Religion and human evolution

Karma is probably the most accurate of the world’s ‘religious’ doctrines. Although some may argue it more philosophy than religion, but it does truly provide a path for proper living, and essentially says if you overindulge in all things, then pretty soon the grass will be gone and your herd will starve. This means of course if you’re indulgent in the ways of eating and reproduction and remiss in teaching your offspring, then your culture will stand a higher chance of extinction.

To counter the effects of lazy ordinariness and the epitome of human nature that would allow disappearance of culture, man has invented religion to proactively explain away the mysteries of the universe and to flog people into proper ritual performance. The most important being those that recognize and beautify the ‘belief’ (much like mowing the grass beautifies the yard and keeps the local tort board from issuing their flogging: the court order and subsequent monetary fine).

Despite the crass assessment (pardon a pun), religion serves several important functions in culture, most notably to protect virginity. Most religion, in a round-about way, is about controlling reproduction or the assets of reproduction as a means of conserving the reservoir of community potential … in other words, your daughter must remain a virgin (and not play cards or dance without particularness) to ensure that the unseen deity in the sky can be satisfied, and this ritual of virginity must take place otherwise the rain will not fall and the grass-growing season will fail, and therefore virginity is directly linked to cultural survival.

However, it seems the ‘deity’ most in need of satisfying are the fellowe herd members who exert their influence via ‘ritual enforcement’ and ‘virginity enforcement’ purely to smite those who violate the rituals ‘required’ to grow grass. In short it’s the fellow herd members who create imaginary rituals as a ‘divine’ way to allocate resources, and energize other herd members into propagating and thus enforcing cultural survival … and nobody in the herd can long stand against those thumpers once it’s decided the invisible deity has spoken badly to them about you.

Fundamentally it’s an age-old rule of society that when enough people say something is true, then it must be true, despite this rendering religion (and most gossip) as mere emotional contagion.

The protection of ritual allows individuals to value their good name above others and kill off those who would infer disrespect on their selves (especially eyeballing blossoming virtue-girls cheering at the football game or cutting in front of an Escalade with a dirty truck while inferring the single-digit gesture) … and of course the resulting smite is all done tastefully in the name of appeasing the ‘larger force running the universe,’ who no doubt is quite busy balancing the equations of matter and dark matter, and blowing up stars, and hurling comets, and who, in the course of this busy day, could hardly be expected to consider only the interests of those living on one tiny mud and nickel speck spinning somewhere in the mist of all else that is going on … meaning that our lives are insignificant except to ourselves and therefore hardly the penultimate goal of the universe, but don’t tell anyone because they might kill you.

Probably the best example of our insignificance can be seen near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Not wishing to single out any peoples over the other, I am sure there are other worldly examples of the same magnitude (for instance volcanic ash covering most of Kansas).

When standing at the salt lake one can see clearly, carved on the Wasatch Mountains overlooking the valley, the old shoreline of Lake Bonneville which at one time covered most of Utah with a considerable depth of water. It is apparent too that there are two distinct lake levels visible on the mountains. It makes one realize that one day the old lake will probably fill again as the Earth’s geology changes over time and allows more abundant rainfall in the area, and the inevitability of this shows that prayers to the larger unseen deity, asking that he shouldn’t flood our cities and churches, is really just an imaginary stalling of inevitable change … which itself implies that grass will stop growing or start growing independent of rituals performed to satisfy the invisible deity.

So it seems that most religious ritual has no meaning, and is not really relevant to how the world works. However Karma, on the other hand, seems a better match to the capricious geo-physics of the planet (the physics that seeks to squash out existing life and wreak the havoc we as communal animals wish to avoid). Karma basically says; do what it takes to survive, but don’t do too much of any one thing and consider the potential of your actions on the coming of the morrow. Karma doesn’t precisely list those things one should do to avoid contemptuously angering a deity, although karma seems to recognize that such needs appear in culture, but that they serve those who enforce the rituals and don’t have gorilla-squat to do with a governing physics that says: for each action in nature there will be an equal reaction.
 
Karma accounts for an ‘equal reaction’ by suggesting that what goes around comes around. Religion however intentionally inflicts the ‘equal reaction’ under the guise of appeasing an unseen deity, which explains why many holy people want to flog all ilk of sinners, especially those thinking improper sex thoughts, bouncing around ridiculously, and failing to dress or address properly (because somehow these impious behaviors implicitly affect how well the grass grows).

This means that religious rituals are about preserving power (and respect) among those who wish to hold it, and are not much about reducing the number of drunk drivers or improving global health and nutrition using genetically enhanced crops. And the ritual that most exposes this contagion of mind is the posturing humans undertake to become the person ordained as the ‘voice of the invisible deity’ … for this honour is simply bestowed on those who most believably proclaim that the deity speaks inside their head … and even more hilarious, the person hearing voices is not held out as the insane who imbibed too much ale, but rather seen culturally as a rod of divinity touched by other-worldly spirits who obviously float around unseen in the sky, luckily having been prevented from blowing off into space by the solar wind because Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field (by pure coincidence of the universe’s manufacture).


Gene Haynes