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Religion origins: How did belief evolve?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/religion-origins/

EXCERPT: Most people assume “belief” refers to religion. But it is so much more. Belief is the ability to combine histories and experiences with imagination, to think beyond the here and now. It enables humans to see, feel, and know an idea that is not immediately present to the senses, then wholly invest in making that idea one’s reality.

We must believe in ideas and abilities in order to invent iPhones, construct rockets, and make movies. We must believe in the value of goods, currencies, and knowledge to build economies. We must believe in collective ideals, constitutions, and institutions to form nations. We must believe in love (something no one can clearly see, define, or understand) to engage in relationships.

In my recent book, Why We Believe, I explore how we evolved this universally and uniquely human capacity, drawing on my 26 years of research into human and other primates’ evolution, biology, and daily lives. Our 2-million-year journey to complex religions, political philosophies, and technologies essentially follows a three-step path: from imagination to meaning-making to belief systems. To trace that path, we must go back to where it started: rocks.

A little over 2 million years ago, our genus (Homo) emerged and pushed the evolutionary envelope. [...] One of the skills that helped Homo succeed was imagination—an ability you can use now to picture how it developed. ... By 500,000 years ago, Homo had mastered the skill of shaping stone, bone, hides, horns, and wood into dozens of tool types. Some of these tools were so symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing that some scientists speculate toolmaking took on a ritual aspect that connected Homo artisans with their traditions and community. These ritualistic behaviors may have evolved, hundreds of thousands of years later, into the rituals we see in religions.

[...] In response to these diverse experiences, Homo grew increasingly dynamic ... During this time period, Homo’s brains reached their modern size. ... structural changes helped Homo generate more effective and expansive mental representations. What emerged was a distinctively human imagination—the capacity that allows us to create and shape our futures. It also gave rise to the next step in the evolution of belief: meaning-making.

The rise of imagination sparked positive feedback loops between creativity, social collaboration, teaching, learning, and experimenting. [...] By about 200,000 years ago, Homo had begun to push the artistic envelope. Groups of Homo sapiens were coloring their stone tools with ochres—red, yellow, and brown pigments made of iron oxide. They were likely also using ochres to paint their bodies and cave walls.

[...] Gradually, they established relations with more and more distant groups, sharing meanings for the items they swapped and the interactions they exchanged. In short, Homo sapiens began engaging full time in meaning-making. Collective meaning-making changes the way humans perceive and experience the world. It enables us to do the wildly imaginative, creative, and destructive things we do. It is during this period that Homo broke the boundaries of the material and the visible so the realm of pure imagination could be made tangible.

[...] We don’t know when it happened, but within the last few hundred thousand years, humans had developed the imagination, the thirst for meaning, and the communication skills necessary for creating explanations of mysterious phenomena. [...] Through language, deeply held thoughts and imaginings could be transferred rapidly and effectively from individuals to small groups to wider populations. This created large-scale shared structures of meaning—what we call belief systems.

Between about 4,000 to 15,000 years ago ... Humans started to domesticate plants and animals. ... Concepts of property and inequality emerged. Towns and, eventually, cities grew. All of this led to the formation of multi-community settlements with stratified political and economic structures. This restructuring profoundly shaped, and was shaped by, belief systems. Toward the end of this period—by 4,000 to 8,000 years ago—we see clear evidence of formal religious institutions: monuments, gathering places, sanctuaries, and altars.

There are numerous explanations for the evolution of religions, and none of them by itself is satisfactory. Some proposals are psychological: Our ancestors understood that other individuals have different mental states, motivation, and agency, so they attributed those same qualities to supernatural agents to explain everything from lightning to illness.

Other researchers note that the rise of huge, hierarchical communities that engaged in large-scale cooperation and warfare correlated with the rise of far-reaching, hierarchical religions with powerful, moralizing deities. Some scientists posit that “big groups” prompted the creation of “big gods” who could enforce order and cooperation in unruly societies. Other researchers hypothesize the reverse: that humans first created “big god” religions in order to coordinate larger and larger social groups.

Still other experts say the human capacity for imagination became so expansive it reached beyond the real and the possible into the unreal and the impossible. This generated the capacity for transcendence—a central feature in the religious experience. But though belief can be transcendent, creative, and unifying, not all of humanity’s beliefs are beneficial... (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Perhaps Man's biggest mistake and possible first belief was that humans were special. Everything else just followed. Call it the swagger of being top predator.
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#3
Magical Realist Online
“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods
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