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by avighnay
1516 days ago
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I have come to view religions as organisms in an eco-system. The behavior is very analogous. The goal for both is survival and propagation. As within an eco-system, organisms evolve and adopt survival strategies. Religions do the same too. Organisms evolve due to genetic aberration, Religions evolve due to social aberration. In any eco-system, the young organisms are known to adopt harsher survival strategies, in religions you find the younger religions (Abrahamic, at this point of time in history), adopt strategies of violence and coercion. The more tougher to get out of a religion is directly proportional to how young it is. The principles are hard wired for survival, hence more emphasis on mandatory daily/weekly rituals for all in the religion, unlike in older ones where rituals in general are more often than not a domain of the priests. The older religions on the other hand are less virulent and more susceptible to younger challengers. Some organisms in nature beat this challenger possibility by adopting a more distributed structure, there by surviving in spite of assault from challengers. Young religions on the other hand prefer a centralized control structure which helps in keeping the line discipline. As within an eco-system, strategies of some organisms might be damaging to the eco-system as a whole. When it comes to religion, the ecological balance can be obtained only when damaging survival strategies are identified and discarded by the said organism, in other words it just needs to grow up... |
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All evelotion is is the axiom or truism "That which works, works."
That statement can't be denied or escaped, and regardless what your mystical feelings are about how unbelievable it is that an eyeball just evolved by itself because that would be magic and magic is impossible but gods are magic that is possible or maybe gods aren't magic...I'm so confused...anyway no matter what you think about all that, there is no way around such a basic statement. You can't not-believe it.
And everything else ultimately flows from that. You can avoid considering it and imagine that there is some unknown other stuff between that and evolution and eyeballs, but you can't actually produce that unknown other stuff if you are ever forced to consider it.
And so it is with any self-oganizing self-modifying system, including organized religions and religious ideas.
You are right that they evolve strategies to perpetuate themselves. That which works, works. If someone had a religious idea to only accept seekers but keep themselves secret and never advertise, not even to their own offspring, that religion would cease to exist within a generation. Anyone still in it after that would have to be in some new religion resulting from a mutation that it's ok to bring in at least some new people by some means or other.