Evolutionary Theories of Religion

[rainmac]

Well congratulations on finally laying god belief as charlatanism to rest once and for all.  Wasn't sure you'd be able to pull it off but you totally dismantled that bad straw boy.  I can only imagine the wails of despair from those whose belief in god was based on that.

I mean...what else do you call it when a bunch of people willfully trick a bunch of other people into believing unreal claims for power/monetary gain? There are people who really believe, sure, but people really believed in snake oil, too. How does that make the salesman less of a charlatan? If he succeeds in convincing people, isn't he MORE of a charlatan? Isn't that the whole goal of a charlatan?

Now, religion has been ADAPTED to various purposes, but considering how religion has been consistently used both today and historically and how effective it is to those ends, I find it very likely that god claims were invented (in their various places and forms) with the intended purpose of preying upon humanity's natural fears and weaknesses for the personal gain of those who spread it.

Yes, this mirrors Dawkins' claim that early religious figures and/or parents leveraged a child's gullibility to promote their manipulative claims, and how these religion beliefs/memes spread throughout human cultures. Your position satisfies the loathing we share for organized religion and their attempt to force their beliefs into civil society and is certainly a popular meme in this forum that gets repeated a lot (similar to how Dawkins says religion endures). Except religion developed and persisted in small tribal bands for 99% of human existence. Now you can assert that the shaman manipulated his tribespeople for power and gain, but then you'd be rewriting all the ethnographies to fit your position. Small tribes are necessarily egalitarian and for good reason. When there's only 25-100 people in a tribe, one or a few bad apples have a disproportionate effect on tribal society. It's clear from what the anthropologists have reported that there is a low tolerance for anybody who tries to pull one over on the rest of the tribe. I sympathize with you and share the antipathy towards the evils of modern, monotheistic religions, but that is a different issue than how polytheistic religions evolved over tens of thousands of years.