The evolution of God...

[Anomalocaris]

Guys, been thinking. (Nah, not really).

Did man create God(s) as an evolutionary coping mechanism?
Throughout history, do you think the God(s) present and past have had a total net sum positive effect on our species as a whole?

OK, a lot of people were killed through superstition and ignorance. We cannot blame the God characters entirely for this as woo has been part of our evolution from the start.
It is really only relatively recently that science has been able to dissolve most woo with better, more effective answers to "mysterious" questions.

Maybe without our God crutches, we wouldn't be here today?
Maybe God is a necessary evil? (pardon the pun) we needed to get to this point.
But my real question, is have we as a species matured enough to confidently say that the crutch is not needed anymore?
Considering human greed, etc, and the % of suffering in the world, I'd say God is needed more than ever? Ironical isn't it.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of all life on earth 64.5 million years ago most certainly had an more positive on our specie as a whole than any god could even conceivably have.  It demonstrably made it possible for us to be here.

Yet I do not pray to it nor have faith in it.

[ignoramus]

I was watching a Ted talk last night. (about the rarity of life in the universe)
He said that if that meteor was a little bigger and killed all life, we wouldn't be here. (small mammals wouldn't have prospered)
If it was slightly smaller and the dino's recovered, we wouldn't have had the needed prosperity to evolve the way we did.

His other point was the unstable tectonic plates in Africa forced us out of the trees and onto the land.
(his graph showed a significant proportion of the earliest fossils of our ancestors along these fault lines)

(there was a third significant point which I can't remember atm ...I'm at work, sorry)

made sense as to why evolution of a species to reach a technological age is an extremely rare occurence indeed.

[Minimalist]

I have no doubt of that.

Still, when you compare it to the absurd belief of an invisible sky-daddy playing in the fucking dirt it seems infinitely more reasonable.

[robvalue]

All part of god’s “plan” to make humans I suppose. He likes doing things in the most roundabout and destructive way possible.

[rskovride]

Would, could, religion exist at all if we took the business aspect out of it?

It would probably still exist without the business aspect. There are remaining benefits if you look at the sociology of successful religions.  

Another question worth asking is, would religion exist at all if the sociological aspects were replaced.  
I tried to start a thread a while back about the sociology of religion but no one was interested I guess.  I don't know what the replacement would look like and that is what I wanted to discuss.

[vorlon13]

Why wouldn't God evolve ??

I note even the arguments advanced by Creationists over the years have evolved considerably.

[Minimalist]

Yeah....but they always fall back on the same old shit.


Goddidit.

[vorlon13]

God also failed to give them their updated, best and final YEC and Creationist arguments in the first place, letting them instead observe which ones worked and which ones did not and then allowed them to fine tune them for the debating environment they were trying to thrive in . . . .

[brewer]

OP: Probably a necessary crutch/cast for the beginnings of society(s) but it's no longer necessary. Now it's like a cast left on a healed foot to long. It's hindering societal progress, possibly making it wither in some cases.

[Anomalocaris]

I am not sure it is so much born of then current necessity of our ancesters as it is a byproduct of the flaws in a barely functional but vastly complicated cognitive machinery Cobbled together from a a huge collection of mismatched parts and programs each arose under different evolutionary pressures over millions of years.