It's a never-ending struggle, and religion, like most of the other human institutions, fails often and massively. Here, I'm just talking about what I see as the original, evolutionary impetus for religion.

I agree. Accepting the belief that religion is the origin of moral behaviour, is swallowing religions worst and most blatant piece of deception. Morality entered religion late, long after it was established as a part of human life. And that morality can only have come from two places, either god or humans, since it did not come from god, (or at least not if we do not believe in god, ) then it had to come from humans, and if humans could easily imbue one of their institutions with it, then there is no good reason to suppose that they can not do it for any institution. And the obvious fact that many political and charitable institutions now provide a moral leadership to the world, with a morality which far excels that of religion, is good evidence for that.

@Fernapple
Just for the record, I have not claimed that religion is the origin of moral behavior.

@skado
Sorry but. "Religion is a practice that counterbalances our animal instincts for the purpose of accommodating civilization." Posting that and then commenting. "Just for the record, I have not claimed that religion is the origin of moral behavior. " Sounds very like back pedaling.

And. If it is not the origin, of morality, then it just serves the natural moral impetus, as every other human intstitution does. In which case it is either pointless, or its practises and rituals can be replicated without its favouring of the ultra conservative and criminal elements of the human condition.

@Fernapple
I didn’t think, say, or intend anything about morality. Putting words in someone’s mouth and then criticizing them for saying what they didn’t say is strawmanning. Morality is something you have added to the conversation. My pedaling has all been in the forward direction.

@skado So. "counterbalances our animal instincts for the purpose of accommodating civilization." is not a moral act then ? Nice to know that you favour our animal instincts over the teaching of religion as the basis of civilization. I knew you would come round one day.

Or how does. "counterbalances our animal instincts for the purpose of accommodating civilization." Differ from the usual religious pseudo morality ?

@Fernapple
There you go again. Never run out of straw do you? I didn't say it was not a moral act. I simply did not address any moral component either way. Again it is you who brings that dimension into the discussion. I haven't addressed it. Counterbalancing is a functional description from an anthropological perspective - not a moralizing sentiment. We simply, factually do have some evolved traits that simply, factually do cause more trouble in dense populations than they did on the savannas. Establishing a new set of guidelines for living in a different environment simply, factually does facilitate more successful functioning in the altered environment. No moral judgments required.

@skado If there are no moral judgements required, why make a post about it ?

@Fernapple
There are no moral judgments required for cleaning a carburetor but people make posts about that. They can be helpful for people who are trying to do the same thing.

I don’t think religion made civilization. I think civilization made religion. But what I’m saying is that religion was part of how we compensated for the shift from nomadic to stationary lifestyles.

@skado cool

Agree with all of that, except that I would amend it by saying that the social structure of most of our fellow primates are not quite as crude as that. Most dominant males in most social primates, hold their possitions due to complex political connections, usually including friendships with other powerful males, and the support of the female collective.

I understand however that your statement was main a simple one designed to refute the post, and that by saying that I am just pedantically nit picking, sorry.

@Fernapple While the support of other high-ranking males in a primate group is likely a factor, so are the overly long canine teeth.

@dahermit I saw a programme on orangutans a while ago, and the keeper said. "Everyone thinks that they are placid, slow and easy going. And they are until they get going, and then they are Sumo wrestlers with teeth."

I have no argument with most of what you're saying here except "That is the only positive thing religion actually does."

It's definitely a mixed bag, such that scholars apparently haven't been able to agree on even how to define it. It might be impossible to actually measure the "good" in it, if for no other reason , that we might never find a consensus on what's good. But even if we did, it would be near impossible to measure.

I mostly don't think of it in terms of good or bad, but in terms of cause and effect. I think, among many other things, religion kept certain (not all) of our instincts in check allowing us to function in a radically self-altered environment, the likes of which 4 billion years of evolution had not otherwise prepared us for. Whether we view that as a positive or a negative is a personal value judgment.

I love it, nice and to the point!

That's term I use (for lack of better) to describe the evolved bio-cultural core at the heart of the corrupted mess we call religion today.

There. You spelled out the central question I had upon reading Skado's post: the particular definition. It is gobblety-guck.

@skado I immediately wondered what you meant by "authentic religion," as you totally failed to clarify that in your starting post. I googled it and got numerous divergent definitions. Best not to use a term as if you coined it yourself and then fail to define it clearly.

