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TGD and the roots of religion
#1
TGD and the roots of religion
One of the most important chapters of TGD is "The roots of religion"
The chapter deals in principle with following essential ideas:
-negation of the so called advantages of religion
-psychological roots of religion
-analogy between evolution of religions and evolution of life
As a convinced atheist I could not but fully agree with the ideas of RD .
However I think that not all what would have had importance to say was said and on the other hand some hypotheses seem to me to be a bit too theoretical.

Considering the first idea about negative aspects of religion one can say as follows.
Religion is obviously from dawn of history an important social phenomenon of the human society.
As such it is linked with other social traits of the society like politics, social structure, economics, culture, spiritual activities, entertainment, internal or external struggles between men or nations, and so on.
The problem is therefore if one can extract religion from other social activities and pin on it negative traits knowing well that they are common also to other activities.
In my opinion such a surgery treatment is possible only insofar that one mention the same negative aspects parallel to other social activities .

More of it, if one analyzes the advantages versus disadvantages of religion one could say similar things about a lot of human activities.
With full certainty we can affirm that each social activity has both, advantages as well as disadvantages.
If we refer, let's say to science and try to analyze possible negative aspects of it we see that even science which we use in the first ranks of the fight against religion is not devoid of negative aspects as for instance the creation of deadly weapons along history.

On the other hand although the Bible or other holy teachings are flawed by immoral commandments one can not deny that religion had and still has an important function in imposing moral laws in the society. One also can not deny the role of Christianity in the development of modern civilization.
There is hardly a part of modern culture like, literature, music, painting, sculpture etc,, where motives from the now so denigrated Bible are not playing an important role.
Being an atheist does not mean to eliminate forcible all the achievements of religion

Elaborating on the idea of psychological roots of religion as a by-product of something else RD writes (quote)" One specially intriguing possibility mentioned by Dennett is that irrationality of religion is a by product of a particular built in irrationality mechanism in the brains…"(unquote).
In my opinion this is one of the most important keys for understanding the belief in God and why man did create him in the past and why the devout man keeps creating him in his mind the moment he thinks about him.
Irrational thinking has nothing to do in particular with the belief in God but is a permanent way of thinking of every one of us, parallel to rational thinking.
There is difficult to affirm which of both ways prevail.

Curiosity about how the nature ticks must have been one of the roots of religion.
Ironically we could say that the first man who thought about God was what we could call to day a "scientist": he understood nature as a phenomenon external to man but could not find any "scientific" explanation of natural phenomena except miraculous powers of an entity known to him which he imagined as dwelling above him high in the sky.
A similar feeling perhaps dominates the today creationist or theist or IDist : a non quenched curiosity about nature without getting final answers on part of science.

I don't have the expertise to judge the analogy between the evolution of religion and evolution of life, as RD does in TGD.
All these memes and alleles are pretty convincing except one big thing which I miss: the free will of man. Where is the free will hidden between al memes and how does it influence the evolution of religion?

I come here back with my crazy idea of indeterminism about which I did not get in this forum up today any satisfactory answer.
I quote from the same chapter of TGD : (quote)" The cultural equivalent of genetic drift is a persuasive option, one that we can not neglect when thinking about the evolution of religion" (unquote).

. The genetic drift, as controversial as it may be, together with the well known principle of uncertainty and, as some add, also the existence of free will, represent pillars of the indeterminism principle.
If RD mentions the genetic drift as a non neglecting factor of evolution of religion then he admits the role of indeterminism in religion.
I quoted that idea with the purpose to affirm my opinion that by accepting indeterminism as a law of nature parallel with causality atheism can repel that "last frontier" of religion which affects even a lot of secular people, namely the belief in Destiny.

Here are some conclusive ideas, I believe, about roots of religion:
There are no Gods then the God created by man and he dwells in no place in the Universe except in the minds of people who believe in him.
The understanding of that creation, it's roots and it's purposes, is an effective method of disproval of God no less than the Darwinian method used by RD
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