Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 08 July 2010

What Purpose Does Religion Serve?

Most, if not all, human groups have had a religion. So, the pertinent question is “what purpose does it serve?”. What has persuaded people to believe that all the weird behavior associated with religions has some benefit?

The first step to an answer is the fact that natural selection gave us a mind adapted to certain particular concepts and variations similar to them. These concepts and their variations are what makes religion attractive to us. Many attempts at analyzing religion fail because they concentrate on some aspect of it familiar to the analyst. Yet, the word religion is meaningless to the many people in the world who have only ever met one religion, their local or tribal religion. To them, religion is an aspect of their local or tribal culture not noticed as being peculiarly separated from it. Religion is mainly distinguished from culture when people are exposed to different ones, with different practices, when tribes coalesced into cities and nations, and commerce began on a wide scale.

We humans are social animals. It does not mean that we are essentially solitary animals who have decided to live together. It means we have evolved to be social. We have developed basic emotions and habits of mind adapted to social living. We are not solitary animals because we cannot do without our neighbors, without some neighbors—a group of people around us. No human left fending for itself until adulthood can emerge as normal. Our humanity is a function of being social, of having other people around us as we grow up, with whom we interact, who help and teach us. Consequently, human beings have a “social mind”, and it is this social mind that makes religion possible.

If there is any one factor responsible for religion, this is it, but the social mind is itself complex, with many different aspects, with different purposes and origins. We have inference systems, we have emotions and we have a multitude of additional mental features and adaptations inclining us towards ways of living harmoniously with others in our group, but with a suspicion and distrust of strangers. These complicated mental interactions, adaptations to social living, happen to make us susceptible to religion too. Religion is a by product of social life, a by product of the evolutionary direction we have taken—to live communally and co-operatively.

The Supernatural

We in the modern world regard the supernatural as mysterious, which is to say that it is out of the ordinary and peculiar to such an extent that no one has ever had the chance to study it adequately enough to understand it. People in less sophisticated societies than ours, however, often regard the supernatural as commonplace—far from being out of the ordinary, it is perfectly normal. Their world is infested with ghosts, witches, curses and malevolence, all of it everyday stuff, albeit not well understood. The peculiarity of the supernatural to us is rather a measure of how far we have moved from needing it in our daily lives.

Yet, in churches, people can be as primitive as they wish, even in our society. No one sane talks to statues, but uttering a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary or a saint to intercede with God on their behalf is commonplace among Catholics. They are talking to a statue or other image of the Virgin or saint as if it could hear them, but they claim they are not talking to the image but merely using it as a focus of their prayers. Well the ancient Greeks and Romans standing before the statue of Zeus or Jove might have made the same claim!

If a vandal had hacked the statue of the Virgin or saint into pieces, the reaction of the Christian would be outrage. Why should the spoiling of a mere artifact used as a focus of attention cause such outrage? Plainly the statue is more than just a focus of attention to the pious Catholic. They feel outraged because the statue or image is actually the Virgin or saint in some sense. It is not just a painted sheet of wood or a carved block of stone, for they must know that an artist or a monumental mason could replace the image using the common materials, the wood and stone, needed for it. Then they would have a new, perhaps better, focus for their prayers, that they could address as if it could hear them. The point is that the believers praying to the image suspend their knowledge of reality for the sake of their beliefs—their religion—and others find it acceptable that they should do so, often even though they would not do it themselves.

People have mental categories that let them infer the properties of certain things once they have been placed in an appropriate category. Most things thus categorized are everyday things we meet in our experience of living, but, once some strange violation of the properties of an object normally categorized appropriately are understood to have occurred, it is regarded as supernatural. Thus a flying horse is considered as supernatural, and similarly a talking donkey. But excessive violation of norms does not make something even more supernatural, but rather it makes them comical. A flying talking donkey would not seem supernatural to most people, but merely a cartoon character, even to most believers. The categories apply to all the subjects of experience before they can become supernatural in some way. They are thought of as the “essence” of things. Cattle have hooves, horns and eat grass. The category for cattle is like Plato’s ideal or form of a cow or bull—a template for all the real cows and bulls that exist.

Knowing the category of an object allows us to infer its general characteristics, for it tells us the appropriate template or ideal. Categories can therefore be arranged into taxonomies, super and sub categories, and the supernatural menagerie consists usually of the categories with a defective or abnormal property. Among the categories is one for people like ourselves that can recognize others as having a mind like our own. But violate the category by imagining a mind free of a body and we have something supernatural—a spirit or a god—a disembodied mind or personality. Natural categories apply to objects we meet in normal life, and that our predescessors met with during our evolution, but once we add an abnormal characteristic, the category is no longer normal or natural. We have invented it. We invent the supernatural. But how do we do it and why?

Intentionality

Even infants can recognize intention in the movement of things. When they are shown an animated cartoon of a hill with, say, a blue circle attempting to ascend it, assisted sometimes by a red triangle, but hindered by a yellow square, then are offered a red triangular cushion and a yellow square cushion to cuddle, they favor the “helpful” red triangular cushion and sometimes even smack the “naughty” yellow square cushion. Not only do infants see intentionality in the cushions shown on the cartoon, they even judge them morally.

From tests like this, psychologists are sure that humans, even at this young age, are aware of intent and morality. They may attribute intent to their toys and judge them accordingly. Evidently, it is natural for a human mind to do these things. As they could hardly have learnt these things at such a tender age, they are instincts we have because they have given us a reproductive advantage in our evolution.

We have evolved in a dangerous and uncertain world where we are prey for certain large raptors. By being able to anticipate intent, we have improved our chances of survival, and the sooner we do it, and can bawl to alert our mother and others in the group, the more likely are our chances of living to be able to produce offspring. Whatever it was in our genetic make up that gave us the ability, is passed on to our own kids, but not to the kids of those without this factor, and so our lineage has the reproductive advantage. Eventually, those without it have all died out, and all humans have it. It has become a human instinct.

A leopard is intent on killing us to eat us, but so too is a rotting log when it is actually a crocodile, and maybe even when it is a rotting log, for we might innocently use it to step on, and be propelled into the water when it yields to our weight. Thus we do not only conceive of animate objects as having malicious intent. Yet by attributing intent to inanimate objects, we are violating a natural category and putting them into a supernatural one.

Intuitions about categories are not necessarily conscious, because young children have such intuitions. They are fully aware that a real cat can move of its own accord, but not a toy cat. Asked to explain why, the children will even offer a rationalization. They might say the real cat can move because it has legs. When the legs on the toy cat are pointed out to them, they might agree, but themselves point out that these are not good legs. They already have real cats properly categorized as different from toy cats, but they do not know why. People are the same in their approach to the supernatural. They have intuitions about the intentionality of spirits, categorizing them as disembodied minds but cannot explain how such entities can see without eyes, or think without a brain.

The “Disgust” Instinct

Religion depends on different cognitive dimensions of the human brain apparently alien to what many of us think of as religious. Besides being social animals, we are also generalists—we are situational generalists because we can survive in different environments, and we are dietary generalists because we are omnivorous. Being a generalist has some evolutionary advantages, but some dangers too. We are often faced with passing through places with food we are not familiar with, and they might not be wholesome. Our reaction, one that has evolved—people that did not have it did not survive—was a sense of disgust for things that seemed unwholesome.