Here, now, you have done so, and it is lacking. To refer to it as evolved is to acknowledge it changes. To call modern religion corrupted, as you just did, is to imply it was once a pure thing. It was/is not. Something that rests on delusional beliefs cannot be pure or healthy, in the generally understood senses of those terms.

I can agree with you on one point: Religion does indeed aim for hopefully positive ends for the individual, namely to provide comfort and guidance and a framework through which to begin the personal spiritual/cognitive work of nurturing and developing personal values. The problem is that it misses those aims because of pressures exerted by the religious leadership and community, and it isn't even necessary to embrace delusions in order to form a good value system for life. It is the community, as well as authority/leadership aspects of religion that tend to impose a heavy pressure to steer the individual toward viewpoints that serve the aims of the religious organization, not necessarily what is best for the individual, or honest for that matter. Might as well explore philosophy and skip the heavy dose of religious authority that ultimately discourages a person from honest inquiry.

Religion is and always has been a communal endeavor. Without community, without doctrine subscribed to the individual by religious authority and supported through community peer pressure, you have no religion. ...Not authentic religion, simply no religion.

What I'm looking for is a definition that answers the most questions when viewed from an evolutionary perspective. Benign is a value judgment, and I don't see Nature in value terms. What is, simply is, or not, as the case may be. Whether we consider it fortunate or unfortunate is irrelevant to the biological cause.

@skado I find it intriguing that you think that religion has a "biological" cause. I don't think I've ever viewed it from that perspective. I've always considered it a byproduct of evolution but as having a psychological cause (i.e. generational social programming reinforcing a set of beliefs because of and familial and social pressures). What biological function would be the cause of religion?

@redbai
I'm using the term "biological" pretty loosely here, but for example, going all the way back, a biological cause that religion sprang from is the imperative to get our genes into the next generation. We can do that only if we are alive. One of the greatest, if not perhaps the only, cause of species extinction is evolutionary mismatch; when the environment changes faster than our fittedness characteristics can evolve to accommodate those changes. The agricultural revolution altered our environment more rapidly and more severely than our hunter/gatherer habits and behaviors could function in. We had a biological "decision" to make. We could go extinct, or we could devise a cultural corrective to layer over our hunter/gatherer behavior (culture can evolve much faster than biology can). We chose, as we always try to, to survive. It's no accident that the Axial Age religions appeared "shortly" after the development of agriculture (ten thousand years is a rapid turn-around in evolutionary time).

This is all (mostly) just my hypothesis. But it is how it all looks to me. There is no scholarly consensus that I am aware of.

@skado I'm less concerned with a scholarly consensus than I am demonstrable argument based on logical arguments and credible assumptions. Religion in my mind is a philosophical concept and has no real material affects except those used to perpetuate any ceremonies instructed necessary by dogma.

"We could go extinct, or we could devise a cultural corrective to layer over our hunter/gatherer behavior (culture can evolve much faster than biology can). We chose, as we always try to, to survive."

Doesn't that imply conscious direction of evolution by humanity? I'm not sure that's demonstrable.

Not sure how the drive to survive relates to religion as animals have the same drive and have no religion. But given your broad definition, does it include non-human animals?

@redbai
With "chose" I'm using figurative language for expedience, as one might say "evolution wants us to survive" but we both know evolution doesn't "want" anything in the literal sense. So, no, I don't think it was a conscious decision. I think it was a natural progression of cultural evolution. We had problems. We experimented with solutions. Some worked; some didn't. We kept the ones that did.

Animals have the drive to survive but they don't have the unique problems that we have. They don't have the big brains that gave rise to introspective and analytical thought. So they couldn't work themselves into the dead end street we put ourselves into by inventing agriculture, and changing our own environment beyond what we were evolved to live in. I don't think any other animal has anything like our religion, because I don't think any other animal has anywhere near the kind of cognitive skills we have.

Some animals certainly have faced rapidly changing environments, but if they survived the change it was because they happened to have other biological traits that they could rapidly co-opt for novel purposes. But more often they just went extinct. If they survived it wasn't because they had such complex cultural skills that they could use them as a substitute for biological evolution like we did.

That doesn't mean we're superior to other animals. We happened to have our uniqueness just like every animal has its uniqueness. We can't smell as well as dogs. We have no radar like bats, etc. What we have is big brains, so we used what we had. Other animals have used what they had. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. My guess is that we will soon run into a mismatch that we don't know how to solve and that will be the end of Homo sapiens.

