Years ago I wrote another blog post about religion (July 15, 2008: Garth Kroeker: Religion), and I thought it was time for an update, on this very important topic. I'm intending to publish this now, but with the intention of revising and adding to this over time.
Before I begin, I'd like to describe my own personal history with religion: my family background is religious. My ancestors were part of a protestant Christian denomination and cultural group known as "Mennonites," which originated in the Netherlands in the 1500s. While in many ways similar to other Protestant denominations, Mennonites stood out for endorsing pacifism, and not participating in wars except as medics or to assist with refugees etc. Also there was probably more cultural unity among members of this group, migrating together for hundreds of years, maintaining their language of origin (Low German). Many Mennonites migrated east from the Netherlands to maintain cultural and religious freedom, settling as farmers in the Ukraine area for over 100 years, after which most eventually relocated again--under the trauma and duress of war & persecution--to various regions in North America, such as southern Manitoba. Some Mennonite subgroups adopted practices comparable to the Amish, while most others became quite mainstream Protestant denominations, some more conservative, fundamentalist, or evangelical, some more liberal or progressive. The branch my family was most recently part of was comparable to other common modern Christian Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Canada. As with many families, the culture of my family over many centuries has been shaped by its religious involvement. Varieties of religion carried in a family are weaved intimately into the family's history, culture, and values. A lot of this history is something to feel proud of. As a child, we attended church frequently. For the most part these were positive experiences. A nice thing about weekly church attendance is it's an opportunity for moral reflection. Sermons often contain some kind of message about dealing with difficult issues, or about being a better person. Some sermons appealed more to the intellectual side of the audience, with references to academic theologians or philosophers. Others would appeal to the more emotional or sentimental side. Many would contain moments of gentle humour or playfulness. Many would deliberately reach out to children, such as by including stories. Most sermons would be based on a Bible passage, many of which were good foundations for moral reflection and also had a poetic quality. The congregation was always reminded to care for members who had experienced recent loss or illness, or to celebrate members who had experienced a recent joy such as a marriage or birth. In some church services, perhaps during prayer or music, some people can be in a type of joyful trance, absorbed and in a "flow" state. This kind of regular experience is profoundly healthy for people, to help people have structured moral reflection with an attitude of gratitude, service and reverence, couched in a loving and supportive community, being aware and involved in a caring way with the joys and travails of other people's lives. However, this format was biased towards people with good intelligence, strict behavioural practices, and good attention span; those with ADHD symptoms, physical problems making it difficult to sit for an hour, or cognitive issues, would surely have found many church services stiflingly difficult to sit through (I can still think of many unfortunate children during my childhood who probably got scolded a lot due to their impatience). I think this is one of the reasons why some modern fundamentalist churches, which put on more of a musical performance, with a rock band and other performers, has been so appealing especially to the younger generation. I also attended a religious high school, with lots of exposure to daily religious practice & education. Once again, this was really quite positive, since the teachers were for the most part kind, thoughtful people, and the motivation of most of this education was to help the students grow in kindness, morality, and ethical leadership (these noble efforts, however, were not always successful), while being humbly conscious of important issues locally and in the world. Also, alongside educational content in religion, there were meaningful, enjoyable, and comforting practices that were part of the experience almost every day, such as choral singing, "chapel time," and opportunities for community volunteering. I only noticed huge gaps in parts of the science curriculum years afterwards.
In my young adult life I also appreciated the philosophical contributions of many religious thinkers. C.S. Lewis was a favourite (following a pleasant introduction, during my early childhood, reading his children's books aloud with my mother), or Kierkegaard, or Bonhoeffer.
Prayer and other symbolic actions can have a peaceful, meditative quality which is psychologically beneficial. Many church buildings are enjoyable to be in, because of the architecture and acoustics, and association with calm, comfort, safety, refuge, and transcendence. Church buildings in much of the world have historically been a sort of architectural gem in the middle of most communities, sometimes the most visible or distinctive physical feature of the neighbourhood. Church attendance can also involve other meaningful activities such as music appreciation or performance; socializing with familiar, friendly people; having contact with people of different age groups (children, youth, and elders); and having opportunities to do safe, well-organized charitable volunteering in the community. Church members often care for fellow members, or receive care themselves in times of need.
So I want to emphasize that I did not have some negative or bitter experience of religion in my childhood which led me to my current stance on this subject. My current stance, as we will come to later, is that there has to be great respect and sensitivity for the many intimate, positive experiences of cultural enrichment and meaning that religion--or what others might call "spirituality"--bring people in their own life history and in their family history.
Discussions about religion from a psychological or overall scientific point of view require great care. Many people have deep personal feelings about this issue, which have developed all their life. Religious beliefs are often taught beginning in early childhood, and can represent an attachment and shared culture with parents and other ancestors sometimes going back hundreds or even thousands of years into a family history. Religious stories, passages from religious text, and other aspects of a religious culture can become like "languages" in terms of the fluency and familiarity that people develop through repeated exposure and practice over a lifetime. Remembering shared religious beliefs and experiences are ways to connect meaningfully with memories of parents, alongside memories of fishing together, playing baseball, going camping, etc. -- the religious association is an intimate, family-oriented memory that makes people value the religion even more dearly. Many religious phrases have become adopted into common parlance that everyone uses; other words or letters derive etymologically from references to Roman or sometimes even ancient Egyptian mythology. Like all languages, it is not possible to "unlearn" it -- the language forms a lens--"hardwired" in the brain through memory infused with emotion--through which one will describe or account for experiences. In many religious families, children would literally learn to read using scripture passages or religious stories. There were periods of time in history in which the Bible was virtually the only book ever read in a household. Whole nations can endorse a religious tradition, and this can permeate government or legal institutions even when there is separation of church and state. In religious families, faith has often been a cornerstone of culture, and a foundation upon which people have contemplated moral issues, relationships, and community. Lessons about how to be a good person, how to be kind, how to be polite, how to deal with conflict, how to be a good citizen, how to deal with guilt or mistakes ("sin") or loss, how to answer or grapple with questions having to do with the meaning of life, have often come from weekly sermons in a church or temple, bolstered further by studying religious texts. Daily habits such as mealtimes can be times to thoughtfully reflect with respect and gratitude, in the form of saying grace. Religious services, music, and architecture have often inspired feelings of awe, reverence, serenity, sometimes even passionate excitement. Many of my own favourite pieces of music or art, those I found most meaningful or beautiful, were created in a religious context by the greatest composers, or refer to religious stories. For many people, their happiest memories, of friendship, loyalty, meaningful service, celebration, "ecstatic" or spine-tingling moments of feeling emotionally moved, are associated with religion, church, or church community. A lot of secular artistry, such as literature and movies, makes use of themes (such as humble, noble, courageous self-sacrifice) present in major religions. For some people these feelings are very individual, but for most there is also a strong group or shared component.
Some church ministers are wonderful, talented orators, with an inspiring gift for rhetoric, a marvelous capacity for great storytelling, a compelling voice, often with a breadth of knowledge about literature and history which infuse their sermons with wisdom, passion, and humour. Some of the great orators in history, such as Martin Luther King, were of course church ministers too. This is not proof of the veracity of religious dogma, it is an example of a marvelous orator with wonderful values, who developed rhetorical talent and found an avenue to share this talent, through the common cultural mechanism of church preaching. Without church, with its elements of altruism and community, I suspect many of these wonderful orators would have had a hard time cultivating their talents in such an impassioned and selfless way. Of course, the dark side of this would be of religious extremists who make use of their religious community to practice to become demagogues: honing fiery, charismatic rhetoric which can be hateful and intolerant, cheered on by a mesmerized congregation.
In case examples where a person becomes religious despite no prior cultural or family attachment, that person often has had a state of loneliness, emptiness, or ungroundedness in life, after which they find warmth, friendship, acceptance, meaning, and sometimes material support, from a welcoming community, then leading to a happier, healthier, more prosperous life. Under these conditions it is natural that such a person would quickly form a loyal and positive attachment to the religious doctrines of those who helped them. It is a little bit like an orphan finding a welcoming adoptive family, and then adopting the family's beliefs and cultural practices. In fact, language about "family" permeates much religious jargon, such as referring to a "church family" or "children of God" etc. Sometimes a church minister can have a role as a counselor or psychotherapist, to help with depression or grief, or to help an engaged couple practice relationship skills to prepare for a healthy marriage.
Religious beliefs, services, and rituals have also helped almost every person in the world's history to cope psychologically with death and loss. You can have less fear or sorrow about death, either facing your own death, or dealing with death of a loved one, if you have a strong belief that death is simply an entry point to another world of eternal happiness, and that one day you'll reunite with the person who passed away.
The idea of somehow "taking away" religion would threaten to take away this very rich and intimate cultural heritage, and one could imagine this would leave many people feeling adrift or empty, perhaps devoid of meaning, in the face of death, loss, or tragedy. Changing one's beliefs about religion could, for some people, feel like betraying their parents, their extended family, and many of their most beloved friends or mentors. They could feel like they are betraying themselves, since many people have been steeped in religious practice all their lives, and so this set of experiences and beliefs are built into their memory, and their framework of conceptualizing reality. People tend to form a belief that they literally have a "relationship with God" so challenging belief could represent what they would think is the ultimate betrayal--a betrayal of God. Also, for many people, there would be no good reason to change or challenge religious belief, since their religion was always experienced as a pure and simple joy of life, a source of meaning, comfort, guidance, and community, with no negatives whatsoever.