We can safely scavenge animal carcases that are not long dead, but beyond a short while, depending on conditions, dead meat begins to putrefy. It then becomes disgusting to us. We will not eat it. Things that stink are most often unwholesome, and we have evolved to avoid them. Places that stink are the same, and we find that food and places might look unpleasant to us. Our sense of disgust is a warning to us of decay, pollution, contamination, excreta—the presence, in fact, of invisible poisons—dangerous bacteria. Disgust is a warning system against potential contagion, which:

• operates though the danger itself is not visible
• tells us that the danger is immediate—we need to respond quickly
• warns us that we need to clean ourselves, for the danger is contagious and we might spread it.

This “contagion system” that we have makes us hyper cautious. People may be neurotically obsessed with cleanliness, using disinfectant and multiple washings when they suspect something disgusting has polluted a utensil, or a food preparation area, but when our contagion system was evolving, we had no remedies like disinfectants and pure water for cleaning. Repeated and thorough purification was the only alternative to discarding the object all together.

Gossip

We are a co-operative species. Our ancient need to range widely together while hunting and gathering has also made us particularly inclined to exchange information. Gatherers gossip together about where roots and berries can best be found, and hunters chatter about where the game will be and when. We therefore need to be able to find landmarks and to navigate our foraging and hunting space, note seasonal changes in the habits of game, exchange knowledge about potential hazards, and so on. We are bonded together by gossiping, not by grooming as in apes, because gossiping allows us to interact with a group of people simultaneously. Living together allows us to co-operate to our mutual advantage, and to do that we need to exchange information. Humans are like squirrels but we hoard information.

Another peculiarity of living socially and co-operatively is that we need to understand what other people’s intentions are, and that means gathering even more information. We have to remember other people’s faces and characteristics—their personal data—and be able to comprehend multiple levels of intentionality via a theory of mind or intuitive psychology—realizing that others have intent, noticing what interests them, realizing their aims, and figuring out their motivation. Gossiping relays one to another what we need—information—information that is socially useful about status, skills, sexual interests and honesty. To retain all this data, we need a mental filing system. Our social intentions are far more complicated than those of most other species, whence our “social minds” and “social intelligence”.

Everyone gossips, though gossip, in our society, is frowned upon as tittle tattle and trivia, not worthy of anyone sensible. One reason, in a male dominated world, is that women are more accomplished gossips and often have better verbal skills than men. Yet men have dominated our societies for three or four thousand years, and claim they do not gossip but speak only of serious things. Yet when they converse in their pubs and clubs, they are very often gossiping too.

Women are probably better verbally because groups of women gathering roots and berries, accompanied by children, were the first to practise gossiping, and so have better developed verbal skills than men. The children, male and female, heard them and picked up the habit in the company of their female guardians, but once adult, the males had less opportunity to use speaking, often requiring to be silent to stalk game. Thus, talking passed to men secondarily, as a childish habit less often used in adulthood, but it then extended male bonding too by being found useful in planning the hunt and how to work together on other mutually useful projects, like hut building and toolmaking—in co-operating.

In the normal human being, the structures in the brain needed for these social functions now already exist through adaptation to human sociality, so people naturally enjoy human groups and co-operating with others. Unless they have some mental deficiency, like autism, they no longer have to work out how to interact with others. It is instinctive. Nor are we limited to merely responding to events. We can imagine what will or might happen, and what we are aiming to achieve, and plan ahead. Our thoughts are effectively decoupled from direct external input. In short, our mental processes, our imagination, can be our motivation.

Extending the Notion of Disgust

Human behavior is conditioned by this plethora of mental systems, and they have changed their focus over the millennia. The human sense of disgust has changed from being only disgust at food, and perhaps certain places, to disgust at others in society. Disgust at the corruption of a corpse motivated people to dispose of them, albeit with suitable ritual in recognition that this obnoxious piece of rotting meat was once a group member, a relative, perhaps, or a friend. Specialists emerged ready to take on the task of handling dead bodies to dispose of them, people undertaking to do an essential job for the health of society. But our disgust and contagion systems meant those benefiting attached their disgust of physical corruption to those handling the corpse, finding them to be as polluting and untouchable as the corpse itself. Then their families were too!

The fear, in fact, was of the invisible agents that spread poison as bad emanations from decaying bodies, the danger we now know to be that of the transfer of bacteria, but then thought of as an evil agent or fluxion. Unclean people could carry these emanations which became personified as malevolent agents or spirits. From these changes arose the whole religious doctrine of pollution and cleanliness. It shows that religion often and perhaps generally depends upon evolved human behavior that does not seem relevant to religion in the least, in this case upon our mental systems for infering what may be bad for us reproductively—it might kill us before we reproduce—and so has become instinctively avoided.

We have different types of such systems controlling our emotional reactions, social reactions and behavior towards others—morals! It is this natural architecture of the mind that religions have commandeered for their own, often unnatural and often antisocial uses. In many of the major religions, their adepts think religion is principally about beliefs because now their religions mainly are. It hinders the appreciation of the proper psychology of religion. Religion is properly an aspect of culture—the particular habits and practices that mark off one people from another. Religion is to be done, not merely contemplated, and done socially, not in isolation. Even in a vast religion like Catholicism, much of it marks off important events in the life of the Church—the church calendar—or the members of its congregation—weddings, christenings, funerals, etc.

In tribal societies, it is the same, the ceremonies and rituals being considered to have been prescribed by some ancestor of the tribe, or a spirit or god in less localized religions, and these supernatural agents supervize the proper performance of the rite. To all intents and purposes, the supernatural agent is another, albeit senior, member of the tribe or congregation, which interacts with members by giving and receiving—giving reassurances and strength while receiving sacrifices, prayers and gratitude. These agents were thought to have a personality and a commitment to the worshipers, whether as ancestors or gods.

Worshipers know, in their turn, that by performing the ritual precisely according to the proper prescription, the agents will be impressed in some way, and will favor the tribe, but tribal members are often unconcerned about the nature of the agents or how they have acquired their superpowers. It is enough to know that they do have the power to influence material lives, and this is as true of many believers in advanced religions today as it was of the original tribal ones.

Agency

Whatever the nature of ancestors spirits and gods, they are usually construed as people with essentially human personalities and similar intentions—agency. We saw that an evolved trait of humans, a trait which exists for its survival value, is to see agents behind many events that we experience in life. The rotten log by the river proves, fortunately, not to be a crocodile, but still throws the human who steps on to it into the river. Imagining that such logs lurk with some malevolent intent makes people hyper cautious, thereby saving lives and giving us an instinct for caution by attributing intent where there is none, in fact. We are evolutionarily predisposed towards agency.