@skado There are animals with larger brains that humans who have no indication of a need for religion to evolve. The sperm whale and elephant both have larger brains than humans. The octopus has the largest and most complex brain on the planet. All evolved without a religion. Other animals change the environment to suit their personal needs, like the beaver with their damns or birds with their nests, creative solutions to environmental limitations done without religious intervention.

I think that the dead end was not agriculture, but the intervention of supernatural explanations for how the science of agriculture worked. Such explanations were probably used as a psychological tool to control the population. The threat that nature will stop acting in ways that facilitate growing crops unless certain behaviors were followed can be powerful psychologically and the person who came up with the explanation is then able to use it as leverage with plausible solutions.

@redbai
The "Big-Brain" phrase is not relative to other animals. It's relative to our own ancestors.
The absolute size of the brain isn't what's at issue. It's a matter of what we happened to do with it. Other mammals may be smarter and may have done smarter things with their brains than we did, for all I know. But what we did was, without question, more impactful on our total physical/psychological environment than any other species that has not gone extinct. Beaver dams are not equivalent in destructiveness to deforestation, and global warming.

I'm not saying we needed religion to evolve. I'm saying we used religion as a counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch caused by the invention of agriculture. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong about this, but that's why I write about it; to get feedback. But I'm not going to be moved from a position that took a lifetime to understand, by someone simply saying it isn't so. If someone understands my perspective well enough to point me toward contravening evidence, I would enthusiastically consider it.

Agriculture wasn't a dead end. It massively multiplied our reproductive fitness, resulting in a population explosion. If anything, we are suffering from too much success. But it came at a cost. Our nomadic, hunter/gatherer instincts were not a neat fit for stationary life on the farm and in the city. We needed to learn how to get along with and co-operate with large numbers of strangers, and we needed to learn how to do that quickly (in evolutionary terms). We needed to do it faster than biological adaptation could accommodate. I believe we accomplished that adjustment by cultural evolution.

@skado I am not trying to convince you that you are wrong. I am attempting to probe with questions that come to mind based on your responses. It is entirely possible that you will convince me that you are right and that I've simply been looking at it from to narrow a POV. As I said in the beginning, it never occurred to me that there was a biological aspect to religion related to evolution. The concept is new to me and I usually react to such experiences with questions.

So the development of religion is not about the size or mass of individual brains, but how the collective consciousness of humanity generated by those brains reacts to the environment. It's just that the human brain was complex enough to create the concept of religion to deal with the social dynamics that resulted from the self imposed environmental changes from hunter/gatherer to stable stationary communities. And you're using a broad definition of religion, that includes creating ceremonies, regardless of a supernatural nature, to facilitate the social evolution from hunter/gatherer to agricultural communities. Correct?

@redbai
Beautifully stated. Yes. Maybe parts of the last sentence could benefit from some elaboration. The thing that I catch the most flak for is the way I define religion. I have looked for... not so much a definition of religion, but a developmental view of religion-formation, from the Axial Age forward, that could be explained biologically. I don't know if I have found it - I don't have a research team or the academic credentials to verify my hypothesis. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur.

For my purposes, the ceremonies, rituals, doctrines, propositional beliefs, etc. are the external manifestations, and vary by culture. But what seems consistent across cultures and across millennia, are primarily two things; a set of guidelines for curbing certain of our instincts that worked on the savannas, but caused problems in the city, and a psychological relief mechanism for the stresses of growing self-awareness coupled with growing societal complexity. So, a set of thou-shalt-nots, and a path of salvation. Thou-shalt-nots are self explanatory. The salvation was clothed in various local symbolic mythologies, but the function was to relieve an unfortunate side effect of the brain that got us into trouble in the first place; the awareness of our own impending death. It makes sense to me that these two things would serve to stabilize the mismatch, and as far as I know, they are in all major world religions in some form or other. Various religions serve other various purposes as well, but I think these two are always present. It's just conjecture. Who knows?

I agree that religion codified our instinctual altruism, but I may have to take issue with the “merely”. Religion is such a complex beastie that, even at this late hour, there is still no scholarly consensus on its definition.

I will argue that the Axial Age religions went further and constructed a purely cultural extension of our biological altruism, that included solutions to problems that didn’t exist before the invention of agriculture.

I’m not convinced there has yet been a distinct “time when superstition reigned”. Superstition seems more like the less accurate end of the scale of explanatory hypotheses, and as such, a quality forever relative to whatever comes after it, instead of being a discrete ideological perspective in and of itself. If humans are still haunting this universe ten thousand years from now, it’s hard to imagine our 21st century “science” won’t look a lot like superstition to them.

