(December 27, 2014 at 3:13 am)robvalue Wrote: I think the human mind gets bored with the repetitive experiences of everyday life so tries to add more meaning to it via the imagination.Which is awesome, since it's where stories come from, and those enrich our lives. But I don't think religion was born of boredom as much as it was a way of explaining things before we had the means to investigate and understand them fully. It would be truly fascinating to see how religious tales evolved over time to become the canon we have today. Which stories had the most versions? Which were initially more popular, and were the final versions completely new or just a matter of revision? And so on.
They do tend to add more meaning by making each person the star of the show, and that might be the most important factor in keeping religion going for so long: it appeals to the ego in ways both overt and very subtle, and that is a very powerful allure.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould