleaned about metaphysics from subjective (“religious”) experiences. (My experiences with contemplative practices has definitely changed my mind about some metaphysical things. The nature of conscious and of reality, the existence of capital-G-“God” (though the answer I find most compelling now definitely isn’t “yes” or “no”), etc.)
But it’s also important to keep it in perspective. Some of these experiences can feel like the most important thing every to happen to anyone. (That’s probably how many/most religions start, honestly. Someone has a mind-blowing experience and tells everybody about it and everybody else grossly misinterprets it because these experiences are ineffable – can’t be put into words – and before you know it you have the crusades and witch burnings and abstinance-only sex ed.) But a contemplative practice, done well, will tell you not to hold too closely to, well, anything really (potentially “except god”). Coming to some belief and holding it as the most important thing ever or basing your whole personality on it is absolutely problematic.
My advice is to hold any beliefs you come to from a religious experience (and any other beliefs you have for that matter) “loosely”. And I think this is helped by not restricting yourself to one religious system. Borrow from both western and eastern religious traditions. Monotheistic, pantheistic, pagan, etc. Indigenous spiritual practices. Even left-hand-path stuff. The more you do that, the better you drive home to your reptilian brain the point that nobody has a monopoly on religious experience and often those experiences even contradict each other.
I guess one other thing to mention is that adpting a particular set of religious beliefs can potentially be a boon to one’s contemplative practice. But for the reasons above, it can be dangerous.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!
Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.
I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.
Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.
Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.
I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.
We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.
The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.
And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.
(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)
Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.
For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.
I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.
I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream
lifedeath.I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.
Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.
Man believes in stories. Such as religion, or money, or companies.
Ref. Yuval Noah Harari.
The origins of the universe have still not being scientifically explained.
Cargo cult atheism has gotten to the point where people now confidently believe we have evidence of things which we do not.
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Atheists religiously repeating the word “science” long enough that they trick themselves into believing they have explained the origins of the universe. And thus there is no reason for anyone to believe in God.
Certainly science has achieved a lot. However we are no closer to explaining the origins of the universe as before. As the origin has not been explained why is everyone somehow so confident in the falsehood of a creator?
Agnosticism (not being sure about a creator) is totally fine. However Atheists have a weird obsession about being absolutely certain of something they cannot prove an their alternative for. Atheism runs on pure faith that “science will figure it out in the future”. It is a religion in itself.
The “largest minds” of Atheism are all too often based on pure emotion. As we find with Richard Dawkins, the man so smart that he can explain the universe away… and also believes Israel is not committing Genocide in Gaza.
https://raseef22.net/english/article/1095904-et-tu-dawkins-you-refuse-religion-but-support-israel
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Atheism is certainty of the nonexistence of a creator.
As clearly demonstrated in this thread by people certain of their atheism so much you would be hard pressed to find a religious person so arrogant in their beliefs.
Atheism is certainty of the nonexistence of a creator.
This is wrong. The only thing required to be an atheist is lacking a belief in theistic claims. You don’t need to make the claim that God doesn’t exist, and most atheists don’t.
The only thing we’re certain of (not absolutely, but fairly certain) is that theists haven’t met their burden of proof.
That’s called Agnosticism.
Atheism means you are certain that god does not exist.
You highlighted the A without any understanding of what the prefix a- means. It means not, or without.
I’m not a theist because they haven’t convinced me of any theistic claims. I don’t claim no gods exist. I just don’t know of any gods that exist, therefore I am without theism. A-theism.
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You are free to correct a person in a conversation if you feel so inclined.
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Indoctrination at a young age.