On top of these positive factors, many individuals or families, in the present generation or throughout the distant past, have been persecuted or oppressed because of their religion, in some cases in a brutal manner (often by groups having a different religion). This happened to my own ancestors, most recently in my grandmother's generation, near the beginning of the Soviet era. This individual or collective trauma leads to an understandable fierce, loyal protectiveness of the religion and culture, with an extra layer of grave intensity and quest to secure rights, freedom, and justice, accentuated by memories of past abuse. Mind you, people who have questioned religious beliefs have also been relentlessly persecuted through the ages.
The term "secular" can sometimes evoke feelings of coldness, like a painting devoid of colour, or music devoid of emotion. Or it can evoke memories of totalitarian states which discouraged religion, such as the Soviet Union. Some people equate secularism or "atheism" with nihilism, criminality, a lack of moral grounding, some kind of pathological state not too far off from psychopathy. Many religious people believe that their moral foundations come from the religion, or from God, without which there would surely be moral decay. A political candidate lacking religious belief would surely not be popular. Some political leaders (including one particularly famous one down south) simply fake their religiosity in order to get votes.
With these acknowledgments in mind, I still have to come around to my main thesis here, that all religions are based on fictional beliefs, with some of the stories having an idealized, embellished, exaggerated relationship to actual historical figures or events, also with many stories borrowed or inspired by other local mythology of the time. All religions contain stories that can have moral lessons, and often reflect the history of cultural groups striving to improve justice, security, morality, happiness, and harmony in their civilizations, while reflecting on human foibles. The stories are impacted by the political or environmental conditions or agendas of the times they were originally written and subsequently revised. In this way religions serve a similar function as other art or cultural forms such as literature, theatre, dance, poetry, or film, in parallel with civilizations striving to improve themselves rationally by developing laws, fair government, and a justice system, though as with these other art forms, they can be instruments of political persuasion (or at worst, propaganda).
At times, the advent or widespread adoption of some new religion can be followed by improvements in a society's stability. But the reasons for this, as I will argue, have little to do with some particular doctrine, or with the embrace of some kind of divinity with its resulting imagined powers. Rather, it is because of what I would call "nonspecific factors."
To explain what I mean by "nonspecific factors," I'd like to share an analogy about psychiatric practice: many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past 150 years, each of which having some quite strong dogmatic beliefs or "doctrines" about the cause or appropriate treatment of psychological problems. The advent of these therapeutic styles was for the most part beneficial for the world, since finally there was a systematic attempt to help people with mental illness. For example, psychoanalysis was originally developed based on an elaborate, somewhat poetic set of beliefs--with its own compelling, insightful, well-written "scripture" to be found in original texts by Freud, etc.--about the origins of mental health problems lying in particular childhood events, especially involving parents. These beliefs were subsequently found to be mostly false or at least extremely exaggerated (though often with some poetic kernels of partial truth) yet many people clearly benefited from psychoanalysis--so how could this be? It is because of the FRAME of psychoanalysis, not the theory: visiting a kind, curious, intelligent person to discuss problems in a professional setting regularly and frequently for a period of a few years can be tremendously helpful for many psychiatric problems. Even if the therapist has false beliefs about causation, and dabbles with fictional or outlandish interpretations, the overarching experience with the therapist is of patient, non-judgmental, empathic support. In "dream analysis" there is elaborate psychoanalytic reasoning about the meaning contained in dreams, some of which could feel very helpful to the patient. But this is an illusion -- dreams are intimate experiences with some reflection of daily events or feelings, but are finally mostly a neutral framework on which to project meaning or interpretation Just like with the Forer (Barnum) effect, if you begin with a neutral or low-content vague but intimate data source, and project meaning onto it through a wise, trusted person's "interpretation", it could be feel special, useful and effective but it has nothing to do with the dreams being valid guides literally. Any interpretation of a dream is likely to feel meaningful, even different interpretations which are entirely opposite, because of dreams feeling so special and personal in the first place. But there is no "correct interpretation" of dreams--dreamscapes are simply a neutral framework to reflect on the topic of meaning in general, borrowing the incidental events of the dreams, with some infusion of actual life events in the content. Similarly, religious situations such as praying, attending church, etc. are frameworks in which to contemplate existential issues, and this frame adds to the gravity of the contemplation, irrespective whether any literal truths are provided.
Most psychotherapy styles share these nonspecific factors; most styles have similar effectiveness provided the nonspecific factors are similar (there are certain factors which boost effectiveness beyond this, particularly in my opinion the idea most evident in CBT, though also present in psychoanalysis as well, that we must have a humble, sincere willingness to work on changing ourselves, and to face our fears, cognitively and behaviourally). The dark side of psychoanalysis, though, is when people can come to misunderstand the cause or appropriate management of their psychological problems, adding to a layer of guilt or confusion or judgment or blame, often worsening their problems. Furthermore, people may follow a therapeutic scheme based on a fictional theory, but not improve, then feel guilty that they just haven't worked hard enough or applied the theory sincerely enough. Similarly, in religions, there is kind, stable, loyal group involvement, a chance to spend time with warm, altruistic mentors, regular devotional practices on a weekly basis or more, a commitment to values that usually go beyond selfishness or materialism, and exposure to sermons which often contain useful moral reflections, irrespective of any reference to religious texts. In religion this is also couched in a setting with beautiful, moving music, architecture, engaging activities, sometimes even food and play, often with a peer group of fellow worshippers with whom one would have many other things in common.
In more dramatic incidents of religion-based therapeutic interventions, such as "faith healing," these common factors are especially salient, magnified further by the awe of an excited crowd of observers, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic human leader. Faith healing, as with similar modalities such as hypnosis, could appear to be particularly effective for problems which have a substantial psychosomatic component, such as factitious, dissociative, or conversion disorders, or histrionic personality, and could allow patients with these problems to "save face" and feel validated, with a sudden transformation back to apparent health endorsed by the community. Their story could even be seen as particularly special and sacred, as opposed to being a banal case of biopsychosocial problems, thus helping the person's self esteem. Unfortunately, such "faith healing" dynamics can easily be exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find many examples. Also there are some obvious biases which are problematic: most people suffering from severe medical problems who attempt faith healing would not have any remission in their illnesses, since their problems are not psychosomatic or particularly amenable to community support, but such people if they are devoutly religious may then conclude that they did not have sufficient "faith" to have the desired recovery, and may feel that they were not special enough or did not work hard enough at it to be worthy of the divine intervention. Or they may conclude, in a resigned fashion, that the divine will is for them to continue suffering from their illness, while others for some inexplicable reason get to have their illnesses cured by a divine hand. Similarly, the many miracle stories in religious texts, of individuals being healed from blindness or even raised from the dead, are awe-inspiring for the reader if one takes them literally--but it should be kept in mind that perhaps 10% of the population of earth was suffering from some horrible illness at the time these stories were written; some of this suffering was due to random physical illness (most of these in the modern era totally curable or preventable using scientific methods), some of it due to economic deprivation or political oppression or warfare or poverty. Almost none of these millions of people, regardless of their sincerity or faithfulness, experienced any miraculous healing of their problems. Some of the specific modalities of simple, massively effective healing, such as improving the safety of the water supply, or improving nutrition, are never addressed in religious stories of the day. So miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners -- if such miracles truly occur, they are very rare and may depend on some extremely unlikely contingency. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to include potential lottery winnings in one's financial planning. Therefore miracle stories have limited value as moral guides.
Aside from the common factors, religions feature dogmatic belief, which in some cases can be very strict. This is where the biggest problems lie, since these beliefs are fictional, unless understood to be a type of mythical construct, not to be taken literally but rather to be understood as poetic, figurative, or a focus of moral reflection. Some dogmatic beliefs could contain some type of wise reflection about morality or justice, but when people take these dogmas literally, it often leads to a narrow or rigid moral reductionism. Furthermore, some particular religious stories even if only understand as metaphors, can be brutal and totally contradictory to other aspects of the religion's doctrines, so it can be quite a stretch to find some beneficial figurative interpretation. One can often find, in the same religious text, examples of stories which utterly contradict each other, in terms of what they say literally, or even in terms of figurative meaning. Because of this, some individuals "pick and choose" scripture passages to bolster a pre-existing stance about almost any subject.
