deepthinker

From expressways, to traffic lights, to elevators, to sliced bread humans have been given credit for many inventions…What I cannot comprehend is that some even go as far as giving credit to humans for inventing religion … exactly, how is religion a human invention?

Chili

It is an inspired invention wherein it exists sufficeint proof for the existence of God.

This argument is the flip side of pink elephants not existing but the color pink and elephants do exist.

Neo-Nietzschean

I think you have the question backwards Deepthinker, the correct way to ask this question is: how could religion NOT be a human invention? I would say that religion is quiet obviously a human invention, how so? Because religion seems to be whatever human beings decide it is. Religion has no nature above what humans define it to be, humans change religion, humans mold religion, humans interpret religion and humans reveal religion; all prophets, seers, holy men, teachers ect. have been humans and all holy books have been written by humans. I think all these things taken together shows us all too clearly that religion is a human invention.

MrWhy

Because there are so many versions of religion. Many, if not most, people like the idea of a god, and they have the ability to invent them. Sometimes they write long elaborate books that tell the religious story they want others to believe. Almost everywhere there is an isolated culture they create a religion from scratch, and there are new religions or versions of existing ones being created in modern times. When someone decides they don't like the existing religion, or think they have a better idea, they make a different version which usually incorporates a few things from existing versions. And the main reason religion is a human invention is there's no proof, or even good evidence, that an actual god was involved in creating any of the hundreds of religions. This leaves only humans as the creators.

christ-on-a-stick

But of course. As cliched as it may be, God was created in man's image (a big "duh" if you ask me)

Astreja

I don't think that spiritual experiences are inventions; more likely, they're naturally occurring brain states.

Creating deities and writing holy books to explain the experiences is definitely a human invention.

abaddon

An invention is anything made by humans. Religion is made up of ideas, and ideas are part of our symbolic thought process, an expression of human imagination. It's the same for history, politics, and science. Anything that we can talk about, anything made of the metaphors that inform our languages which inform our cultures (in short, anything that's put into words or fashioned into art) is an invention.

That inventions are untrue is a myth. And myths are the constellation of images that inform the ideas within any ideology. But we're often unconscious of the mythic nature of our views on the world. (Please read this paragraph again, carefully, before telling me myths are only synonymous with falsehoods, because while the word can mean either "structural unit of an ideology" or "a falsehood," I'm using the term strictly for the former and I am not saying that religion, history, politics and science are untrue for being human inventions or being based on metaphors/myths).

David B

Perhaps the answer lies in closely defining what 'human invention', and 'invention' mean.

Religion seems to have come about among humans - but perhaps wasn't, in some sense of the word, invented at all. Maybe it's an invention of mindless replicators - memes - and their particular survival capabilities.

David B

WishboneDawn

I find this question a little odd. Whether you believe in God or not, religion is a seperate matter (okay, I know a lot of more conservative theists would argue that). Religion is a culture's attempt to explain the world, frame communities, offer a common experienc in worship. How can it not be our invention?

David B

In a minimal sense of invention, like saying that birds and bats independently invented flight, then of course it is an invention.

As a deliberate, conscious invention - there are alternative explanations.

One being genuine revelation - which of course I dismiss.

Another being that it wasn't invented in a sense other than birds or bats inventing flight - that it evolved.

And then again, there could be (as I think), elements of blind evolution and elements of conscious invention in it.

David B