Of course, we are familiar with agency directly through interacting in sophisticated ways with our fellow humans, each of whom we know have their own motives and intentions. So, by imagining agency in inert things, we are attributing them with a human quality of their own, or to an hidden agent residing within them and causing their response to our presence. In a similar way, as children we see faces and forms in the patterns made by shadows and the wallpaper, in clouds, in knots in tree trunks, in eroded rocks, and inanimate objects generally in Nature. S E Guthrie (Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, 1993) has delved into this tendency of ours to anthropomorphize things in our environment in some detail. Our hyper sensitivity to such shapes is again beneficial to our survival.

From these degrees of hypersensitivity, we are inclined to get false positives—we see or suspect agents where there are none—and we are alerted to potential threats when nothing actually threatens us. We are therefore generally ready to respond at the crack of a twig, or the creak of a floorboard, an ominous shape, a scent or breath of air. We are inferring from signs and signals around us that danger lurks—something possibly with malevolent intentions towards us, perhaps a predator or someone from an enemy tribe. It is natural for us to do it, and even when we reassure ourselves that we are safe, there was no predator there after all, we still suspect something was. Something hidden is out there! By attributing signs and sounds around us with intent, we are giving things in our environment a human characteristic, and so are creating a supernatural category. We are creating God—or rather spirits and gods—in our own image—not the reverse!

As the signs and sounds were not comforting, but the exact reverse, the spirits, the disembodied personalities we imagined out there, were not conceived as being kind. They were thought of initially as being malevolent. Even the ancestors were not initially thought of as being well disposed towards us. At root, they were akin to predators and enemy tribesmen, and invited fear and loathing. Their unpleasantness was rationalized as being because they were strict guardians of tribal culture and values—after all, they had given them to us—and they had founded the tribe for our benefit as members of it, so ultimately they had us at heart. They were essentially kind, but were angry when tradition was badly kept. Eventually, kindness overpowered anger, and we ended up with Christianity.

Of course, in human society, children are introduced to their parents concepts before they have ever been in a wood alone. Our impressions have been conditioned or pre-empted by culture, ever since humans began to gossip, and eventually, we lose all awareness of how our ancestors arrived at a particular concept. Only with evolutionary psychology has evidence of our mental structures, their history and consequences, begun to emerge.

Sociability is so instinctive to us that children from the age of three make up little dramas which they act out with their toys, or with totally invisible, entirely imaginary friends. Studies show that these friends are not some confusion of reality and imagination. The children know perfectly well that their imaginary friend is not of the same nature as their real friends. Moreover, these children have a better developed intuitive psychology to allow them to play the roles of their “friends” appropriately. These friends cannot be properly shared with other children—they do not possess knowledge of their history and personalities as imagined by their originator.

Imaginary friends help to give children a theory of mind that is useful socially, and can be applied to the human conception of spirits and gods, but those who believe in spirits or gods do not consider them in any way imaginary, and the concepts of them are shared with other members of the tribe or church. Believers interact “socially” with them using social inference systems which it is assumed they share with tribal members or other co-religionists. A prayer to an ancestor or god assumes that they know and share our own concerns. The central difference is that we know our fellow humans have limited information, whereas the supernatural agent has far more, and perhaps total information.

The information they are considered to have, though, in tribal society, at any rate, is not abstract knowledge or encyclopedic knowledge, but it is social knowledge—knowledge pertinent to our social interactions within our own existence in our own society. It has been called “socially strategic” information because it is what we would like to know to be able to function more effectively within society. Ancestors or tribal gods, we think, always have this “strategic” information about our circumstances, so they know when we have done something contrary to tribal custom, of which they are the guardians—they know when we have sinned!

Moral Instinct

Another evolved mental system is our moral intuition. It is essentially an inbuilt emotion—an instinct—which we rationalize, making it easy to think it is purely reasoned. The emotion involved is not a heavy one like anger or even a softer one like love, but simply a feeling, comfortable or uncomfortable depending on whether we have acted according to it or otherwise. We saw that even young infants—barely toddlers—can have moral feelings, so they cannot have been taught. We naturally feel it when something is morally wrong. Most of us naturally feel it is wrong to deliberately harm others, and we feel guilty when we do it. Moreover, sociopaths usually know what is wrong and that they are doing wrong—they are not devoid of morals—but they are not emotionally bothered by it. Their fault is not lack of any sense of morality, but a lack of guilt, the feeling acting immorally arouses.

So the feeling of moral wrongdoing seems to be instinctive for children to have it at a young age without having been taught it by normal upbringing or formal teaching. These latter serve to reinforce and rationalize the moral instinct, not to create it. Warm blooded animals and birds feel empathy for others ot their kind, and even others not of their kind. It is caused by mirroring their distress. We feel it, and normally would feel it for the people we know we are harming when we act immorally—a feeling of the hurt our victims feel. The conflict induces guilt, a twinge of punishment for doing it. The sociopath is socially defective in not getting any such feeling.

Most young children, barely out of infancy, know that certain acts are intrinsically wrong. What is wrong or right to them is not merely a question of viewpoint. They are moral realists. Psychologist, Eliot Turiel, testing young children, has confirmed that they behave morally despite their immaturity. Even three and four year olds know that non-playful hitting of others is wrong, without any prescription given by adults. Shouting, however, is only seen as wrong when it has been specifically forbidden. One is an intuitive moral feeling, whereas the other is a social convention. At a slightly older age, children can put both moral and conventional harms into a taxonomy. They know the relative seriousness of immoral acts and conventional proscriptions. Perhaps surprisingly, neglected and abused children mostly retain their moral awareness, at least while young.

Morality, therefore is an instinct. It has evolved along with group living because it promotes prosociality instead of antisociality. But it must have evolved because the group would not tolerate anyone trying to cheat, or free ride, or trying otherwise to exploit the good will of the rest of the group. Such bad eggs must have been expelled from the nest! Antisocial people were thrown out, were deprived of group benefits and would have had to fend for themselves as solitary animals unless they were accepted into another group. Mostly, they could not have survived long in the face of rivalry from the groups. Even if they had succeeded in reproducing, their antisocial nature would have passed down their genetic branch and will have prevented any group of them from being stable. They would have remained as solitary animals, and eventually been eliminated by social humans.

Successful groups remained successful by continuing to expel antisocial members, leaving behind all those who were socially inclined, and they would have passed that inclination down their genetic branch until groups consisted predominantly of people who had inherited the genes responsible for sociability and co-operative behavior. Yet, even today, studies show that about a fifth of all humans try free riding and cheating within our groups, and now they cannot be expelled. Either the process has not been completed, or a small number of free riders and cheats has some other advantage for society, and the proportion has therefore stabilized. If not, though, the logical equivalent of expulsion would be the death penalty for cheats, or sterilization, but the four fifths of us who are gentle co-operators find that inhuman and unsatisfactory, so the prospect for society is that cheats will increase until society collapses. In our modern society, among the cheats are bankers and corporate bosses.

It is essential to the presevation of society that cheats are punished, preferably by expulsion from society so that future society is not contaminated by their descendents. That is what we did for two million years until we settled into modern civilization a few thousand years ago, and the capitalist economic system a few hundred years ago, when we decided to reward those who rob us all for their personal aggrandizement. There are doubtless costs involved, but the cost of not doing it is the destruction of society. It might already be too late. The cheats and free riders are in control, and it is the received wisdom they are able to propagate from their privileged position of power in society that theirs is not just the best but the only economic system for today, even though it reduces to “beggar my neighbor”, the very antithesis of society and, for that matter Christianity!