I’m also pretty sure a lot of our current behaviors will seem bizarre and hideous to them, like all the cutting up, burning, and eating of all kinds of animals we do today, not to mention the ritual slaughter of our own species that we glorify as “war” and “justice”. A few millennia will do that to any cultural backdrop.

Every place where people say “religion” took advantage, I’d say the human capacity for corruption took advantage, and nobody I know thinks religion is the only place that ever happened. If we establish the practice of throwing out every enterprise that becomes corrupted, we’ll be throwing out everything civilization has ever built, because we’d be hard pressed to find a corner of it that hasn’t been touched by corruption.

I don’t think we’re witnessing religion’s decline, gradual or otherwise. Religion, because it is considered sacred, and because it doesn’t have a timely self-correcting mechanism like science does, updates itself in a more cataclysmic rhythm. It resists bending until it breaks. But it reconstitutes on the other side, precisely because it is not just some terminally corrupted criminal enterprise, but an emergent quality of human nature, and an answer to a perennial human need.

What comes after the current religions may look nothing like what we think of as religion today, but as long as Homo sapiens remains a natural, biological animal, and as long as that animal does not revert to ferality, it will need to practice curbing certain of its instinctual impulses, just as religions have prescribed since we abandoned nomadic hunting and gathering for farming in place.

@skado Religion is not a monolith. I am reminded of the Sam Harris observation that the term religion is like the term sports, and that about the only commonality between kick boxing and badminton is breathing. Perhaps we should avoid using the singular, and remind ourselves of the many thousands of religions, both active and dead, by using the plural?

I am curious as to the motivation for your apparent esteem for religions. Unless one is a theist, and believes in divine inspiration, what reason would one have to elevate a peculiar group of incompatible philosophies or set of ideas, particularly in light of the fact that many of those ideas are incongruent with our present understanding?

@p-nullifidian
I don’t disagree with your preference for the plural. My use of the singular is just shorthand, mostly. But I’m really not talking about specific religions so much as the concept of religion, like we speak of science when there are actually many sciences.

Thanks for asking about my motivation. I hope I can do the question justice. It’s really just an intellectual curiosity. I’m not a theist. I think religious fundamentalism has massive destructive potential, and should be countered at every turn. I speak against it constantly, and believe it is an imposter, sitting in the place where authentic religion should be.

That may be why I am reluctant to use the plural, because it brings to mind the existing religions, which is not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about what appears to me to be the 100% natural, bio/cultural impetus that gave rise to those religions; not the things that they have become.

And the reason that original essence of religion is of particular interest to me now is that my lifetime of (casual) independent studies brought me to an unexpected insight about four years ago, in which I came to see a common thread that ran through most major world religions AND... through science.

I have spent the last four years trying to discover whether anyone else has seen it or written about it, but I am untrained at research, and I can’t afford the paywalls. So I keep wandering about, trying to instigate discussions with strangers, just hoping against hope that someone will ask me what motivates my interest in the subject!

As a nullifidian I am lacking in any faith or religious belief, and as such, have been accused of painting with too broad a brush when it comes to my scathing anti-religious sentiments. But if any placebo is 'useful' to people, it should at least be open to questioning, debate and by all means, ridicule. Nothing is sacred, including religion. If people don't want to look behind the curtain, and prefer the hocus pocus, that's just too bad, because I intend to be the Toto that exposes the Wizard of Oz for what he really is--a fraud.

Let me work on that for a minute.

“Civilization” is a set of behaviors that counterbalance our animal instincts for the purpose of accommodating our reproductive fitness in an atmosphere of evolutionary mismatch caused by the invention of agriculture.

Culturally driven behaviors generally require only outward compliance with established standards. They don’t, and can’t, outside of authentic religious practice, address, guide, fortify, or enrich inward concerns related to meaning, mood, attitude, and relative emotional buoyancy.

Mastering these particular skills, as with any skill, requires regular practice. Every major religion extant today has, tucked away somewhere underneath all its accumulated barnacles, an esoteric system of practices aimed at building mastery in the realm of inner peace.

I don’t see a similar set of practices under any other cultural domain, either active or dormant. I acknowledge that even in the domain of religion, an argument could be made that they are currently dormant almost to the point of being vestigial. But I’m not aware of even vestiges of them in any other domain.

