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Is religion inevitable for any conscious evolving species?

I think Religion/Gods are part of the hacker instinct in all humans: we are always looking for shortcuts to avoid doing the actual work.
So why build an irrigation system when you can just bride a deity to bring rain for the low low price of an animal or virgin sacrifice.

as long as doing things is hard, people will delude themselves into wishing someone supernatural will do it for them.
 
JoeMorgue said:
No. I think even for humans religion is something of an anomaly.
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It is very obvious that it isn't. It has only slowly started to lose its grip on people in the more affluent societies where they lead fairly secure lives free from most diseases and other debilitating events.

Basically a small handful of monotheistic religions managed to parasite themselves onto major social/political/government advances.
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Yes, monotheism is relatively new to the table and has been very successful for a couple of thousand years. Calling it a parasite explains absolutely nothing.

Honestly had the Christian/Muslim/Jewish religions not managed to follow the spice routes around the world I think the odds are good, not certain but good, that religion would have died off. The vague, less organized Earthy and ancestor worship religions would have faded quicker had they not had the Monotheism to really keep "religion" going.
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It is not as if other religions were about to disappear and be replaced by science and common sense when monotheism took over. Miserable conditions, and there are more than enough of those, cause the need for religions. If they don't already exist, people invent them.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
I think Religion/Gods are part of the hacker instinct in all humans: we are always looking for shortcuts to avoid doing the actual work.
So why build an irrigation system when you can just bride a deity to bring rain for the low low price of an animal or virgin sacrifice.

as long as doing things is hard, people will delude themselves into wishing someone supernatural will do it for them.
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Do you think that the children in Beslan invented the Harry Potter religion or resorted to established Christianity because they were too lazy to fight the Chechen rebels who had taken them hostage? Or is it possible that they did so because they were utterly helpless and scared?

dann said:
the children in Beslan who were held hostage at a school by Chechen rebels:
Carat, 11: "I was hoping that Harry Potter would come. I remembered that he had a cloak that made him invisible and he would come and wrap me in it, and we'd be invisible and we'd escape."
Nine-year-old Laima draws pictures of what she saw when she was held hostage:
"I found a little cross on the gym's floor. I kept it on me for all of the three days. It helped me to survive."

What these children needed was to get the hell out of there! Once they were in safety, you could start telling them about the superstitions that people invent in uncomfortable situations that are out of their control.
What sick Africans need is health care, first and foremost. Once they have that, it makes sense to start telling them about the difference between medical doctors and witchdoctors. Only then will they actually benefit from knowing about the difference.
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I once read some anthropology article that examined religious trends across the world and it appears monotheism is much more likely among nomadic pastoralists and they are usually more violent societies, while polytheism seems to be more common among societies based in the rainforest or in permanent settlements.
 
dann said:
Yes, monotheism is relatively new to the table and has been very successful for a couple of thousand years. Calling it a parasite explains absolutely nothing.
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Depends on exactly what you define as monotheism, actually. From all the evidence we have, including literally thousands of written prayers from the Sumerians, everyone believing in exactly one god as the real thing was actually the overwhelming majority situation.

At it even makes sense too, if you think about it: Gods* are a father figure. Nobody fancies themselves being the *ahem* son of a thousand fathers :p

Polytheism is actually the one that appears later, by the time you start dealing with ruling or allying with several cities, each worshiping a different god. Like, you have the city of Eridu which worships Enki, and Lagash which worships Ninurta, and Uruk which worshipped Nanna aka Sin, and Uruk which worships Inanna. (Actual cities and actual gods of those cities, btw.) And none of them is going to go "well, we were wrong to worship Inanna, we should worship Sin instead, if our new overlord worships Sin." So you invent whole pantheons where Inanna is actually the daughter of Sin, and Sin is subordinate to some other guy, and so on, so everyone can play along.

What's newer is exclusive monotheism. I.e., being the kind of assh... err... hat (don't want to trigger the mods about that again;)) who'll go, "no, all your gods are false, you all are mistaken, only our Yahweh is the real deal."