Many people feel that their guidance regarding "right and wrong," i.e. their foundation of morality, comes from religion or from religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide, a set of instructions about right and wrong. Yet this reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage of development, a child may understand the morality of a situation to be dictated by a rigid external rule, for example "don't take that cookie" or "you'll be punished if you take that cookie." The foundation of the morality is then dictated in this case by the external rule, and/or by the fear of punishment: cookies are not to be taken because mom said not to. But the moral grounding of this is precarious: it would obviously be morally superior for the child to be able to reason about the morality of complex situations beyond following an external instruction. In psychopathic disorders, people may not be able to go farther than this type of moral development. Imagine if you were with someone for whom the main reason they are not assaulting you or stealing from you is because they are strictly following an external rule, or a scripture passage, or that they feared punishment if they were to rob you--would you feel comfortable with this person or their character? Deep moral development, the kind I'm sure most people would desire for themselves or require in their friendships, is having a capacity to reason deeply about why or why not to do an action, balancing desires with social consequences, balancing short term factors with long term factors, and recognizing the rare need for exceptions to fixed rules (e.g. perhaps sometimes you may need to steal something in order to save a starving child). Such moral development occurs naturally in humans, irrespective of any religious belief. And there are good reasons why it does occur naturally, but we'll have to come to that later. I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts do make inspired statements about moral reasoning, for example "The Sermon on the Mount." There are various examples of the Golden Rule in almost every ancient culture and religion across the world; this is again not a simple coincidence nor evidence of some kind of divinity, it is an expected moral concept which is expected to evolve and be strongly selected for in any social species.
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In order to explore more of the evidence about my main thesis here, I now have to defer to experts who are masters of their respective fields. I would say I have an amateur or undergraduate-level appreciation of many of these fields, so I don't want to falsely pose as an expert in fields such as genetics, history, physics, astronomy, biology, etc. Yet with many complex topics, it is valuable to have a moderate level of expertise in multiple areas. A human limitation is that most experts in one area (such as astronomy) are not necessarily experts in another (such as genetics). But in any case, I'd like to introduce and discuss a video and reading list to get started:
1) The most approachable place to start for many people would be to take a look at nature documentaries. David Attenborough is the greatest nature documentarian in the world's history--and a truly wonderful person, hard not to admire regardless of one's political or religious orientation--and I hope that everyone would enjoy very much his narration of the following BBC masterpieces (there are many more, but here are some to get started with):
-Planet Earth (2006), Planet Earth II (2016) and Planet Earth III (2023)
-A Life on Our Planet (2020)
These documentaries are a primer to begin a discussion about evolution and about the history of the earth, but they can begin by simply appreciating the wonder of the natural world in all its variety. The natural world contains not only beautiful stories of cute baby animals, but many horrific stories of brutality and suffering, of predators and prey, with reflections about how and why these creatures came to be and how life forms in the world are interrelated. Unfortunately an increasingly urgent theme in these documentaries is the severe, unprecedented damage humans are causing to the environment and to all ecological systems--not just climate change but especially habitat destruction and pollution leading to a massive rise in extinctions.
2) Earth: The Biography (2008) by geologist Iain Stewart. This is an enjoyable introduction to the earth's geology and history, which helps viewers to understand--once again with mountains (!) of evidence that the earth is billions of years old. This is relevant to the topic of religion because many believers in literal religious dogma think that the earth is just a few thousand years old.
3) Cosmos (the original in 1980 with Carl Sagan, and the new series in 2014 by Neil deGrasse Tyson) -- a nice introduction to topics from the history of science and astronomy, narrated once again by delightful and inspiring scientists. Documentaries of this type help viewers to understand the very strong evidence for the origins of the universe, the life cycle of stars, etc. -- with the time scales involved here being billions of years. Once again, this is important regarding the discussion about religion, since dogmatic religious faith often has particular beliefs about origins and age of the world. In presenting evidence about science, there is never a claim that "science has all the answers," but it very much is the claim that scientific knowledge has given us a wonderful, inspiring insight into the workings of nature and of our origins, flexibly growing and changing, correcting mistakes when they are found, which have very little in common with religious accounts.
4) The Incredible Human Journey, narrated by Alice Roberts (2019) : here we are shown evidence about the early history of humans, originating in Africa over 100 000 years ago and migrating over tens of thousands of years to other continents. It's a wonderfully interesting story, very "hands on" in terms of evidence, and once again directly challenges the notions that many religions have about where people originated from, and over what scale of time. Once again, a delightful and inspiring scientist narrator.
5) Evolution (7-part PBS Series, 2001), narrated by Liam Neeson. This is the best introductory series of its type, but unfortunately it is quite dated now, and the production values are mediocre to poor by modern standards. Parts of it are a little tiresome, such as dramatizations in the first episode about the life of Charles Darwin. Also there could be much clearer, better examples, case studies, and explanations of the biological and biochemical foundations and details of how evolution works. Evolutionary biology is a wonderfully interesting and extremely robust, well-researched subject, and this is a good place to get started (I invite you not to stop at this documentary, but to have a project to read extensively about evolutionary biology if you have any interest in nature or ecology. The evidence here is overwhelmingly strong and clear, and also the basics of it are not hard to understand. I should add that pretty much every scientific point or example (such as from paleontology or genetics) presented in this program has been been followed in the past 25 years by many more robust, expansive findings, bolstered greatly by the huge advancements of genetic research and ongoing paleontological work since then. The final episode is about religion, and I'd have to admit that it was difficult for me to watch.
An understanding of evolutionary processes does not need to dampen morale or lead to some existential crisis in some way any more than understanding that the earth is not the centre of the solar system (this basic Copernican astronomy was also scandalous and considered heretical or by religious leaders of the day) or that the sun appears to rise because of the rotation of the earth--it is simply a really interesting and clear system of understanding how biological systems in nature operate, and why various phenomena have arisen in the natural world.
One small critique about the language (rhetorical style) used in this documentary and others is that it can lapse into "personification" just as religions do. This has to do with how we use language figuratively to communicate, and speaks to a cognitive and stylistic bias that is common to all humans. For example, passages in the documentary could use language such as "nature wants" or "evolution tinkers" which evokes an image in a literal-minded listener of "nature" or "evolution" being something like a person who is deciding to do a thing. All languages engage in such subtle personification--this very sentence is doing it!--in the way many common phrases are constructed (in fact, developmentally in humans, we acquire a tendency beginning in infancy to "personify" attributions, to look at any sequence of events and form a conviction that a person is causing the action). But the authors of this documentary don't literally mean this, it is simply a figure of speech. What they mean is that a process happens as a result of the way nature or evolution is organized--things do not happen because "nature decides" or "evolution tinkers." Nature and evolution are not beings, they are systems which operate under a set of logical organizational rules which we are growing to understand better and better. I have to mention this point because documentaries of this type must be very precise with their language, in order to best engage people unfamiliar with the science or who are poised to criticize it.
6) Various documentaries, such as "Into the Universe" (2010), featuring Stephen Hawking, the great cosmologist: appreciating a scientific view about how the universe formed, and its likely destiny, couched in philosophical reflection that is approachable by viewers who don't need to have an advanced education in astronomy or physics. There are always new insights and discoveries in this field, and it is so interesting to follow it even if you're not an expert. Alongside this topic would be a need to acquaint oneself with at least the basics of Einstein's special and general relativity, and of quantum mechanics, with the intention of reflecting upon their existential implications.
Reading List:
1) The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. An absolutely devastating critique of all religious belief, from a scientific point of view, looking in particular at harmful aspects of religions. But Dawkins falls short in understanding or affirming the psychological and sociocultural causes and benefits of religions, irrespective of their many harms.
2) other books by Richard Dawkins including The Ancestor's Tale, and The Selfish Gene. These are excellent introductions to genetics in general, evolutionary biology in particular, with wonderful case studies highlighting particular organisms or biological systems. These books showcase Dawkins as one of the great science communicators, and show that evolutionary biology can be a fascinating topic. It has always bothered me that university students in the sciences can get a degree, sometimes even in biology, without having read these books. Another good book about the history of genetics is "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" by Carl Zimmer.
3) Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. This is a brilliant book looking at the causes of violence through history, and why violence has declined over the centuries. Simple factors such as better education for women, clearly have led through multiple mechanisms, to reduced rates of violence. Most of all, Pinker shows that reasoned thinking, typified by the enlightenment period, is the strongest factor leading to reduced violence. Some religions may emphasize or be associated with enlightenment-style thinking (i.e. reasoned approaches to justice and societal organization) but this is an accessory feature of religions, not always present, a "nonspecific factor" irrespective of any dogmatic beliefs. Religions, when they do not cultivate reasoned thinking, or when their dogmas or ideologies override reasoned aspects to the culture, are shown to be associated with horrific violence through history. I have reviewed this book in more detail previously in this blog: Garth Kroeker: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker: A Book Review, Part 1 and Garth Kroeker: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker: A Book Review, Part 2
4) Robert Trivers, "The Folly of Fools", the chapter on Religion. Trivers, one of the great biologists of the past generation, argues that the capacity to engage in deception can be a trait which provides survival advantages, often found in the natural world. For example, an animal which can pretend to have some dangerous feature such as poison or large size, can be more effective either as a predator or to prevent predation. Trivers goes further to argue that the most effective such deception occurs when one viscerally believes that the deception is "true." Humans have a capacity for awareness that could diminish the effectiveness of deceptive tactics, unless the humans involved are totally invested with the belief that the deception is true. Trivers' thesis about religion is that it is self-deception on a collective scale--attributing causation to a mystical being can alleviate psychological distress, and the more firmly one believes this fictional construct, bolstered by identical beliefs among your peers and family, the more substantial the comfort will be. A large group of people all holding a similar set of fictional beliefs is on the one hand likely to be more unified and therefore strong, but is also prone to manipulation on a political level, to persuade the group to engage in intergroup conflict, war, or persecution of outsiders, while exploiting members of the group to provide financial and other contributions to leaders. A soldier who no longer fears death, because of a fervent belief in the afterlife, could be much more effective and dangerous as a warrior. At worst, this soldier may have fewer qualms about killing, or accepting a devastating state of war in their homeland, since the soldier may believe that the people who are killed (including innocent civilians and children) would simply go to heaven, while their military opponents would go to hell. And such soldier could be persuaded with some kind of religious explanation that their military exploits are divinely endorsed, and that there would be heavenly reward if they were killed in battle.
