>>The most obvious example of this phenomenon is organized religion. We
>>have an extraordinary person (Christ, Buddha, for example)
>>communicating these very subtle, but powerful truths, but they become
>>mangled and twisted by humans who are not in the proper state of
>>receiving.
>>Or take these newsgroups, for example. Many of these discussions
>>consist of two people trading prejudices, in the hopes their
>>prejudices will win out. In reality though, neither side knows how to
>>listen, and so their struggles are perpetual. They are doomed to live
>>in the past, and so never get to really live.
Yes, science is more like primitive religion. Like the totem pole,
where new chiefs replace old chiefs, and are moved up the pole,
science is adaptive to the dynamics of cultural evolution. But once we
get these symbols and written languages that last past to many
generations on come the problems. Science deals with this problem by
going with the evidence or what works. World religions must learn to
adapt just as science, which replaced it as the main religion now.
Science stole religions vast power because religions became hardened
by unchangable dogmas. Religion must somehow incorperate the best
evidence for things we can find, as science does do.
Excuse the same long quote, but...
The Evolution of Religion
The essence of religion is communal: religious rituals are performed
by assemblies of people. The word itself, probably derived from the
Latin religare, meaning to bind, speaks to its role in social
cohesion. Religious ceremonies involve emotive communal actions, such
as singing or dancing, and this commonality of physical action
reinforces the participants' commitment to the shared religious views.
The propensity for religious belief may be innate since it is found in
societies around the world. Innate behaviors are shaped by natural
selection because they confer some advantage in the struggle for
survival. But if religion is innate, what could that advantage have
been?
No one can describe with certainty the specific needs of hunter-
gatherer societies that religion evolved to satisfy. But a strong
possibility is that religion coevolved with language, because language
can be used to deceive, and religion is a safeguard against deception.
Religion began as a mechanism for a community to exclude those who
could not be trusted. Later, it grew into a means of encouraging
communal action, a necessary role in hunter-gatherer societies that
have no chiefs or central authority. It was then co-opted by the
rulers of settled societies as a way of solidifying their authority
and justifying their privileged position. Modern states now accomplish
by other means many of the early roles performed by religion, which is
why religion has become of less relevance in some societies. But
because the propensity for religious belief is still wired into the
human mind, religion continues to be a potent force in societies that
still struggle for cohesion.
A distinctive feature of religion is that it appeals to something
deeper than reason: religious truths are accepted not as mere
statements of fact but as sacred truths, something that it would be
morally wrong to doubt. This emotive quality suggests that religion
has deep roots in human nature, and that just as people are born with
a propensity to learn the language they hear spoken around them, so
too they may be primed to embrace their community's religious beliefs.
Can the origin of religion be dated? A surprising answer is yes, if
the following argument is accepted. Like most behaviors that are found
in societies throughout the world, religion must have been present in
the ancestral human population before the dispersal from Africa 50,000
years ago. Although religious rituals usually involve dance and music,
they are also very verbal, since the sacred truths have to be stated.
If so, religion, at least in its modern form, cannot pre-date the
emergence of language. It has been argued earlier that language
attained its modern state shortly before the exodus from Africa. If
religion had to await the evolution of modern, articulate language,
then it too would have emerged shortly before 50,000 years ago.
If both religion and language evolved at the same time, it is
reasonable to assume that each emerged in interaction with the other.
It is easy enough to see why religion needed language, as a vehicle
for the sharing of religious ideas. But why should language have
needed religion?
The answer may have to do with the instinct for reciprocal altruism
that is a principal cohesive force in human society, and specifically
with its principal vulnerability, the freeloaders who may take
advantage of the system without returning favors to others. Unless
freeloaders can be curbed, a society may disintegrate, since
membership loses its advantages. With the advent of language,
freeloaders gained a great weapon, the power to deceive. Religion
could have evolved as a means of defense against freeloading. Those
who committed themselves in public ritual to the sacred truth were
armed against the lie by knowing that they could trust one another.
The anthropologist Roy Rappaport argued that sanctified statements
were early societies' antidote to the misuse of the newly emerged
powers of language. "This implies that the idea of the sacred is as
old as language," he wrote, "and that the evolution of language and of
the idea of the sacred were closely related, if not bound together in
a single mutual causal process." The emergence of the sacred, he
suggested, "possibly helped to maintain the general features of some
previously existing social organization in the face of new threats
posed by an ever-increasing capacity for lying."
For early societies making the first use of language, there had to be
some context in which statements were reliably and indubitably true.
That context, in Rappaport's view, was sanctity. This feature has been
retained to a considerable degree in modern religions, which are
centered around sacred truths, such as "The Lord Our God the Lord is
One," or "There is no god but God." These sacred truths are
unverifiable, and unfalsifiable, but the faithful nevertheless accept
them to be unquestionable. In doing so, like assemblies of the
faithful since the dawn of language, they bind themselves together for
protection or common action against the unbelievers and their lies.
