[ExI] [Extropolis] Religion

[Dylan Distasio]

I don't wanna be the guy who says that to someone with a hammer everything
looks like...but...

I think xenophobia is downstream of religion if we are talking about them
together (not saying all xenophobia is caused by religion though), and
religion exists (and persists) because it is quite a terrible prospect for
a self conscious, intelligent organism to contemplate their mortality.   I
would suggest Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life as a guidepost in
explaining why it exists and the tension between Faith and Reason.

A great deal of life on this planet is suffering, and without the hope of
an afterlife the outlook is pretty bleak.   I say this as an atheist.
 Religious belief systems inspire hope which leads to greater reproduction
in that group.

There are alot of additional directions I could go in as to why early,
primitive religions exist in terms of explaining and controlling your
environment (or rather the appearance of control) but I think the crux of
my answer is in my argument above.

Memento mori.

On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 7:58 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> The interesting question is why do humans have religions at all? I
> make a case that it is a side effect of selection for war.
>
> Religion is a class of mutually exclusive memes. I.e., it is seldom
> that a given person has more than one of them, so you don't expect
> someone who identifies as a Catholic to also be a Methodist. This
> brings you to the interesting conclusion that communism is a religion
> since being one makes it unlikely to have any of the common religious
> memes.
>
> This classification does not help with the question of why humans have
> (or are infested) with such memes. From how common this is, religious
> memes (or something related) must have been important to survival in
> the Stone Age.
>
> Religious memes seem to be descended from xenophobic memes.
>
> Xenophobic memes are the first step in the path to war. I think
> genetic selection for war is the origin of susceptibility to religious
> memes.
>
>
> Keith
>
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