One could claim, and many have, that the domain of Philosophy deals with those subjects, and it does, intellectually. Philosophy and Religion are deeply interwoven in many respects. But as these various disciplines have matured and distinguished themselves from one another, philosophy, it appears to me, has specialized in teaching the mastery of thinking skills, where religion has specialized in teaching the mastery of feeling skills.

The current relative success of Religion’s remaining speciality is another discussion, but the human need for that skill is as urgent as ever, and no other domain addresses it at all, save Psychology and Psychiatry, on the remedial side, but nothing in the realm of preventative skill-building.

The actual religious behavior that is an artifact of mankind’s cultural childhood hasn’t been practiced since the dawn of the Axial Age. Axial Age Religions, like all before them, still have to, and will always have to (at least until we get a helluva lot better at genetic manipulation) contend with mankind’s biological childhood, because that is not so easily set aside.

But that struggle is exactly why modern religion evolved, and exactly why we will, for the foreseeable future, need to practice, practice, practice turning the other cheek, call it whatever you like, if we hope to avoid self-annihilation at the species level.

Don’t like the Axial Age religions? Me neither. Time to reform them. Don’t like self-discipline? Me neither. But I like war, societal collapse and extinction even less.

@skado "Culturally driven behaviors generally require only outward compliance with established standards. They don’t, and can’t, outside of authentic religious practice, address, guide, fortify, or enrich inward concerns related to meaning, mood, attitude, and relative emotional buoyancy. "

Of course they can, and perhaps far better than religion which is burdened with its history.

@skado

But that struggle is exactly why modern religion evolved

Point of order; "modern religion" evolved from ancient religions, and ancient religions evolved from a need to address the questions of where the world came from, where people came from, where we go when we die, and why it all happens.

Science now has an almost infinitely better grasp of the first two subjects. There is no provable answer to the third, and philosophy has just as good an answer to the fourth. Moral philosophy is also almost infinitely better than religion at telling us how to live together in peace and harmony, since the majority of philosophers (apart from Nietzsche and such ilk) don't spend time justifying why we should go around smiting one another; while religion is full of contradictions on this point.

Perhaps if we actually had a "modern" religion, that wasn't descended from squabbling tribes in the Middle East and yet claimed to know the secrets of the Universe, it might command some moral suasion. Something that didn't say "Thou shalt not commit murder", and then in the next chapter contain explicit commands on who to murder (in the name of God, of course).

@skado "The actual religious behavior that is an artifact of mankind’s cultural childhood hasn’t been practiced since the dawn of the Axial Age." is quite a sweeping generalization, no? What "religious behavior" hasn't been practiced?

@Fernapple
Can you give an example?

@Paul4747
I don't see that what something is descended from has much to do with what it is today, necessarily. We are descended from something we would today describe as a fish, but now we fly airplanes and build computers. Fish can't do that. Never could. But that doesn't stop us.

For me personally, there is no contest between science and religion. I depend on science, and only on science for propositional statements about the nature of Nature. Superstition has no place in my science or in my religion. What passes for religion today in popular awareness as well as in popular practice is a near complete corruption of what I see as "authentic" or evolved religion, and is not what I'm talking about here.

@skado If you don't believe our limbic systems and R-complex still drive our behavior, look at politics. Voters act overwhelmingly out of fear and hatred rather than out of any rational calculation of self-interest. Yes, humans have evolved in a technological sense, but in many ways this has only made us more dangerous to ourselves.

So what is this "authentic" religion you're talking about, who exactly practices it, and why doesn't anyone seem to have heard of it?

@Paul4747
I didn't say we don't have any of our earlier traits. I said we have some that we previously didn't.

The "authentic religion" concept is my own hypothesis that I arrived at from my independent study of evolution sciences and world religion.

It seems like a rational conclusion, to me, based on what I know about established science, the history of religions, and personal experience. I have tried for four years now to find references to it in other people's work, but have not been able to confirm or deny it. What I have found though, is all the necessary ingredients; just no one who has put them all together. That's really why I talk about it here. I'd love to find someone who could refute it, but so far, no luck. Plenty of people have opinions, but no evidence... so far.

The only person I know of who practices it is me.

@skado Yes my village cafe, which generates well being and a feeling of community, all of which is quite real.

@Fernapple
I have now released the notice for this comment but am too sleepy to give it serious thought . Please respond with a token reply to generate a fresh notice so I won’t forget to respond tomorrow. Thanks.

@skado Well at least different time zones takes the pressure of replies. That'l do hope.

