In his paper on Psychology and Religion, Jung suggests that “religion
is incontestably one of the earliest and most universal activities of
the human mind” (1969:1) Dunne (2000:152) indicates that Jung
described religion as a defense against the religious experience, or
what Jung (1969:7) calls the numinosum. The idea of the ‘mystical
numinosum’ is understood by Jung as the impulsive thoughts of the
mind, which come from the unconscious. Since Jung (1969:46) believes
that the unconscious mind, like God is something that is unknown to
people, religion is there to act as a barrier between the unconscious
“perils of the soul” (1969:15) and the conscious part of the human
mind. For Jung (1969:4) the existence of God is not a philosophical
question, but something that can be understood by looking at the inner
workings of the mind.
The numinosum as Jung suggests is:
A dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On
the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always
rather its victim than its creator… it is either a quality belonging
to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that
causes a peculiar alternation of the consciousness (1969:7).
According to Cambray and Carter (2004:205), Jung’s theory of the “God
within” is derived from the understanding that the numinosum was
similar to that of instincts, which like sexuality, aggression or
hunger, were seen as omnipresent. The omnipresence of these thoughts
and urges from the unconscious is then seen as transcendent and
universal, depicting the characteristics of a higher power, or that of
God. Therefore the ‘influence’ that Jung talks about when he describes
the numinosum is then said to be the influence of the unconscious,
which is the “God within”. Furthermore, Cambray and Carter (2004:205)
imply that Jung considered religion to be an omnipresent function that
paid attention to the “dynamic effect” caused by a numinosum, to serve
as a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious.
Where as Freud defined the unconscious as something that was resultant
of the conscious mind, Jung suggested that the conscious mind was due
to the unconscious (Palmer 1997:95). Jung’s theory of the collective
unconscious supports this point that the unconscious is something of a
divine nature that gave way to the rise of the conscious mind (Jung
1969:345). This is because the collective unconscious holds symbols or
what Jung calls archetypes that are constant and common to many
different people all over the world. It is therefore the theory of the
collective unconscious that gives credibility to the idea that the
unconscious is transcendent and universal.
http://www.modernexistence.net/jung-religion-and-modern-man/
The mind is composed of a large number of mental modules each designed
to solve a specific problem. For example, there is one mechanism for
perceiving three dimensions, another for anger, another for falling in
love. The mind is like a Swiss Army knife; i.e., it has lots of
specialized tools. There is no such thing as general intelligence,
general learning, or any other general ability to solve problems.
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/463evolpsyIQ.html
If religion is a by-product of the way our minds evolved to negotiate
the natural and, more importantly, the social world and the
explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the
way all human minds work.
Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct mental
systems, present also in non-religious contexts, and ‘tweak’ the usual
inferences of these systems. They deal with detection and
representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral
intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of
misfortune. Each of these activates distinct neural resources or
families of networks.
The Inferential Instinct: ...a naturalistic account of cultural
representations that describes how evolved conceptual dispositions
make humans likely to acquire certain concepts more easily than
others. The aggregated result of these individual acquisition
processes channels cultures along particular paths, with the result
that some concepts are both relatively stable within a group and
recurrent among different groups.
Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That
Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors
by Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465006965/
If institutional religion manipulates these modules, then that does
not necessarily justify the institutions at all, like advertising and
how it manipulates human nature as a means to an end, that could be
the case also with institutional religion and traditions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oaSZxd9jOY