In a sense it's actually a step back.


* But it should also be mentioned that that only works about Gods or at least great ruler spirits. If it's animism where everything is a spirit or has a spirit, you can still have thousands of smaller spirits around naturally.
 
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BTW, just to make it clear, those prayers we found for every single Sumerian and Akadian God make it clear that people were pretty explicitly monotheistic in their own prayers even long AFTER polytheism was a thing. In fact, all the way until we get Marduk for everyone. Just, officially, when dealing with other people, they'd pretend that it's a real pantheon and all gods are real. Presumably so they don't have to brain each other over whose Slim Shady is the real Slim Shady. Err... I mean, whose god is the real god.

A lot of modern religious tolerance for other beliefs is actually relatively close to how that ancient "polytheism" worked.

Pretty much the only thing that exclusive monotheism brought (back) is the idea that, "no, screw you, I'm done pretending your god is real too. MY god gets angry if I don't kill you guys over your worshiping false gods" :p
 
HansMustermann said:
BTW, just to make it clear, those prayers we found for every single Sumerian and Akadian God make it clear that people were pretty explicitly monotheistic in their own prayers even long AFTER polytheism was a thing. In fact, all the way until we get Marduk for everyone. Just, officially, when dealing with other people, they'd pretend that it's a real pantheon and all gods are real. Presumably so they don't have to brain each other over whose Slim Shady is the real Slim Shady. Err... I mean, whose god is the real god.

A lot of modern religious tolerance for other beliefs is actually relatively close to how that ancient "polytheism" worked.

Pretty much the only thing that exclusive monotheism brought (back) is the idea that, "no, screw you, I'm done pretending your god is real too. MY god gets angry if I don't kill you guys over your worshiping false gods" :p
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Where, in modern religious tolerance, do people pretend that it's a real pantheon and all gods are real?
 
Well, the closest would be the ones going some version of "we're all worshipping god, just under different names". That's pretty much how the Roman numina worked, or how previously they made Ishtar and Inanna be the same goddess.
 
dann said:
Do you think that the children in Beslan invented the Harry Potter religion or resorted to established Christianity because they were too lazy to fight the Chechen rebels who had taken them hostage? Or is it possible that they did so because they were utterly helpless and scared?
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seems to me that you are making my point for me:

when things seem too hard to do (because they are or because you are lazy), you turn to religion in the hope that someone else will do things for you.
 
carlosy said:
Is religion (the belief into some concepts of supernatural forces or entities) an inevitable step or byproduct or even necessary in the evolution of any conscious species during the process of learning and becoming a more advanced society?

I tend to think it is almost inevitable.

I've put this topic into the science section, because it is not about the contents of any religion.
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When dealing with aliens, I think we should use a broader and more generic definition of religion. For those purposes, I would define religion as a set of alogical (not necessarily illogical) shared beliefs that majorly affect the believers' values. Belief in a deity or other pervasive supernatural things can obviously qualify, but it's not limited to that.

I don't know if religion, even with this broader definition, is inevitable for intelligent social species. But I DO think that if we ever encounter interstellar space-faring intelligent species, they will be religious under this broader definition. I think that is inevitable, because I think only some kind of religion (of this broader definition) can sufficiently motivate a society to spend enough resources for something as difficult and resource-intensive as space travel when the direct payoff is so small.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
seems to me that you are making my point for me:

when things seem too hard to do (because they are or because you are lazy), you turn to religion in the hope that someone else will do things for you.
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I am willing to believe that you came up with this idea because you were too lazy to think things through. However, a student who doesn't do his homework because it is too hard or he is too lazy doesn't usually turn to religion or come up with deities that will do the work for him.
 
How many honest to pete monotheists are there? Christianists and Muslimoids all believe in Satan, and in angels and jdinns and demons. Jews mostly credit Satan too, and those who don't still set a place for Gabriel -- or whoever, I don't have my notes here -- at Passover. All those b'lievers may class their Yehooavow as the one true only deity, but, standing off at this distance, I merely note their folklore, and I certainly don't accept it.

