The Cosmopolitan Ape

[neo-x]

Read full article here

An excerpt, I certainly recommend reading the entire article, its intresting.

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Where does religion come in?

Religion is very interesting to me. My book is called The Bonobo and the Atheist partly because I’m objecting to the New Atheist who trashes religion as irrelevant and bad and morally wrong.

Yet you identify yourself as an atheist.

Yeah, but I really don’t care if God exists or not. If people can lead good lives by believing in God, that’s perfectly fine with me as long as they are not overly dogmatic. But some atheists have also become dogmatic.

Why are you bothered by atheists who don’t like religion and want to smash it?

Because religion is so inherently human that I don’t know what happens if you kick it out of society. Sigmund Freud wrote a whole book against religion and in the end he says that he is still not sure what would happen if we would remove it from society. It might not be good. We’ve seen the Communist experiment where they tried to get rid of religion. Stalin killed a lot of religious leaders and that experiment did not go well. Religion is so much part of human society. All human societies we know of have some sort of belief in the supernatural, so the question for me as a biologist is not so much whether religion is good or bad, but where does it come from? Why do we have this tendency? Is it some very special survival skill that humans developed? I believe morality came before religion, so religion cannot claim to be the source of human morality. But religion may contribute to maintaining morality in society.

Especially in large societies?

That’s the thinking of some people who study religion. Human groups used to be 100 or maybe 200 people, a bit like primate groups. In these small groups you can keep an eye on everybody if they’re not cooperative or if they cheat or lie. But that doesn’t work so well if you go to a big society of a thousand people or several million. At that point we needed another system to monitor morality. And what better way than imagining some being who’s omniscient, who can see you from every corner and even at night? So that may be why religions evolved and helped sustain these large societies.

But religion also has dark side.

Humans do terrible things to each other, sometimes in the name of God, sometimes without any religious reference. There is no proof that without religion we would be treating our enemies any better. We’re just not a particularly nice species when it comes to the out-group. But I have no patience with cruel religious practices, such as witch burning and genital mutilation. In this regard, I agree with the atheists that banning all of those superstitious behaviors would be a great relief.

Your take on religion is fascinating because you’re not religious yourself. You don’t believe in God but you seem to have what I would call a kind of “spiritual atheism.”

That’s an interesting term.

Well, you write about the experience of transcendence.

I believe the reason you find so many scientists who are agnostics and atheists is because we replace religion with something else. We do not see science as a religion, but we have a connection to the larger universe through our science. So that’s part of the transcendence that we feel.

But transcendence is more than just an understanding of the larger world. There’s a deeper, powerful emotional feeling that comes with it.

Yeah, it’s an emotional feeling of connection. Of course, every scientist, myself included, is very unhappy if you say this is mysterious and must be caused by some supernatural force. Still, we feel connected to a larger whole. I was recently at a meeting where an astronomer started crying. He choked up when he showed pictures of stars billions of light years away. He couldn’t speak, and then he composed himself and explained that ever since childhood, he’s been deeply affected by seeing these images. For the primatologist, most of us were completely fascinated the first time we looked into the eyes of an ape. We felt an immediate connection between apes and humans. We feel this connection at a very visceral level.

Do other primates have some form of religion?

I don’t think primates have religions, but they may have certain superstitions. For example, if a thunderstorm comes through with an enormous amount of noise and rain, male chimpanzees will put their hands up and start walking around bipedally, in a dancing sort of fashion. It’s called a rain dance and it has been observed with chimpanzees approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know why they do it. Are they impressed by what happens? Do they think they can stop it? Of course, that would be superstition. Are they somehow in awe of nature? They also react to death. We see that primates are very strongly affected by the death of others. They will not eat for days after one of their group members has died.

They grieve?

You could call it grieving. Let’s say a mother loses her child. It’s not only that she doesn’t eat; she screams or sits huddled in the corner. I think they know death is permanent, but we don’t know if they have that knowledge about themselves, like humans know they will die one day. That’s interesting because the afterlife plays very heavily in religion.
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Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally-syndicated show “To the Best of Our Knowledge”. He’s the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (Oxford University Press

[PaulSacramento]

Religion and civilization have gone hand-in-hand down the ages and it is virtually impossible to make the call of which came first.
I think that the view that man invented God to keep members of their group/society in place is, well, unfounded.
Why?
To be honest, there are far better, easier and more effective methods of doing so and we know that from experience.

I do agree the morals came before religion of course because, well, religion is simply a "formalization" of beliefs and views.
The issue is where did morals come from, especially the morals that are NOT in the best interest of the group or individual but that are still viewed as, typically, universally right.