this just a thoght i had while smoking a cigarette… i’ll hope it makes a valid point and i’m looking forward to discuss it.
fear is a normal reaction towards unknown. fear is also expereinced by animals (i say it now, since it may be an argument to some of yours counter-arguments).
first, fear is irational and unrational. being confronted with unknown, fear is one thing we know for sure that does not help. it triggers some chimical reactions that may improve our physic abilities (ie the “rush of adrenaline”) but it also limits our capacity to ration, which is more useful when the unknown is not a dark forest. it is unrational in the sense that presence or lack of rationality does not disable/enable you to experience fear.
being born into this world, we have to know it. it is a normal thing for animals to know their environment and for people to know theirs. Unlike the animals, people have a spiritual dimension (i used spiritual to avoid a term like rationality or inteligence, terms that are more specific). we do not know how this world was created or why we were born, so our first reaction is fear. Rationality is something that we learn. We have within ourselves the capacity to learn rationality as the birds have the capacity to learn to fly, but we still have to learn it. Before learning rationality, creating a god is a good solution for the unknown. we no longer need to fear the uknown, since now we explained it, hence it no longer is unknown.
so, i find the birth of religion a normal consequence to a condition that humans (and animals!!!) share. i would further assume that the prmitive man was not very different in terms of behaiviour to an animal. It had a different brain, with some special features, but before he learned to use those special features, he was not far from the animals. As he created his first explanaitions for the world (the first religions), he also learned to use the special features of his brain. Then he refined his religions, with the help of his new abilities. Thus, we moved from primitive religions to more complex ones. Pretty much like we moved from greek and roman gods to chrsitianity. 2000 years ago, it made some sense to have god that walks the earth, but nowadays that would seem, well, irational. There is no doubt that mithology influenced christianity. Society does influence religion as much as religion influences society. What has changed, I think, is the fact that we can now see the succesion of religions. We can see how politics divided christianity in orthodox and catholic and how certain social realities divided catholics into protestants, puritans and so on.
Having developed our special fatures in the brain, we no longer need a religion-type of explanation for our world; not because we have other explanaitions, but because the more rational we are, the less we fear the unknown. I think that the number of atheists is constantly growing. I’m not saying that god will “die”, but i do believe that religion will give up its role as explaining the unknown or - to be more accurate - the impossibile-to-know.
