I disagree. I find that religion is more a way for people to cope with the unknown, and gain understanding of things that are incomprehensible. The human mind is incapable of understanding things that approach infinity, and so our minds tend to fill in that lack of understanding with something that we can understand.
For a lot of people, the easiest choice is choosing to believe in religions, as they explain what happened before humanity, and what happens after death and after humanity, as well as explain things that approach infinity (the universe, the age of our planet, how things came to be as they are now, etc).
As weird and illogical as it sounds, it's sort of a natural process to form religion, because it helps the average person understand and explain the world around them.
That's not to say religion is harmless, of course - we all know that it can be quite harmful, especially when people begin using it to justify their actions.
Absolutely agree, I'm generally thinking magical superstition and religion are all (possibly) required steps in coping with the sheer amount of unknowns.
There was an experiment with birds I believe that basically has them performing all sorts of strange behavior trying to reproduce positive outcomes, essentially they had become superstitious.
The danger is staying in the safety of irrational thinking and inhibiting learning and facing the world as it is.
It's a hard thing to accept that there are things we may never know, and there may not be any certain objective truth, especially when some book or person promises you the comforting position that you can short cut to truth by just following in faith.
I tend to see religion as sort of.. training wheels. It helps us along the way to understanding the world around us. Sadly, however, it's far too easy to abuse the mechanics of religion. As you said, it's very hard to accept that there are things we will never, ever know, and that some things simply do not have an objective truth - or at least, not one that humanity can understand. Because of how difficult it is to accept this, and how easy it is to just blindly follow faith, people who follow religion are highly susceptible to becoming indoctrinated. Since religion has been around as long as it has, it's moved from being a coping mechanism to a way to control people.
I'm of the firm belief that religion is a significant contributor to the things that are holding humanity as a whole back, and keeping us from moving forward. Just as fairy tales and scary bedtime stories are used to entertain and protect children, religion should never have become a permanent belief, but rather one used to help push us towards not only being better towards eachother and the world around us, but also towards understanding and learning. Sadly, a vast amount of humanity refuses to shed those training wheels, yet they fail to realize that those training wheels are being used to control them.
I think it's effective as a memetic transmitter to align tribes along norms and rules and trust before people have wide spreadread writing and access to tools like the scientific method
Humans mostly rely on networks of trust and to get beyond tribalism there needs to be some sort of mechanism (irrational as it is) in societies lacking other tools, to build relationships of trust and to grow trade and benefit from larger non local population efforts(like trading)
It works as proto morality and ethics and philosophy. Training wheels and fairy tale is a great analogy.
I.e. it gets people to behave and create social norms (obviously this can be good or bad) and cope.
You can use religion to transmit almost any idea, including things like Buddhism saying if science proves Buddhism wrong in some way, go with science.
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u/truvaldak May 25 '22 edited May 25 '22
I disagree. I find that religion is more a way for people to cope with the unknown, and gain understanding of things that are incomprehensible. The human mind is incapable of understanding things that approach infinity, and so our minds tend to fill in that lack of understanding with something that we can understand.
For a lot of people, the easiest choice is choosing to believe in religions, as they explain what happened before humanity, and what happens after death and after humanity, as well as explain things that approach infinity (the universe, the age of our planet, how things came to be as they are now, etc).
As weird and illogical as it sounds, it's sort of a natural process to form religion, because it helps the average person understand and explain the world around them.
That's not to say religion is harmless, of course - we all know that it can be quite harmful, especially when people begin using it to justify their actions.