Economics in nature is fascinating. There is always a balance or a balance sheet if you will. A cheetah has to make a kill once in every five tries or it will starve to death and not be able to have the energy for a sixth attempt.
When a species is lost to extinction another species adapts to fill the gap. Aminals divided by continents cause different species to like rolls of other species. In Australia, kangaroos fulfill the role of deer and other grazers.
So it is in every aspect of life including humans. Take politics. When an extreme party totally dominates and eradicates an opposing party, the body of the remaining party will slowly but ultimately split and start acting as two different parties that resemble the past parties.
We all contemplate what the world would be without religion. The fact is nature just won't allow that to happen. We may as a society eradicate what we know as religion, but a new entity will emerge to take its place.
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Very true- North Korea for example is considered an atheist state- but if you really think about it, they're not- they literally worship Kim Jong Un.
Well, GarfeildRepublican, but that's because the North Korean state imposes that religion, not because the North Koreans wish to have any religion. Precisely North Korea is the practical demonstration that religion is cultural, not anything innate in the human being.
And here we return to the paradox of the necessity of religion as an institution, if that need disappears, the institution also disappears. I could put many examples, but Europe seems to me very good one. Although the offer of religions in Europe is the same as in the United States, remember that Europe is the cradle of Christianity, the number of believers is much lower than in US. Can anyone tell me why? Why don't European politicians boast about being believers? Why episcopal conferences, or synagogues councils, or the national Muslim councils, have no weight in the politics of European countries, except Spain and Finland? Did you know that one of the reasons that Europeans voted against the text that was supposed to be our Constitution was to include a text that said "a Europe based on Christian principles have been its origin and have allowed their development"?
The question is, Is religion, as an institution, necessary today, or should it be eradicated because it is harmful to the development of humanity? We all know the logical and reasoned response. Is there any logical reason why it should not? There isn't, it's a fallacy.
Sorry to tell you, mykcob4, but that's silly. Although you don't realize what you're saying is that if we have 100 children who have no knowledge of what religion is, be taught to be altruistic, supportive, why a lightning strike and what is the golden ratio a percent of them will innately develop one... Religion? Just as a percent of them will have mumps? Or maybe because the concept of religion is imprinted on our genes in any way? Ôo)-~
You know religion is a human institution, Right? And that like any human institution, when it isn't necessary, disappears, like monarchy, for example.
If you want, if you're more comfortable, maybe we should make a simile. Let the children leave the churches and turn schools, colleges and universities into their temples. Would that seem like a good change to fill the physical gap, and science fill the gap, let's call it, symbolic and sacred? I ask.
Oh I agree with mykcob4; religion isn't going anywhere. A particular brand of religion might lose favor and die out but it will be replaced by lots of smaller brands. Often with the brands claiming they are not religions.
@SBMontero
I am not referring to human-made institutions per se. Rather, any entity that has become a necessary or function of society. Note "or". Religion is a manifestation of superstition. When a superstition declines into obscurity another will take its place. That may or may not be religion. Now if conditions arise that one type of human institution is marginalized but doesn't disappear, then the possibility is that nothing will arise to take its place as it isn't actually gone. To clarify, in nature some species decline to a point but never disappear. Their existence isn't necessary, but they still exist. There is no need to replace them. Niches are filled when they are empty. The same is with the human condition. There is a direct parallel between nature and humanity.
Well, mykcob4, let's put aside institutions, temples, synagogue councils, episcopal conferences, or national Muslim councils. Religion is the result of the institutionalization of superstition, superstition wrapped in a series of socially accepted rules, but that isn't the point. Now you're talking about natural selection in relation to superstition: If one superstition disappears, another appears to take its place, but that would be like saying that at the moment we knew that HIV was a virus the superstitious stopped saying that it was a divine punishment against sinners and replaced it with any other disgusting superstition... it wasn't true, they continue to say, they even say about cancer, even Incurable childhood diseases. It isn't natural selection, it's pure and simple ignorance based on superstitions, and if you end with ignorance, if you force the ignorant to give studies to their children and academic studies, not secular, religion disappears, and if you want I can go back and use the example of Europe... again.
I understand what you mean when you say that the superstition doesnt disappear, it only reduces and remains dormant, but that happens because ignorance isn't eradicated, it's encouraged as something good in some parts of the world. I can put the example of the so-called bible belt, anyone can visit a library and look for the Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or any book by Bukowski, or Henry Miller. And I'm completely convinced, if ignorance is eradicated, superstition is eradicated and if superstition disappears religion disappears.
Have I already told you that I have a ten-year-old daughter who has never felt the need to have superstitions, religions or anything that resembles? Remember, "truly wonderful the mind of a child is".
It seems to me that Mykcob4 and SBMontero are both right. The natural human tendency toward Apophenia, the universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling, results in seeing causal relationships that do not exist. Coupled with the misidentification of external agency, the human mind can imbue natural coincidences with supernatural significance. This implies no religion or dogma per se, but it lends itself to misconstruction by persons who are uneducated about the fundamental forces at work in nature. Lightning strikes and snake bites and lucky events are easily misread, and those mistakes are internalized and our natural confirmation bias then strengthens those errant conclusions. Humanity's capacity for communication (and exageration) transfers these mistaken notions to others, and voilá! Religion is born. So I think you are both correct. It is perfectly natural, as Mykcob4 said, and religion itself is a human made institution, as SBMontero said.