Most of us are outraged that bankers can rob us and go unpunished, rather rewarding themselves for their cleverness by giving themselves huge “bonuses”—otherwise meaning a cut of the swag. Equally, we are enraged when big businessmen pays no regard to the environment that we have to live in—they have the resources to live anywhere they wish—and have negligible thought for the welfare of the less fortunate, who have to scratch a living out of the environment as they find it—poisoned and polluted from corporate greed. Many of us condone their greed, and some of us approve of it—a monstrous crime—yet we get angry when someone pushes in front of us in a bus queue.

The serious cheats seem remote to us, and we get angry with those who are close, a reflexion of the pleistocene world in which our social life evolved. Similarly, we can relate and be appalled at one, or a few, deaths we can relate to, but cannot emote with the thousands killed annually on the roads. We sympathize with our own dead soldiers fighting in distant wars, but we cannot relate with the many more innocents they are killing in that foreign country, nor can we understand why.

It makes sense for us to legislate against the cheats, which we do in a small way through regulation, and to ensure that they are properly punished, which now we rarely do. Exploiting the group, cheating and freeloading has to be costly to those perpetrating these antisocial crimes. At present we reward them, or rather let them reward themselves. They should feel guilty, but are persuaded by their own ubiquitous propaganda that they deserve their rewards. In the traditional small group societies of humanity, the equivalent of entrepreneurs and bankers—the “big men”—were enterprising for the common good, and felt adequately rewarded by the pleasure they brought and the admiration and honor other members of the tribe held them in. Even in ancient Rome, wealthy people often spent much of their fortunes in public works and entertainments to be honored by the people. In the UK today, we have the honors system whereby people recieve a medal, a title or certificate for doing their public duty. Needless to say, mostly these honors go to the cheats and free riders!

Gratitude is the opposite emotion of guilt. It is the positive feeling of reward someone earns by helping others or willingly co-operating when cheating was open to them. Rich men who have become vastly wealthy from the labor of others, like the rich Roman, can earn the gratitude of the multitude by returning much of their wealth to the public, and it used to be common for rich men to do it, even in recent times. Today, it hardly ever occurs, and when it does, it has a hidden sting, an ulterior motive. It is charity that somehow feeds the the entrepreneurs’ market, or more generally supports the continuation of the antisocial economics by which they got rich—a form of propaganda, or even cornering the market.

What the arguments for capitalism miss is that co-operation, even within the capitalist system, is far more important than competition. Turiel’s studies showed that childen under four years of age will punish those who refuse to be co-operative. Adults in eastern societies will punish others for some slight, even killing them in so-called “honor killings”, most often of women seeking independence from feudal social rules. Sometimes feuds between families or clans last for generations. In western societies, we avoid it by trusting to the law, but the law must be seen to be applied, and must be applied fairly to work. To repeat, society depends upon miscreants being punished to hold together.

Religion has not been clearly visible in much of this, but the fact of evolved morality is central to it. We have that instinct for what is socially wrong and right. Once we humans begin to think in terms of powers like totems and ancestors, spirits and gods, having a personality, we accept that they are interested parties in the moral decisions and behavior of the tribe. These powers were part of the tribe—the personification of it—and, like us, were interested in what went on in it. Members of the tribe all shared knowledge of the nature, powers and personality of the spirits, so, although the spirits objectively were imaginary, they were not merely subjective. What is subjective is known only to one person. What is objective is agreed by everyone.

The spirits were considered as disembodied tribal members, ancestors—not fantasies or imaginary, but actually present still, a shared albeit invisible reality. The same remains true of our concepts of God, Allah, and so on. Believers confuse shared beliefs with objective reality, because, for them, they are objective reality—they agree on them. But nowadays, agreement is not sufficient. Objective reality has to be testable, and the result of the test agreed upon! It prevents everyone agreeing on something that can be shown to be false.

The key point about the ancestors or gods is that they possess strategic information concerning the tribe. They know and guard what is right and what is wrong in and for the tribe, who is honest, who are suited for marriage, what is relevant, who deserves punishment, what is fair—everything that is important to the human social mind.

The Social Mind

Much of what is important to the social mind is naturally moral, derived from the moral instinct that underpins sociality. Consequently, the strategic information possessed by the ancestors and spirits is information concerning morals. Given sufficient information about some act—all the relevant information, in other words—we feel we can judge whether it was right or wrong. The ancestors have all such strategic information within the tribe. After all, they founded the tribe, and are the guardians of its culture, which is to say that they are the personification of the tribe. So the basic religious idea is that of a disembodied social mind aware of everything happening of any moral or social consequence, and supposed able to make a correct judgement of it.

If someone utters a word which is taboo—or blasphemous, as we might say today—we know the supernatural agent knows we uttered it. We therefore feel guilty. Most of us feel guilt when we do something immoral, and the belief that supernatural agents have that piece of strategic knowledge offers us an explanation of our natural instinct. We worry that someone saw us, and fear that even if no one human did see us, an ancestor did. Here then is an encapsulation of the basic notion of religion. Failure to follow our instinct to help others and co-operate with them makes us feel guilty, we think we have been seen by an ancestor, or god and so feel guilt. We are therefore obliged to keep the ancestors on side by being moral, if possible, and if not by placating them in some prescribed way.

The ancestors or spirits are persons—personalities—with a social mind and respond to those seeking to help them just as a fellow human in the tribe would. To keep the spirits on side, the tribespeople offer them a sacrifice. Ancestors are tribal members still, and everyone likes a feast, so having a feast pleases the ancestors no end. The whole tribe will eat the sacrificed pig or sheep, and everyone will benefit from having high protein meal once in a while. In addition, people benefit because the ancestors respond with favors exchanged with the tribe for honoring the ancestors with the sacrifice. It is simple a fair exchange of favors. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours, but not with a fellow living human being in the tribe, but with the spirits of notionally former members—the ancestors. Once again, it reflects the co-operative society.

Our social mindset readily lets us picture unseen beings as the causes of inexplicable happenings, like fortune and misfortune. Such events were seen not in general terms but in social ones. Thus, an accident might be seen as due to some sort of cheating—maybe witchcraft. The same is true of someone proving to be exceptional at some valuable skill that changes the regard they are held in by tribal chiefs, and even their whole social status. Some differences in social status may be acceptable—classes or castes—but such differences are justified as being differences in the “essence” of people in the different castes, essence being an intrinsic unchangeable quality. As essence does not change, good fortune might be seen as having been caused by someone, an evil spirit or a witch, and witches were considered to be cheats or thieves, people aiming to take what is not theirs—status, wealth, health or even life. The ancestors are then seen as protectors.

Such constructs are functions of our social minds. We live socially and interact socially, even before we have to confront Nature, so fortune and misfortune is a social matter. Someone—an ancestor or evil spirit or witch—caused it, and that idea with our moral instinct generates the notion of unseen people causing things to happen that otherwise would be inexplicable.

