Article By Jesse Bering at Scientific American
Last weekend I traveled to Edinburgh to attend a small workshop on religion. The group consisted of a multidisciplinary group of scholars—psychologists, biologists, political scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists—each of whom were studying the natural (that is, Darwinian) foundations of religious belief and behavior. The meeting took place at a marvelously opulent hotel near Waverly Station on Princes Street, with distant glimpses of the castle and the Old Town district. Each morning, about ten of us, still bloated with wine and food from the evening before, sat around an enormous lion-pawed walnut table in a Victorian suite while the bitterly cold Scottish winds rattled the windowpanes and rushed down the flue of the chimney, where a coal fire quietly warmed us.
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I’ve just starting reading ‘Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes’ – an autobiography of a Christian Missionary who lived with an Amazonian tribe for the best part of 30 years. Apparently, this tribe (the Pirahas) have had virtually no influence from outside cultures, which has resulted in a singularly unique (and therefore fascinating) language, as well as them having no concept of God.
Having initially intended to convert to Pirahas to Christianity, the author eventually became an aetheist himself, after seeing how happy they were without religion & how strongly religious views were determined by language & culture.
This suggests to me that a significant part of religions’ inability to politely leave the room is due to it being a socially conditioned set of easy answers.
The concept that “belief in the afterlife is more or less an inevitable byproduct of human consciousness” has been backed up by studies & feels like ‘common sense’ (whatever that is) to me but the Pirahas show us that ‘more or less’ is very much the order of the day.
Weird title .. it’s I think the leaders who use religion as a tool to control the people … so if you want to make religion adaptive you probably mean .. make the leaders adaptive to peace … which is a totallly different matter .. primitve (mainly in these cases) male egos who get into these fights. They will ofcourse make sure that religion or anything will be adapted to their ‘mind’ so that they can use it.
What an ace way to spend the weekend.
What – going to the Amazon and becoming an aetheist?! Thomas Cook are doing good all inclusive at the mo…you get a free blow up hammer with a squeak to beat yourself with
oh no I didnt mean to put one of those smileys in…
I could’ve gone for a bit more text. An entire weekend crammed into 1.5 page?
It’s an interesting subject. =)