Dark Jedi

Is death responsible for religion as we know it? Mankind has feared death for as long as man has been able to concieve of it. This is commonly thought to be the driving force of religions.

Perhaps it is. But is the concept of death what caused religion? I'm a little curious about this. I have a hypothesis that death itself is a root cause (perhaps the root cause?) of religion.

Death,the dying of the brain, has been documented as being quite a cataclysmic process. Cells dying, little lighning storms of crazed nerve cells, memories and sensations run amok. This is the cause (hypothesized, so far) of "near death" or afterlife and return experiences. People who's brains have started the process of dying expereince these little tantrums of dying brain tissue. They see a bright light, they remember their loved ones, they feel fearful and euphoric. All in a huge jumble of chaos for the poor person to try and make sense of when the very rare occasion of someone being brought back from the brink of brain death.

It's easy to see a notion of an afterlife forming from this. Especially when it happens often enough to be documented, and only to people that everyone around will swear had died.....

It's a possibility. Anyone working on a doctoral need a thesis topic?

Ms. Siv

I'm afraid that your concept isn't a new one at all.

Carl Sagan explored it in his Dragons of Eden. So have many scientists studying NDEs (Near Death Experiences).

Dark Jedi

Hmm.. I have read many works on NDE, but hadn't run across one that touched on NDE as the origin of religion, rather than it's interpretation influenced by religion.

Amos

I would say that death is the cessation of life which must be an illusion to make dying an apparent reality and if life is an illusion it must be a reflection of something that is real and that reality is what religion is based on. They call it eternal life and the difference between the illusion that allows death and the real thing is our perception of it. Either way we will die but if all we can see is the illusion we will die without ever having known who we really and die as a stranger to our own self.

atheist_in_foxhole

Sagan's book "Broca's Brain" also has a terrific chapter on NDE's.

Barefoot Bree

I haven't read any of the referenced books (my local library is tiny), but I have a quibble with the OP.

For NDE's to be a root cause of religion, way back "when" in the dawn of religious history, there would have had to be lots of NDE's to go around. Seems to me that NDE's are pretty much a recent phenomenon - only became "common" enough to talk about when medicine became advanced enough to actually bring people back from near death. How many cases of NDE's were documented before, say, 1900?

Regards, Barefoot Bree

Amos

From somewhere it can be argued that NDE's have nothing to do with medicine because the medici itself is puzzled by them and it is only through the frequency of their occurances that they have become accepted as commom occurances.

NDE's are just extraordinary dreams for which we must be divided in our own mind so one mind can communicate with the other. They were predicted a long time ago when what's-his-name said that "an evil age will come when old men shall have dreams," which obviously was not the norm in those days or it would not have been predicted to become an evil age.

NDE's are evidence of our dual nature wherein our rational identity dies or is temporary blacked out while our animal man identity just keeps on living and upon awakening the rational identity wonders what the heck that was all about. If, according to this analogy, we are divided in our own mind it is easy to see how one identity can be blacked out (because it was an illusion to begin with) which now means that NDE's are just evidence of our prior delusion.

McNamara

No, NDEs are most certainly a medical phenomena. Just because it's "puzzling" to doctors does not remove it from the realm of science and medicine.

Amos

That's looking at things a little backwards, I would say. NDE's are a human phenomena and doctors are puzzled by it because they see a bussiness opportunity it.

Dark Jedi

I would think that modern medicine makes for more NDE, but would not rule out a common enough occourance in even prehistoric times. It could be brought on by anything that can begin braincell death and be overcome.
Fever
head injury
choking
to name some examples off the top of my head. So long as man was tribal/communal enough to allow food and shelter while the body recuperates, it is a distinct liklihood that such recoveries were made. Rare indeed, but there nonetheless.