Tribal spirits are often ancestors or totem animals, often considered as related to the tribe as a type of ancestor, and present day cousins or even siblings. So, totem animals can be ancestors too. But ancestors are dead, and here arises the notion of life after death, because the ancestors are still supernatural members of the tribe, though they are dead! Death is not final. The tribe continues to exist when members of it die, but its customs and culture continues on as if it is everlasting. That is because the ancestors continue to guard the tribe and its traditions.

Ancestors remain members of the tribe, retaining their human characteristics, their ability to exchange favors with living members, and their senses of anger and gratitude when the tribe’s culture is violated or a gift offered. Yet they have no bodies. Their putrefying bodies have had to be disposed of in some way, for putrefaction is disgusting to us. Even Neanderthals knew something had to be done with dead bodies. They surrounded their dead with flowers, and attempt to make them less disgusting by disguising their smell and appearance while they were being ritually buried. Early modern humans did the same. It was an early commonplace that corpses had to be removed as digusting, but these had been valued members of the tribe not long before, and their personalities remained with the tribe to guide it.

Purity, Pollution and Death

Human societies seem always to have a link between death, spirits and religion. A feature of the social mind is that it is a narrative mind—it strives to join up experiences into a coherent story. It finds the effects of causes and the causes of effects. Perhaps as a result people realized that they can plan ahead. The have learned that by doing something a particular effect can be expected. Early humans were not always right in their inferences but they were often enough to appreciate that planning was possible and its value. Naturally, they must have realized too that they would die, but must also have felt that, when they did, remaining as respected members of the tribe, albeit now as ancestors, was a comfort to them. They joined the guardians of the traditions of the tribe, so they had better know them and stick to them while alive, for when they were dead they would be relying on reciprocating with the living members for their succor. It was a fair exchange, but they had to do their bit, even when they were dead.

Psychologists find that people, told stories in which death is prominent, begin to act as moral guardians though they are still alive. They get much harsher in wanting to punish social deviance, and are more rigorous in punishing defamation of treasured cultural symbols, like the national flag, the cross, the prophet Mohammed, and so on. They also become more suspicious of people from other groups, more inclined to judge their activities negatively, and more antagonistic to those, even of their own community, who disagree with their views. Awarenes of mortality generates a socially defensive attitude, a psychological trick used continuously these days by governments—especially those of the right—stirring up fear of terrorism when the chances of getting killed in a road accident are far more likely. By sticking to tribal—to social—norms, people establish their right to be post mortem guardians of them—to become tribal ancestors, or, today, to expect an afterlife in the balmy place!

People seem to desire the comfort of a life and purpose after death, but funerary rituals have nothing to do with it. They all emerged from the disposal of the dead body. People are anxious and emotional while the dead body is still around, but the anxiety is not about their own death. Corpses are horrible, not merely because they are corrupting by the minute, but because they once were a person—they once had a personality, perhaps that of someone we knew and loved. Emotions are therefore mixed in the presence of a dead body, and it is the conflicting emotions of love or respect versus disgust that appals us. Modern horror films play on it by having the dead walking. Similarly, the ancient Hellenes could not comprehend the Christian idea of resurrection without conjuring up thoughts of a putrefying corpse apparently alive and walking.

From Zoroastrianism, dead bodies were thought of as polluting—a manifestation of disgust and contagion—so they could not be treated in a way that allowed the elements to be polluted by them. Corpses had to be kept clear of contact with water or the earth, at least while the flesh was still putrefying, and cremation was forbidden as polluting fire and air. Zoroastrians had the Towers of Silence in which dead bodies were placed on stone tiers to be picked by crows and vultures until only the dry bones remained, or they were placed in stone tombs—a tradition that was continued in the Zoroastrian offshoot, Judaism—until only the bones remained to be placed in an ossuary. Stone was considered impervious to the pollution, so protected the earth from corruption.

Contact with a corpse polluted the person who had been in contact with it, and he, or she, required ritual purification—holy men particularly. Undertakers could not avoid such contact and pollution, so they were a caste of untouchables, pollution being thought of as contagious. The social mind, alongside its natural feeling of disgust at bad meat, has an associated feeling of contagion—that contact with anything decaying could have undesired consequences. These are evolved instincts that religion uses incidentally, but which give its doctrines and rituals a cachet of truth, and produce related tales of the undead flitting around as vampires spreading contagion with a bite for which religion—the cross—is the cure.

The contagion system applied to dead bodies is naturally widespread, invoking personal feelings of disgust and unspecified but fearful danger. Moslems have to dispose of a corpse within a day. The horror of death is that we knew the dead person only yesterday as a person! Now it is disgusting and getting more disgusting by the hour. So, the doctrine and ritual of death concerns the proper disposal of the dead body while insulating we who still live from the horror of it. It is less horrifying when we think they still live on as ancestors, and will in a sense remain with us in the tribe—but spiritually! The ritual assures us that this belief is upheld, and that we too in our turn will escape putrefaction in the same way. The magic implicit in the ritual lets the person and not the disgusting body transfer effortlessly to its new state of being, and with no danger to those of us who remain. Without the proper death rites, the corpse might reanimate itself as a zombie, vampire or werewolf, some horrible, predatory monster.

Ritual

A rite or ritual differs from ordinary acts in being prescribed by rules, like a game. Indeed, rituals look very much like games, that have become fossilized and their original meaning, and perhaps purpose, lost. They are, for example, often conducted in an archaic dialect, or even a dead language. It is likely that rituals began as occasions of social bonding—feasts and fun days—assigned to specific purposes, sowing, harvest, births, marriages, passage into adulthood, and to specific cultural occasions for the tribe, which then became celebrations of the ancestors, and eventually gods. What is common is that rituals are communal, originally everyone in the tribe would have been involved in them, and even still, in modern extended societies, they serve to unite familes and close friends who otherwise live apart, church congregations, and so on. Tribal rituals are even social to the extent of involving ancestors, those formerly living members of the tribe who have become its guides, guardians and ultimately gods.

They often require a marked off area or space with distinct boundaries considerd “sacred” which probably was the name for a label saying, “Special! For tribal use only” Similarly, certain objects were reserved for use in the ceremonies only, a sacred cauldron, a sacred drum, a sacred spear or wand. By being reserved for the ceremony, they were kept clean or pure and unpolluted by everyday or profane use. Anyone who used or sought to use any such object or space for something other than the purpose for which it was considered sacred would pollute, contaminate or corrupt it. Natural feelings of disgust and contagion were applied outside of their original meaning to violations of anything reserved for a communal purpose.

Anthropologist, Alan Fiske, has revived the older observation that the repetition of rituals and their need for precise observation are reminiscent of OCD (Obsessive Compulsion Disorder) in an individual. In both cases the people involved are often concerned with cleanliness, and the use of particular behavior to ensure cleanliness, though their actions might not necessarily seem to have any purifying value. In both cases, failure to follow the ritual correctly creates a sense of forboding, danger or disgust. Quite why is rarely obvious, but it plainly relates to the contagion system of the brain, and that is ultimately the instinct of keeping the tribe free from contagion—protecting it from hidden dangers betrayed only by the fear and loathing they produce.

