In Richard Dawkins book, The Gods Delusion, he mentions a shared theory that religion is the by-product of something else entirely.  And from a psychological point of view I am going to have to agree. Looking at the facts, religion spontaneously arose in every quadrant of the planet at around the same time. This points to a universal variable that for the most part remained consistent and steadfast all across the evolutionary scope of human development. And in my opinion can only really to point to one cause, the psychological impact of trying to define an ever changing world through an objective sense resulting in an incomplete view of reality. To really put things into perspective, the first thing that we must define is how the invention of language impacted our everyday lives, and how this impact began to slowly evolve from what we can see to what we can’t see. The purpose of such evolutionary means follows the same basic formula, everything evolves with purpose and with focus, and both language and religion is really no different in that respect. As humans began to organize the external world, we automatically force a compromise to the internal, and with it, we create opportunity to interact with each other expanding our emotional capacity. This basic interaction creates the need for expansive expression and new language was created as a result. As we continued to expand our influence on the world, the world then continued to expand its influence on us, and with it, through co-evolution, we began to define the world by assigning it meaning. This meaning, for what it’s worth was the simple form of explaining the known world.  And as a result, religion as we know it today slowly expanded its influence to encompass millions of people all around the world. This of course spread at different rates, as there are a countless number of them, but the similarities between them all remain pretty consistent.

Our shortfall, as people is really how impressionable the brain network really is, our brains were programmed over millions of years to take information in and use it in an objective sense to serve an objective need, however this all changed when we developed the ability to reason, as the ability to reason didn’t serve a direct purpose when it was applied to a ever changing world that we really knew nothing about, and in the early stages, religion was taught and spread through neighboring communities to invoke a sense of security against the insecurity of not actually knowing what to do for the first time in our evolutionary history. This lead to the teaching of the doctrine and was considered favorable to the rate of survival for the community. Or at least so they thought on some superficial level.

Now we have to ask, where did we go wrong, at least in terms of when it comes to religion? Let’s throw in the variable of assigning a value to the community, let’s call this greed. All of a sudden the direction of the community has changed, safety has been established, high levels of organization has been increasing for a long time, there is an abundance of food, there are people engaging in healthy social structure etc... Now I am not going to say that everything happened over night, but as human beings we worry about two very important things in life, security and prosperity, which by all accounts reflect the cycle of evolution, expansion and consolidation, and as humans we always try and find the most economical way of obtaining both, so I guess you have to ask yourself, is there a better way to obtain both then promote religion to the masses? I bet you won’t find a better way I doubt anybody could?  And if you compare religion to something like marketing, then the similarities are really synonymous with each other, both rely on imprinting a brand into the mind, both try and imprint that brand at an early age, both try and latch on to your vulnerable emotional appeal although they do it in different ways, both rely on the mass population to promote their business by word of mouth, and both accept forms of payment in one form or another. All of a sudden, the focus of society has changed and everything in it has been affected in some way, religion being one of the biggest.

In the very least, I am obliged to call science an evolved form of religion, as religion is an early attempt to explain the world and science being what it is today, is really just religion in its evolved form. The presence of religion seems to be lingering around like a strong gene that just won’t go away. However with the spread of knowledge the numbers will begin to dwindle towards a tipping point, where after the reputation of religion will decrease exponentially very much in the same way that it raised to such great heights.

Essentially religion is an early attempt to define the world, an evolutionary step in the grand scale of our evolution. And we will continue this march, in fact I doubt it will ever end, unless of course we do something to end it entirely, but even that idea is premature as life is governed by universal variables, and that will never stop evolving.

Thanks for reading.

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