Accommodation vs. Confrontation

[Fred]

That a propensity for religion may provide us with a survival advantage in one scenario (debatable) in no way validates it's existence given it's disadvantages in another (rock fucking solid).

That debatable there certainly is true because I have seen numerous debates of folks squabbling about just that. Maybe you have a different take, but the folks on the atheist side point over and over to the survival thing as an accepted given. Maybe you should take it up with them. I don't agree with them that it's the full story either, but I'm not on their team, so that's to be expected.

I'm not sure what you mean by validating its existence. Uh, it's there, been there and doing that for countless millenia. If it's disadvantages outweighed its advantages from a survival pov, it wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. Or is this a case of Immaculate Natural Selection or something?

The glaringly obvious difference between religion, and say a smilodons teeth, is that we have a choice in the matter. Something which you so blissfully ignore, again because it would erode the foundations of your non-points.

Whether I agree or not is beside the point. However, there are genetic determinist types who absolutely disagree with you about that choice we are supposed to have. That's the theme of the Wolfe article and a lot of the reason Wilson caught so much shit from the PC crowd when Sociobiology came out.

From Wolfe's article:

"Neuroscientists involved in three–dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you?

"I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth."

Please suggest ways in which religion might confer a survival advantage beyond the advantage of strength in numbers, which is not limited to human beings, or even within human beings limited to the religious.

I have no clue as to the answer here. I don't subscribe to the evo-psych theory, remember? That's your team, not mine.

Please show that religion predates our becoming a social species. Again, it isn't our responsibility to prove your inane ramblings incorrect, it is upon you to provide evidence of their accuracy.

Whatever. I wasn't looking for you to prove them incorrect because I wasn't defending the idea. I was just reporting it's part in the bigger picture. You got trouble with what your own team is laying out there, you can take it up with them.