Ritual boils down to actual or symbolic ways of preserving the sociality of the tribe. The peculiarities of it arise because people have their moral and social instincts but do not know why, and celebrations they once held for reasons purely of social bonding in commemorating certain important tribal events end up being necessary for the future success of the tribal community. Of course, the social bonding is necessary, but the peculiar ceremonies and practices are not. People do not properly understand the basis of their sociality and come to believe that the details of ancient traditions are vital to its purpose. Then when the detailed prescriptions are not precisely followed the ritual is invalidated. The social occasion has become a religious service.

These are also emotional occasions, but we have always been baffled also by our emotions—essentially the ways our instincts drive us. We fall in love and are ecstatic when our love is requited, and upset and depressed when it is not, yet we are simply being instinctively driven to find a mate with whom we can reproduce. Reason has no explanation for it until our reproductive drive is recognized. If we were left with pure logic as our only drive to reproduce, we might easily decide it is too much trouble for us. Many of the logical set might choose to remain childless, and die off, but those with a perverted sense that they want to have sex together will do so, until the only people remaining in the world are those with the sexual drive. That is what happened, and most people have an instinct to have sexual relations. It is called falling in love.

What happens is that we try to rationalize our instincts. We try to say why we love someone. Tiny babies cry when they are held by someone they are not used to. It is a protective instinct. They can distinguish family and familiar friends from strangers. It is not a racist or xenophobic instinct because people of quite different racial characteristics will be trusted when they are among the familiar circle, and the same is true of strangers who have also been accepted within the circle. It is a xenophobia for those not already known to the infant, suggesting it is related to the natural sociality of the family, community or tribe. People of other tribes have been described as having a different “essence” or “blood” to explain the phenomenon. Our tribe has it, but another tribe has another unfamilar one. It is easy to see how such ideas can metamorphose into racism and feuding in national and imperial societies much bigger than the size of the natural tribe. It becomes easy to justify social division into castes and classes based on such inadequate logic.

Such “naïve sociality” is a flawed attempt to explain our social situation. We extend it in terms of our social brain into speaking of whole groups of people as if they all thought alike, have the same memories and desires, and even characteristics—Germans are methodical, Chinese are inscrutable, etc. Originally it applied to nearby tribes, often our rivals and perhaps enemies. In company law still, a corporation is legally a person, a way of absolving corporate bosses from any social responsibility for their actions in this greedy age.

Many rituals are rites of passage—they mark stages or events in one’s life like a Bar Mitzvah, a wedding and the last rites. People feel that something in the ritual transforms them, and it is particularly strong when the rites are painful, as in some initiations into adulthood. The feeling is one of crossing over, or transcendence, some mysterious force propelling and guiding one across. Early men found much of their lives mysterious, accepting their customs and culture as given and guided by the power of their totem or ancestors. Modern explanations are increasingly the same for many of us, as the educational system is slowly destroyed. Newton explained why the apple fell onto his head. It was caused by the force of gravity. But that is no explanation to those who never discover what gravity itself is. The word “gravity” simply explains it for many of us. Something unobservable and mysterious serves as an explanation for something commonplace. God as an explanation for everything is a more significant example of the same thing.

The Emergence of God

As explanations, rituals are similar. Something mysterious in them is supposed to bring about the required effect. Initiation rites and marriage rites allegedly change people, but no one knows why. Just as gravity, a mysterious force for most people, explains why things fall to earth, so the ancestors’ spirits or gods explain the effectiveness of rituals. Apples fall whether we have a word for gravity or not, and similarly people pass through adolescence into adulthood or have children whether or not they have been ritually initiated into adulthood or ritually married, whether or not supposed ancestors have approved it. Habit and culture builds upon the social inclinations of our social minds to create the psychological illusion that the ritual effects the transformation. That there can be nothing in it generally is proved by some tribes and peoples realizing that the mysterious ingredient is not invisble beings but is actually the living community, or the power that represents it, the totem.

Similarly, atheists today might willingly attend the religious wedding ceremony of a friend or relative, because they are willing to accept it as a communal recognition of the couple’s commitment to each other. It is an illustration and justification of the notion that God and society are really the same thing. The religious believer has simply forgotten and failed to work out anew that God is simply a personification of society. Initially everyone lived in a community and did not know it as a god but appreciated that it was beneficial and they were wise to act in ways that supported it. They celebrated social life thereby strengthening the community, but when the community became associated with symbols and spirits, the original purpose of the celebrations was lost. They came to think the symbolic ancestors of the tribe had prescribed all tribal culture, and these became gods and then God in imperial society.

A tribe has a life of its own, and that was evident even to early modern humans. It was not merely the current members. All the current members will eventually die but the tribe will continue to exist. Its members become a younger generation, but its customs and culture remain the same, and life within the tribe is the same as it always was. Tribal culture evolves only slowly. Our social minds therefore have personified the tribe. We know our tribe existed before our earliest memories, but how did it start? Humans like to have narrative explanations, for they mimic our personal experience. Tribes had totems, or probably later, tribal ancestors, so it is natural that the older members should invent stories about the foundation of the tribe by the totem, or by some heroic ancestor. The totem spirit or the founding ancestor thereafter preserved the traditions of the tribe.

Eventually the heroic founding ancestor was identified utterly with the tribe, such that the characteristic of the tribe became those of the founding ancestor. This personification of the tribe became its god—it lives forever, knows all the tribe’s strategic data, guards its morals and its culture, was much more powerful than any individual and would punish those who were recalcitrant, but helped and protected members who accepted tribal norms and honored them and it. Society was quite baffling, and much in Nature was too, but it was beneficial to those who co-operated with it, and punished and even rejected those who did not. It was generally benign, but could by angry. Eventually, the supernatural ancestor was given these characteristics and became a god. Of course, by then, the process had been forgotten, and when the imperial age arose, the tribal gods became a monotheistic God! Only with the work of Emile Durkheim then the realization that morality is an instinct has it been possible to work out this broadly true narrative.

The Paradox of Religious Hatred

Religious ritual and doctrine then has a firm basis in human sociality and our social brains. Religion is a by product of our sociality, of our evolution as social animals—S J Gould and R C Lewontin (1979) likened it to the spandrels of old churches, the intersection of two arches. It is the arch that is important, a spandrel simply being a consequence or by product of two adjacent arches.

Various mental systems, which have evolved for quite different purposes, have helped to reinforce communal behavior in such a way as to fossilize it in ritual. Religious ritual evokes keen emotions linked to evolved instincts like our contagion system—an instinctive response to hidden danger. Refusing to join a ritual in a small tribal society became sufficient to make others doubt your commitment to the tribe, and could lead to expulsion, so most tribal members would hesitate to do it. What became called religious practices thus strengthened social unity but at the cost of increasing lack of flexibility or intolerance, and the imposition of a sort of communal compulsive obsession, a type of automatism.

