Religion - just a system of organizing humans?
Offline Ok well I'm a psychology major at a large university. Now thats just said to give a little background on myself, not to profess and uncanny knowledge of the subject.
In my view, religion is kind of like a country/nation. It's an effective way of organizing people into one group. There's even a hierarchy with a god or gods being the ultimate ruler. And the hierarchy then splits downward into popes, priests, other religious leaders, down to the practicers or followers. What a magnificent machine for controlling people, from a political sense.
Religion can also be looked at as the ultimate answer to life's yet unanswered questions. To explain what science has yet to explain. Hey the greeks didn't know why the sun went up and then down again, so they created the god Apollo, who was in charge of the sun. Noone understood the ocean, so Posidon (spelling?) was invented. And so on and so forth. Those gods don't make sense nowadays, because we know the sun goes up and down because of the rotation of the Earth. The tides move up and down because of the gravity from the moon. What's left to explain? Well what happens after death? What happens before life? Where did the universe come from? And religion has amazing answers to explain each of them. So in that sense, religion is just a means of explaining the scientifically unexplainable.
If you've heard of skinner, then more power to you. If not I'll try to give an accurate description of their work quickly. He was the father of what is called operant conditioning. If you do something, and someone gives you a dollar, you will likely do it again (positive reinforcement), if you do something and someone punches you in the face, you won't likely do it again (positive punishment). If you do something and I give you a tax break (take something bad away) you will likely do it again (negative reinforcement) and if you do something and i take a dollar from you, you won't likely do it again (negative punishment). Sorry that was a bit lengthy.
With that said let's apply it to religion. So you convert to a religion, and you get lots of friends, positive reinforcement. Oops, you lied to your mom, now time to go to confession, or pray or what have you positive punishment. If you accept god and pray to god, your sins will be washed clean, negative reinforcement. If you are blasphemous, you can't go to heaven, negative punishment. In this sense is religion just a set of reinforcers and punishers to get you to do something. This not to mention all the social reinforcements and other psychological advantages of religion.
Can't forget economics. 10% of your earnings must be tithed. Hey, what an excellent system for paying the priests/pastors. Don't forget all the huge cathedrals and massive amounts of art and decorations paid for by religion. Think about how many wonders of the world, that were paid for by religion. What an ingenius way of setting up an economy that transends national borders.
All this sounds wonderful and fancy. But it's just a system. A wonderfully crafted political, economical, psychological system for controlling people. The only price you have to pay is thought.
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I agree with about 98% of your post, Werisgott.
I think the place where I'd disagree is that your viewpoint makes it almost sound like a plot or conspiracy by some people to control other people.
In my experience it doesn't typically work that way. It's more like that if you have two societies, and one is organized according to a religion and the other one is not, the religious one will tend to do better in competition. To be honest, religions are a good way of organizing people, getting them to subvert their own interests to the interests of a group, and getting them to do unpleasant things that they might not otherwise do. So if they have to do something like fight a war, the religious group will tend to win out in competition between primitive city-states or tribes at least.
So the religious societies are the ones that survive, and they pass their religion-adhering genes on to their offspring, and you get the hard-wired tendency to be religious that the other thread mentioned. It's not a conspiracy--it doesn't require a designer any more than a human eye does. Religion is a complex social structure that emerges by natural non-random processes over time.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
Eh, just kind of a collection of my musings about religion as an organization. I would go into more debth, if I had more time, had more informations, and knew people would actually read a 10 page post. I was looking through an online database for good psychology papers on religion but couldn't find any (then again it was only 30 mins of "research"
Just figured I'd post it to see what other people think...
Oh and thanks for the comments you've been giving me on this and other topics of mine. It's nice to see that even people with less than 20 posts actually get recognition of sorts.