5) various books about cognitive biases in humans, such as Thinking: Fast and Slow by Kahneman. This is relevant to religion because most religious beliefs are consolidated by various biases: there are obvious ingroup biases, leading to "belief bubbles" in which followers of a religion would selectively expose themselves to opinions supporting their beliefs, and avoid exposure to opinions that would challenge their beliefs. The beliefs themselves become so intimately associated with the integrity of the ingroup that a logical challenge of the beliefs could feel like a forceful or dangerous attack, something that would threaten the integrity or safety of the group, leading to powerful group retaliation or defense. Some religious groups might use frightening terminology, such as "of the Devil," to describe challenges to the established dogma. In some religious groups (or cults) members are specifically trained to refute logical challenges to their dogmatic beliefs. Religions also contain a lot of "magical thinking," a tendency to be persuaded strongly by a story, irrespective of evidence (i.e. "story bias"), a tendency to form personifications to attribute causation (for example, to observe a sequence of events and become convinced that there is a person -- perhaps a divine being -- causing the events to occur... in earlier religions this could be present in many forms few religious people would believe today, such as having the notion that a divine being was pulling the sun across the sky daily, etc.).
6) Books about the psychology of tribalism, such as "The Power of Us" by psychologist Jay Van Bavel (see my review: Garth Kroeker: "The Power of Us" by Jay Van Bavel & Dominic Packer: a recommendation, review, and applications in psychiatry). One of the core aspects or causes of religion is its tribal nature. This tribalism is an innate property of humans, the tendency to form groups which we value and protect, but almost always at the expense of outsiders.
The founding or origins of most religions contain implicit tribalism: usually it is one particular group of people at one particular time in history that is believed to have received some kind of divine message which leads to "correct" living, "correct" belief, and eternal reward, while most of the other people in the world (starting with neighbouring tribes) are obviously left out of this divine insight, unless members of the chosen group successfully proselytize through missionary efforts. But of course, even the most efficient missionary efforts would miss out on conveying the supposedly divine message to all other groups in the world, or there could be a delay of hundreds of years, sentencing all these other billions of people to hell, or at the very least to some lesser eternal reward. This aggrandization of a particular chosen group and geographical region at the expense of all other humans on the earth contradicts the spirit of justice & worldwide non-prejudicial benevolence that most religions, at their best, endorse. Many texts in religious stories go on to describe military exploits as well, in which the chosen group defeats or annihilates outgroup opponents (usually neighbouring tribes, sometimes including entire cities--see the Book of Joshua; or 1 Samuel 15; or Numbers 31), with divine endorsement. Oddly the divine help rarely involves settling military problems peacefully.
7) Joseph Campbell: "The Power of Myth" and "Myths to Live By" -- these were favourites of mine in my young adult years, though it could come across as a little dated now. Campbell was an anthropologist with a strong interest in comparative mythology. He was a great story-teller and saw world myths as a source of poetic insights about history, humanity, and morality--but these insights would get extinguished if you started to take the myths literally. In fact I came to appreciate after reading Campbell that the expression "it's just a myth" doesn't need to be disparaging--while a myth is not a historical account, it does offer a portrait of the culture of the time it was written, alongside moral lessons or creative ideas that the original authors of the myths had thought about, or perhaps refined over generations as the myth got updated or edited. Yet of course, there would have been ideological agendas projected onto cultural myths through the generations, often to support the actions or attitudes of the groups or political leaders of the day.
But if one takes a myth, such as a religious text, literally, it is analogous to reading a great novel or watching a great movie which had reflections about humanity and ethics, but then viewing the movie as a documentary, an instruction book for how to live, with rigid rules about behaviour to be obtained by studying the movie's script in detail, and then to avoid and denigrate other movies as "blasphemy."
8) Determined, by the great neuroscientist Robert Zapolsky. See my review on this book: Garth Kroeker: "Determined" by Robert Sapolsky The main points here that pertain to religion have to do with our understanding of causality in human (or animal) behaviour: Zapolsky shows, with a mountain of evidence, that behaviours have many deterministic causes, including genetic influences over hundreds or thousands of years, brain changes due to childhood experiences (positive or negative), hormonal fluctuations over a period of days to weeks, and proximal changes in the environment such as hunger, temperature, or random positive or negative contingencies. "Free will" is at the very least much less "free" than what most people believe, and for some people with different genetic or environmental histories, or current situations, it will be much more difficult to follow societal rules in a way which is culturally or religiously accepted.
This speaks to another simple issue regarding religious dogma: if a deity (God) is felt to be all-knowing and all-powerful, this is a contradiction, and also leads to moral problems. If all-knowing, then God would know all of the past and all of the future, thus there would not really be "free will." It would be like God is simply watching a movie with a fixed script of events in the universe, including of all human actions, sufferings, and failures, but God would have known the outcome all along, including of some humans going to heaven or hell. Or it could be like God has assembled a model of the universe, a bit like a child assembling a toy marble run, with the outcome absolutely determined, but in this case the marble run would have various little "disasters" included in parts of it, where some of the marbles would plunge down into a pit of fire, while others would successfully complete their descent. Life would become just a rather brutal show, full of tragedy and suffering alongside all the joy and success, but with a fixed outcome (since God in His all-knowing state would have known the story all along). Furthermore, if "all-knowing" then God would know all the past and all the future, but this would imply that fate is fixed, therefore beyond any power to change it. If you know for certain what the future will be, this means it is not changeable by any power, so this contradicts the idea that God could be all-powerful. A religious apologist may "hand wave" to explain this one, by suggesting that human logic of this sort does not apply to divine matters.
9) The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong. A history of fundamentalism, very engaging to read, looking at social and political causes of fundamentalism, with many case examples. For any member of a particular type of religious congregation, it could be valuable to understand the cultural history of how religious denominations in general came to be.
10) The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those where he is discussing religion.
11) At least one book about evolutionary psychology, such as "Spent" by Geoffrey Miller. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: "Spent" by Geoffrey Miller -- a discussion of evolutionary psychology)
12) Various scholars in fields such as archaeology, history of the Ancient Near East, history of science, and philosophy. Look for scholars with excellent qualifications and background, just as you would evaluate any expert. Bart Ehrman would be a good person to start with. One should be acquainted with scholarship that has to do with careful history of the origins of religious texts, and to realize that most religious texts have multiple versions, edits over time, are often based on or strongly inspired by other myths from other cultural traditions, etc. But a caution here: as with many topics affected by culturally-sanctioned, polarized views, there are plenty of religious apologists to be found in these disciplines, some of whom could be excitedly persuasive and dismissive of contrary evidence, in the same way that religions themselves can be.
13) "Astronomy Today" (textbook). An intro textbook about astronomy is really interesting, even just for esthetic reasons (stars and planets and nebulae or beautiful!) One particular small point in human religious behaviour, deriving from ancient practices or traditions, is of referring to God in a spatial sense. So we have phrases like "God above." A person stating this may literally look upward. But as we know, if one is looking upward, this is the same direction as a person on the other side of the earth would be looking, (let's say in Australia) if that person was staring directly down into the earth. Also the same look upward will be pointed in a different direction a few minutes or hours later, because the earth is rotating, orbiting around the sun, and even the sun is orbiting around the centre of the galaxy. Of course, the looking upward thing is a figurative action, but many people do take this quite literally. But I suppose it would be fair for any religious person to look downwards if they are intending to look towards God, because this is as valid a direction as any other. Or perhaps you could salvage the "looking up" thing by redefining the spatial location of God to be "opposite to the orientation of the local gravitational field." Even then, this would imply that God is located in some particular place more than others. Should God not be omnipresent, i.e. equally present in the depths of the planet as up in the atmosphere and beyond?
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Natural Selection
This is the main guiding force in evolutionary theory. The principle is profoundly simple, and it only requires that you accept how humans (or other creatures) reproduce, i.e. involving replication of DNA which in turn gives rise to physical and psychological traits. This basic understanding of genetics does not require the belief that heredity is the ONLY cause for traits, only that it is a strong impactful factor (an overarching finding in massive studies about heritability over the past decades is that genetic factors affecting almost all human traits, physically and psychologically, are almost always much more impactful than people previously believed). One can see the evidence for basic heritability occurring all around us every day...traits, both physical and psychological, both quantitative and qualitative, increase the likelihood that these traits would show up in the next generation. We see this in strains of wheat, in the health & behaviour of a new puppy, of the physical and psychological characteristics of one's children, and in the properties of microbes such as environmental pathogens.