@Fernapple
If your secular social routine meets all of your spiritual needs, then more power to you. You must understand that it doesn't for a great majority of your fellow human beings. In part, it's a matter of degree, and in part, it's a matter of kind. It's not that there's no overlap; there's plenty. It's just not a satisfactory substitute, on the whole, for most people.

@skado No it does not meet most peoples needs, but it is a complete delution to believe that religion provides an alternative. Indeed the main reason that the secular world, especially its education system fails to meet those needs in most people, is because of the tradition of thinking that it was the job of religion to fulfil those needs. Therefore there has for a long time been an assumption, that the secular powers that be need not bother to address those needs in an organised way, despite thse fact that religion's complete failure to do so leaves a gapping hole in western thinking, and that its failure has now become obvious to everyone.

@Fernapple
It would be fine with me if people build a secular alternative that actually serves the same evolutionary need, but that hasn’t been accomplished yet. And if it is accomplished, it will be, in my view, an authentic religion, albeit “secular” by virtue of having shed its religious literalism.

@skado If it is not literal it is not religion, since if you take it metaphorically, then there is no need to be loyal to any one religion, they can all be plumbed for whatever good bits they contain metphorically, what you have if you take it metaphorically is only academic study.

And in any case that does not hold water, since the secular wold onf thought has already taken on board all the good ideas found in religion, The only parts remaining to religion which are found in it and not in secular thought, are the bad bits.

@skado That would be philosophy; the secular equivalent of religion, without the mythology.

@Paul4747
That’s a fair way to say it, in general. I think religion does some other useful things that philosophy doesn’t really even attempt or claim to do, but generally, yes.

,@Fernapple
Religion is not just a pool of ideas. It’s also a set of practices. And if you practice them, you’re practicing them, whether you call it religion or ice hockey. It’s not the name that makes it what it is; it’s the behavior. An example might be meditation. It came from a religious tradition. It’s not an idea; it’s a practice. Now people meditate outside of religious settings and don’t think of it as religious. But meditation is meditation, no matter what we call it. Is meditation somehow less a religious phenomenon just because we don’t call it that now? I don’t see how it matters.

I think religion is a lot like art. If somebody thinks it’s art, it’s art to them. You get to say what it is for you, and I get to say what it is for me.

@skado
The Bing online dictionary provides the following for "religion":

"the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods"
"a particular system of faith and worship"
"a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance"

Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, says:

"a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices"
"archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness"
"a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith"

The beliefs and the practices go hand in hand. For example: meditation is just meditation (however much it might do for any given individual). But practicing meditation with the belief that it makes you one with the universal spirit; that's a religion.

By all means, call whatever you want "religion". But if it doesn't sound like religion to everybody else, don't be surprised.

@Paul4747
I'm never surprised. I know what rules I'm breaking.

@skado Yes but ritual is something that you can have and develop without religion, and as I said part of the reason why secularism is often not addressing all needs, is because of the lazy assumption that these things are religions job. Which leaves a gap as religions fade and move towards the darkness.

@Fernapple
It's definitely leaving a gap.

@skado But that gap is far better filled, and is slowly being filled by secular movements. Ritual, community and well being are growing into the gap from many quarters. From secular charities, citizen science, envirionmental groups and health care etc.

In the UK where we are much further down the line than the US, it is impossible that the church, where in our village a small group of elderly facsists, ( They get four or five on a good Sunday. ) gather each week to try and convince themselves, wrongly, that they are not selfish and bigotted has any real 'spiritual' (whatever that mean,) worth left, nor since it has not put forward a new good idea for a hundred years, that it has any interest in filling the gap.

@Fernapple
I understand how you feel.

@tactic8
Taken from its context in the conversation, it would indeed be quite a sweeping generalization as a stand-alone statement, and a pretty clumsy one in any case. It wasn't aimed so much at describing what hasn't been practiced, as to distinguish our cultural childhood from our biological childhood, using Paul's statement, "Religion is an artifact of mankind's childhood..." as a pattern. I was trying, however clumsily, to say that Axial age religions grew from a different cultural context than hunter/gatherer religions, and as such, still perform a useful function, under a very different kind of pressure than pre-agricultural religions did.

Since the Age of Reason, religion is once again pressing against obsolescence, but I think it is still performing an evolutionary service that is vital to the maintenance of an agriculture-based society. Hopefully we can realize this in time to save the baby from the tub before tossing the bathwater. While I do heartily acknowledge that the bathwater needs changing, I don't think we're as ready to dryclean babies as we think we are.

Tell us how you really feel!