POST /rpc/ping HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Aquilakahecate Host: rpc.technorati.com Content-Type: text/xml Content-length: 250 weblogUpdates.ping Omniscience Annex http://breindood.blogspot.com/

05 August 2004

What Use is Religion?

For the proponents of a Darwinian theory of Religion, the following question has always been problem: . . . it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit. (Steven Pinker."How the Mind Works") So readMy Hero's Take On It wherein he concludes : 'Darwinian selection sets up childhood brains with a tendency to believe their elders. It sets up brains with a tendency to imitate, hence indirectly to spread rumors, spread urban legends, and believe religions. But given that genetic selection has set up brains of this kind, they then provide the equivalent of a new kind of nongenetic heredity, which might form the basis for a new kind of epidemiology, and perhaps even a new kind of nongenetic Darwinian selection. I believe that religion is one of a group of phenomena explained by this kind of nongenetic epidemiology, with the possible admixture of nongenetic Darwinian selection. If I am right, religion has no survival value for individual human beings, nor for the benefit of their genes. The benefit, if there is any, is to religion itself. '

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home