[arcsin]

> "...it's basically a psychological coping mechanism."

I think this isn't quite right. Religion is a social mechanism. It creates the right incentives for its members to buy into a kind of insurance program. When a member falls on hard times the other members will take care of them. Of course this is more appealing to people in financially or socially unstable circumstances.

In order to avoid free-loading, there might be something like a tithe where you actually have to pay money into a shared pool. But if you don't have money to spare then usually membership comes down to costly signalling, i.e. various forms of self-sacrifice. Usually the poorer the members the more extreme the religion.

The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in (which is why costly signals of buy-in are so important). It shifts the prisoner's dilemma payouts away from defect, toward cooperate. And a strange quirk of the human mind is that the more socially useful something is, the more it will prevent us from realizing it's not actually based on something true, and the more socially harmful it is the more it will prevent us from realizing it's actually true.

As society modernizes, people move away from religion because the costs don't seem to justify the benefits. Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true. Unfortunately I think we do lose something in the process. Modern society is more likely to be disconnected. Religiously active people generally tend to be happier. Looking around a lot of people I know have nothing like a weekly church meeting where they can socialize with a group of people that takes care of each other.

[Jedd]

> Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true.

Can you clarify what you're trying to assert here please?

> The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in ...

Would you be able to cite some examples of where this has happened in the past few millennia?