[ExI] [Extropolis] Religion

[efc at disroot.org]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2024, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat wrote:

> 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.

I agree. My bet would be that the origin is safety/control and
explanation. Eventually it led to science, and hence the antagonism
between religion and science. Religion feels threatened.

I'd also add that it's a nice tool to control society and
ensure a homogeneous culture and cooperation.

But within the phenomenon of religion, you also have the mystics, which
I think started with the above, but found their way to an incredibly
strong internal experience, which kind of lessened the need for safety
and explanation for them, but they have always been a tiny minority so
perhaps not so relevant for the original question.

> 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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> 
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