Post Religion

[Angrboda]

All the while people can be herded by the stick and carrot of religion in the direction powerful people with them to go, religion will never die out. It remains the number one way to get popular support for anything from war to tax laws.

From the outside America seems far more religious new than it was 20 years ago.

From inside, that is understandable but not really correct. What's really happening is that religious Americans are far louder and more public and pushy about their beliefs because, for the first time, they feel that Christianity's status as de facto national religion is legitimately threatened.

I believe there are actually some statistics which support the notion that the U.S. has become more religious over time since its beginnings, and in a big way, but I'd have to research the question more thoroughly, as there are complications regarding the data point I'm resting this on. (There's a chart in a book on "selling God" that I read a while back which purported that early America was possessed of about 20% church membership, and that figure has since tripled or quadrupled. Of course, verifying that's a valid statistic is only the beginning of figuring out the relationship of those facts to the question.)

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I would say that religion and things like superstition and especially conspiracy theories are categorically different things. The religions and religious behaviors, in addition to having social components, appear to capitalize on cognitively useful aspects of the mind and the brain, repurposing them to purely psychogenically rewarding behaviors with little, no, or even counter-productive instrumental utility (good brain circuits, used in bad ways). Conspiracy theories and superstition and woo, to my mind involve faulty cognitions resulting from either cognitive deficits, or from faulty learning experiences (see the classic experiment regarding making "pigeons superstitious"; my hunch is that CT thinking, like woo, is a product of a learning reinforcement pattern during acquisition and assessment of evidence, combined with certain common cognitive deficits, which produces the equivalent of "historical woo."). So I suspect what leads to, and perpetuates religion, is categorically different from that which contributes to a person developing "woo infected beliefs," whether they relate to UFOs, quantum consciousness, or the JFK assassination. The fundamental operating principles between religion and woo, are, I suspect, radically different.

One of the fundamental problems in getting rid of religion is that many of the behaviors of ritual religion have directly rewarding and stimulating effects on the mammalian brain, particularly dealing with the dopamine systems and the endocrine system, but also secondary rewards and stimulations. Secular behaviors, unless they incorporate similarly stimulating and rewarding ritual behaviors, will have a tendency to be "out-competed" by religion because of the powerful hormonal and neurological reinforcement of that ritualized religious behavior.