Religions arose to regulate resource consumption in much poorer times

For most of human history, the vast majority of the population alive at any time lived in poverty so extreme in absolute terms that it was worse than we can easily imagine. People survived off insufficient, monotonous, unsatisfying diets high in starch and low in fat, protein and vitamins. Animal products were either unhygienic or salted, making them unhealthy and unpleasant to eat in the long run. The more people there were alive in the community, the more people there were who wanted food. To alleviate this problem which was the main concern of most people for most of history until recently (along with protecting oneself from other peoples' violence and dealing out violence yourself), religions evolved which societies used to justify the reduced consumption of resources (especially food) over the year at certain times i.e. fasting, adherence to spartan lifestyles etc. In addition, religious doctrine was used to back up sexual taboos the main motives for whose existence was really the desire to avoid too great a demand on available resources, primarily of food. Thoughts?

smacl

I'd go more with the 'Opium of the people' line. From Wikipedia;

Marx believed that religion had certain practical functions in society that were similar to the function of opium in a sick or injured person: it reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions, but it also reduced their energy and their willingness to confront the oppressive, heartless, and soulless reality that capitalism had forced them into.

Although I tend to think what it removes is fear of death and a promise of a better life in the hereafter. Greatest Ponzi scheme of all time really.

magicbastarder

have you read 'sapiens' by yuval hariri?
you might like it, but he reaches different conclusions about human diet than you (depending on how you define 'most of human history').

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review

it's certainly opinionated and would not be classified as dry.

robindch

Deleted User wrote: »

Religions arose to regulate resource consumption in much poorer times

There is research which suggests that religions acquired political power early on and used this power to regulate human activity to its own long-term benefit.

One way it did this is by concentrating its efforts on conflict areas within society - so if your society was having grief on account of people shagging without strict rules in place, then religion stepped in and tried regulate sex (while benefiting itself); if your society had problems allocating land or other resources, then the religion involved itself in that too (while benefiting itself); if your society had problems with the legitimacy of the reigning king or queen, then your local religion would help with that too (while helping itself).

smacl

smacl wrote: »

I'd go more with the 'Opium of the people' line. From Wikipedia;



Although I tend to think what it removes is fear of death and a promise of a better life in the hereafter. Greatest Ponzi scheme of all time really.

Oh yeah didn't mean to imply that what I wrote about above was the only factors motivating cultures to form religions. Lack of understanding of the natural world was another reason. Providing a meal-ticket for the children of higher social class individuals was another. Feeling at the mercy of invisible and powerful natural forces to supply agricultural produce was another.

Cianmcliam

I think the modern atheist view of religion has been too much influenced by Marxism, as Durkheim said: "When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion out to be an enormous error conceived by priests, at least they were able to explain its persistence by the interest the sacerdotal caste had in deceiving the masses. But if the peoples themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas, at the same time that they were their dupes, how has this extraordinary hoax been able to perpetuate itself throughout the course of history? "

The fact is that religion/supernatural cults are a constant feature of egalitarian hunter gatherer societies so the explanations based on trickery or self interest and Dennet/Dawkins self-perpetuating "mind viruses" won't wash.

One reason religion appears in egalitarain societies is because it allows decisions to be reached in a system where no-one can, or wants to, stick their neck out or be held to blame for the results. Essentially all parties have an interest in allowing quick, decisive decisions being made when needed. Often making no decision or taking no cohesive action is worse than making a bad decision or taking no action. Having a ritual/divining specialist facilitates a decision being 'revealed' through contacting the 'supernatural'. It doesn't really matter whether people believe this in their heart of hearts (as long as they don't express that directly and openly), it allows the system to function while the blame and fallout of bad outcomes is directed away from individuals in the group.

Most religions in egalitarian societies have no moral component, there's no need for it when gossip and exclusion work well to keep people focused on the group rather than themselves. Bad things happen because the spirits were mad and good things happen because they are happy, but your own actions has little influence. So explanations based on social control don't add up either.

Saying that though, when societies become more complex, religion does act as a kind of 'lightning conductor' for internal tensions. People can't go around beating each other up or killing each other because you don't get along, from jealousy or you just don't like them. But if someone does violate a religious taboo, all of that internal tension gets released with extraordinary fury. That can run out of control though leading to witch-hunts, but this can arise in secular cults as well as religious as we see too often.

silverharp

there is an argument that it gave an evolutionary advantage in that a society with a religion would be superior to a society without one. In the past there was no welfare state so the cost of things going wrong around sex for instance was high and basically religion fit the bill to keep a society in order with more cooperation than if there was "nothing" outside of the people of the group.

Cianmcliam

silverharp wrote: »

there is an argument that it gave an evolutionary advantage in that a society with a religion would be superior to a society without one. In the past there was no welfare state so the cost of things going wrong around sex for instance was high and basically religion fit the bill to keep a society in order with more cooperation that if there was "nothing" outside of the people of the group.

There could well be something to that, but that invokes group selection which itself is a kind of taboo in modern evolutionary thinking. The debate still rages.

robindch

Cianmcliam wrote: »

There could well be something to that, but that invokes group selection which itself is a kind of taboo in modern evolutionary thinking.

Hanging around biologists from time to time, it seems less taboo than rage-inducing.

silverharp

Cianmcliam wrote: »

There could well be something to that, but that invokes group selection which itself is a kind of taboo in modern evolutionary thinking. The debate still rages.

not familiar with exactly what you mean there, I have heard of kin selection which biologically makes sense , and if you have kids tell them to be extra nice to their maternal grandmothers they are likely to be the most generous when it comes to gifts

Peregrinus

Well, if you buy into the Dawkins "religion is a meme" view, religion basically seeks to propagate itself by being passed on from mind to mind, as it were. (OK, we shouldn't use language that ascribes intentionality, like "seeks", but you know what I mean.)

Obviously, if I can be all Darwiney about it for a moment, the successful religions will be the ones that do get passed on, and the ones that get passed on most successfully will be the ones that are best-adapted to their environment.

A religion that helps to ration scarce resources in an efficient way is well-adapted to an environment in which resources are scarce. A religion which imposes control or order on fertility is well-adapted to an environment in which uncontrolled or disordered fertility poses an existential threat. And so forth.

But this doesn't mean, as the OP suggests, that religion arose to do these things. It just explains why we observe religions doing these things; the religions that failed to do these things did not survive. They are no longer around, and therefore we don't observe them.

Possibly what this does tell us is nothing about religion as such, but something about the societies that preceded us. If we observe that religion is preoccupied with controlling fertility, that tells us that the societies from which we inherited that religion were in some way - or possibly in several ways - threatened by uncontrolled fertility. And likewise for other traits we observe in apparently successful religions.

For what it's worth, I'm not particularly drawn to the argument that one of the ways that religion was well-adapted was that it served to limit consumption of resources. Yes, you can observe religious practices like fasting and asceticism, but you can also observe religious practices like feasting, and abstaining from work on holidays, and the destruction of resources by offering them to the gods in, e.g., burnt offerings, all of which tend to consume resources, or reduce the production of resources. So I think the evidence that religion did, on the whole, serve to limit consumption is pretty weak. You might find that in a particular environment a particular religious tradition which fostered asceticism did flourish - e.g. Tibetan Buddhism in a part of the world not well-adapted to food production - but I don't think you can generalise from that to religion as a totality.

silverharp

speaking of Dawkins, someone asks him a question about evolution and religion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYwWZ9QTNLE