[ExI] Reason for religions, was riots

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 12:41 PM,  Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:

> Il 28/09/2012 02:07, Keith Henson ha scritto:
>
>> I think it is worth considering where all religions came from in the
>> first place.  They are, near as I can see every one of them,
>> xenophobic memes.   And the reason they thrive in human minds is due
>> to the same mechanisms that have caused wars for the last few
>> million years.
>
> I don't think so.
>
> My take is religions are useful to bind people together and allow much
> more cooperation.

Yes.  particularly getting the warrior of a hunter gatherer tribe to
kill the neighbors because trying that is better for genes in a
situation where half the tribe would otherwise stave.

> It is like standardization of behaviors. If I belong
> to a community with a definite set of officially shared memes I'm able
> to plan my activities with a larger degree of safety.

Indeed.  Attacking in a group has a much better chance of working.

> Different standards/religions could coexist, if they share some subset
> of fundamental memes allowing them to coexist.

Happens all the time.  Zones of mixed religions such as Jews and
Christians have peacefully existed for a long time.  Then you get into
bad economic conditions such as happened when Hitler came to power.

> Cooperation is a tremendous asset when there is an external threat, not
> only because people go together against their shared threat, but because
> they will help each other to endure the threat. But the threat need not
> to be some human, just an harsh ecosystem, a dangerous job, etc.

Read what Azar Gat has to say about the Australian evidence.

>> That's more or less true today, but any religion can be used as an
>> excuse to kill unbelievers and will be if the population is under
>> "bleak future" stress.
>
> Anything can be used as an reason to kill. I know of mothers killing
> their children to protect them from the pain to become adults.
>
>
>> If you need examples, I can certainly proved plenty of them.  But if
>> you want to figure this out yourself, tell me why the IRA is much
>> less of a problem today.
>
> Because the Catholics (Irish) see no reason to fight, as demography is
> on their side. Protestants (Scot-English) see no reason to fight because
> demography is not on their side and fighting would make thing worse
> faster.

Can you find data to support this?  It's been a long time since I dug
out the data.  As I recall, the fighting stopped close to a generation
after the birth rate of the Catholics dropped to about the same as the
Protestants.

> Both Churches hierarchies are against fighting for ideological
> reasons. The main thing to worry about is, for both, the economy and the
> lack of jobs. Fighting would make things worse.

Please read what Pope Urban  II  is reported to have said

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_II#Crusades

> In Italy we had a decade of terrorism. At the end, all the troubles of a
> decade could be ascribed to just around 4-500 terrorist full time (this
> is all of them, left-right and center) and something 4-5.000 supporters.
> Italy had  around 50 M inhabitants at the time. So, when the times
> changed, it was easy to suppress them out. In many ways, it is the same
> for IRA. Without external help in the form of money and weapons, their
> ability to perform was severely crippled. The real number of IRA or ETA
> terrorists was always small.

They were certainly the tail of the distribution.  But take a look at
the economic outlook and the derivative of that output over the time
you had such problems.

If you have a better predictive model that is based on biology and
evolution of the psychological traits by natural selection, please
state it clearly.  I am not welded to any of these theories if a
better model can be articulated.

I am not a big fan of the model I have created because, while I think
does a good job of explaining things, it isn't worth a hoot at
defining simple solutions to fix the origins of the problems.

Keith