Charlou wrote:XC, I read and agree with your linked post as it relates to our notion of 'self', but I don't think that's what led us to become religious. I think our religious meme arose initially from superstition born of paranoia. Observing animal, particularly herd animal, behaviour generally, their fears and preservative reactions to threats seen and unseen, I think the paranoia hypothesis is a good one ... Think of humans appeasing gods, for example ... rituals and sacrifices in an attempt to placate or please gods in order to improve their chances and conditions of survival.
Your example of herd animals is an interesting one. Do the individuals in the herd fear their own demise in the approach of a predator? Do they watch for movements in the undergrowth because they are scared of lions? No. They act as they act because that is what is hard-wired into their brains directly from their genes. Their fear is visceral, their reactions are instinctive, their behaviour is predictable and, more importantly, benefits the herd as a whole more than it does any individual. Often, the individual behaviour of a herd animal is not the most certain to guarantee its own survival. Humans are different - our self-awareness allows us to short-circuit and override such herd instincts and to act in
self-interest. In fact, our desire to protect ourselves is so powerful that individuals that risk their lives for others are the exception (and, since we would hope to have that person assist
us if need arose, venerated and held up as examples.)
Fear plays a large part in the psychological 'need' for religion, almost certainly, but it is the sense of self that drives that fear. Human fear comes from
knowing what might happen, not from a visceral, gut reaction, and that is the crux of the matter - without reason, there can be no superstition. Wildebeest, cats and slugs have no need of gods because they have no knowledge of self and, ultimately, no desperate need to prolong their lives - they simply act according to the hard-coded patterns that evolution has provided them with - patterns which give us, with our sense of things having motives and reasons, the illusion of self-interest. We alone have evolved the ability to know ourselves and, in so doing, to extrapolate from specific cases to the general. We alone recognise the concept of a reason, an underlying cause, a prime mover, and that is the genetic trap that leads us to create
any explanation rather than none - hence religion.
