Jamie_L

In one thread a while ago, someone postulated that the reason human beings as a whole are so enthralled with religion is that as infants, we are trained to expect the world to fill our needs. We cry and we get help. Our brain pathways grow accordingly.

I thought of that again as I was reading something in a parent's magazine. A PhD-type was saying the main thing children are learning in their first few weeks of life is that the world will provide for their needs. This confidence in the world, and more specifically in the parents, becomes the foundation for self-confidence. If the infant is denied needs early on, it can lead to self-confidence and self-reliance problems in adulthood.

I found this all fascinating. Perhaps the human race is prone to these father-figure dieties because our earliest experiences teach us that the universe is there for us, and that some power we don't understand will provide for us if we just make enough fuss about it. Even more intriguing is the notion that maybe this can't be fixed at the source - denying a child what it needs in infancy leads to really f*#@ed up adults.

Any thoughts?

Jamie

nixon

Only problem with this theory is that were it true, most societies should be Matriarchal (female ruled), not Patriarchal (Male ruled) since the mother provides most of this early nurturing.

sullster

I think there is something to the idea that religion comes from early brain development and the fact that the brain readily develops this way may indicate a natural selection aspect.

I don't agree that it is all explained by the infant's needs demanded of the parents. This is an aspect, but religion is mostly based on fear of punishment. The huge and powerful parents can clearly kill you when you are a small child and thus learning to please them and keep them from killing you has to be a part of the development. There is as much of a survival advantage to fearing parents as to demanding from them.

The parents are like gods who can bestow rewards for compliance and can conjure up punishments for non-compliance. What is hell, but the monster who will get you if you don't tow the line. The all powerful mother and father are god-powerful to the infant and child.

Religion may be explained by the fact that we never get over our fear of parental power. Parental power fears are exploited by the clergy of all religions and they then continue the trick into adulthood for their own enrichment and power.

Arrowman

My first reaction was - what lot of pseudo scientific post modernist sociological crap.

But, on further consideration, including sullster's response, I have to say there might be something to it. Although as sullster points out, it's probably a bit more complex than the original postulation.

After all, we have to admit that despite our growing numbers non-believers are still overwhlemingly outnumbered by believers - and even the "weak" believers who just tick the census box are doing so because of a sneaking regard for religious beliefs.

Add in non-religious supernatural beliefs such as astrology, psychics, tarot etc, and you have a picture of a race which has a major prediliction for belief in supernatural beings and forces with guard, protect, punish, predict and guide our lives.

Why? I don't think it's as simple as "the way infants are programmed". After all, if that was the case, we'd see herds of non-human mammals gathered at some tree or rock, worshipping something or other. The difference? Intelligence and self-awareness. We have taken a basic survival instinct and using our intelligence and self-awareness spun that into religion. Or put another way, the more intelligent and self-aware we have become, the more we realise how insignificant and alone we are, the more we try to push that away by inventing these things.

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Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilisation.
- Henri Bergson

IvanK

I'd have to say it's sort of the other way around. That is, the religious establishment (priests, prelates and their assorted hangers-on) is very good at exploiting the feelings and attitudes associated with earthly parent figures to encourage belief in an unearthly Parent or Parents. The ideal human father is firm, just, loving, etc.; religion conflates these qualities into a Perfect Father. In the same way, for instance, Christianity has overlaid pagan traditions based on natural desires to support its most important holy days (Easter, Christmas).

Jamie_L

This question is really part of a larger question I've asked myself alot since embracing my atheism:

Am I somehow inherintly different from religious people, thus leading me to accept atheism? Is it nurture or nature that makes so much of the world blindly follow religions that seem so clearly bogus to me?

Jamie

trientalis

I see what you're getting at, Ivan. Personally I've always found the use of the Perfect Father as a metaphor for God to be, well, inappropriate. The goal of parenting is to raise one's children to be independent of their parents, to encourage self-confidence and self-reliance. Theism, on the other hand, encourages a sense of abject dependence akin to infancy. God is hardly the perfect parent because he doesn't really want us to grow up. Sorry if this counts as a rant but as I say, this metaphor really gets my goat.

IvanK

I know more than a few theists (I'm married to one as it happens) and not many of them are abjectly dependent or infantile. The more reasonable (to my mind) among them might say that their God does want them to grow, but in a particular direction. And I can live with that.

On the nature/nurture thing, I'd be surprised to encounter someone who never had serious doubts about their religous beliefs. My experience has been that these doubts engender fears that can lead one in various directions, whether back into relatively unquestioning faith or toward benign acceptance, philosophical detachment or, for us, freethought. My guess would be that the more independently-minded most often find themselves leaving the faiths in which they were raised, but whether that's a nature or nurture thang I can't say.

trientalis

Sorry I should have been more precise. I intended no insult to your friends and loved ones. I believe that theism encourages a sense of abject dependence ON GOD. I consider the insistence on giving God credit for things the theist has done himself an example of this sort of thinking. The idea that one's life belongs to God, that everything that happens or doesn't happen to oneself is God's will, the view of oneself as a vessel or tool of God, the metaphor of the claypot to represent the self (created by and subject to the whims of God) and so forth--all these ideas are consistent with the picture I have of theism. My point is that none of these images should apply to the relationship between parents and children, at least not once the child reaches adulthood. But do we ever reach adulthood and independence with respect to God in theism?

sullster

Threats of punishment are the cornerstone of parental control of child behaviour. Parents are constantly threatening different kinds of punishments for various infractions. Children learn to play a game of sorts with this and the smart ones manage to keep the parents happy and do an occasional infraction without getting caught.

This for me is the model of religion and its desire to control human behaviour. All it has to do is institute a form of the ingrained child-parent system and it is up and running. Obviously, it is in society's interest that people don't go wild and do what they want, so religion has a role in controlling behaviour, along with the policing power of the state.

Unfortunately, the barely sane irrational parts of the human brain, create the ideas and the system of religion's parental role. Thus we have an organization which threatens the other-worldly punishment of hell, clearly raving irrationalism, to control behaviour and thought. An absolutely crazy system, but it must give a selective advantage, because humans are all over the place and so is religion.