religion, godHi guys :)
Across the world and the centuries people venerate their gods, looks like they need it, something is empty without it.
Some religions do good things, but why animal sacrifices ? Why subjugation of women ? Why preconception of social classes ?
I believe in God but I don’t need any religion to know what is wrong and right. So, being good or bad, why people want to believe ?
Thanks
score: 6
Religion is a byproduct of the way we mature.
Humans have a very long childhood, which is necessary in order to acquire from our parents the wide range of knowledge and experiences that we need to survive in the world as adults. A long childhood is needed because we have large brains with highly complex functions (such as language); other animals, even other apes, have shorter childhoods.
During childhood, one of the major strategies for us to learn is imitation. We are bound to replicate the behaviours that we observe in our parents. This helps us develop what we need to grow up, but it also means that any “useless” idea (some would say “meme”) propagates as well.
Since our minds are great pattern-detecting machines, it is easy to see how random beliefs based on false positives can easily propagate to new generations through this built-in imitation mechanism.
So, to answer your question, I wouldn’t say that “we want to believe”. We just believe because it is part of our nature. We are wired that way. It takes a lot of supra-natural (not to be confused with supernatural) intelligence to overcome the natural trend and rationalise it away.
By the way, Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” explains this argument much better than I.
Bad brain wiring. Bad cultures. Bad thinking.
Your questions starts “across the centuries”. This is very important. People sacrificed animals because it sent smoke up into the air, a place they had no knowledge of, no comprehension of the 14 billion year old universe. But light and warmth and water came from there, so communicating with it, giving it a gift seemed reasonable. The reasons for doing that changed drastically in the last few hundred years, so you can’t ask the question as a universal, as if it still applies to all people the same way it did then.
Clarification: You said, “looks like they need it, something is empty without it.” True, we have always needed to make sense of evil, the feeling of isolation coupled with the need for companionship, the impulse to fight and the desire for peace, not to mention the meaning of dreams or any unexplained phenomena. But recently, we have been able to answer some of this with brain science, evolution and quantum theory, and for what is unanswered, we have a process to explore it. So are you making a “god of the gaps” argument?
That argument had some logic to it 400 years ago, but it needs to be admitted that it was a theological error. If not, we will see the end of theology.
Some people need a crutch, some don’t
People get pleasure from believing, and it can help to relieve pain.
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