I have always been fascinated by the question of belief. Especially belief in things that are impossible to prove or disprove. I have wondered what the purpose of such beliefs would be.

Recent speculation has suggested that a genetic predisposition to gullibility might enhance survival. This seems to defy common sense.  You would think that the closer a person could come to an accurate picture of reality, the better suited they would be for survival.

The argument goes something like this. If you saw a shadow in the forest and thought that it might be a tiger, you would run away. If you were wrong, no harm done. On the other hand, if you saw a shadow in the forest and dismissed it as a bush and you were wrong, you might wind up dead. Therefore, it would be best to err on the side of belief in a danger. So, those who a little more gullible would survive to pass on their genes while those who were more skeptical would not.

So much for the idividual but what about the group? There has been a big debate in evolutionary theory over whether survival selection operates primarily at the individual level or the group level. Some research with software agents has yielded provacative results. One  group of agents was programmed to believe only things that could be validated. Another group was programmed to believe in both things that could be valideated and things that could not  be validated. It turns out that the group that shared a belief in things that could not be validate fared  better in internal cooperate and external competition than the group that went strickly by what could be validated.

Apparently, belief in things that cannot be validated could enhance survival at both the individual and group level.

Surveys of belief indicate that those with strong religious beliefs live longer, are healthier and happier. Research has shown that being able to understand the reason something happened can help a person cope with stress. So, if a person believes strongly that some supernatural power controls the world and that everything that happens happens for a reason, that person would cope better with stressful events even if they could not aticulate the reason for a particular event.

Loneliness can be very stressful and injurious to health. Believing that an invisible supernatural person loved you and was always with you could help someone cope with loneliness.

Consideration of individual mortality has been shown to be stressful. Believing that a supernatural power can grant eternal life if one believes strongly enough would be helpful in coping with fear of death.

Recently, a gene was discovered that appears to enhance the placebo effect. Apparently, if a person has this gene, they are susceptible to placebos. If you don’t have the gene, you are not. Is this the belief gene?

There seem to be a lot of reasons for a belief in things that cannot be proven or dis-proven to survive. Unfortunately, there are times when such a belief could prove to be fatal. So if seems that skepticism will also survive.

One of the problems that I have in understanding many religious traditions is that such a great gulf of time separates their origins from our present time. The people who witnessed the birth of an ancient religion saw the world very differently than we do. It is difficult for us to understand how they might have experienced the events that have come down to us through the centuries.

The idea that Jesus served as the scapegoat for the whole human race is the center piece of Christianity. What did this mean to the Jewish people of the 1st century?

The scapegoat was a Jewish tradition where they symbolically put the sins of the community on a young and innocent goat or lamb. Then they sacrificed the animal and offered the blood to Yahweh to wash away their sins. The story told in the Christian bible is that Jesus voluntarily went to the cross in sacrifice so his blood would atone for our sins.

In the early part of the 4th century CE, Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria promoted the idea that Jesus was human and was inhabited by the spirit of God. The spirit of God left him as he hung on the cross and he died as a man to atone for our sins. One of the things that Jesus is reported to have said on the cross is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” which is Aramaic for “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” This makes sense in the context of the scapegoat.

Arianism Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a long term interest in religion and it is certainly a topic of widespread concern today. A lot of people talk casually about ‘religious people” as if all the different sorts of people who practice one of the world’s many religions could be easily placed in one category with a single set of defining elements. In the interest of broadening the discussion, I would like to talk about at least several different identifiable types of religious people.

1)       The intrinsically religious

There are a lot of people who sincerely believe the precepts of their religion and are comfortable about trying to apply those principles in their daily lives. They want to act in the “proper” way because they have internalized the rules and identify with them. 

2)       The extrinsically religious

There are people who may have some problems with their beliefs but they are motivated to behave in the “proper” way of a particular religion for external reasons. Such things as social contact, sense of purpose, power, money, etc. can motivate some people to follow religious principles

3)       The quest religious

There are those that are involved in religion because they are seeking something greater than themselves, something beyond the normal world of day-to-day life. Depending on the religion, they may want to talk to God or find Nirvana. Apparently, most human brains have the capacity for transcendental experiences. The way such experiences will be interpreted depends upon the cultural framework of the experiencer.

Religious Orientation

Refering to one of my earlier posts, the question of motivational penetration into the “self” can be “unpacked” as the academics say. In “What’s my motivation”, I discussed a model of motivation that contained a range of motivational states between the standard extrinsic and the intrinsic types.

What’s My Motivation