Where did religion come from?

[BurtWorm]

[cynatnite]

1. Simply put...religion evolved out of fear, IMO. n/t

[Kutjara]

2. Evolutionary explanation.

Groups of people with a propensity to believe in a divine power who supports their goals and shapes their destinies will tend to be more cohesive, aggressive, and determined than groups with no equivalent ideology. As a result, religiously-motivated groups have been more reproductively successful than non-religiously motivated groups.

Scientists have recently identified a portion of the human brain that mediates religious experience. It is likely that this brain region was originally a random mutation that proved to be evolutionarily adaptive for the species. In times of reasonably primitive warmaking technology, greater religious cohesion (or fanaticism) probably produced greater success in conquest and conversion of non-believers. Over time, this success would translate into a growing proportion of the population possessing the "religion mutation."

The rest, as they say, is history.

[progressive_realist]

3. Egypt and Persia, I think

:shrug:

Am I missing something?

[ingac70]

4. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Read that book. It tells you exactly where religion comes from.

[PassingFair]

10. Ha Ha Ha.!

I start googling for the title and noticed that you
had already posted it!!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/418KQQ6QHJL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg

Julian Jaynes will certainly give you something to THINK about!!!

[Crunchy Frog]

5. Religion is about humanity's propensity for creating narratives.

It's related to the fact that we are naturally curious about our world, but for most of our history we had no possibility of actually understanding it.

We'll always have that propensity for storytelling though, even when our scientific understanding has become almost complete. It's just something about the way our minds work.

[bananas]

6. The fire part of fire.

[Tesha]

7. People 1) needed explanations for things 2) hate the thought of rotting away

People:

1) Needed explanations for the natural phenomena that
they were observing so they imagined gods to run
things. Later, as humanity's control over things
grew, they tossed out the little gods (of the trees
and the rivers, etc.) and replaced them with a big,
almighty god or three.

2) Hate the thought that once they're dead, it's all
over for them and they just rot away so they imagined
afterlifes of all different sorts (reincarnation,
Valhalla, being taken up into Heaven, etc.)

3) Hate the thought that the bad guys "get away with it"
so they imagined devine retribution and kharma-based
reincarnation.

It's all imaginary, of course. In fact, there's no
world controller, no afterlife, and no almighty
omniscient being to punish the bad guys and Republicans.

And meanwhile, the powerful have discovered how to
manipulate religious feelings to control people.

Tesha

[anacreon]

8. Being one who believes that religion is created by man...

I agree with what many have said thus far. In addition to the above comments, I believe that religion was created as a way to establish law and order.

[varkam]

9. Giving Meaning to Suffering

I think that there are probably many different reasons for both why and how religion developed, but I think that one of the fundamental motivations for it is to give some sort of meaning to suffering. If this life is bleak, and all we do is toil in the fields all day for our Lord/King and suffer so that they can be merry - well that's kind of a nasty proposition. To believe that suffering in this life will be rewarded in the next can give people a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

[lips]

11. I think religion

is essentially a coping mechanism. But does not necessarily originate in the minds/brians of humans. Religion describes things that are readily apparent, but misunderstood because of complex interactions that only sometimes operate with respect to people. I think it is why so many 'religions' or prayers of reverence revolve around animals, celestial objects, and progeny, because each characteristic exhibits traits of conciousness, or the realization that one choice is sometimes better than an alternative.

Natural selection plays into this because these choices, or at least some kind of (macro/micro)evaluation is always going on, whether human brains perceive it or not. Seem to me that religion has always been about, in one form or another, and the narrative to which it adheres is just as important, and varied, as the phenomena it claims to describe.

I don't think evolution has anything to do with it. Evolution=positive. Devolution=negative. The question is, positive/negative for who...?

Does anyone really know what direction the selection process is traveling?