Other cults teem with gods n demons n sperrits n whatall. Just favoring one over the others and praying to him on a brick is hardly exclusive monotheism.

Over the millenia, gods rise and fall, often turning into, yessir, demons, angels, spirits, and the habit of nailing a horseshoe over the door.

For decades now, we've seen fools trying to revive (or reinvent?) defunct gods, with some success. I'm inclined to think that pure-quill monotheism can never satisfy anybody's religious cravings, because it's so goddamn boring. It explains everything with the ringing of one dull bell: GODDIDIT. Even so-called simple folk can't stay satisfied with that. Our minds swarm with questions, fantasies, and conjectures. We want the supernatural to be at least as varied -- and as strangely beautiful -- as the world we inhabit.

But, and this is what may eventually save us from religion, as we learn more about the world and the universe, the more satisfying they become because we know so little but now we can find out. After all, those innumerable supernatural explanations were never really adequate, hence their continual proliferation.
 
Monotheism is generally more a case of just arbitrarily

As said Christians with Jesus, the Trinity, Mary (especially the Catholics), and the Saints requiring miracles are polytheistic in everything but name.

Believing in a big "G" and a bunch of little "g"s is monotheism technically at most.
 
sackett said:
How many honest to pete monotheists are there? Christianists and Muslimoids all believe in Satan, and in angels and jdinns and demons. Jews mostly credit Satan too, and those who don't still set a place for Gabriel -- or whoever, I don't have my notes here -- at Passover. All those b'lievers may class their Yehooavow as the one true only deity, but, standing off at this distance, I merely note their folklore, and I certainly don't accept it.

Other cults teem with gods n demons n sperrits n whatall. Just favoring one over the others and praying to him on a brick is hardly exclusive monotheism.

Over the millenia, gods rise and fall, often turning into, yessir, demons, angels, spirits, and the habit of nailing a horseshoe over the door.
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There's truth to this, but it's not exactly difficult for modern observers to be monotheist. Perhaps it was more difficult in the past due to the confluence of annoying details you mentioned. The satan was God's prosecutor, angels are messengers, though Satan's since been turned into what almost amounts to God's evil twin by centuries of Pietist propaganda. Mainstream believers today seem comfortable relegating the prominent godly figures to lower spiritual beings and allegorizing everyone else a peg below them.

That's quite different from what the ancient Israelites believed, many who actually did favor one god over the others, because he served almost as their heavenly governor for their region. We can see vestiges of this in the texts of course.
 
dann said:
I am willing to believe that you came up with this idea because you were too lazy to think things through. However, a student who doesn't do his homework because it is too hard or he is too lazy doesn't usually turn to religion or come up with deities that will do the work for him.
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NANI?! You've never seen students go to pray or light a candle or something before an exam? And I'm getting the impression that in Japan (though it's not really equivalent, as it's literally the farthest possible from monotheism and it's one of the least religious countries) that's pretty much half the business that shrines make. People who haven't bothered to go to a shrine since the last festival or new year, whichever was last, suddenly decide it can't hurt to chuck a coin and ask the spirits for help before an exam. Not that it's the only one, though. In a study in India, at least one of them even referred to going to the temple before an exam as "bribing" a god.

And even without religion, a lot come up with other superstitions, a lot of them about exams. Stuff ranging always using their lucky pencil (or an exact same model from the same brand) for an exam, to outright wearing magic talismans or fortune telling or little rituals to 'ward off evil' (questions on the exam.)

So, yeah, sad to say, students too come up with some kind of magical force that compensates in some way or another for their not studying enough :p
 
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Ziggurat said:
When dealing with aliens, I think we should use a broader and more generic definition of religion. For those purposes, I would define religion as a set of alogical (not necessarily illogical) shared beliefs that majorly affect the believers' values. Belief in a deity or other pervasive supernatural things can obviously qualify, but it's not limited to that.

