Religion in Modern Society

So why do almost all societies have religious beliefs and practices. Why is the belief in invisible supernatural beings that have the power to influence our lives and our destiny so widespread? Why did we develop religious rituals and prayer? Why does religion have such a strong hold on human society? Presumably once the belief is there and firmly established then the rituals and prayer will follow in a natural progression. And the influence religion was to have on society would naturally grow as unfolding events, in particular evil events, would become increasingly interpreted within a religious context.

Maybe the spirit world and religion had its origins in dreams. In ancient times it must have been difficult to understand and explain dreams after waking. It must have seemed like another world which you stepped into. And maybe the concept of a spirit world was developed which was the only viable explanation of dreams at that time.

Perhaps religion is hardwired into the brain. Does some sort of psychological mechanism in the mind make us susceptible to religious beliefs? Is this why there are so many similarities in the religious ideas of cultures that are not geographically connected and are widely separated through time?

So maybe the human mind, across all cultures, is pre-programmed to generate and be easily acceptable to religious ideas. This is a function of the brain. It’s inherited, it’s in the genes. Is there a ‘religious’ gene? Did this gene appear in the Neanderthals around the time of the Upper Paleolithic? Or maybe this was one of the first memes (see below) that began to propagate in our very ancient past.

The strongest instinct of mankind is the will to survive and live forever. Could this be the reason we created ‘religion’ and the concept of an afterlife? An afterlife is at the heart of all major religions, it allows us to become immortal and live forever. Or was it at this stage in our evolution that we began to become aware of the existence of God and an afterlife, and ‘religion’ was developed by us to help us understand and organise that new complex and difficult-to-grasp idea? It was a convenient means of trying to explain life and the whole universe. It was a ‘simple’ answer. There was no need to explain further. If anybody asked difficult questions about life and the universe then the answer was that God made everything!

Suppose for a moment that there is no such thing as a God, and no afterlife. Would there be an advantage for humans if religion was hardwired into our brains? Perhaps belief in the supernatural and an afterlife strengthens and fortifies human minds. It gives us something to aim for, it strongly suggests immortality. Also, in general the morals preached by many religions would tend to establish a better and more organised society. They would assist us in creating an orderly world, controlled and managed by dependable rules and practices. I stress in general, as the evil side of religion and the atrocities perpetrated on behalf of religion and by the guardians of religion are widely known, from the human sacrifice of mammoth proportions in many of the Mesoamerica cultures such as the Aztecs, to the medieval inquisitions, to the many wars fought because of clashes between religious ideals, to the modern day revelations of child abuse. But that aside (and not meaning to trivialize the above), in olden days religion held the family and the tribe together, and still does to a large degree. Maybe these are favourable traits for a species to have and Darwinian evolution would therefore imply this trait would be selected and would dominate (if it were an inheritable trait). The trait would be central to the optimum survival and functioning of man. So religion persisted and spread, because it was favourable to survival. There was and is a profound inherent need to create an orderly world around us.

Memes
Recently we have seen the theory of evolution by natural selection being applied to ideas and not just biological processes. Ideas too replicate themselves, they can be contagious, passing from person to person, generation to generation and from culture to culture and can change over time. They too compete for survival in the minds of people and some ‘survive’ and some become ‘extinct’. Ideas that replicate themselves in this way have been called memes, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. The word was chosen to suggest a strong analogy with genes and a strong analogy between evolution at a cultural level and a biological level. The study of this process is called memetics.

A meme refers to a replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits to another mind. They can be ideas, opinions, beliefs, fashions, etc., that propagate within a culture or from culture to culture. It is a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission analogous to a gene as a unit of genetic information. Just like genes propagating themselves by leaping from body to body, memes propagate themselves by leaping from mind to mind. And as it propagates itself it is subject to evolution by natural selection.

It should also be noted that while ideas, customs and collective rituals can replicate themselves widely and spread from culture to culture over time, they may not correspond or have any bearing to the truth. This is how some people view the whole concept of religion.