Religion Is An Enigma That Can Explain Our Minds

Religion arose as an age-old necessity, or so we think, and it has stuck to the present day with no signs of it ever going away. If you look at history, you will see that religion – if we can talk about it in a general way – has had many variations. Consider, for example, the emergence of monotheism, the belief in a single god.

The gods have also changed a lot over the centuries and have taken many different names and forms. There are gods that you are not allowed to make images of and others that have fantastic shapes. These shapes are sometimes even related to animals.

Religion has now also become an institution. Humans have created social institutions in the name of God designed to provide or improve services such as education and health. The negative side of this is that there have also been major wars in the name of God. People have also committed many crimes and injustices based on sacred texts, which are often misinterpreted.

explanations

Many explanations have been put forward to try to explain the origin and development of religion over the centuries. One of the best explanations is that it serves to answer questions that we have never been able to answer. But that’s not the only explanation people have given.

Today we are going to tell you about some of these attempts to explain the origin and progression of religion:

• Religion arose as a result of drug use. People taking hallucinogens had unusual visions that they eventually interpreted as messages from the great afterlife. Some shamans and medicine men took drugs to be closer to the gods or to communicate with them to make decisions. Perhaps they were not always aware that they were taking drugs. It is therefore quite logical that their interpretations have to do with divine beings.

• Another explanation says that religion began as a way of explaining the natural phenomena that had no logical interpretations. There were some phenomena that were more difficult for us to explain convincingly, such as rain and thunder. Humans could not find a logical way to interpret these phenomena, and that led them to create gods. Thus it became the gods who caused the phenomena that humans could not rationally explain.
• The rise of religion also appears to be a kind of idolatry. People even began to worship and idolize certain figures for their words and deeds. Religions were therefore created around these figures.
• The latter statement says that religion appeared as a cognitive adaptation. These are mental functions, processes and states. They have a specific focus on processes such as understanding, inference, decision making, planning and learning. This is one of the most accepted viewpoints in biology and psychology.

In God’s We Trust

According to a book by Scott Attran, In Gods We Trust , religion attempts to transfer genes with a predisposition to certain behavior, group selection, and mimicry or imitation. Religion is not a doctrine or an institution and it is not even a belief. According to Attran, religion exists as a result of the human mind having to deal with life. It is an explanation for things like birth, old age, death, the unexpected and love.

To understand this perspective, you must realize that religion is difficult to understand. Also, the doctrines often go against intuition. For example, some religions attach importance to making sacrifices. Following a religion can also be extremely expensive. And in certain periods it even costs lives. The positive and negative characteristics of religion may weigh equally. This means that people probably don’t choose religion just because of its benefits.

Instead, we can see religion as a non-adaptive consequence of the adaptive features of human cognition. That is, religion is an adjustment at the cognitive level. But it’s not adaptive in and of itself when we consider all the costs and benefits that come with it. Religion, like other cultural phenomena, is the outcome of an encounter between cognitive, behavioral and physical mediums. It also stems from the biological limitations of our mind.

Psychological abilities that create religion

Religion comes from certain psychological faculties that we use to adapt to the circumstances of life. Here are some of these abilities:

• Primary and secondary affective programs: The emotions we feel and how we interpret them have a direct impact on our interaction with other people. By believing in a religion, we have different affective reactions with our group than with other groups. Of course, our reactions will be more affectionate with people from our own group. Expressing emotions in this way was good for our evolution because it benefited the groups we belonged to.
• Social intelligence: group life paved the way for different interpretations that acted as a protection of the group. Choosing one god or the other is the result of belonging to a specific group. And this choice ultimately creates the differences between groups. The difference between the choices regulates and legitimizes the relationships that groups establish with different gods. And this benefits our own group.

• Cognitive modules: These are the mental boxes that regulate our interpretation of actions and rituals. People understand and justify these modules through religion. We understand and accept all rituals from our religion. Meanwhile, all the rituals of other religions seem strange and impossible to understand. The rituals and actions of a specific group are carried through through these frameworks.

Religion as a means of survival

As humans, we tend to detect agency (the ability of an autonomous being to act). Similarly, we tend to detect the cause of an action, even where there is none. For example, our belief in the supernatural stems from the same cognitive adaptation as that of our ancestors. For example, they interpreted the sound of a breeze rustling a bush as the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.

This interpretation was useful because it helped people survive. In that sense, supernatural acts were just a by-product of evolution. Which in this case stemmed from our predator detection systems.

In that sense, religion is the tool our minds use to make plausible interpretations of events we are unsure of. Our minds reproduced those mechanisms and frameworks over the centuries to ensure that we belong to a group and survive.