I don't know if religion, even with this broader definition, is inevitable for intelligent social species. But I DO think that if we ever encounter interstellar space-faring intelligent species, they will be religious under this broader definition. I think that is inevitable, because I think only some kind of religion (of this broader definition) can sufficiently motivate a society to spend enough resources for something as difficult and resource-intensive as space travel when the direct payoff is so small.
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I'm generally not a fan of these extension exercises, in which anything can be argued to be a religion, just because one or two elements kinda work like those in a religion, and ignoring the other elements that don't work that way or are missing entirely. The chief problem being just that: that you can do that to argue that anything is a religion.

I mean watch me prove that anime is a religion :p

- protagonists who come back from the dead
- it has some fanatical zealots
- ... and missionaries
- it has its share of holy wars, including over minute deviations from the Holy canon or interpretations thereof
- ... not to mention the whole bloody schism over subbed vs dubbed
- some people will surround themselves with effigies of their favourite *ahem* religious figures and symbols, or even wear such to school (or take them to bed, even)
- it has its holy dates, sites and pilgrimages
- it requires weekly attendance
- it can impart valuable lessons
- it has been historically ok with harems

The problem at that point is that if it covers everything, it becomes effectively meaningless. It's like if I argued that every mammal is a cat, then "I saw a cat" doesn't actually tell you much any more. Is it the kind that meows, or the kind of 'cat' that goes MOO? Is it even the land type, or one of the kinds that swim in the ocean?
 
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HansMustermann said:
I'm generally not a fan of these extension exercises, in which anything can be argued to be a religion, just because one or two elements kinda work like those in a religion, and ignoring the other elements that don't work that way or are missing entirely. The chief problem being just that: that you can do that to argue that anything is a religion.

I mean watch me prove that anime is a religion :p
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Most of your bullet points have absolutely nothing to do with my definition. Some of them are particularly bad criteria to consider when dealing with aliens. What possible relevance do the significance of holy dates and sites have to us? Some of them are also not at all peculiar to religion and shouldn't be considered as such, like the stories that impart lessons. Using storytelling to impart lessons has nothing intrinsically connected to the supernatural (the OP's definition), to deities (a more traditional definition) or to shared alogical beliefs (my definition). We use stories to impart lessons because that's how our brains work. The difference between religious uses and non-religious uses is entirely about what lessons are being imparted. GI Joe cartoons that teach you not to put water on a grease fire, or My Little Pony cartoons that teach you to be nice to the shy kid aren't religious, under any of these definitions. So you're really stretching to try to fit anime into a definition of religion, you aren't even trying to use mine, and no, most stuff most certainly doesn't qualify.

And when it comes to aliens, the specifics of their religious beliefs aren't going to matter much to us anyways, what's going to matter to us is how it makes them behave. For example, are they driven to take over every inhabitable world they encounter? Do they sterilize local life to make way for their own? Do they wage war against other intelligent species? Do they leave other intelligent species alone? The answer is that it's going to depend upon what their values are. If they are religious in a more traditional sense (a belief in deities), that's obviously going to make a big difference. But my point in using the definition I used is that it doesn't matter if they're driven by a belief in some deity, or if they're just driven by some other shared philosophy that might have nothing to do with the supernatural. The effects are going to be the same. They may be hostile or friendly to us with no regard to the logical costs or benefits of that status, based on whatever those beliefs are. This is different than if they only acted on their logical self-interest. You can predict a lot about a logical actor's actions based on logic, but you cannot predict the actions of an alogical actor

And my point is that we should EXPECT aliens to have some set of deeply held alogical beliefs, which means they will fall into the latter category, not the former.
 
My point is that there's no need to start calling every ideology, superstition, delusion, wishful thinking, or whatever a religion.
 
HansMustermann said:
My point is that there's no need to start calling every ideology, superstition, delusion, wishful thinking, or whatever a religion.
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Why not? If it's shared by most of a society, if it strongly affects behavior, why isn't it deserving of that title?
 
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