(February 2, 2017 at 5:08 pm)Aoi Magi Wrote: Well as long as there is a parent/child concept, there'll always be an instinctive desire for a greater parental figure.
But that aside, what is so special or different about aliens having different theistic concepts when we have so many different religions and beliefs on this very planet?
I am not sure about that religion was always dependent on an junenile desire for parent figure amongst adults.
We know some form of shamanism probably predates large settled community by a long time. But the main attraction of shamanistic religions don't occur to be as being the form of an reassuring sky daddy. Instead shamanism seem to primarily offer some promise of explaining phenomenons for which no rational explanation could have otherwise been deduced.
In biology it is often observed that the act of taming or domesticating a specie involves preferentially selecting creatures which fail to mature. Hence the behavior of such animals of dogs, domesticated cattle, horses, etc most closely resemble those of the adolescents of their wild ancestors.
So religion which takes advantage of juvenile desire for sky daddy could well have arisen because as hunter gathered struggled to adopt themselves to larger social groups, and in the processes unconsciously domesticated each other. This process would entire selection of offsprings who emotionally never fully mature. So to make large societies less violent, we paradoxically made our species less mature.
