existential anxieties is only a tinyy part of why people are religious, religions ride piggyback on other mental-mechanisms/cognitive hard-ware meant for detecting predators/prey/protectors from fragmentary information under uncertain situations, violations of folkphysics, biology and folkpsychology play a huge role.
Thats only a tiny part of the picture.
No it isn’t, that is the underlying essence of all human activity.
Detecting predators is fear driven - anxiety.
Uncertain situations create anxiety and folk anything is a result of human groupings made possible due to survival concerns.
Even sex is based on existential motives and concerns, even though most people remain only aware of its manifestation as an emotional and biological need.
You’re not familiar with all the studies on how violations of innate expectations of folkbiology/psychology/physics/natural kinds effects transmissability/memorability of claims. The fact is that the agency-detection and violations ARE OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE. The violations and which categories they violate DETERMINE the memorability/transmissability of the idea.
So yeah, say what you want about ‘anxiety’ beign the main force, but these violations of expected category are of HUGE IMPORTANCE. Religious belief all over the world shares certain themes because its produced by a human nature. Theres a lot of potential gods that are anxiety producing that we don’t fear or WORSHIP because they don’t violate these categories in the same way.
Try reading.
“Agency”?
Is the CIA behind this?
By agency detection I mean ‘detection of intentionality behind anything’.
If thats easier.
If a baby see’s a ball thrown through the air, it will follow to look towards a source looking for ‘agency’ the ‘source’ of the movement. Its assumed the ball just didn’t roll under its own force or esteem. Humans are trip-wired to detect intentionality behind everything even outside of anxiety. (One of the reason’s were trip-wired to detect agency is to find protectors/prey, niether of which are anxiety producing).
Humans hear voices in the wind, see ghosts out of shadows, not only because their scared, but because their mind is trip-wired to make connections out of fragmentary information JUST IN CASE, somthing is there.
The reason we are struck by fear by one God and not another is due to cultural forces which ingrain in us, from an early age, a narrative.
All religion is a method of alleviating existential anxieties. Now what form or what symbols these anxieties take is a cultural matter.
And thanks for the suggestion. I will certainly try reading.
I’m sure one day I will reach your level.
Try thinking.
Reading is inheriting the thinking of another.
What you explain is a mechanism, evolved in an organism, to facilitate survival and to more efficiently direct action.
Anxiety is the prime motivator because one must maintain self before one can be active.
In seeking out prey the hunter overcomes his anxieties concerning this unknown entity which it requires to continue being.
With every hunt the hinter risks himself. It is why the path of least resistance directs even the strongest predator and it is why predators feed on the weakest.
yes those mental mechanisms facilitate survival and fast/economical reaction to potential threats. They also MISFIRE cons tantly because they are trip-wired to go off…
If you hear a voice in the wind or a scream, its not because it actually sounded anything like what you think you heard. Because domains of folkpsychology are activated but not propery resolved, issues of folkbiology are seemingly violated, making it a memorable occurance or whatever.
Anyway, how tranmissable somthming is isn’t an issue of how anxiety producing it is(though thats a huge part of it), but rather specific violations of specific innate expectations. A melting zooming brick may be anxiety producing, its not a candidate for transmission/memorability like the claim of a talking horse, or the claim of a burning speaking bush.
How memorable/attention grabbing these different things are DEPEND on how they violate innate expectation and in WHICH ways.
Again you mistake the system of which I speak with the system that exists at the moment.
And what is this system?
For what it is worth, we seem to be conflating Platonic/Nietzschean definitions of equality with Liberal/Marxist ones - they are essentially different in their target. One demands the essential characterological inequality of mankind, and thus the right for those inherently superior to rule, note this does not necessarily apply to material goods. Indeed to both Plato and Nietzsche, the superior being disavows . Nietzsche makes it quiet clear that equality is distasteful - but he also in his aphorisms deliberately declares himself opposed to capitalistic modes of thinking. Firstly one need look at his aphorism suggesting that hard labour be assigned chiefly to those obtuse enough to bear it - his utopia is essentially Plato’s utopia, but justified in a radically different manner. And also, he notes well that neither increasing the pay of alienated workers, nor forcing them into a collectivised system of labour as socialism suggests will make an iota of difference to their quality of life - still will they be denied time to exalt their faculties to all that makes the human glorious!
What most people here talk of is, it would seem, a form of inequality expressed in economic terms - which is what liberal and marxist in their foolishly reductionalistic perspectives take. They are stuck in the assumptions both of the Enlightenment, but more importantly of the political economists - especially the vaguely utilitarian concept of greater happiness being simplistically equated to material prosperity. Something, I might suggest that even modern psychology has disproved. For sure, abject penury is misery, but then so is vile slavishness such as our culture has now esteemed, thanks to the mindless creed of the protestant reformers onwards, to be the bastion of good character! Now, whilst indepedent responsibility may justify this, I would suggest, personally, that there is something deeply irrational about a society that will throw the overmen into the mindless nausea of the marketplace, and deny their abilities the scope in which it may affect the world. It is an anti-meriocracy that we have, instead of promoting this best, the greatest, instead our society worships and promotes the most vulgar, the crass and the hebetudinous. Glibness, superficiality and duplicity are what ennable success. Oh and that little externality that is ‘inheritance’. Gladly would I see all our wantwitted politicians, business leaders, ‘celebrities’ and public figures shot and expurgated from the annales and all the capitalistic nobility of inbreed fools massacred too, to be replaced by an aristocracy of the mind.
No. You’re wrong.