If there is a particular inherited trait that increases the chance of having healthy offspring, then the next generation will have a higher proportion of this trait (since more healthy offspring with this trait will be born), and if there is a trait that reduces the chance of having offspring, the next generation will have less of this trait, since less offspring will be born! It is extremely simple, clear logic, with massively abundant data to support this.
Many people may not be aware of the next fundamental property of DNA-based reproduction, but it is both intuitively obvious and also richly supported with massive extremely clear and quantified evidence: the DNA replication process has a small error rate which causes small changes ("mutations") in inherited genetic material from one generation to the next. Such DNA changes would of course cause small changes in traits, such as physical or psychological characteristics. "Mutation" here does not mean that a negative change would occur, only a tiny tweak in a pre-existing state (which could have a positive, neutral, or negative effect depending on the environment in which the organism is living). Mutations cause resulting proteins (manufactured using DNA as a "recipe") to have small changes, it is like tweaking a recipe for soup by very slightly changing the amount or type of this or that spice, or tweaking the manufacturing of an engine by placing rivets in a slightly different place or using a slightly different material. There are various causes for the errors, which are well-characterized, but finally they occur in a random pattern (an apologist for religion might argue that the divine influence upon the natural world occurs exactly at these apparently random moments, where it is actually a divine "hand" that causes genetic variation based on apparent random replication error--i.e. that it is God who always is controlling the outcome of events which appear random--yet in studies of randomness there is no evidence that such mutation events or most other pseudorandom events occur in any different pattern statistically than being truly random--i.e. no evidence of "intelligent design" with respect to random or pseudorandom events). When there are small changes in the replication of DNA from one generation to the next, if these changes reduce the chance of having offspring in the next generation, this genetic change will diminish in frequency, but if the changes increase the chance of having offspring, the genetic change will obviously be passed on to the offspring, and therefore increase in frequency.
In this way, reproduction over generations will gradually cause increased prevalence of traits which are more adapted to the immediate local environment. If a slight variation appears that causes a bird to have a slightly longer beak, birds with long beaks would appear, and they would flourish in territories where having a long beak would improve access to food (such as areas where the bird needs to reach deeply to catch and eat an insect), while in other territories with different environments, birds with some other shape or size of beak would survive and flourish better (Darwin's initial work in the Galapagos Islands led to the first case studies about exactly this). This is the foundation of evolution, and it is simple to understand at its most basic level. Because it takes time for a new generation to occur, and because of the relatively low rate of genetic errors, evolutionary changes beyond simple local variations in trait frequency can take thousands of generations to become obvious. So evolution in larger organisms acts on a long time scale compared to a human life, just like geological changes and astronomical events such as stellar formation etc., occur on an immensely longer time scale than a human life.
Small changes of this type, accumulated over thousands of generations, can gradually cause massive changes to traits, including gradual changes in complex organ systems such as the heart, the eye, or the brain. The mechanisms of these gradual transformative changes have been well-characterized. There has been accumulating evidence from many branches of science, such as paleontology, that intermediate forms for almost any evolutionary process, have existed in the past. Many intermediate forms still exist today among related species. Apparent "gaps" in the fossil record are usually due to discoveries which have just not occurred yet (these "gaps" keep getting filled by new discoveries) or due to geological/structural factors preventing certain types of fossils or soft tissues from being easily preserved.
One common misconception about evolution is the statement along the lines "humans are descended from chimpanzees." This is not true at all -- evolutionary science shows us that all living creatures are part of a family tree. We are not descended from chimpanzees, but rather chimpanzees derive from a different branch of the phylogenetic tree, and are cousins to humans, with the last common ape-like ancestor between humans and chimps about 6 million years ago (we all have 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, etc., but with chimpanzees they would be something like 300 000th cousins to humans).
The small changes in DNA from one generation to the next, when measured quantitatively, allow us to determine with good accuracy when the common ancestor lived. For example, analysis of DNA differences from human siblings or first cousins would show with good accuracy that these individuals' common ancestors were parents who lived a generation ago, or grandparents who lived two generations ago. DNA between distant relatives would show the common ancestor (e.g. a great-great-great grandparent) lived a few hundred years ago. Comparing DNA from people from different parts of the world would demonstrate the common ancestor living thousands of years ago or longer, depending on how separated the family trees were of these people. Finally, all humans trace back their ancestry to common ancestors who lived in Africa over 100 000 years ago. We can take this to the next level, to show that humans and Neanderthals have a common ancestor closer to a million years ago, humans and chimpanzees 6 million years ago, humans and wolves 85 million years ago, humans and fish 450 million years ago, humans and plants a billion years ago. In this way we come to appreciate that all living creatures on the earth are quite literally cousins, all of whom having common ancestors which lived long ago. Just like modern knowledge about astronomy which began in the Middle Ages, this can be a source of wonder about nature, rather than some kind of depressing disappointment that our previous view of the universe was incorrect.
The lens of evolutionary biology can be applied to all biological systems, starting on a molecular level, going all the way up to cell types, organ systems, and whole organisms. For example, simply looking at the detailed structure of common proteins (such as myosin or hemoglobin), studying small differences due to variation or mutations in the genes which guide the creation of these proteins, gives rise to a similar phylogenetic tree to compare individual people, or different species, with similar estimates of the date of the common ancestor. Organ systems such as the heart or brain can be studied this way as well, with anatomical differences correlating with differences in associated genes, again allowing an accurate phylogenetic tree consistent with other modes of study.
In a shorter term, evolutionary changes simply increase diversity, or caused localized changes in trait frequencies, within existing species. But over the longer term, divergence over time of branches of an evolutionary family tree cause creatures in the different branches to lose the ability to reproduce with each other. This is what is meant by "speciation" -- for two diverging groups to be considered separate species, it means they can in general no longer reproduce with each other. But in nature, the genetic divergence leading to speciation of large animals can take tens of thousands of generations.
An analogous natural selection and evolutionary process occurs in any phenomenon which "reproduces itself" even in a figurative way. Dawkins was I believe the first to use the word "meme" to describe this non-genetic evolutionary process. For example, language families evolve with time, forming a phylogenetic family tree of language, with each new generation of speakers, often in a different geographic region, having slight variations in vocabulary or grammar or pronunciation. As these branches of language groups drift farther apart over time, respective generations of speakers gradually lose the ability to understand members from a different branch, or contribute to each other's linguistic culture, thus forming different language "species." All languages have "common ancestor" languages, which were often spoken hundreds or thousands of years ago. For example, German and English or German and Dutch. The languages of Europe trace back to ancestral languages such as Latin and Greek, but then further back, alongside the languages of India, to languages that are virtually lost in the mists of time, such as "Proto-Indo-European." One can still see the similarities in many vocabulary words between disparate languages of Europe, as evidence of their common ancestry, with words becoming more and more similar as the common ancestor becomes more recent (e.g. German and Dutch, with a common ancestor language 1000 or so years ago, have much much more similar words and grammar than German and Russian, with common ancestor closer to 5000 years ago).
Another ironic example of memetic evolution concerns religions themselves. All major religions have branches, where there have been some divergences in belief or doctrine, and over time the religions "speciate" such that followers of one particular branch would no longer consider followers of the other branch to be part of the same fundamental group such as "Christians" at all, while usually insisting that their own particular branch is the "correct" one. In Christian religious groups, for example, there are often schisms, where a church splits apart due to some disagreement about doctrine, or maybe due to geographical separation. Going farther back, there are larger divisions--every major denomination has a family of variations, which can be traced back in a phylogenetic "family tree" to a "common ancestor." Going farther back to the Reformation, we see a split between Catholicism and the various types of Protestantism. Farther back, a division between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox. Farther back, between Judaism and Christianity. In some cases of recent schisms, followers of one group would still consider followers of another to have the same foundation, i.e. "Christians," so for example most attendees of Lutheran or United churches would consider attendees of Baptist churches to be fellow Christians, and vice-versa. But as we go farther, to more distant denominational "cousins" there is a movement towards "speciation" in which the divergent groups no longer consider themselves to have the same unifying principles. So for example some followers of Baptist groups would not consider followers of Catholicism to be fellow Christians. We see similar divergences, "speciation," and "family trees" in the world's other major religions. This divergence process continues very actively, and one can easily find examples of various religious groups who have split in recent years, often over some doctrine (typically these days about a social issue), quite often with the resulting groups disparaging each other while insisting that their group is "correct."
Many religious groups have disparaged evolutionary theory, and religious authors, including some rare ones with expertise in science, have written venomous critiques of evolutionary biology (very frustrating to read as a scientist), which perhaps might be persuasive to some relatively uneducated readers, or other better-educated readers who are loyal adherents to particular ideological ingroups. This genre reminds me of the phenomenon we have seen frequently in the past years, which leads, through spurious reasoning, sometimes by quite intelligent people and good writers with strong beliefs, to a believe in conspiracy theories (e.g. about vaccines or even about the earth being flat).
