Why do we worship 'higher' beings?

January 2, 2006 12:29 PM

Why, throughout history, has mankind always seen the need to worship some kind of higher being?

I was watching an episode of the BBC's What The Ancients Did For Us the other day and it struck me that for thousands of years BC (if you believe there was a 'C') the human race has always worshipped something. The something could be one of the countless Egyptian deities, the Christian god, one of the Hindu gods, something like the 'goddess of spring' (if there is such a thing), Buddha or something else entirely.

Worship of these beings seems to have happened throughout time, in individual cultures separated by thousands of miles. Why do we feel the need to have to worship something higher/better than us?

posted by TheDonF to religion & philosophy (52 comments total)

Fear?
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:31 PM on January 2, 2006

That was a bit flippant of me, so perhaps I should elaborate. I think we have a natural, ingrained urge to appeal to authority to control matters and solve problems. As children, the authority is our parents. We grow up, and realize that our parents are fallible mortals just like us, but we don't necessarily lose that need for somebody to be in charge. Voila-- religion.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:33 PM on January 2, 2006

If you've ever watched a mother with her newborn, you realize that when we were most helpless, vulnerable and suggestible, there was an omnipotent being who watched over us, heard our cries and assuaged our needs. That imprinting, I'd suggest, is pretty powerful.
posted by mojohand at 12:36 PM on January 2, 2006

The online link is for subscribers only, unfortunately, but pick up the current issue of The Atlantic for an interesting discussion of that very question.
posted by pdb at 12:38 PM on January 2, 2006

Man naturally seeks to understand his surroundings, and when there is a question whose answer is beyond our capacity to understand at the time we project the answer onto a being, or beings, created in our image, but with greater capacities then us.

Why did this tragedy have to happen? Is just too big a question for some people living today.

Why does the sun rise? Was too big a question for someone living 8,000 years ago.

So build a god or gods that either reflect our weaknesses (like the Greeks) or embody our ideals (Vishnu) or perhaps like christianity a bit of both (the angry, vengeful, jealous, petty, loving, giving, all knowing, all good God).

Then viola, the unanswerable becomes less of a problem, the horrible becomes less heartbreaking, so on and so forth.
posted by Jezztek at 12:44 PM on January 2, 2006

I thought maybe fear or deep-seated inadequecy. Also, all of these beings (again depending on your beliefs) have never been met. The Egyptian dog/man Anubis would never have been met, the Christian God may or may not have been met, you're never going to meet the goddess of spring (I Googled, there is one!) - these are pretty much all fictional characters.

The fear aspect would explain the countless sacrifices that numerous races made to their gods throughout time, but those don't happen now (much), so is it just some massively clever ruse to instill morales on people?
posted by TheDonF at 12:44 PM on January 2, 2006

maybe it's an innate and instinctive truth?
posted by andrew cooke at 12:49 PM on January 2, 2006

maybe it's an innate and instinctive truth?

So the sun is really being pushed by a big dung beetle?
posted by Jezztek at 12:55 PM on January 2, 2006

Perhaps, Mr. Cooke. I think not, myself, but I've been wrong before.
posted by mojohand at 12:58 PM on January 2, 2006

no, but maybe there is something higher/better than us, and somehow people are aware of that.

maybe that seems arbitrary, but i don't see how it's more arbitrary than taking fear as axiomatic. if fear is ok, why not awe?
posted by andrew cooke at 1:01 PM on January 2, 2006

Dennett has a new book out exploring this very question.
posted by meehawl at 1:02 PM on January 2, 2006

Death. It's just something that we can't reconcile ourselves with - and I don't believe anyone who says otherwise - so we have to believe that there's some kind of continuity beyond the physical reality of flesh and bones decaying. (Ok we don't "have to", can't find the right word for it, but what I mean is, it's a rather spontaneous projection/hope/wish or whatever you want to call it, depending on point of view).

The feeling of being part of a vast world/universe, of not being able to control everything. Maybe also the desire to be connected to everything. Spirituality provides a channel for this.

The tendency to look for meaning/structure/order in wider terms, which leads to think in terms of fate which leads to personify fate as a divinity.

The feeling of awe towards nature, regardless of scientific theories and explanations of individual phenomena (I don't think science eliminates that sense of awe or wonder, whether in the contemplative sense or as supersition and fear, or everything in between, of course it doesn't have to be religious or spiritual but religions have tended to incorporate that).

Those are probably some of the main basic foundations for the impulse to consider spiritual/religious beliefs at an individual level. Psychological if you will.

Religion in terms of organised social structures and authority and codes of conduct is another matter, that has more to do with social systems and cultures. In that sense, worshipping something bigger and mysterious has also provided a channel for cultural traditions and structures, rituals, etc. as part of an organised society. For better and for worse.

(I'm just rambling, just the first things that come to mind...)

