[ExI] Religion (was AI the easy road)

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 18/10/2026 14:03, John K Clark wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 5:37 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>     > my best guess on that is that religion confers an advantage for writing
>     and reading.  Consider three very successful religions of our times:
>     Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  All three are heavily dependent on the
>     written word.  Judaism is a huge collection of very complicated and
>     arbitrary 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 , or the 41,000 year old  Venus of Hohle Fels.


Why jump to the assumption that they had anything to do with religion? I can think of a much more likely explanation, and I'm sure you can too.

It's probably true, though, that religion pre-dates writing. Plus the fact that even after the invention of writing (or should that be discovery? :D ), most people were illiterate, for a very long time. So I'm doubtful about the relevance of writing to religion, at least in its early stages.

The abrahamic religions are very recent, so I don't think they are any use for figuring out how religions evolved in the first place. You need to look thousands of years earlier for that.


> 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.


I still don't see the 'group cohesion' thing.


> 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. 


That's true, and is apparently one of the significant differences between humans and chimps. Young chimps have to try everything out for themselves.


> 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.


That can't be the root cause of religions, but it's a very effective way of propagating them.
-- 
Ben
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein