this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Because religion evolved to thrive in us.
It's like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.
Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn't have these beneficial traits went extinct.
Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it's necessary to spread your belief to others, are 'somehow' more spread out than religions who don't convey that need.
This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.
This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It's funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.
โFifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.โ
โ Peter Watts, Echopraxia