IMO, religion has three causes: a) being aware of death, b) a desire to explain, c) need for a parent-in-adulthood. Religion is on the decline in the developed world because religion can't explain much of anything that science can't much better. It's explanatory power has been stripped bare of any meaning and therefore open to ridicule for those educated or rational enough to do so. However, a) and c) remain strong as causes and so we should expect religion to remain in some form until they have been eliminated. Simple as that.
I've always hypothesized that it was mostly a and b, with both stemming from traits that we possess almost by definition as a reproducing species: 1) a survival instinct, and 2) the ability to learn. Possessing a survival instinct coupled with an awareness of death essentially colors, taints, and otherwise poisons the desire to explain stemming from our ability to learn, which does not turn off in life. By definition, human creatures in the aggregate want to always continue. It's a side effect of wanting to continue at all in the first place, -it doesn't turn off (again, in the aggregate. Biology is full of exceptions, and indeed needs them). When your psyche requires that you lust for, value, and exert maximum effort to continuing to exist, it is no wonder that we invent myths that promise us what we desire most at a fundamental, biological level. We come to a place where our collective explanations across civilizations and time echo each other in very predictable, comfortable ways.
When science undermines some of these comforting explanations, it is confronted with a bias that is not just historical, or cultural, but biological as well. As far as C goes, I imagine that it plays an important role psychologically for obvious reasons (and probably plenty that aren't obvious at all to me), but I never placed it near A and B myself. I would sooner give the C position to JakobVirgil and his belief that religion = rules, since I believe that rules/laws are inseparable from social creatures living in groups and religion is intimately compatible with lending authority to inevitable rules.
There are plenty of cultures were belief in an afterlife and religion only have tenuous connections or none at all Classical Paganism and Temple Judaism stand out as particularly relevant examples to the west . the Greeks of course had a god of the dead but he was no where near the center of worship. I think the West's assumption that religion = afterlife has to do with path-dependency. (That member of my tribe who thinks his birthday is so important that it messed up my Blake's 7 watching schedule.) To throw some more fuel on the fire James Fraser thought religion had its origin in charlatanism and wrote 13 volumes on that thesis.
IMO we do not know the cause of religion. The theory I find the most compelling is Religion is tribal law at the constitutional level. The things that a society holds sacred and beyond discussion rights, privileges, when to plant and harvest, maintenance of symbols that define a people, marriage, life thresholds and hopefully ethical behavior etc. The Myths and Rituals are secondary to and largely serve as mnemonics for practice. your a) and c) (and most of b) I think are a product of western soul searching , affluent angst and other modernisms.
(not on your part but on those that proposed them.) They are just too low on the list of needs of non industrial people to explain the origin of something as universal and ancient as religion.
Eh. A poorly argued piece. Spending time with the religious poor and struggling isn't an argument for atheism being the provence of intellectual privilege or selfishness. Reading it, the author had a couple disturbing red flags that hinted that he had some pretty bizarre ideas of what atheism is all aboutL Huh. I always thought the perfect candidate for atheism was someone who did not find the various religious dogmas presented to them logical or sound. Atheism via bitterness seems odd, and even an atheist that has never touched a Bible knows that the corporeal world being evil is an essential component of the dogma. That's aside from the perception that it is precisely those who are desperate and in need who are most susceptible to religion (endorsed most by theists themselves, hence the term "foxhole atheist"). The article left me wondering if the author himself was searching desperately for a redemption that led to his softening stance: to this... It seems to me that the author has a guilty conscience, but his sins may be rooted in something besides atheism. But the red flags he threw up surrounding his understanding of what it meant to be an atheist suggests that it is good he has become less militant about it.If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.
Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years.
Takeesha and the other homeless addicts are brutalized by a system driven by a predatory economic rationalism...
The authors view is also held by Kurt Vonnegut who reached it from a different route. (could be read as an appeal to authority but meant as an example that the same thing can be seen from different vantages)
Well-written and a thesis I kinda agree with (i.e the title), but it must be remembered that he's throwing anecdotal heartstring-tugging evidence at us in spades. I remain open to the opinion that for every crack addict who's turned to god because she has no one else, there's a single mother of five who turned away from god because her lot in life was Job's.
Really? I actually feel like this is one of those pieces that I feel dumber for having read. Does it really take quitting a high paying job and spending a couple years around addicts to find out what all civilized people should know from the get go? Namely, that different people have different thoughts, feelings and beliefs about a whole range of topics, faith included (perhaps faith in particular). Are there not rich, educated men of strong faith? Are there not poor, destitute people who have no god?Well-written and a thesis I kinda agree with (i.e the title)...
His general message at the end seems to be that if the poor and uneducated need a placebo to get by, why not let them have religion. However, it's a pretty dangerous argument given some of the destructive qualities religion has shown to bring forth in people. If god be with us....
Religion is one of the handles by which folks are manipulated by the baddies. But Patriotism, Material Interest (real or Imagined), Vanity, Class, Race, Defense of Science and a host of other things will still exist even if religion is gone. The status quo of human shittiness will be maintained.