Another interesting aspect of evolution is so-called "sexual selection," which is a variant of natural selection in which traits and reproductive success are favoured by esthetic phenomena which may not be otherwise functional. The peacock's tail is a classic example--the tail is beautiful but cumbersome and literally weighs the birds down dangerously, making it harder to escape predators. Yet a culture forms, in a co-evolved fashion, for colourful large tails to be a sign of a worthy mate, leading to an escalation of this trait. Most theorists believe that the large tail gives an indirect sign of fitness, since only a robust, healthy, fit male peacock could get away with and survive being weighed down by a huge tail. But my favourite theorist on this topic is a bird specialist, Richard Prum, who argues that sexual selection is not necessarily always founded by indirect assessments of fitness, but rather develops as an esthetic culture in which females (those which carry the higher physiologic burden of gestating or caring for young) of a species can exert a greater degree of choice. One can account for many human traits (such as cultural preferences and styles, fads, or even--as evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has suggested--human intelligence, humour, and artistry) as driven by a similar process.
Religiosity itself is also impacted by heredity, most likely through multiple pathways, some more salient in particular people. For example, the character trait of "schizotypy" which would give rise to having unusual sensory experiences or loosened associations in thinking, increases the tendency to form mystical beliefs. Schizotypy is not a "pathology," it is just a trait variation which in small doses could lead to a more "poetic" experience of life, but in extreme cases can cause problems including psychotic states. Schizotypy is a bit like the gain on an amplifier, where high levels could increase sensitivity to stimuli, but at the cost of more "noise" and more tendency to receive erroneous messages. Obsessive-compulsive personality traits, in which a person would have a more rigid or "black and white" understanding of right and wrong, or about rules, with a tendency to denigrate or judge those having a different view, would impact the degree to which a person might adopt theological beliefs that are also very "black and white." As Jonathan Haidt has shown (see my review: Garth Kroeker: Review: "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt), the inherited traits that lead to increased priority for feelings of group loyalty and "moral purity" (as opposed to traits that lead to higher priority in values for fairness, compassion, or justice), increase the probability that one would form strong group allegiances to a religion. Other inherited traits would impact the degree to which one would loyally follow intellectual or ethical principles introduced by others, as opposed to flexibly reasoning through these issues on one's own or being willing to question and challenge. Narcissistic personality traits would also increase the tendency for a person to insist--irrespective of evidence--that their beliefs are correct or "better," and to dismissively or angrily conclude that others are wrong.
Another interesting but potentially troubling angle on this is that sometimes latching devoutly onto an entirely fictional or even delusional belief system can lead to positive changes not found otherwise. This would entrench people further into their fictional belief system, since they would see positive results. The mechanism is similar to the deception-mediated one which Trivers described (see above) or my previous example about psychoanalysis. For example some people may latch onto an extremely rigorous or bizarre diet, which is completely unfounded from a scientific or health point of view, yet achieve stabilization of a prior eating or obesity problem. In order for the diet to work, the person would need to have devout belief in the diet's theoretical benefit. The strength of belief (in this spurious theory), perhaps bolstered by "spiritual practices" such as meditations or perusing theoretical texts, or following a charismatic leader, with the enthusiastic support of fellow dieters, would increase the person's adherence to the diet, and therefore lead to more disciplined change in prior eating problems. But the mechanism here is not that the underlying theory is correct, it is that the theory has ensnared the person into very devout belief, which increases engagement and compliance with disciplined dietary change (such as attention to amounts and timing of eating). The mechanism of improvement would once again be due to "common factors" of increased discipline and regular engagement with structured habits, perhaps with the support of peers, even though the dietary theory could be entirely fictional, needlessly expensive, and often harmful or medically dangerous. Also very often these diets, or other examples such as some alternative medicine modalities, are mostly fictional or outlandish, but also contain some elements of good or effective strategies, such as reducing consumption of processed foods, eating more vegetables, exercising regularly, etc. Sometimes one can just understand these forays into false belief to be harmless, especially if they are leading to health improvements, but once again there is a dark side here, of people adopting behaviours which may be harmful, or of adopting a loyalty to their fictional beliefs, suspending critical thinking, causing them to reject more helpful treatments when they are indicated. Also people following these beliefs would tend to get drawn into a community of others holding similar or other unusual beliefs. So for example a belief in particular alternative medicine practices might increase the probability of getting involved in some new spiritual beliefs, political or philosophical leanings, also involving financial contributions being requested, etc. (usually, just like with many religious groups, there is someone making a lot of money from these things). Furthermore, just as in religions, if people are loyally adherent to these beliefs, they will tend to well-meaningly "proselytize" others, to try to "convert" other people to join their group of believers, while often disparaging outsiders. This, in turn, when it comes to fad diets etc., can do a lot of harm to public health.
Over history, many wise people wanting to use their intelligence and other talents to learn about existential or philosophical or scientific topics while also leading or guiding or helping their community, would have ended up studying religion. At some points in history, the church was the main means of obtaining an education. It would have been hard for such a talented person to get an education and develop their skills, outside of the church, and without having to study the theology of the day. Therefore, there would have been a bias among scholars to have been church leaders, and for church leaders to have been well-spoken, well-educated, with good orational skills, and a good sense of altruism (of course there were many exceptions). Conversely, many scientists would have been well-educated in theology. These skills would overall have helped communities grow, morally and intellectually. The non-causal association between theological education and scientific/scholarly education would have attracted some people to religions, since they would respect such intelligent, accomplished people. This is not because the underlying church doctrines were correct, it was because intelligent, thoughtful, altruistic people are compelling to others, and more often than not are good for society, even if they sometimes hold beliefs which are unfounded.
Many religions operate as a business: there is marketing (proselytization), branding (including with various symbols people might wear on their clothing or on a necklace), encouragement to be loyal to your brand, criticism of other brands, but then a financial commitment, leading to a financial structure. There is work to be done by members of this business-like structure, with an ultimate goal to expand its membership, while maintaining morale. With some intensely tribal business-like groups (such as gangs or frat houses) there might even be an onerous initiation ritual one would have to do; but in doing this ritual--as social psychologists have shown us--people would tend to form a stronger, more loyal bond with the group. Religions as well usually have ritualistic initiation processes, in which potential members would be vetted, have to attend educational sessions, then finally some sort of public ritual with solemn commitments being given. In many cases religious groups amass vast wealth, in terms of property, buildings, etc. Some major well-known religious groups have investments and property holdings worth around $100 billion. While many religious leaders may have modest salaries, there are of course many egregious examples of charismatic churches in which the leaders become very wealthy from their congregants' donations. In some cases these congregants are living near the poverty line. These business-like structures usually operate with societal protection, and often do not have to pay various types of tax. There can be insightful cautions in some religious texts which rise above this, for example, the statement attributed to Jesus (present in three of the Synoptic Gospels), "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." ...
Sacrifice
Most religions have some form of sacrifice alluded to in their theology. This could literally involve killing, and then perhaps burning, innocent animals (often baby animals) or perhaps giving valuable objects which would then be destroyed. There are references to human sacrifice in some traditions, including in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, in which willingness to sacrifice one's own son (e.g. in the story of Abraham and his son) is lauded as a sign of piety and obedience, or even the story of Jesus which has a theme of self-sacrifice as a gift for humanity.
Sacrifice is an extension, born in ancient times, present in almost every ancient culture, of human ideas about reciprocity and gratitude, but then infused with some magical thinking. In a community we may do favours or give gifts to others, which we may experience joyfully and be driven to do from altruistic motives, but such behaviours require that there be some general norm of reciprocity. Such reciprocity in social behaviour is yet another evolved trait in humans. If one believes that there is a mystical power who controls destiny, fate, health, fertility wealth, military success, the weather, etc., it is understandable that one would be motivated to give some kind of gift (i.e. sacrifice) with the hope that some positive turn of fortune (in present life or imagined afterlife) might result from such gift-giving behaviour. There is no escaping the pseudo-logic of this, if one has this mindset--since if one makes abundant sacrifices yet an adverse outcome still happens, one could believe that the sacrifice was not good enough, and one should increase it or make it more "sincere" next time; conversely if something positive happens after the sacrifice, one would tend to believe that the sacrifice was effective, and therefore should also be repeated in the future. The poor creatures getting sacrificed wouldn't usually have much say in the matter.
Speaking of reciprocity, or reciprocal altruism, it is a strongly selected trait to favour or help genetic relatives, sometimes even in a self-sacrificial way. If there is a person who has a trait which causes them to selectively help relatives, then this trait would also be carried frequently in the entire genetic family, since traits obviously run in families. Members of such a family would help each other, in turn increasing the survival, prosperity and overall success of the whole family, thus leading to improved likelihood of passing traits on to the next generation; but these traits would include this trait for kin altruism. Thus, the proportion of people who treat family members altruistically will obviously increase in frequency in subsequent generations. Altruism in general would similarly be a positively selected trait in all humans, but it must logically be true that even if people have a very altruistic stance towards everyone, as a very nice quality of character, they would always feel less altruistic to people who are likely to be more distantly related. This, in turn, drives various negative human tendencies on a population level: the derived traits that all people have will bias people to treat relatives better than non-relatives. People with different cultures, languages, and skin colour are likely to be less genetically related than people with the same culture, language, and skin colour. Therefore there is a genetic bias to treat outsiders poorly, and at worst to behave in a racist manner. Such biases must be addressed on a sociocultural level, to recognize and take active steps to avoid and mitigate the prejudices that we are all naturally inclined toward.
