[hirundo]

"After the decline of traditional faith, the ensuing churn of political religions makes me believe that total religiosity is largely conserved; we’ve just been shuffling it around between better or worse vessels."

The conservation of religiosity makes a lot of sense. Religious behavior keeps re-emerging because it isn't something done to us, imposed from outside, but because it is somehow produced by our own psycho-biology.

That's something of an argument for secular organizations to adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions, to make themselves more sustainable by satisfying those inherent cravings. The military seems to have discovered this.

This is my perspective as a life-long atheist, trying to understand the behavior of normal humans. But it may be like a color blind person trying to understand the reaction to a vibrant painting. Maybe I just lack the sense to detect the external religiosity beamed to me by an omnipresent deity.

[guerrilla]

> because it isn't something done to us, imposed from outside

You assumed it isn't still something being done to us, being imposed from the outside. I doubt that's right. It was a useful tool of power before, it probably still is. Why do you think it's produced by our own psycho-biology?

[civil_engineer]

We are wired to want to participate in a social system. To belong. To have a common enemy. I propose organized sports!

[tasha0663]

A massive ritualized practice with its own symbols, laws, large structures, sacrifices, regional variants, written and unwritten codes of ethics, hierarchies of permissions and enforcement that sometimes involve costume and decorated carriages...

I'm talking about commuting, of course!

[guerrilla]

Sacrafices? :D

[tasha0663]

Potential ancestors who didn't experience the dread of possibly being watched from the tall grass were more likely to be eaten. And so we begin to believe in the unseen.

[guerrilla]

Seems like a giant leap from being aware of yoir surroundings being benefi i to having a habit of inventing invisible superheroes who are the ultimate moral judges of the universe...

[tasha0663]

It's also a giant leap from morganucodon to homo sapiens, which is to say it's a vast amount of tiny leaps over eons.

[guerrilla]

Yes; however, the mechanism of one is well documented and understood and comes with a predictive theory, while the other is so far just speculation of somone on the Internet.

[tasha0663]

While I'm flattered that you think I could have come up with it, I must confess it wasn't my idea https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14694-superstitions-e...

[crdrost]

I mean, I would be surprised if you lacked the “sense of color” altogether. But I will say that, it needs to be cultivated over time.

That the trappings and ceremonies of religion are co-opted by power-structures and televangelists and faith healers to divide and exploit and extract money from... To us religious these are true wolves in sheep-clothing.

I don't think you should seek the answer in a biological imperative to be religious. Instead try to see the Chasm. A yawning chasm saying that we are not worth it, that what we do shall not amount to anything, that all is lost/hopeless, that in the long run you are unloved and unlovable... That is the Chasm.

The experience of the Chasm is very common, and the need to run away from it is very real. Things we do to run away from it include social structures like blaming/ridiculing others, various addictions and obsessions to numb it, food and TV and relationships and sometimes even drugs. Marx saw religion as just another one of these, not evil intrinsically—but he thought the Chasm to come from folks' reactions to their own enslavement and that there wouldn't be a Chasm after we abolished wage slavery.

But religiosity in the sense you mean is better understood as the part where we turn and fight, where we take a stand against the Chasm rather than running forever. Its ubiquity comes from the common problem it attempts to solve, not from some random biological preset. Us religious folks continue because we think we have found something strong enough to fight it, whether it is Jesus or the truth of no-self or the pursuit of a cosmic Harmony or something else entirely.

[tasha0663]

> adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions

Watching its weird icons puttering by, I always felt like ClearCase was failing in an attempt to do this.