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Giving Religion way too much credit

10/21/2022

What makes us human is the capacity for religion. To conceive of the supernatural. Animals don’t do that. Of course this is the same capacity that allows for superstition and conspiracy theory. So like most things it isn’t inherently good or bad, it can be a source of power used to either end. Animals are incapable of utilizing that power.

Religion is what separates us from the animals. Religion is what makes us human. Or better said, religion is the essence of humanity.
So yes that means rational skeptic atheists are less human. They might be a superior animal, but they are less human as they reject or are less influenced by the essential human characteristic of religiosity. If you don’t like the idea of atheists being a different species, then you can argue that relational skepticism is in fact a religious devotion to empiricism. And animals are by default empiricists because they don’t have the human qualities to be otherwise!

I think it’s fun to argue the enlightenment did signal an evolutional step for mankind, but there is nothing that guarantees that move was forward or upward. It can be a lateral move. Or maybe even a regression depending on your perspective. If religion is supposed to be leading human evolution to a state of transcending physical existence, then rational skepticism is the wrong kind of enlightenment and it constitutes devolving. But I don’t typically buy into the myth of progress. What I think k is that the characteristics we typically associate with being uniquely human are all religious in nature. Our ability to conceive of gods or spiritual forces is what separates us from animals. That’s it. Even animals have “rituals,” and customs or culture. That is not uniquely human. To the best of our knowledge believing in gods is. When you believe in gods or other supernatural forces it changes your perception of yourself and your role in the world. Many animals have complex social hierarchies. Dolphins are self aware and have individual identities and group and inter group affiliation. Monkeys have coordinated wars.
But none of them conceive of supernatural forces that could be harnessed to control nature it’s self. To the rest of the animal kingdom the wind and rain and sun and moon and seasons are things to recognize and count on. Only humans conceive of control, and religion is the vehicle of that control. Atheist Rational empiricism says that control is possible by scientific systematic observation and testing, nothing more or less. Religion is a short cut to control, that has become so convoluted that it is now the long way round.

So if we want to try and train animals to be more human, the way to do it would be to look for instances of superstition and try to reinforce it. When monkeys start having illogical fears, then rituals to mark and highlight those illogical fears aren’t far behind. Now they are on a path towards humanity.

It would seem to make sense that notions of religious control and fire would be obvious bed fellows here. If you accidentally discover you can control fire that would reinforce supernatural ideas, but you probably don’t comprehend control of fire until you have a concept of supernatural. Fire in nature would come either from the sky as lightning or out of the ground as volcanic activity. I can remember a Native American legend of fire being stolen from a volcano and relay runners had to carry it away from the volcano as fast as they could to get it to man. That isn’t wholesale different from Prometheus, but Prometheus blatantly stole fire from the gods. Clearly the harnessing of fire become associated with religion very early on, even if we can’t say which came first. It seems plausible they developed together in tandem.

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