Prayer
Prayer may mean different things to different people. For many it is a meditative act, a type of philosophical reflection with existential themes, a type of relaxation therapy, a "grounding" moment. The praying person may believe they are having a conversation with God. The manner in which God is understood to speak back is often taken in a broad figurative way, for example if the person would subsequently have an idea or inclination or motivation to make some different decision, perhaps with a redoubling of confidence, or if the person had a new wave of different emotion. Or some people may not expect that God would speak back, they may be ok with simply venting their thoughts in a reverent framework. In some ways it is comparable to classical psychoanalysis, with the therapist rarely speaking.
For many people, they may pray "for something." There may be a specific request in the prayer, a request for God to intervene in some way. If God did intervene, it would I suppose require that there be some exception to the laws of physics and causation in order to alter future events. If a deity were to grant the requests in prayers frequently, one would think that there would be billions of examples per year in the world of the laws of physics not seeming to apply as expected, and that if you held that some particular variety of religion was more "correct" or effective than others, that these exceptions to the laws of physics would occur most often in particular regions where people had this favoured belief system. Yet I am not aware of geographical regions containing more or less numbers of particular religious people, in which there are more or less exceptions noted to the laws of physics.
The moral structure of prayer often conforms to the patterns by which we experience empathy. Many people's prayers are truly empathic--they may be thinking of struggling friends or family members, or sometimes of terrible world events, and requesting that there be divine comfort given in some way. But supposing that the prayer led to such divine comfort being provided, it leads to the counterfactual -- if the prayer had not occurred, then divine comfort would not have been provided. But shouldn't God be a provider of comfort to anyone who is suffering, or a mediator or comforter in all terrible world events, even if nobody is praying for comfort? In fact, some of the worst events in the world (in terms of private pain and suffering) occur without anyone else knowing, so there would be nobody to specifically pray to mend the situation. Also, in terms of empathy, it is important to consider psychologist Paul Bloom's insights. See my review of his book "Against Empathy" (Garth Kroeker: Compassion vs. Empathy: Reflections on Paul Bloom's Book). Bloom shows us that empathy is often biased and therefore unjust. We are more likely to have empathy for those who are similar to us, in terms of having similar problems, similar attitudes, similar appearance. Thus it is prone to being prejudicial. And empathy is evoked more strongly by an emotionally dramatic display, irrespective of the gravity of the need, causing empathic reactions to be excessively swayed by emotive incidents, while those who suffer quietly or perhaps who show pain in a less socially acceptable way would evoke less empathy. Relatively fewer prayers are focused on global fairness and compassion.
Many prayers are not about empathy for others at all, they are about wishing something for oneself. There are many battlefield prayers. Or prayers prior to a medical procedure. People may pray for money, or to mend a broken relationship, or to get a new job, or to heal from a painful illness. There are prayers for the outcome of a baseball pitch or a hockey game. As a meditative act this is completely understandable, but the moral structure of this reminds me a little bit of my comments about sacrifice: if the prayer is followed by some good thing happening later, the person will tend to feel that the prayer was successful, and it will bolster the tendency to gratefully pray again. If the prayer is not followed by a good thing happening later, people may feel that they simply didn't pray well enough or long enough or sincerely enough, or perhaps they may feel that God was just busy with something else, or didn't find the request worthy. But often the motivational foundation is quite self-oriented. Also supposing one had not prayed regarding some issue, and then some bad thing happened in the realm of this issue: one could then logically feel some sense of guilt and responsibility for having not prayed about it. This is a type of symptom dynamic that can occur in some forms of OCD, in which a person has an anxious belief that if they don't do some kind of ritual (such as checking or counting etc.) then some disaster would happen. Every time they do the ritual and a disaster does not immediately happen, they are bolstered further in their OCD habit. But if some disaster does happen at some point, the person may insist that it was because they did not do their OCD habits enough.
Object Relations
Humans have a much more richly developed capacity than that of non-human animals of being able to imagine. A person can create an "internalized" representation of all relationships. In a sense this is like having an imaginary friend. This is a foundation of so-called "object relations theory" which was one of the more insightful and useful branches of psychoanalysis. Developmentally, we are initially comforted by a literal parent, but over time we can carry with us, in our memory, an internalized representation of our parent, which can also be comforting. This allows us to be more confident and stable, to hold onto positive memories from the past, even when we are alone, and to deal with grief if the loved one passes away. For many people, they have an internalized relationship with an idealized figure they would call God. Often this figure could have a human-like appearance (often a bearded man, usually Caucasian in Christian traditions), and have various qualities that could be deemed ideal in some way, such as being gentle, kind, fatherly, all-knowing, loving, wise, consistent, coach-like, or like a therapist. Some people's internalized conceptions of a divine figure could be frightening or stern, a figure poised to punish if one were to do something wrong. Just like literal relationships with living humans, people can be devoutly loyal to their internalized relationship figures, to almost any extreme--many people would be willing to die in service of their internalized relationship. People could be extremely angry and offended if one were to claim that their internalized relationship was with an entity that did not exist outside of their imagination. People may also have a personified concept of ultimate evil, that they may label using some kind of devil-like name. On a psychological level, this could allow more comfortable or engaging processing of regrettable behaviour, since one could attribute it to an external evil figure, reframing the moral challenge as a battle against evil, with God on one's side, as opposed to simply struggling with one's own moral challenges. Also, with this framing, the community, provided such beliefs are shared, may be able to be more empathic about bad behaviour--if such behaviour could be attributed to some external malevolent character (e.g. "the devil") rather than the person, then the person's character could be more easily reintegrated into the community, provided some tactic or simple ritual was done to supposedly deal with it. Thus personified attributions of good and evil could be socially useful in a small community.
Religious Abuse
Abuse is unfortunately common. It affects every type of community and family. I have seen numerous cases in which religious texts or other elements of religious faith were used as tools to abuse innocent children. This includes the worst case of emotional abuse that I have seen in my career.
In this case, of a teenager with a sweet, loving, gentle, intelligent, altruistic personality, living in a very wealthy household, there would be forced family sessions late at night in which this young person would be made to listen to Bible passages for hours, accusing her of being a bad person. The patient was in fact actively involved in altruistic leadership at a church, but the family would accuse her of hypocrisy or of being a "false disciple" using passages such as Matthew 7:21-23 and Matthew 23:13-20. She was told "God has abandoned you" with many threats that she would be going to hell. Then there would be a foray into the Old Testament, with recitations of Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which advised that a stubborn or rebellious child who does not obey parents should be stoned to death by the community. Being a gentle, religious person herself, this type of experience was torturous--permanently traumatizing--in combination with the family's many other types of abusive and neglectful behaviour. As is often the case with such family situations, the parents were seen as quite pious and respected by other members of the community. Of course, it should be noted that the causes of abusive behaviour are complex, and that in the absence of religion these parents would likely have been equally abusive in some other way. But it should also be noted that in this family, the abuse worsened as the family got more and more involved in their religious practices. Congregants aware of what was going on were horrified by the events but did nothing to help other than perhaps to pray.
There are other case examples; one one was a simple statement from abusive religious parents: "turn or burn." I find this a concise epitome of a lurking firm belief that many people hold: if you don't follow my belief, you're going to be tortured in hell for all of eternity. At once it is a sincere invitation to join the religion, but at the same time it is a torturous threat. At once it may be well-meaning in a sort of way, but the spirit of the statement violates the moral foundations of the religion itself: surely people are not followers of a religion simply because they fear being tortured for all of eternity if they don't join! Surely, in an advanced, divinely inspired way of life, there would be a beautiful, ethical foundation for being part of it, rather than a violent threat!
Heaven & Hell
Many religions have concepts of Heaven and Hell. Heaven an eternal state of perfect happiness. And Hell an eternal state of punishment. Religious doctrines would advise that people live appropriately during their lifetime on earth, and after they die they would be judged and sent to one place or the other. In some doctrines, the criteria are not even that you live a good life (for example, to be kind, to not hurt others, to contribute to society, to make the world a better place, etc.) but rather the main criterion seems to be whether you profess belief in a very particular way. Thus one could be the kindest, most helpful person in human history, but still go to hell if the appropriate beliefs are not endorsed. Or one could commit the worst atrocities in history, and just be an all-round hurtful person, yet go to heaven afterwards if the appropriate beliefs are endorsed.
This concept perhaps induces group affiliation using a combination of threat and reward. It is like a company which offers to pay off your mortgage after your death if you just sign a lifetime membership, and if you guarantee not to deal with other companies. But this company would also make you go permanently bankrupt if you broke the deal.
Such a system is in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice -- the striving towards mature, advanced morality -- present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of crimes does not make sense.
