Religion is a beautiful thing, it is also a terrible thing. At once glorious and destructive, the apex of mans creativity and the depths of the pit to which mans creativity can sink, and yet it seems that it is something that we can not do without. Of the six billion or so people on this tiny planet, almost 80% profess some believe in the divine with a range of systems and structures that boggles the mind. From Shamanism through Hinduism and Shinto, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Polytheism, Monotheism, Spiritualism the list goes on and on. Believers range from peasant farmers to quantum physicists and despite the incredible efforts of political leaders in Russia and China, scientists in the Western World and community leaders of many different backgrounds at many different times there seems to be no way of limiting the spread of religious belief.
Hence the title of the post, and the source of the question. It seems to be the case that we, as a species are built to believe. Not necessarily in any one thing, but simply to believe in something more, something other, something "out there" but why is this the case? It could be that the reason is that there truly is something to believe in. Some divine essence, some spark that in it's influence on the human race has left a nebulous sense of itself in each of us that we try to understand in ways that vary as a consequence of our background and societal upbringing giving rise to competing and conflicting belief systems as we each try to explain or feelings in our own way, each of us right, but at the same time, none of us having a complete answer, perhaps because a complete answer is impossible without actually becoming divine. But is this the only possible answer?
If we think in terms of Occams Razor, the best answer being the one that makes the least assunptions, isnt there a more likely scenario? What if we suggest that humanity began to develop beyond basic animalistic urges as a hunter gatherer? There is pretty good evidence that this is the case, and was a key earlier differentiator in our development as a species. As a hunter gatherer we would have to develop skills of pattern recognition, in order to track game, harvest fruit and nuts at the right time and so on. As our skills at PR developed we began to perceive patterns in more and more of our surroundings, the shapes of rocks and trees and clouds, the patterns of stars, the changing of the seasons, and as we started to communicate we needed ways of passing on the patterns that we saw that were useful to us so we started to draw and paint on cave walls, we started to tell stories. Over time these stories became more and more stylised and developed and ingrained, and the patterns took on significance and meaning.
As the stories developed and the world took on more complexity as societies grew and merged and swapped different stories perhaps there was a need to explain things that affected day to day life but weren't explicable without technology. It is hard to explain why a village suddenly dies if you don't understand about siting the latrines away from the well for drinking water, so you tell a story to explain it, and maybe that story suggests moving the latrines away from the village because villages were that is done don't die, but maybe that story says that you should move the latrines because the spirits of the ancestors want it moved, or because it should line up with a pattern of stars in the sky. Whatever the real reason there is a good chance that our current belief systems may be more of a function of our development as a species than any fundamental understanding of reality, but then again, maybe it was an alien super-race that implanted these ideas to keep us subservient to our lizard hybrid overlords..... ;) sleep tight.....
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