Did we evolve to be religious?

[itaskol]

it should be better in this way:
a child under 18 years old. should not allowed to have religion. should not allowed to enter mosque or church、
and after 18, he can choice to have religion

 

[Schutz]

it should be better in this way:
a child under 18 years old. should not allowed to have religion. should not allowed to enter mosque or church、
and after 18, he can choice to have religion

That would be brilliant but completely unenforceable, its when they say "Islam is the fastest growing religion" no its fucking not, they have far to many children per family, usually to the point where they are claiming benefits for having 8 children. And the kids have no choice, if I was a muslim I would not fully respect someone as a muslim who was raised to be one and didnt make the choice.

A convert made the choice out of their own will, an average muslim who was forced to become one by his mum and dad has shown no desire to be one, just forced to do it because of tradition and deep in their heart they have no true love for it, just repetition since birth that this is what they are. People who convert or decide at adulthood to enter a religion are the only ones that are truly members of that faith, being forced to learn something since birth is not good and most extremists never made the choice.

 

[PeaceGen]

Jonathan Haidt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence (spirituality)

Opium of the people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Karl Marx:
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. [1]

Lenin:
Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man."

So who is right, the video above or Marx and Lenin?

@M_Saint @Chinese-Dragon @cnleio

​

in my humble opinion:

Religion does not have to be / mean oppression.

Religion is also not a sure-fire way to spiritual extasy or fullfillment.

Religion, around the world, is so diverse, no real definition for it can be given on a global level.

The best definition *i* can give for religion is this: a / another standarized way to worship The Divine that can be shared and taught to others.

What's in a religion determines much of it's attributes PER religion (or sub-religion as in the Sunni / Shia faiths), as well as how the people who are not part of that religion look at that religion and it's believers.

 

[narcon]

it should be better in this way:
a child under 18 years old. should not allowed to have religion. should not allowed to enter mosque or church、
and after 18, he can choice to have religion

Not applicable to Islam...

 

[Aepsilons]

You're a scientist, I remember.

Anyway, the scientific method is much more consistent, because it is based on empirical evidence, that provides consistent results over repeated testing.

Even something simple like dropping an object at sea level to measure the force of gravity, it can be tested repeatedly and provides consistent results, even for a layman like me. Whereas I have tried prayer, and needless to say, the results are not what you would call consistent, or more accurately non-existent in my case (I tried praying for an end to human suffering, world hunger, etc).

Science did not come from our fear of the unknown, but seemingly on another trait we picked up through evolution, curiosity of the unknown. Which I guess would have provided significant survival benefits to our ancestors, and obviously today, as modern science has multiplied the human lifespan by multiple times.

But in the same manner that we use empirical model to support a hypothesis or null hypothesis, we cannot empirically disprove the existence of God.

Religion has a social and even psychological importance for human, it serves not only as coping mechanism for majority of people, but provides a basis for socialization through organized prayers amongst believers. For example, in Hindu festivals it is common for thousands if not millions of devotees to worship a physical representation of God. The same in the case for Muslims who perform the Hajj and Umrah, the same for Christians who attend pilgrimages. There is a positive aspect of religious activity, as it is capable of offsetting environmental stress, which is the emotional, mental and physical wear and tear. Researchers have even conducted studies that supports that religious activity can prevent anxiety, aggression, irritability, dependence, withdrawal and even depression. As well as an active spiritual life can be positively attributed to healing rates among patients and even drecreased stress for those who are in hospice care, terminal care.

Can we truly relegate religion as an outdated modality of human social expression , i would conjecture the absolute opposite.

BEAUTIFUL..SPIRITUALITY made MANIFEST...

 

[OCguy]

But in the same manner that we use empirical model to support a hypothesis or null hypothesis, we cannot empirically disprove the existence of God.

That is called a logical fallacy. The onus is on the one suggesting an idea to prove it is true.

Arguments from ignorance infer that a proposition is true from the fact that it is not known to be false. Not all arguments of this form are fallacious; if it is known that if the proposition were not true then it would have been disproven, then a valid argument from ignorance may be constructed. In other cases, though, arguments from ignorance are fallacious.

Example
(1) No one has been able to disprove the existence of God.
Therefore:
(2) God exists.

This argument is fallacious because the non-existence of God is perfectly consistent with no one having been able to prove God’s non-existence.

You also can't disprove that millions of invisible unicorns are prancing around the sky, but that doesn't make it true.

Logical Fallacies» Arguing from Ignorance

 

[Aepsilons]

Further, taking a Kantian perspective, or correlationist in some contemporary discourse, the laws of nature as understood or intuited by us are within only the phenomenal realm; in the noumenal realm, it exists as the phenomenal world supervenes on it, but it itself is indescribable, having no attributes we can ever hope to have purchase on. If one then considers nature in its proper sense to be both this world of phenomena and the world of noumena then one can say that the larger part of nature is forever out of reach.