Moreover, a group’s religion is an important cultural marker. The ritualized traditions of the group define its boundaries and membership, distinguishing it from other. Rituals have to be practised precisely or they will be ineffective. Tribes believe that their ancestors preserve their rituals, and will be angered and will then fail to reciprocate, bringing misfortune to the tribe. Rituals are therefore highly conservative customs. Ancestors and gods were peculiar to a tribe and a people, and all of this myth and paraphernalia is what we came to call religion, once we began to see it as a separate aspect of our lives and not an integral part of them. People with different religions and spirits were different people from different tribes whom we treated with suspicion and even hated as enemies.

Religion still has this xenophobic aspect to it, and remains an important source of division and tension between people. So religion has the peculiar double effect of helping to unite individual social groups of co-religionists, while dividing such groups from each other often murderously. It stems from the million or so years that we lived in small groups of around 150 people with their own distinct culture which differed from those of neighboring tribes. Now that the tribes have coalesced into empires with WMD, it is a small group mentality we will retain at the cost of our own existence, or at least of civilization.

Monotheism as Imperial Religion

Then, religion was part of tribal culture, but once tribes coalesced into cities, nations and empires, populations exceeded the practical limits of the natural human groups of the last million years. Imperial religions became political entities aimed at making it possible to rule large populations more easily. Religious professionals emerged and founded institutions to establish and maintain religions centrally, and to propagate a unified doctrine and identity. Religion therefore separated from culture, per se, making it possible to have people of otherwise different cultures with the same religion. But it had to be engineered.

Unity could not be maintained across increasingly vast empires when communications were poor and slow. When people of one religion spread into the region of people with another, they were likely to change religions in a generation or so to the local one. Alternatively the religion of the incomers and that of the locals might syncretize—merge some or all of their rituals and doctrines. The deliberate propagation of a religion required proselytism and state support. Each empire had an imperial god, the god of the conquering nation, and it would be given a special status among the local gods of the empire.

In the ANE, emperors would “restore” the proper worship of the local God of conquered people, claiming that previous rulers had introduced or allowed improper practices. Now the new ruler, a stickler for religious correctness, a man sent by God—a messiah—would restore the religion to its pristine state. In fact, he was changing it to suit his imperial needs. The Persians perfected this method, partly because they did not have enough trained administrators to rule their vast empire, and relied on the priests of such “restored” religions to do the job of administration and control for them.

The sudden emergence of Judaism is the prime example. In 450 BC, Herodotus could find no Jews anywhere to mention in his famous Histories. By 300 BC, when the Persian empire fell to Alexander, and the Macedonians imposed Hellenization on to the ancient world, there were millions of Jews in and around the Persian empire. Now, religion was a choice. People joined the group with beliefs that they liked. When any such faith group had privileges like tax concessions from the emperor, people were ready to join it. That is how the Persians encouraged the growth of Judaism—to supply an administrative caste for the Persian empire, and a fifth column abroad. Christianity under the Romans after Constantine was similar, and Moslems introduced the same incentive to convert.

Religious doctrines in the age of imperialism were devised by the professionals to suit imperial policy. With the invention of writing from about 4000 BC, doctrines and laws could be written down, and eventually some religious professionals took the job of scribes. Scribes were effectively secretaries, but not merely ones who wrote things down, they were administrators like the Secretary of State in the US, and Home Secretary in the UK—senior officials. Such important people were only possible in imperial states with need for them, and the economic base to support them. Small states did not need any or many scribes, and those they had were devoted to the king’s affairs of state and not to recording myths. City states and the prenational small entities of the ANE had no pressing need to record the doctrines of their local religion. Everyone knew what was relevant because religion in such countries had still not separated from culture. It was the empires that required a massive administration and an imposed—albeit subtly—religious compliance to maintain order.

Across the large space and time that comprised an empire, doctrines and their justification had to be known to all the professionals in different places so that they all told the same story in their exhortations of the people in their temples. Ordinary people mainly remained illiterate, and could not afford books anyway, so the priests in their temple services expounded the law and their narrative explanations to the ignorant masses. The professionals were offering a “service” like a blacksmith, but a religious one, for which a payment was similarly required. The payment came through their share of the sacrifices offered. When the priesthood of a temple like that at Jerusalem served a large community, sacrifical animals were commodities delivered in large volumes, and the priesthood got exceedlingly rich, in the case of Jerusalem, especially when the Persian empire fell, and they were no longer obliged to feed a lot of the takings into the Persian treasury. Thus it was that a caste of Jewish priests were extremely rich by the time of Christ. They had a monopoly in the Jerusalem temple that served Jews everywhere, and by then there were millions of them, each committed to give an annual contribution to the temple, and to undertake a pilgrimage there at least once before they died.

Constantine tried to unite the different arms of the Christian church to make it into an imperial religion at the Council of Nicea, and, when the western empire collapsed a century or so later, the Catholic Church was left with a similar monopoly in Europe. Religious institutions always like to have a monopoly, and fight hard to retain it. The Catholic church kept its monopoly all through the dark ages until the failure of Christ to reappear at his expected parousia around 1000 AD triggered a wave of dissent, accompanied by theats from the Moslems in the east. The vicars of Christ decided on genocidal crusades to retain their power, and succeeded against the Cathars, but failed against the Moslems. The failure helped Europe to emerge from the darkness via the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It is now all again under threat from fundamentalists in the USA and in the Moslem world.

The service offered by religious professionals was that of interceding with a divinity on behalf of the worshipper. They charged a good price for it , not hesitating to take a widow’s last mite, but they needed a bill of trade, so when literacy spread under the Greeks, they wanted to advertize their services, and so put together popular accounts of the religion written in the common language of the Greek world—Koine Greek. Thus the Jewish scriptures, which previously had been unknown, were published in Alexandria.

A few hundred years later, the Christian scriptures were added to them, but initially Christianity had spread organically, and different churches had different accounts and sometimes doctrines too, and new ones were being added. Only when Christianity became the Roman imperial religion were the anomalies sorted out by Constantine at the aforementioned Nicene Council. Later councils continued the process of settling doctrine. The established texts were known as the “Word of God”, and constituted absolute truth, guaranteeing that the established churches had the religious monopoly. Moreover, imperial religions had to have an imperial god. Local traditions and gods were anathema unless they were squarely behind the monopoly position, so they promoted monotheism, relegating local gods to saints, or often demons, following the example of Zoroaster for whom the word “daeva” (diva) meant a devil—an earlier god who had turned wicked.

Imperial monotheistic religion, however, eventually got too stade and dull for some, and got too obviously a tool of the state. Periodic rebellions occurred, led by some charismatic religious leader, or influenced by religious syncretism. Today, in the US, religion is often some evangelical minister’s business, his way of making a lucrative living and the admiration of the people who permit him to swindle them of their hard earned dollars. It is cynical exploitation, very often of poor and gullible people, quite the opposite of the teachings that Christians attribute to their God, Christ. They are also often blatant covers for right wing politicians whose objectives are diametrically opposite to the alleged objectives of Christ, and certainly opposite to the social origins of religion as a whole.

