It seems to me that the evolution of larger-brained creatures through sexual intercourse necessitated a closer individual association and tolerance, producing social behaviors and resulting in the religious mind.
Emotion was meant to facilitate survival and some of our treasured higher emotional states, such as love and compassion, are meant to facilitate the newer survival tactic of cooperation and grouping as well as facilitate the procreative process and lessen the weaning burden.
Emotion sublimates individual drives and inebriates instinctive inhibitions, so as to enable this cooperative and unifying strategic mechanism.
It is the ultimate harnessing of reason to instinct.
What is the connection between the religious feeling and the procreative, survival strategy of sexual intercourse?
Even this “Bang and Go†demands a certain loss of inhibition so as to approach and tolerate the other for a time.
As in most primitive creatures the social mechanism is less developed.
What does this mean?
I’m saying religion is the projected peak of emotionalism, which is meant to facilitate social and sexual interaction.
Satyr,
I thoroughly agree with your OP. To see religion in its worst case scenario is not to see it as an organic development. We, here in the West, are more upset over the demands and social restrictions placed on our sexual drives than is almost anyone else in the world. It’s from taught puritanism. In some cultures the sexual experience is a direct analogy to our religious experience. (But don’t tell the kids that. They are not ready for it. )
We are organisms first, with survival needs. Second, we are brains with minds, attempting to articulate, and thereby to specify, our needs. What a mess this has become for those who bifurcate organic from mental, physical from spiritual, etc.
I think that we need to make a distinction between emotive spirituality and what is religion as a social reinforcement tool. While both may “borrow” from one another, there are qualitative recognizable differences.
A man staring into the night sky may emotionally experience awe and reverence toward the totality of all before him without such emotions being connected to any thought of social well being. Indeed, the realization of the mystery, the unknown and not knowable may be a trigger for religious social organization, but the root impetus for religion may not be the drive for reproduction, but the awareness of our insignificance in the universe.
tentative,
That we are insignificant in our universe is a taught idea based on our survival dilemma. Unfortunately, our minds allign with negative as well as positive ideas of who and what we are. My awe at the stars in the night sky just might be the recognition of my belonging to all of that, not my estrangement from it.
Our insignificance is taught? Perhaps. I’m sure that for purposes of religion, that is true. But I have experienced in solitude feelings quite apart from those of religious zeal.
I’m not quite sure how you arrived at insignificance being equated to belonging or estrangement. I wasn’t thinking of belonging or not belonging, but in feelings of personal importance in the totality of what is.
I believe this bifurcation is caused by the very mechanism of self-consciousness.
I draw inspiration from Sartre who saw consciousness as a negating force.
If we are to accept this definition as true then to become conscious of self would involve separating a piece of the mind so as to see the rest of it.
But the seeing part never sees itself, since it cannot be but the seeing part and so a cloud of mystery shrouds it.
The eye cannot see itself.
This is where the error occurs. This seeing part assumes that it, the seeing part, is different or separate from the rest, resulting in duality and in concepts concerning God.
tentative
This is the root – a weakness trying to correct itself.
Emotion becomes a strategy, resulting in the religious mind.
Reason on its own can only say ‘I do not know’ or ‘I do know’.
It is not reacting but only observing. Its gaze is cold and indifferent.
The acting is sparked as a reaction to what is observed through emotion.
We feel fear and we want to change it.
Love comes to sublimate this fear and comfort and pacify it.
Emotion sublimates and inebriates instinctive inhibitions.
Instinctive inhibitions are emotions themselves.
Motives are both inhibitions and ambitions.
Emotion, whether conscious or unconscious, is most often a focus upon a reason.
Maybe I can’t talk strait today.
It’s probably meant to facilitate all of a persons strongest desires, yeah. God will tell you to make peace with your brother, AND kill the wicked, depending upon what the cultural ideas of “right” are.
I’m not sure that I equate emotion as a weakness trying to correct itself. I’m sure that emotion is used for all sorts of socialization, but emotion can simply function as awareness undifferentiated, much as reason is simply observation.
I realize I’m suggesting intrinsic qualities to both affective and cognitive states, and that is a departure from your POV . but I’m just not ready to accept that all of the tiny bits and pieces ever add up to one.
I definitely agree that religion is the result of perceived weaknesses or vulnerablities but being neither religious or non-religious, the religious mind is more a curiosity than a contemplated state of being.
)