[ExI] Religion (was AI the easy road)

[John Clark]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 5:37 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


>
>
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> *> my best guess on that is that religion confers an advantage for
> writingand reading.  Consider three very successful religions of our
> times:Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  All three are heavily dependent on
> thewritten word.  Judaism is a huge collection of very complicated
> andarbitrary rules, which really need the written word.*



*But there is archaeological evidence that humans were religious long
before they invented writing. Look at fertility sculptures such as the
intricately carved 29,500 year old  Venus of Willendorf
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf> , **or the 41,000 year
old  Venus of Hohle Fels
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Hohle_Fels>.*

*The conventional explanation for the existence of religion is the fear of
death and the unpleasant helpless feeling primitive people must have felt
when confronted with powerful forces far outside their control, like the
weather or disease or volcanic eruption; praying is at least doing
something and its not hard to fool yourself into thinking it helps. And
that gives at least a little feeling of power which is better than a
feeling of having no power at all. The conventional argument is that this
emotional equanimity brings about enhanced group cohesion and that aids in
survival. I think this is almost certainly true but is probably not the
entire answer.*

*In general it would be a Evolutionary advantage for children to be
genetically wired in such a way that they listen to and believe what
adults, particularly parents, have to say; don't eat those berries they
will kill you, don't swim in that river there are crocodiles, etc. Most
people may not be born with innate religious feelings and hear voices from
the sky and see things that are not there but some do, and those people
teach their children that the hallucinations they saw were real and the
children believe it even if they don't themselves suffer from
hallucinations. And when those children grow up they in turn teach their
children about the strange things their grandparents saw and they believe
it too. That's why religious belief has such a strong geographical pattern;
if you're a Christian the chances are overwhelming that your mommy and
daddy were Christians too. So the root cause of religion is that most
people have a tendency (which started out as an advantage) to believe into
adulthood whatever they were told as children. And so screwy religious
ideas that start very small grow exponentially and soon become huge.*

*John K Clark*
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