Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 15 - August 26, 2018
Fourth, religions are continuously emerging, and the success or failure of each is largely determined by the economic, political, or military success of its adherents.
Finally, the emergence of new religions occurs primarily by borrowing gods and theology from older religions. For example, among the deities of ancient Greece, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, is thought to have come from Cyprus and to have been “brought to Greece by sea-traders.”
The dilemma of death was an inevitable consequence of the evolution of the human brain, but gods and religions have provided us with a solution to this innate and infinite dilemma.
The Denial of Death when he called humans “gods with anuses”: “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”
Using neuroscience studies not, of course, available to Darwin, chapters 1 through 5 describe five major advances in “the reasoning powers of man.”
As hominin brains grew in size and developed increasingly strong connections among various brain areas, we acquired intelligence, an ability to think about ourselves, an ability to think about what others were thinking (theory of mind), and then an introspective ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves. Finally, about 40,000 years ago, we acquired an autobiographical memory, an ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time in a way not previously possible. We had become modern Homo sapiens.
In The Faith Instinct, Wade argued that “the evolutionary function of religion … is to bind people together and make them put the group’s interests ahead of their own.” Thus, said Wade, “groups with a stronger religious inclination would have been more united and at a considerable advantage compared with groups that were less cohesive.”
Thus, for Freud “religion arises only in response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses,” and once people have resolved their unconscious conflicts thorough psychoanalysis, they will have no further need for religion.
Guthrie claimed that anthropomorphizing is evolutionarily advantageous, “because the world is uncertain, ambiguous, and in need of interpretation.” From an evolutionary point of view, he noted, “it is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder.”
few researchers have even suggested that “our universal spiritual/religious proclivities represent … a genetically inherited trait … what we could call ‘spiritual’ genes.” If true, then “human beings are genetically predisposed or ‘hard-wired’ to believe in the concepts of spiritual reality, a God or gods, a soul, and an afterlife.”
A final question regarding theories of the origin of gods is whether the emergence of the gods represents an adaptation of evolution and was evolutionarily advantageous, or whether the emergence of gods was merely a by-product of evolution, “a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind,” in the words of one writer. Debate on this issue has been ongoing and spirited, with the majority of writers favoring an adaptationist position.
in Religion Explained, cited previously, who argued that gods and religions are by-products of the human tendency to seek patterns.
In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, a list of history’s 100 worst manmade atrocities, 25 of the 100 were god contests.
Just as new gods and religions will continue to be born, so others will continue to die. Many old gods, such as Anu, Ra, Zeus, and Jupiter, grace the world’s art museums, admired but not revered, viewed as artistic creations rather than divine creations.