From his study of the Maring, primitive agriculturalists of the New
Guinea central highlands, Rappaport also recognized that ritual was an
essential source of authority in an egalitarian society without
headmen or ruling elites. It was by their attendance at ritual dances
that the Maring would commit themselves to fight as their host's
allies in the next war cycle. "It is plausible to argue that religious
ritual played an important role in social and ecological regulation
during a time in human history when the arbitrariness of social
conventions was increasing but it was not yet possible for
authorities, if they existed at all, to enforce compliance," he wrote.
Rappaport's ideas about the role of religion in early societies have
been buttressed by a remarkable series of excavations in the Oaxaca
valley of Mexico. The archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent V Flannery
traced the development of religion over a 7,000-year period as the
people of the valley went through four stages of social development,
from hunters and gatherers, to a settled egalitarian society, to a
society ruled by an elite, and finally to an archaic state known as
the Zapotec state. As the Oaxacan people's society evolved, so too did
their form of religion.
At the hunting and gathering stage, Joyce and Flannery found signs of
a plain dance floor, its sides marked by stones. The dance floor,
assuming it was used like those of modern hunter-gatherers, would have
been the site of ritual dancing on ad hoc occasions when many
different groups came together for initiations and courtship.
By 1500 BC the Oaxacans had developed strains of maize that allowed
them to settle down and practice agriculture (the reverse of the
sequence in the Near East, where settlement long preceded
agriculture). At first their society was egalitarian, as it had been
in their hunter-gatherer days, but their rituals became more formal.
Marcus and Flannery have excavated four men's houses, all oriented in
the same direction, which may have been determined by the sun's path
at spring equinox. The orientation suggests that religious ceremonies
were now held at fixed times, determined by astronomical events. The
men's houses, to judge by practice in contemporary societies, may have
been open only to men who had passed acceptability tests and been
initiated into secret rituals.
By 1150 BC the third stage of society had began to emerge, with an
elite who lived in large houses, wore jade-studded clothes and
deformed their skulls in childhood as a sign of nobility. The men's
houses were replaced with temples, also oriented in the same
direction. Religious practice had become more elaborate, the
archaeologists found, with ritual bloodletting, a symbolic self-
sacrifice, and the cooking and eating of sacrificial victims.
The fourth stage of society, the Zapotec state, which was founded in
500 BC, was accompanied by a more complex form of religion. The
temples now had rooms for a special caste of religious officers, the
priests.
The advent of the priests marked the culmination of a steady trend in
the evolution of Oaxacan ritual, its growing exclusivity. At the
hunter-gatherer stage, the ritual dances were open to everyone. By the
time of the men's houses, only initiated members of the public could
participate in rituals, and by the stage of the Zapotec state,
religion had come under the control of a special priestly caste.
What underlay this coevolution of religion with social structure? It
seems that the important coordinating role of ritual in hunter-
gatherer societies did not end when leaders and elites emerged in
settled societies. Instead, the elites coopted the ritual practices as
another mechanism of social control and as a means of justifying their
privileged position. Making the religion more exclusionary gave the
elites greater power to control the believers. To justify the ruler's
position, new truths, also unverifiable and un-falsifiable, were added
as subtexts to the religion's sacred postulates, such as "The chief
has great mana," "Pharaoh is the living Horus," or "Henry is by the
Grace of God King."
Rappaport believed that the conditions that enabled authorities to
exercise civil power emerged only recently, and that for much of human
existence rulers invoked sanctity as a principal source of their
authority. Even archaic states were theocratic, at least to begin
with. Modern states too, despite the ample civil power at their
disposal, have not entirely dispensed with appeals to religious
cohesion and authority. Even in a society like that of the United
States, political allegiance is sealed with the declaration of "One
nation under God."
Religion's other ancient role, that of protecting the community from
freeloaders, can also been seen still at work in contemporary
societies. Among ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York's diamond district,
the level of trust is so high that multi-million-dollar deals can be
sealed by a handshake. Islam is said to have spread through Africa as
a facilitator of trade and trust.
Trust and cohesiveness are nowhere more important than in wartime.
Contemporary religions preach the virtues of peace in peacetime but in
war the bishops are expected to bless the cannon, and official
churches almost always support national military goals. "Religion is
superbly serviceable to the purposes of warfare and economic
exploitation," writes the biologist Edward O. Wilson, noting that it
is "above all the process by which individuals are persuaded to
subordinate their immediate self-interest to the interests of the
group."
Why does religion persist when its primary role, that of providing
social cohesion, is now supplied by many other cultural and political
institutions? While religion may no longer be socially necessary, it
nevertheless fills a strong need for many people, and this may reflect
the presence of genetic predisposition. Wilson, for one, believes that
religion has a genetic basis, that its sources "are in fact
hereditary, urged into birth through biases in mental development
encoded in the genes."
Religion, language and reciprocity are three comparatively recent
elements of the glue that holds human societies together. All seem to
have emerged some 50,000 years ago. But a far more ancient adaptation
for social cohesiveness, one that set human societies on a decisively
different path from those of apes, was the formation of the pair bond.
Much of human nature consists of the behaviors necessary to support
the male-female bond and a man's willingness to protect his family in
return for a woman's willingness to bear only his children.
Before the Dawn: Recovering the
Lost History of Our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/014303832X/