In the world, on average at this point, there are about 2 deaths per second, 7000 deaths per hour, 5 million deaths per month. Human deaths occur on the earth about twice as fast as your heartbeat. Only a fraction of these people who are dying will follow any one particular religious belief system. Therefore there would be several thousand deaths per hour of people who would not consider themselves Christians. Or thousands who would not consider themselves Buddhists or Muslims or Hindus. Many of these thousands of people would have lived gentle, kind, loving, generous lives, contributing to their families and communities. If one has a particularly strict set of beliefs about "Hell" conforming to a strict interpretation of doctrine, then it would follow that there would be thousands of kind-hearted people every hour who would be banished into a state of eternal, infinite punitive suffering, as a result of their lack of appropriate belief. Conversely, many others who had behaved cruelly all their lives would receive an infinite reward, if they had the correct beliefs in their last moments. One could imagine a lineup of people being pushed into a flaming inferno, worse than any human concentration camp or medieval torture chamber, since the suffering would be understood as permanent. And the person or entity doing this pushing would be the person or entity deemed the most perfect, wonderful, loving force in the universe (i.e. God). If one truly believed this was the fate of all these thousands or millions of people, one would either need to adopt some degree of indifference to this suffering, adopt a quite horrific view of the way the world works, or one would need to devote one's life to "converting" as many people as possible so as to save them from hell. It would not make sense to devote one's life to rescuing people on some smaller scale (e.g. being a firefighter or a therapist etc.) since this would distract from the colossal task of saving many more people from an infinitely worse fate than any human fire or accident or mental illness might cause. Being a proselytizing missionary would seem to be the only reasonable altruistic activity.
The statement that I think captures the best themes of Christianity (e.g. grace, love, altruism, selflessness) while still admitting the possibility of this horrible infinite suffering scenario, comes from Mother Teresa: she stated that she would leave Heaven willingly, in order to go to Hell, in order to comfort those who suffer there.
Eschatology
Many religions have a view of how the world, or how life in the world, will end. This is called "eschatology." In some instances there is an almost excited anticipation of the world's ending, with a view that there would subsequently be a glorious ascent of worthy people up to heaven. Of course those with this view would usually assume that they would be among these worthy people. In turn, some would cultivate a sense of passive resignation about attempting to improve the world's problems--they would just say that these are the "end times." To some degree such beliefs can influence political policy. It is a bleak and cynical example of the consequences of taking dogma literally. Such thinking at times leads to very dark extreme behaviour, such as the Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide in 1997. Even if the world was ending, it seems profoundly dishonourable to adopt passive or even joyful resignation about helpful action--it would be like watching a burning building with no attempt to help the people trapped inside. In fact, I think most of us would agree that the most noble and beautiful actions that humans are capable of is being helpful and atruistic, working towards the improvement of any situation, even if the situation is bleak or seemingly hopeless. Such a noble person would not be motivated by thoughts of a glorious heavenly reward upon death -- they would be motivated to do good things because of the intrinsic good of the action itself.
Behavioural Restrictions
In some cases, religious groups can prescribe particular types of food, particular styles of dress, and particular behavioural expectations that are only obscurely related to some moral issue, if at all. The main purpose of these behavioural rules, beyond simply being a cultural fad with obscure origins, is signaling value, to remind others (and even oneself) about the group affiliation. Sometimes these can be understood as simple cultural variations, but often there is a sense of these rules being rigid and imperative, such that veering away from these recommendations would be seen as an offence (either an offence towards the religious community or family, or an offence against God). At times the restrictions cause difficulties with living freely or enjoyably in modern society. This is comparable to other mechanisms used by groups to bolster loyalty: if there are styles of appearance and behaviour that demonstrate clearly that one is part of a particular group, these can be extra signs that make it easier to find fellow group members. Over time, one can become fond of these behavioural symbols or signals, it can evoke feelings associated with the religion, and it can be like wearing a ring that has special significance every day and night for years of time since childhood. People would then feel uncomfortable, or perhaps even guilty, without it, and they would feel a sense of relief to find others with a similar ring. It could be quite burdensome if this "ring" so to speak was so massive and cumbersome that it would significantly hinder normal activity (this is reminiscent of the peacock's tail). Another area in modern culture where we see similar phenomena would be in corporate branding. Once again, we can understand such phenomena as normal human cultural variations, but the darker side of this could be when people don't wish to participate in these behavioural restrictions or rules, or the symbols are used as tools to suppress behaviour, and where the person would face rejection or punishment from peers if they didn't follow the rules.
Another related dark side of religious dogma is doctrine-based condemnation or discrimination against people who have lifestyles not endorsed by the religion. Such judgments are often simply founded, at their root, by the human tendency to exclude people who are different in some way, even if they are not harming anyone. But the best of religious texts I think call for people to rise above such prejudicial thinking, and call for people to be inclusive, non-judgmental, and unfailingly loving towards everyone, not just towards people who share the same belief system or lifestyle.
Other Behavioural Phenomena
Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. For example, glossolalia ("speaking in tongues"). Every cultural group has particular rituals that may symbolize divine intervention somehow, but of course it is concerning in modern times that people would take such things as being literal manifestations of God speaking through someone. One can look up examples online, for example on YouTube of an infamous political leader of a major country whose "Faith Leader" is shown "speaking in tongues" in public. From a psychiatric point of view, it's a particular talent akin to dissociation or hypnosis, combined with robust showmanship, basically in which one can create incoherent language while projecting the sense that this is a sublime moment of insight. Metaphorically, it is oddly consistent, since the content of coherent texts from extreme religious idealogues is arguably similarly lacking in rationality. I suppose such a display would be quite entrancing to the excited observers, but the incredibly dark side of this is that it solidifies intense group solidarity, via spectacle and emotional intensity, while allowing the person doing this to exert influence on actual government policy, often based on ideologies that are not well-supported by the public, and are often founded on fictional or even bizarre belief.
Consciousness
There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works. Part of the wonder of science is appreciating that for every advance in understanding, there are always new horizons of the unknown to explore further. I find that one existential frontier in understanding has to do with consciousness. Regardless of the various physical explanations about why we have conscious, subjective experience (of memory, drives, sensations, emotions, etc.) it remains truly miraculous that this occurs. Some great scientists such as Roger Penrose have theorized about the mechanisms of consciousness; while I think such theorizing is interesting and worth following, I'm not sure that the result would impact my opinion of this matter too much. Even if there was a precise physical explanation, it does not lessen the miraculousness of it. I find consciousness even more miraculous than "free will" since even if the universe was entirely deterministic or superdeterministic, there would still be human consciousness, which is something which deserves a feeling of wonder and awe. Some people would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine -- and I guess I'd have to be ok with that, perhaps even as a foundational definition of the word "divine."
Conclusion & Ideas for the Future
In conclusion, religious beliefs and organized group religion in particular has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years. Culturally, religion can have many benefits to help communities come together, to celebrate, to grieve, to contemplate morality, to show gratitude, and to meditate. Religious faith is consolidated by human tendencies to be loyal (in this case, to an ingroup, to one's family, to longstanding beliefs learned and practiced often since childhood, and to an internalized idealized figure), and by the human tendency to formal internalized, personified representations (in this case, God being an internalized representation of an ideal good, or an ideal power). Religions are further consolidated by many enjoyable and meaningful human cultural activities: a lot of the world's greatest art, music, literature, and architecture is based on religion. Religions also help people cope with the deepest, most painful, and most frightening experiences of life, such as facing the deaths of our loved ones, or facing one's own mortality. Religions and religious services can also be an enjoyable medium through which to meet friends or potential partners, with a better than average chance of meeting someone with whom you might have values in common.
Yet religions hold beliefs that are fictional. These fictional beliefs are often taken quite literally, and the dogmatic adherence to these beliefs is often required as a sign of loyalty to the religion. Some such fictions may be inconsequential most of the time, for example maybe it doesn't matter much to most people's lives if they don't have an accurate understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, or ancient history. Yet the darker side of this has to do with extremity of group loyalty, such that ingroups and outgroups form, seeding human conflict. Religions can become an emblem of group loyalty, which can seed maltreatment of outgroups. And dogmatic pronouncements in religious belief can often be oppressive to their own members, particularly if they are narrowly adherent to literalistic interpretation of texts that are considered sacred. Also I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive towards understanding deep truths, about ourselves and about the world, and it is just not satisfying to settle for fictional belief, even if these fictions might comfort us in some way. We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person -- in fact, in some cases religious beliefs can obstruct these positive qualities, and add to the world's problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life--dealing with grief, loss, and death--while behaving honourably, peacefully, nobly, gently, without requiring a belief in some kind of eternal reward. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require working on living well and striving to become a better person, both for the benefit of oneself but also as an act of leadership for others.
There are examples of keeping the healthiest aspects of religion -- the focus on values, morality, kindness, altruism, charity, humility, working on self-improvement and sincerely acknowledging and making amends for mistakes, caring for group members, meditation, beautiful music, art, and architecture, and a focus on gratitude and reverence -- while not becoming distracted by narrow or rigid dogma, false beliefs about science, or denigrating outgroup members. For example, there are "interfaith" movements that strive to cultivate respect and peace between different types of religions. Or there are branches of modern religions that are simply less dogmatic, more open to understanding and affirming modern science, while maintaining the positive values and cultural history of their faith.
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