Evolution, Intelligence, Suggestibility and Religion

[Bipolar Bob]

Ever since William James published Varieties of Religious Experience, scholars the connection between human intelligence, suggestibility and the adaption of religion.

In every scholarly paper on the connection between suggestibility and religion, all the scholars agree that religious people are more susceptible to the power of suggestion than non-religious. It has been put forth by many that those who are religious may very well be in a state of a semi-hypnotic trance. They are not fully conscious or self-aware. In a sense they live in a artificial reality that's been fabricated around them by their culture and their religion.

Most of you will have notice that many of the religious people one meets seem to be oblivious to the basic facts of life. That is they are truly living in a fantasy world that was created around them.

So why are people susceptible to the power of suggestion? Human intelligence, the human species is one of the most intelligent animals on our planet, but the degree and nature of our intelligence lends us to the danger of being too aware, of information overload and the psychological damage that this entails. So nature gave us a defense against our own intelligence...the ability to put ourselves in a trance state where we do not have to deal with the burden of raw reality.

This is what religion and culture does to the human mind, they create a buffer around us so we do not have to deal with the raw and most brutal facts of life.

This is just my own opinion of the hows and whys we developed into religious animals. I may be wrong or you may have more info regarding these issues, so I hope you guys share your opinions and thoughts on these issues

[Owlix]

I think religion was developed because questions needed answers and peasants needed controlling.

And science was things like making fire and getting crops to grow back then.

[ChildOfReason]

I've never thought of it like that.
I'm a frequent practicer of self hypnosis in a meditative form, and thinking about religion being semi-hypnotic sounds really likely.
The common view of hypnosis is of a mysterious man making people act like ducks in their sleep, but really it is much more subtle.
Over years and years of suggestions, I imagine it to be very likely that people go into a trance; especially if the suggestions start at a young age, when one is very susceptible.

[MindForgedManacle]

I think it should be noted that even if all that is true to utmost degree (and I'm not disputing it), that wouldn't really undermine religious belief or negate God's existence.


And speaking of William James, it is from his writings that my username is from.

[pineapplebunnybounce]

I don't think that the human mind evolved this to protect us from the overload of information. Perception definitely does protect us from the overload of stimuli, but that's different.

We evolved much of our physiology in conditions where we were not exposed to much information at all. Written history is less than a blink of an eye in our species's history. I think that we're just not equipped to understand many forms of information, many of us can't even understand large magnitudes of numbers. We say the world has more than 7 billion people. Do we really have a sense of how many that is? Not really, it's just a number. Without using equipments can we even determine how fast something is moving? You probably won't even trust the estimate you come up with. My point is, we're not equipped to differentiate perception from reality without extra help, which is why science is an actual field you need to be trained in, and much of it involves how to minimize human error. If this is not done, we won't get far trying to learn about our environment, because we'll make too many mistakes. And that's part of the problem, because if people aren't exposed to science/reality, their perceived reality may very well fit perfectly into their worldview. Another thing about too much information, we don't understand numbers like I said, that's why we need to learn statistics and learn what they actually mean.

[MindForgedManacle]

It's not actually possible to differentiate between perception and reality, because you only know the perception. #ImThatGuy