Or one can take a Spinozan perspective. If God exists as the solely neccessary self-subsistent sunstance, and the world is his creation, then supposing nothing can come from nohing, the world itself is a part of God, for this Spinoza was denounced as a Pantheist; further he said that God had an infinite number of modes, with only two being cognisant by us - extension and thought. So again when world is considered as a whole, the larger part of the world, that is God, is beyond us.

An Islamic perspective take all laws to be fixed by God except for human beings who are endowed with free will to make ethical choices. So all laws of nature at bottom until revoked by God are at bottom fixed. One could suppose that God could unfix these laws, but this goes against the spirit of what is meant by Nature here. The world of natural phenomena in the world.

The Arabic word kalam literally means "speech," but came to denote a certain type of philosophical theology—a type containing demonstrations that the world could not be infinitely old and must therefore have been created by God. This sort of demonstration has had a long and wide appeal among both Christians and Muslims. Its form is simple and straightforward.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

Grant the first premise. (Most people—outside of asylums and graduate schools would consider it not only true, but certainly and obviously true.)

Is the second premise true? Did the universe—the collection of all things bounded by space and time—begin to exist? This premise has recently received powerful support from natural science—from so-called Big Bang Cosmology. But there are philosophical arguments in its favor as well. Can an infinite task ever be done or completed? If, in order to reach a certain end, infinitely many steps had to precede it, could the end ever be reached? Of course not—not even in an infinite time. For an infinite time would be unending, just as the steps would be. In other words, no end would ever be reached. The task would—could—never be completed.

But what about the step just before the end? Could that point ever be reached? Well, if the task is really infinite, then an infinity of steps must also have preceded it. And therefore the step just before the end could also never be reached. But then neither could the step just before that one. In fact, no step in the sequence could be reached, because an infinity of steps must always have preceded any step; must always have been gone through one by one before it. The problem comes from supposing that an infinite sequence could ever reach, by temporal succession, any point at all.

Now if the universe never began, then it always was. If it always was, then it is infinitely old. If it is infinitely old, then an infinite amount of time would have to have elapsed before (say) today. And so an infinite number of days must have been completed—one day succeeding another, one bit of time being added to what went before—in order for the present day to arrive. But this exactly parallels the problem of an infinite task. If the present day has been reached, then the actually infinite sequence of history has reached this present point: in fact, has been completed up to this point—for at any present point the whole past must already have happened. But an infinite sequence of steps could never have reached this present point—or any point before it.

So, either the present day has not been reached, or the process of reaching it was not infinite. But obviously the present day has been reached. So the process of reaching it was not infinite. In other words, the universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being, a Creator.

 

[Aepsilons]

The Argument from Desire
http://www.strangenotions.com/god-exists/#0

1. Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
2. But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
3. Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
4. This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

The first premise implies a distinction of desires into two kinds: innate and externally conditioned, or natural and artificial. We naturally desire things like food, drink, sex, sleep, knowledge, friendship and beauty; and we naturally shun things like starvation, loneliness, ignorance and ugliness. We also desire (but not innately or naturally) things like sports cars, political office, flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship.

Now there are differences between these two kinds of desires. We do not, for example, for the most part, recognize corresponding states of deprivation for the second, the artificial, desires, as we do for the first. There is no word like "Ozlessness" parallel to "sleeplessness." But more importantly, the natural desires come from within, from our nature, while the artificial ones come from without, from society, advertising or fiction. This second difference is the reason for a third difference: the natural desires are found in all of us, but the artificial ones vary from person to person.

The existence of the artificial desires does not necessarily mean that the desired objects exist. Some do; some don't. Sports cars do; Oz does not. But the existence of natural desires does, in every discoverable case, mean that the objects desired exist. No one has ever found one case of an innate desire for a nonexistent object.

The second premise requires only honest introspection. If someone denies it and says, "I am perfectly happy playing with mud pies, or sports cars, or money, or sex, or power," we can only ask, "Are you, really?" But we can only appeal, we cannot compel. And we can refer such a person to the nearly universal testimony of human history in all its great literature. Even the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre admitted that "there comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, 'Is that all there is?'"

The conclusion of the argument is not that everything the Bible tells us about God and life with God is really so. What it proves is an unknown X, but an unknown whose direction, so to speak, is known. This X is more: more beauty, more desirability, more awesomeness, more joy. This X is to great beauty as, for example, great beauty is to small beauty or to a mixture of beauty and ugliness. And the same is true of other perfections.

But the "more" is infinitely more, for we are not satisfied with the finite and partial. Thus the analogy (X is to great beauty as great beauty is to small beauty) is not proportionate. Twenty is to ten as ten is to five, but infinite is not to twenty as twenty is to ten. The argument points down an infinite corridor in a definite direction. Its conclusion is not "God" as already conceived or defined, but a moving and mysterious X which pulls us to itself and pulls all our images and concepts out of themselves.

In other words, the only concept of God in this argument is the concept of that which transcends concepts, something "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived" (1: Corinthians 2:9) In other words, this is the real God.

C. S. Lewis, who uses this argument in a number of places, summarizes it succinctly:


"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A dolphin wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."