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By Jim Downard
Every society has a religion. Discuss?
It is true that natural human societies have religious beliefs. Even dogmatically atheist societies (the old Soviet Union and current PRC and North Korea) possess institutions which function like religions, including reverential personality cults. So why?
The science underlying how religious beliefs are generated, cognitively and socially, is a broad one. The upshot is that there are deep-seated cognitive systems underlying how we come to attribute “life” and “agency” to the animals and objects around us, and supernaturalist beliefs (not just specifically religions involving godly entities) arise from that.
Obviously the specific religions that emerge in that process differ wildly, and it’s also true to say that whatever religion a particular person believes in, most of the people on earth don’t believe in that one, and this has always been true. There has never been a universal faith, as far as can be told from the available history and archaeological record.
The history of how various religions have fared competitively is tied up not just with how much of their doctrines are “true” but how they become promoted or spread by the success of the cultures in which they developed. Religions in those contexts regularly reinforce social norms (think of Hinduism and their caste system, or Islam and the clothing conventions of a nomadic society). Their content often evolves adaptively, incorporating local traditions that only become obvious when the practices are compared to what went on in earlier centuries (or less, as in how quickly rock music has been incorporated into even conservative Christian denominations that only a few decades ago would have decried them as “satanic”).
Most religions are spread by dedicated missionaries, though Islam did the convert or die mode in its early days. It’s likely no coincidence that there are more Christians in the world today than Buddhists because Christianity was early adopted as the Roman Imperial religion, and it was often ruthlessly spread later during European colonial expansion. Once the religion takes hold, it can draw on the inertia of the cultural context.
It can be fairly argued that religions are as natural to humans as games, politics or sex. Which faith you end up with is usually a matter of your local birth circumstance, of course. Religions don’t have to be true to be believed. They only need to work in their social context and reinforce what the believer wants to be true.
