Humans have a great desire to find answers for anything that happens in their environment.  The urge to explain the sometimes unexplainable seems to have been a very successful drive in our evolution of culture. The prediction of future events is also very strong. Predicting tides by the position of the moon as well as the seasons by the shadow of the sun, lead to astrology. The majority of the population had to be very impressed by the few people who did notice the connection. An elite developed which started to explain everything. Two “kinds” of minds developed. One kind would attempt to explain all things by inventing a cause for every thing happening in the environment, mostly made up stories by story tellers who wanted to give the impression of superior knowledge, but there were always some skeptics who did not believe in the made up explanations. But since the human urge is so great in most people, to feel more secure by having a cause for everything happening around them and being told that they could influence the happenings by certain rituals, such as offerings, they rather ignored the skeptic(s) and even despised and persecuted these naysayers.

We see that “hate” to day towards Atheists because they “undermine” the security that humans so desperately want to feel to be able to cope with the world they live in. Read some of the comments in forums discussing atheism. The words, stupid, morons, immoral, brainless, crazy and many other insults are rampant in these “discussions”, showing how threatened the average believer feels if there beliefs are questioned. Rational discussion is the first thing that goes out of the window.

A Skeptic will say, I have not yet an explanation for some things, I’ll try to find out, However, many people want to have answers, a golden opportunity for some to become leaders by providing explanations, and the promise that by following rituals, such as praying and/or paying (offerings) you can influence the situation you find yourself in.

Now I ask you, would you rather admit that you don’t know yet, but pursue by the scientific method to find out facts or accept someone’s fantasy to feel more secure to be able to deal with the unpredictability of life.

It becomes clear to me that we have two kinds of minds, the skeptic and the believer and that these are hardwired in the brain. Although environment plays a large role in the development of the mind, I believe that we all are born with a range between belief and skepticism. That the extreme “ranges” cannot possibly be “converted’, which explains why some people brought up religious become Atheist and vice versa, while the middle group is more apt to be influenced by education and the culture they grew up in.

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Some people state that there is no conflict between science and religion. Yes there is. The latest research in neuro-science through neuro-imagining by Dimitrios Kapogiannis, National Institutes of Health USA, Neuroradiology, shows a definite neural foundation of religious beliefs in the brain www.pnas.org/content/106/12/4876.short

Social cognition is the “encoding, storage, retrieval and processing of information in the Brain. The experiments regarding the beliefs systems indicate that religion is a product of the brain that evolved to help humans cope with the little understood environment. Fear of the unknown was a powerful survival instinct.  We also have an innate sense of morality as found in studies  (Just Babies: the origin of good and evil by Paul Bloom) that babies who do are to young to have been indoctrinated by religion have a sense of right and wrong, an interesting read. That brings into question the assertion that we need religion to be moral. An interesting quote I ran into (I wish I could remember the source) was:

Morality is what is right in spite of what we are told.

Religious Morality is doing what we are told regardless whether it is right.

I leave you with one more “bon mot”: It takes religion to make good people do bad things! That sums up very well, doesn’t it?

Would the world be better off without religions? The debate rages on. On the one side, Atheists, Agnostics and unbelievers are sure that if religion did not exist the world would be a much better place. They point at the Crusades, the Inquisition, The Irish Catholic/Protestant conflict, Witch hunts, Suicide bombers as obvious proof.

Religious people often point out Mao and Stalin as Atheists, who murdered more people than all religious war in history did, as if numbers make a difference. A mass murderer who kills ten people is “better” than a mass murderer who kills twenty?

It is time that we have a closer look at these “conclusions” which seem so “obvious to many people at both sides of the argument.

Can we come to any conclusion that indicates whether we are better off without religion or not. Many prominent scholars have pondered the question.  Dawkins, Dennett, Prager, Lilienfeld, Ammirati , to name a few, have questioned the premise that without religion the conflicts in the world would greatly diminish.

Let us do a little thought-experiment. Imaging a world with the same religion everywhere and no different factions either. We would still be faced with political strife, such as Socialism, Capitalism, Racism, Nationalism, Patriotism and intolerance in general.

 We would still go to war on a large scale and we would still hate our neighbor who votes for a different party locally. There will always be good people and bad people in the world in spite of their religion or affiliation. Innate morality is found in babies (see a previous blog) and personalities differ and so do our mental states. We can confidentially state that extremism of whatever kind can develop in severe violence when it is in conjunction with deeply held beliefs that the opposing side is not only wrong but also very evil.

The cause of wars and violence has more to do with the inborn evolutionary drive to make one’s tribe prevail rather than religious beliefs. That explains also why religious groups can be just as ruthless as non-religious ones. Their morals often apply to the members of their tribe only and not to their rivals.

This conclusion seems to make one very pessimistic until one realize that inherited instincts and drives can be overcome by reasoning and restrains, a brain function which we possess and animals do not have. Rather than trying to convince the “other side” that we are right and they are wrong we must tolerate the difference between us.  Love thy neighbor has been tried over and over again. It doesn’t work because it only applies to the tribe one belongs to and does not extend to a different tribe. We can however, learn to tolerate the other tribe, as long as we don’t try to convince them to change and vice versa. then perhaps, there is still hope for a better world.

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