Evolution of Religion
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[edit] Religious Governance
We are wired to make sense of our surroundings as a matter of survival. Ever since Homo-Habilis's days, and probably before, we were forced to compete with our fellow animals by figuring out the environment and making tools in order to cope. The act of trying to figure out the environment had two pivotal side effects in our evolution. The first was the development of symbolic thinking. We see evidence for that in rock drawings as early as the paleolithic age, some 40000 years ago (and probably before). Symbolic thinking creates abstract sets of related objects in our mental picture of our environment. For our paleolithic ancestors, that would have meant themselves, their friends and enemies, their animal and plant food sources, environmental landmarks, terrestrial and cosmic symbols, etc. One could argue that by then our ancestors must have developed a language to verbalize what they were drawing (they certainly had the vocalization capacity).
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An interesting note about these rock drawings is that they were placed in very inaccessible caves, indicating that they were ritualistic practices, maybe the first inklings of shamanism. So one can imagine that these ritual acts were indeed acts of symbolic deification. Contrary to common portrayals, shamans were then (as are today) bearers of important practical knowledge, such as the knowledge of surroundings, animal behavior, edible plants, medicinal plants and inevitably psychedelic plants.
This brings us to the second pivotal point in our evolution, that is the need to create mental closure. You see, once the mental picture of the one's surroundings gets large enough then one can see the boundaries of the known and the unknown. By the paleolithic period the known set was all that was required for survival, the clan elders and shamans where the guardians of that knowledge, which must have made them very important in the clan social structure. But that process necessarily evokes the concept of the unknown. And that is more than just an abstraction, that is the domain of all the new stuff that could come in handy, and all of the bad stuff that could kill. By default, the clan elders and shamans must have been the guardians of that as well. In the process the shamans developed the first religions that tried to depict these concepts of existence, the known and the unknown. And perhaps that is what we see in the rock arts, the known: horses, oxen and hunters, and the unknown: the deified, God like creatures depicted in cosmic settings.
As groups became more successful and larger, social behavior gained increased significance. By the time agriculture got established in Mesopotamia some ten thousand years ago, the act of symbolic deification had come out of caves and was placed in the most prominent places. The first known altar, dedicated to the deity Inana (or Ishtar), was placed on a hilltop in the present-day southern Iraq, around which the first known city, Uruq, grew. So the first steps towards civilization were religious in nature and shamanism evolved to become the social glue that covered everything from hunting to herding to agriculture to social behavior (undoubtedly inducing acts of paying homage and material goods to the deities and the priestly casts that cared for them). At that point in time, the natural and the supernatural were an undistinguishable amalgam channeled by the priestly king cults.
By 3500 BC clan elders and shamans had evolved to the priestly king cults that we see in Mesopotamia, then Egypt and later in India, Persia, Africa, what is now called the Americas, etc. Rulership, knowledge and deification had merged to become the central driving force in the perpetuation of those early societies. That pattern of tying in rulership, knowledge and deification continued right up to the modern days, though the forms of deities changed, depending what suited the culture most. Agricultural societies tended to favor female deities, herding cultures tended to favor male deities. There were forms of pantheism (seeing God in everything), polytheism (many Gods governing various aspects of perceived life) and monotheism (God of Abraham). Those religious themes exist to this day and the main task of religion, which is putting a symbolic face on the metaphysical and harvesting the knowledge of the day to construct social behavior, remains intact.
Monotheism evolved into Judaism, Christianity and Islam in that successive order in Middle East. Polytheism evolved into Hinduism and the related religions of the Indian subcontinent. Pantheism evolved into Buddhism, Daoism and the related religions of East Asia. And the Shamanic practices to this day remain among native groups in Americas, Australia as well as groups not touched by the larger social evolutionary forces that have by now swept the globe.
In short, religion appears to be a universal human trait that has evolved over time, has shaped the governance of societies and the societies themselves, over time emerging as socio-political morphologies that we see today [sorry Christians, but that applies to Christianity as well. Yes Christianity, who doesn't believe in evolution, actively shuns it, actually is a very good example of religious evolution, in the context of social evolution. PBS FRONTLINE has a very good documentary rendering the evolution of Christianity, in fact it is called "From Jesus To Christ"].
Ok, so we know from history that evolution of religion happens, in the context of social evolution, but why? Morphological Flows shed light on that. From a personal perspective, in light of the domains of internal attention (art of survival in the known domain) and external attention (art of growth into the unknown), all religions give psychological comfort and cohesion to the members of the order. They provide mental closure. The basic unwritten contract is that if you, the practitioner, follow the rules of the religion, then you will be given redemption in this life and salvation in the thereafter. Not only this is psychologically comforting to a person but it also offers the glue for social cohesion. It becomes a point of personal comfort in moments of distress, pain and death (there are no atheists in the foxhole!). It becomes the guide in social rituals of marriage and birth. In between birth and death, it governs the rules reaching manhood and womanhood, conduct and punishment, trade and war.
So, religion codifies behavior. Lets explore that further, especially in the context of the Middle Eastern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that have by now encompassed most of the globe. These religions provide the framework for morality and define immorality. That is the philosophy of good behavior vs bad behavior: kindness vs hatred, generosity vs greed, piety vs debauchery. Morality in turn frames ethical vs unethical behavior: do onto others as you wish others do to you vs do onto others what you can get away with. Or, be kind to your neighbor vs screw your neighbor before he screws you. Or, help those less fortunate, vs to hell with the poor go get yours! Ethics then get codified into law where behavior is governed and bad behavior is punished. One can broaden the scope and argue that the modalities of morality, ethics and law are social orders rendered in specific religious language, and as such any religion worth its salt employs those modalities as frameworks for social cohesion.