I agree, Truett. The point is if it's impossible to eradicate superstition, only change one for other, I don't believe it, indeed, I've my daughter to prove it.
@SBMontero
First great to hear about your daughter.
I would like to state that ignorance will never be eradicated, therefore religion will always remain in some form. Apparently, superstition has a place in the human condition or it would have been erased long ago. Maybe it IS part of the brain and we, as we grow more intelligent, are able to ignore it actually fight the urge to be superstitious. Clearly, some individuals do that better than others.
I agree, mykcob4, in general, but, in particular, it's impossible for me to agree that ignorance cannot be eradicated. We have lost one thousand four hundred years because of religion, especially of the three religions of the book. Can we imagine where we would be if humanity had not lost that millennium and a half? We have accumulated more knowledge in the last three hundred years than in the previous ten millennia and the rate of accumulation of knowledge is multiplied by two every ten years.
Let me ask a simpler question, Are there more believers in proportion today that 50 years ago, or less?
P.S.
Excuse me for putting my daughter into the conversation. She's just a good example from my point of view.
What a grand point you made about the lost 1,500 years. In 500 BC the value of reason and critical inquiry was codified by Plato's recollections of Socrates' teachings, and in 230 BC the world was introduced to the Heliocentric model by Aristarchus of Samos. The Grecian appreciation for education and aesthetics and enlightenment was utterly demolished in the latter days of Roman rule under the christian banner. We'll never know where we would be if not for the abandonment of reason. I've imagined what might have been if Germany didn't follow Austria into the nightmare of the War to End All Wars in the early 20th century. I can't begin to fathom what we would be today if theocracy hadn't replaced enlightenment.
In answer to your question SBMontero, I could only hazard a guess. The thing is that statistic is dynamic and it sways in both directions it isn't a constant nor a trend. You keep proving my point inadvertently. Yes, we lost 500 some years. When the world was embracing reason, all of a sudden it turned to religion. Thus my point.
Sorry, mykcob4, from Nicaea to the eighteenth century are more than five hundred years. I haven't understood very well that when the world was embracing reason, all of a sudden it turned to religion. When the council of Nicaea occurs the world has been involved in the ups and downs of a declining empire for four centuries, and the assassination of Hypatia of Alexandria marks the end of what was left of the classical world. The world didn't turn to religion, the State, the Roman Empire, turned to religion and, at the end, religion phagocytes what is left of the empire and brings the Mediterranean to the greatest period of darkness that Western society has seen... We've seen a similar example, on a smaller scale physical and temporal, Iran in 1979.
The problem are the States that turn to religion, because States use it to subjugate their citizens and when those States are empires, let's say I'm talking about China, the United States, That's when the world should start shaking and atheists, intellectuals and thinkers burn in bonfires, or hang us from cranes.
And your point is that we can not change the repetition of it. I refuse.
P.S.
I would also like to thank you for the post. I've been a little on the forum, but it's true that this has been one of the best discussions I've had here.
@SBMontero: "We have accumulated more knowledge in the last three hundred years than in the previous ten millennia"
I agree completely. Those lost centuries are perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history, both for the loss of progress, and also for so many generations of needless suffering and blighted lives.
The modern growth of knowledge began with Enlightment and was accelerated by the emergence of the scientific method. But I think the original triggers were the Reformation, which showed that the power of the Catholic church could be challenged, and the English Civil War, which taught us that the so-called divine right of kings could be overturned. These events weakened the two great stultifying forces that had held us back since the Dark Ages.
Another factor was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, which took away the Church's monopoly as the only provider of upward mobility for talented people of low birth. I wonder how many geniuses wasted their talents in monasteries.
@Algebe: Completely agree with you.
good post mykob4.
Yeah definitely
People tend to protect and nurture the familiar, which is the comforting knowledge that does not exert psychological challenge to the (selectively) ignorant.
Everyone is curious but few will subordinate life to it in the pursuit of truths. They are aware the challenge awaits them but fear of the unknown has already been sated enough to provide them with the familiar they can accept and live by (god).
Immortality is the driving force, not superstition. The former begets the latter and no one is going to give up hope for the former any time soon. This promulgates superstition as the banner virtue. Cultures being divisive as they are, this banner virtue is also divided yielding subsets of the source virtue - god - in the form of our many named religions. This well established and ingrained, remember it to be the work of the imagination's desire for immortality.
The problem with the god as we currently understand it is people deflect their imagination's source for it and further imagine it as a source unto itself. We create the joy of hope and then ascribe it to something else we create to credit that joy to and then create an entire industry around it. Nothing could be more embarrassing on a grand scale than to have played such a joke upon ourselves.
Immortality is the incentive for the joke, man refuses to admit he's played it upon himself, and only a long and testy period of emerging knowledge will unceremoniously regain the pride humanity has sacrificed these many centuries.
As discussed here, deposed superstition will reinvent itself until all hint of it is conventionally dismissed as the silly fears humanity creatively secured itself from. My curiosity, which will go unrewarded, is how history will treat the vast religious time line. Will it be kind to man or will it unabashedly transport him to the annals of his gross stupidities?
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