Generally, the rebels complain that the institutionalized religion has lost something of the original, and demand a return to it—a restoration! All they have, though, to go on is the narrative and doctrines set down in its founding documents, themselves a product of the original institution’s religious professionals. Few if any have understood the social basis of religion so they cannot call for a restoration of that, and, in any case, it would mean referring to other religions, none of which are considered valid. There is only one true religion—whatever religion it is that people have been induced to hold. People only believe in their own good nonsense, while regarding everyone else’s as plain or evil nonsense!

Mental laziness might be one factor. Religious explanations are easy to grasp. God did it, probably by a miracle, and maybe with the help of an angel or a prophet. Nothing could be simpler to comprehend. So, in real life someone turns up, claiming to be a prophet or an angel, bearing a message, a new revelation or warning from God, and supported by a few slick conjuring tricks to demonstrate their divine power, and always there are people happy to be convinced. Only people who are exceptional are good enough to be given such godly powers, yet they appear to common inspection to be normal human beings. It makes them all the more believable to their supporters. God has to come down to the human level to be able to relate with them.

The Chriatian Son of God is the epitome of this. The American psychologist, William James, thought the experiences of exceptional people—mystics—was how religion began. Today, though, we can examine, by brain scanning methods, the living brains of people who experience some feeling or phenomenon that they interpret as religious or God given. Other people with the same experience as shown by the brain scan do not, however, feel that it is in any way religious. The interpretation seems to depend on prior expectation. What does give people mystical experiences are some types of epilepsy, implying that mysticism might be a mental defect not a gift. Indeed, the old mystics and prophets not uncommonly sound insane, and today are likely to be committed to the care of a psychiatrist.

Summary

The argument put forward here is that religion is a side effect of natural mental processes—an evolutionary spandrel. We have moral instincts to support us as social animals—animals for which society is essential, not just an option—and we have an instinct to attribute agency to anything suspicious or unusual that we experience, an instinct that helped us survive by being cautious. These have contrived to give us religion, an explanation of phenomena we experience through our sociality. We explain our culture and traditions as being invented and preserved by invisible guardians who develop into gods, and our moral instinct is explained as the behavior these invisible guardians expect of us towards other members of our group.

Religion is more other worldly and mysterious than other abilities we have developed as side effects of our mental evolution like reading, writing, making pictures or composing music. The mental processes behind religion are like the mental processes behind these talents. We have them for mundane evolutionary reasons to do with our social lifestyle, but find then that they have allowed us to do extraordinary things quite unrelated to why they originally evolved. Mystics and prophets, when they are not simply confidence tricksters, seem to be those who handle the mystery of such evolutionary spandrels in religion on the very edge of sanity.

Most ordinary people’s religious concepts are independent of the extended theology of the modern churches. They have been persuaded by their close kin and influences to believe, just as they would in small scale society, and have broad ideas that God is protective as long as they remain good too. They are moral people. They have a mattering of doctrine and religious narrative mainly learned at school and through films and videos, so they feel able to decide what God wants of them. But most of their general religious impressions are had from others in their immediate community of friends.

They feel that God is theirs, so that what they do is broadly right and what others do is often wrong. Essentially they make God’s mind up for him, and God thinks just what they do! Religious professionals will disagree but will rarely say they do, for it is all too easy, especially in the modern USA, for anyone to find a church that suits them irrespective of Christ’s original teaching. Believers therefore always think they are right even though few indeed of them have a clue about the teachings in their Holy Book, and the bent pastors can always reassure them by cherry picking biblical citations.

So, people do not normally think theologically, even the devout ones. The whole mental system of thinking about what we now distinguish as religion has evolved without religion in mind. Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001) summarizes thus:

• the intuitive psychology system treats ancestors (or God) as intentional agents
• the exchange system treats them as able to exchange favours with us
• the moral system treats them as witnesses to and guradians of moral acts
• the recognition file system treats them as people with distinct if general characteristics.

Even skeptics can accept all this, but consider the spirits as mythical or imaginary, for even imaginary and mythical beings can be procesed by our mental systems. The reason is that inferences about these need not involve the separate mental system that separates truth from falsehood. The skeptic engages it and decides “false”, but then can simply treat the spirits as fictional beings. The religious do not engage their truth and falsehood processes because they have been taught not to, either by upbringing or persuasion.

The primitive tribesperson will not question the absurdity of offering a lamb as nourishment to an immaterial being for a favor, then instead treating the tribe to a feast on the sacrifice. The reason is that everyone on the tribe agrees that is how things are. Similarly, Christians are persuaded that an almighty universal God will favor them because they attend church regularly, sing hymns to Him, pray, and listen to an exhortation. As all the Christians they know accept it, and no one questions it. To them, it is a fair exchange between them and a good God. By being a function of several different mental processes besides the exchange system, the concept of hidden beings is all the more convincing.

Believers like to cite plausibility as a good reason for belief, and it is the appeal of the constituents of belief to the different aspects of thinking that makes them plausible. Ghosts or gods are thought of as just like people, but they have no personality other than what the believer projects on to them—their own! Necessarily then they are perfectly plausible.

Religion was an aspect of the culture of separate small human groups, so it came to each generation through it being raised in that culture. In a good measure that remains true still. People take to the religion of their immediate community, especially that of their parents, and disparage others. They adopt the practices they are used to, and nowhere are religious practices totally arbitrary because they depend on certain mental processes shared by all integral human beings. All of the multitudes of possibilities that do not engage them will, at best, be fads or fairy tales. Only those that activate mental inference systems for agaency, predation, death, morality, and social exchange can produce the supernatural beings that most religions require.

Gossiping is the human substitute for grooming in apes—intimate social bonding. It exercises many of our mental systems, and most concerns our local society, some being passed on from one generation to the next, becoming culture. Most gossip is forgotten, but when it engages several mental processes at the same time, it excites us, is remembered and passed on. Richard Dawkins has likened them to genes, calling them “memes”. Jokes are a good example. They are persistent bits of gossip, and bits of gossip that get reinvented when they fade in the communal memory.

Some of these excite us because they are unusual or mysterious, they violate our experience and intuitions. Particularly interesting to us are when agency is attributed to other than human beings, giving rise to a plethora of stories, myths and ultimately religion. The only agents we know are human, and with our ideas of how other minds work we can second and third guess them, but we also think they can know what we do, and often do, and more! When these agents are our ancestors, they also guard our moral behavior, and misfortune considered the result of an agent might be a punishment. The exchange system is invoked to placate the ancestors, and with them come rituals which have to be performed precisely, and so do not change easily. The rituals match the culture and life of the tribe, over time, becoming its essence, and being preserved then by the invisble ancestors who have passed it on to us down the generations.

Eventually, in big societies, religious specialists take over the function of conducting the rituals, then begin to prescribe and write down doctrine. But most people retain a simple concept of religion as a social event—going to church—and at sparse intervals will rebel against the institutionalized, imperial religion. Religion relies on certain evolved ways of thinking, accompanied by cultural selection, and ultimately politics. Belief is a by product of our evolution. We have no genes for religion, and no instinct for religion, but it is an out growth of the way we have evolved to think. Primarily it is an outgrowth of our moral instinct, and our inclination to see agents behind everything that happens. These together with some of our prosocial ways of behaving let us conceive of moral guardians just like ourselves but invisible—and we have gods and religion.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History