Religion dissected by science

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you're at ubc too?

>>8743932
Do religious or superstitious societies have a general advantage? It seems a natural selection type of thing for religion or spiritualism to drive most societies throughout history.

>>8743942
One side composed of fanatics will beat another side of unmotivated nihilists.

>>8743942

That's precisely the question.

Given religious / ritual behaviour is often so (seemingly) costly in terms of time and resources, what kind of advantage must it be offering? ...

People are now studying questions like this using a range of legit scientific methods.

Here's a sample lecture:
https://vimeo.com/204322996/8f6d567558

>>8743942
>>8743997

Yeah, you'd think that just maybe religion was true after all.

>>8743942
Supertition is a product of false pattern recognition. Lookup 'supertitious pigeons'.

I do think that it has some advantages in social cohesion. When a group has a shared set of beliefs it's easier for them to work together towards a goal. It also becomes a sort of banner they can fight under.

Now it doesn't have to be a religion. It could be an ideology like communism ir just a shared set of values like freedom and democracy.

However religion has some other aspects to it which humans seem to find attractive. Like a higher power and authority figure.

>>8743997

Religion takes up a lot of resources because it is extreemly motivating. People litterally travel to the other side of the world for years just because they beleive that the poor people there need to know about a Jewish guy that was crucified 2000 years ago and that they should similarly devote their lives to them.

When faced with a threat to their ideology or culture, religious societies tend to draw from their religion and use it as motivation to beat the enemy. This is where the benefit comes in.

Religion seems almost like an evolutionary trap.

>>8743942
I really like Richard Dawkin's theory of religion being a by-product of childhood guillabilty and the theory of memetics.

>>8744198
When I took Psych 101, Skinner was the one who I enjoyed most.

Natural selection doesn't give a crap about the verbiage wrapped around the behaviors, it's just sorting for results. Religion was a fundamental social rule set that made societies cohesive and coordinated.

Tearing it down because "it's stupid and fake" misses the point completely.

No shit it's not true for empirical reality. But that was never the zone in which it mattered. It mattered for large primate packs - larger than any one primate's social bonding capacity - in that it allowed for cohesion and action of the mega-pack to maximize group fitness.

Tear it down at your peril, if there's nothing to replace it.

>>8744447
no matter what replaces anti-intellectualism it won't be worse

>>8744457

Religion=anti-intellectualism is a pretty recent conceit though. For centuries the church was where you went if you were a bookish type who didn't want to be a farmer and weren't good at fighting. The church led the way in preserving and expanding knowledge from the middle ages up until the 18th century and even into the 19th. This ranged from re-accessing and translating the knowledge of the classical world all the way up to supporting advanced research (for its day).

My point being that the religion itself - with its host of primary social implications - isn't the enemy. The means by which it's all applied can be, though.

It has been sorted and selected and optimized over tens of thousands of years. Sure you can come up with a set of trivially obvious "fixes" for things that suck about it, but they will inevitably miss the myriad of subtle connections and consequences which will be attendant. You're essentially resetting the neural net with a bunch of new parameters and hoping that the selection towards optimum won't take 12,000 years this time. I'm not as optimistic.

>>8744457
>>8744464

I like you.

In addition, I feel like our society is also far too quick to disregard the spiritual aspects of religion due to confusing it for the metaphysics. Just as far as religion has provided social cohesion and a form of governance, it provides essentially a manual or guide on "how to human" that's been revised and rediscovered for thousands of years, dealing with the nature of our experience and the nature of our minds. Buddhism and hinduism especially dug into this.