Religion Is A Riddle Our Minds Can Explain

Religion came as an ancient necessity,  that is at least what we believe, and it has followed us to this day without any sign that it will disappear. If you take a look at history, you will see that religion, if we can talk about it on a general basis, has had many variations. For example, we have the birth of the monotheistic religions, those who pray to a single God.

The gods have also changed a lot over the centuries and have taken many different names and forms. There are gods you are not allowed to create any representations of and others that have wonderful forms. These forms are sometimes also related to animals.

Religion has also managed to be institutionalized. People have created social institutions in the name of religion that are meant to provide or improve services such as education and health. The downside of this is that there have also been major wars in the name of religion. People have also committed many crimes and injustices based on sacred texts that they often misinterpret.

Explanations

There are many explanations that people have put forward to try to explain the birth and life of religion over the centuries. One of the best explanations is that it serves the purpose of answering questions we have never been able to answer. But that is not the only explanation people have given.

Below we explain to you some of these attempts to explain the birth and life of religion:

• Religion came as a result of taking medication. People who took hallucinogenic drugs had unusual visions and they ended up interpreting it as messages “from outside”. Some shamans and witch doctors took drugs to get closer to the gods or communicate with them to make decisions. Maybe they did not always take these drugs on purpose. So it makes sense that their interpretations be associated with divine beings.

• Another explanation says that religion started as a way of explaining the natural phenomena, which had no logical interpretations. There were some phenomena that were more difficult for us to explain convincingly, such as. rain and thunder. People could not find a logical way to interpret these, and this led them to create gods. So then these gods were the ones who caused the phenomena that people rationally could not explain.
• Growing up in religion also seems like a kind of idol worship. People began to worship and idolize certain people for their words and actions. This worship led people to create religions based on these people.
• The latest explanation says that religion established itself as a cognitive adaptation. These are mental functions, processes and states. They have a special focus on processes such as understanding, concluding, decision making, planning and learning. This is one of the most accepted views in biology and psychology.

We trust Gods

According to a book by Scott Attran, In gods we trust , religion attempts to transfer genes with a predisposition to a certain behavior, group choice and miming or imitation. Religion is not a doctrine or an institution, it is not even a faith. According to Attran, religion exists because of the human mind’s curiosity about life, such as birth, old age, death, the unexpected, and love.

To understand this perspective, one must realize that religion is difficult to understand, and often its doctrines go against intuition. For example, it is the meaning that some religions give to victims. Following one religion or another can be extremely costly and in some cases even life-giving. If we weigh the positive and negative qualities of religion, they can even come out equal. This means that people probably do not choose religions based solely on their benefits.

Instead, we can see religion as a non-adaptive consequence of the adaptive properties of human understanding. That is, religion is an adaptation at the cognitive level. But it is not adaptive in itself if we look at all the disadvantages and advantages. Religion, just like other cultural phenomena, is the result of an encounter between cognitive, behavioral and physical media. It also comes from the ecological limitations of our minds.

Faculties of psychology that create religion

Religion comes from certain psychological faculties that adapt us to the living conditions. Here are some of these faculties:

• Primary and secondary affective programs: The emotions we feel and how we interpret them have a direct impact on our interactions with other people. Believing in a religion makes us have different affective responses in our group than we do in other groups. Of course, our responses will be more affective with members of our own group. This way of expressing emotions was good for our evolution because it benefited the groups we belonged to.
• Social intelligence:  Social group life paved the way for different interpretations that worked to protect the group. Choosing a god or another comes from belonging to a particular group. And this choice ends up creating the differences between groups. The difference between their choices works to regulate and legitimize the conditions that groups of different gods establish. And this provides benefits to our own group.

• Cognitive modules: These are the mental frameworks that regulate our interpretation of actions and rituals. People understand and justify these modules through religion. We understand and accept all the rituals of our religion. Meanwhile, some rituals from other religions seem strange and impossible to understand. The rituals and actions of a particular group will continue through this framework.

As humans, we tend to discover the effect of or the cause of an action, even if there is no one. For example, our belief in the supernatural stems from the same cognitive adaptation that our ancestors had. They interpreted the sound of a breeze shaking a bush as the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.

This interpretation was useful because it helped people to survive. In this sense, supernatural actions were only a by-product of evolution that came from our predator detection systems.

From this point of view, religion is the tool that our minds use to give credible interpretations of events that we are not sure about. Our minds reproduced these mechanisms and frameworks through evolution to ensure that we belong to a group and survive.