It is noteworthy that efforts to do away with religion, as in communism, dysfunctional humanism (where man replaces God, ala Nietzsche) etc. have proven to be disastrous. Without the personal psychological comfort that governs birth, death and everything in between, the common man's mind is deprived of a road map. Without the moral and ethical compass and the social glue, society falls into arbitrary dictates and whims of whoever is in charge. And we have seen this in action, over and over. You see, one man rule, dictatorships, have a narrow time span. They are effective, only during the reign of the strongmen, or at best during the succession of rulers, the dynasty. Whereas religion, as a societal knowledge tree, is reinforced, evolves, generation after generation, thereby providing social/cultural stability to the group across generations. Where one man dictatorships are only stable during the strongman's reign, religions provide social stability over very long periods of time, much much longer than the lifetime of any ruler, or practitioner for that matter. That is why governance morphs, evolves, with religion, as an expression of natural selection of stable systems over unstable systems. Strongman rule is inherently unstable, the strongman eventually dies. Religion gives governance the stability over time that it by itself can't provide.
All of the previous arguments reside in the context of mono-religious, tribal type societies. What happens in the case of multi-religious, e.g. immigrant societies, where many religions have to coexist. One thing that can happen is that one religion becomes the dominant one, the state religion. In such cases, the amalgamation of religion and governance, remains intact. On the other hand, in the case of Functional Humanism, if we could call it that, governance has to somehow incorporate all of the contributing religions that give its social sub-sets moral/ethical/legal impetus. From an evolutionary perspective, functional humanism was forced upon societies with many religious orders, e.g. US, Canada, etc. Therefore the emerging governance of such societies, e.g. authors of the US constitution, had to devise a non-sectarian form of governance in order to allow each of these religious orders the freedom to exist without the threat of religious conflict. Were as dysfunctional humanism replaces God with man, functional humanism tends to leave the issue of religion alone altogether (with varying degrees of success, or failure, depending on how you look at it). What inevitably happens in these democratic forms of governance is that non-sectarian legal/constitutional framework becomes the framework of social order. In turn, that legal/constitutional framework serves as the social glue, augmenting the hitherto necessary religious framework that could permeate and evolve across generations. The constitutional framework doesn't replace the religious frameworks, they can happily coexist within their domains so long as they do not supersede it. Once that happens, the main functional role of religion in providing stability to governance over time is no longer needed, governance and religion can separate. Over time, the constitutional framework provides the needed social stability. In such a case, the people in that society are free to practice any one religion, amalgamate various religious beliefs and practices, or drop religion altogether. Even in these free societies religion retains its staying power. Religion still can and does provide social stability and order to the faithful, it still provides psychological comfort to the believers. It still provides needed mental closure where constitutional law, and science for that matter, can't.
Because of the multi-generational social stability effect, history shows that religion is necessary for the social/psychological evolution of the group in the long run. It is noteworthy that this applies to even truly grizzly religions. Native American religions such as the Maya, Aztec, Toltec, etc. regularly practiced human sacrifice and child sacrifice in particular, including their own children. Shamanic cultures in Papua New Guinea practiced cannibalism until recently. Even in those cases, it seems that having a religion was a necessity in developing a social/psychological framework, all be it a particularly nasty one.
Having said what is good, necessary, about religion, we must also note what religion is notoriously bad at. One is that any given religion is universal, it isn't, non of them are. Any religion applies only to the people of the group, the flock. The consequence of making that mistake is universally disastrous. Our history is full of religious wars that persist to this day. The anatomy of that rift is easy to see. The fire brands of one group say that my way is the word of God, another group's fire brands say no my way is the word of God, and the next thing you know they are at war. There is no better motivator for battle than fighting for God.
Another thing that religion is particularly bad at is rendering divinity, i.e. the works of God. If you want to see works of God in action, study physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. You will not find any specifics on the actual mechanisms of creation in any religious text. It is worthy of analysis as to why that is. Again, religion is aimed at the flock, the common man, and it is aimed at behavior understandable to the common man. Moses didn't come down from the mountain with quantum mechanics, he came with the ten commandments. The point is that religion is created by the priestly class of the people, for the people, in the language that they understand. Religion is created in the image of their practitioners. That is why it is so group specific and effective as a social glue. It must speak to the least common denominator of understanding within the group otherwise it is ineffective.
Finally, another thing that religion is particularly notorious for is exceptional cruelty to anything threatening, especially to the members of the flock deemed heretics. To religions, almost universally, going against the word of God means expulsion, punishment, and even death. Disrupting religion, especially in primitive societies, meant disrupting the social order. That would have been intolerable to the governance of the social order, which religion happened to foster.
[edit] key
Chapter Key: Morphological Flows, entities going through functional constructs thereby creating more complex entities with more complex functionalities:
(note: societal knowledge trees and culture are one and the same thing)
societal knowledge trees: religion + governance == social evolution ==> tribal cultures, societies and governments
societal knowledge trees: science == scientific evolution ==> technological societies and cultures
societal knowledge trees: economics == economic evolution ==> national wealth, trans-national economic alliances
societal kowledge trees: democratic governance == evolution of free societies ==> global coalition of free societies
societal knowledge trees: military arts and sciences == military evolution ==> empires, international military alliances
[edit] Link
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html - Comprehensive site on Epistemology, so big it'll probably be under construction forever
http://www.academicinfo.net/religindex.html - Religious gateway
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