On the other hand, I think there's a lot of difficulties - and risks of oversimplification - in trying to find single explanations and reasons for "the" religious impulse without considering all the different ways religious beliefs have manifested themselves across different times, societies, etc. This recent article in the Guardian makes that point in interesting and provoking ways:

... There is no more a thing called religion that can be studied than there is a thing called life. In particular, there is no definition that will encompass religion and exclude everything that is not religion. The chief reason why people can never say that religion is "really" anything else is that it isn't, really, anything to start with.

... Science, when it studies religion must take into account both its sociological functions and its psychological ones; and to understand how these two work together on each other. Any particular religion must be specified with reference to both. This is true but I don't think it goes far enough. The range of human societies and their effects on the psychologies of their members, is just too great for there to be any single form of social organisation, and thus any single thing called religion, which is found in all of them. Technological revolutions, like agriculture, and writing, fundamentally change the nature of religious beliefs. So does trade. The shaman drinking reindeer piss to bring back a vision for his tribe is not performing the same functions as a Jesuit missionary at the court of a Chinese emperor in the 16th century. They aren't doing different versions of religion. They are doing entirely different things. Neither is more or less religious than the other. Not to believe in religion is in some ways a more radical step than not believing in God, but it might get us out of rather more difficulties...
posted by funambulist at 1:06 PM on January 2, 2006

Nietzsche - who is often full of shit - had what I think is a good answer for this one. He figured that, back at the dawn of civilization, there evolved a sense that the younger generation owed something to the previous generation, a sort of debt of gratitude for all they'd done. And there's some logic to this; I mean, if you're born and there are already homes built, animals domesticated, crops planted, etc., then clearly the previous generation has done you a favor or three. Nietzsche argued that, as time wore on, the generations to whom this debt was owed receded further and further in the past. So it went from giving some sort of deference to the wise old guy who lived in the next hut to revering the grave of the old people who had died to worshiping the spirits of the old people who died so long ago that no one even knew where they were buried. And then, finally, just as Jack the Ripper or Wyatt Earp became mythologized - that is, just as the stories about them became far more important and relevant than the things they did while they were alive - so did these long dead ancestors. And so, gradually, they became gods.
posted by Clay201 at 1:17 PM on January 2, 2006

You need to read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which addresses this very issue. From the excerpt:

Julian Jaynes proposed in 1976 that human brains existed in a bicameral state until as recently as 3000 years ago in his work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes asserts that until the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not have the "interior monologue" that is characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Jaynes believes that the bicameral mental commands were at some point believed to be issued by "gods"—so often recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts—were in fact emanating from individuals' own minds.
posted by geoff. at 1:28 PM on January 2, 2006

From an empirical viewpoint, it would be extremely foolish to assume that mankind is the highest form of being in the universe. Any rational person must believe that there is some higher being than man, unless that rational person is suffers from the hubris that is quite common among us humans.

Faced with the prospect of the almost undeniable existence of some being more advanced than man, the most obvious choices are: A) Worship; B) Ignore or C) Revile.

As far as people's conception of the nature of the higher being(s), some people just invent it, some take the word of others who invented it, and some claim to have firsthand knowledge. And if someone tells us they have firsthand knowledge of something that we have no knowledge of, who are we to assume they're lying?
posted by JekPorkins at 1:37 PM on January 2, 2006

I think a bunch has to do with questions that can't be answered: where did we come from, how was the world created, what happens when we die, etc etc. Thus, myths regarding invisible beings (can't be proven nor unproven) come about to answer these questions.
posted by hopeless romantique at 1:39 PM on January 2, 2006

There's an interesting book on the subject written in 2001: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer. I've read it and would highly recommend it. As he explains, there are many reasons why people believe in supernatural powers.
posted by nancoix at 1:45 PM on January 2, 2006

And if someone tells us they have firsthand knowledge of something that we have no knowledge of, who are we to assume they're lying?

Now that is funny.
posted by Jezztek at 1:54 PM on January 2, 2006

There was a post about this a while ago (which I can't find right now but I'll keep looking) which basically said that in small societies ghost stories are used to keep kids in line (don't go in the forest or the witch will eat you), in larger society gods are created to keep adults in line (if you kill someone you will be tortured forever after you die), and in even larger societies laws are created to keep everyone in line (if you kill someone you will be put in prison for the rest of your life).
posted by JackarypQQ at 2:03 PM on January 2, 2006

Any rational person must believe that there is some higher being than man

Quite true, and most of us end up marrying one.

Jokes aside, I find your line of thought rather curious. Empirically, I don't see any evidence whatsoever of any being higher than ourselves, and thus can feel quite rational in not believing in deities.

Then again, I tend not to care much about who's "higher" or "lower", since that attitude invariably leads to elitism and a host of other nasty personality quirks, which in turn lead to things like destroying one's natural habitat and being rather mean to one's fellow humans.


Anyway, to not be too off-topic--most of what I would offer has already been said; I would say the Number 1 reason humanity worships deities of varying kinds is the whole creation myth deal. It's just not possible to mentally concieve of Something (our universe) springing from Nothing, and thus we need some way to explain that, whether it be giant turtles, old Caucasian-looking men in the clouds, or whatever.

Even to this day we aren't much closer to really answering that class of question (along with Why Are We Here and Where Are We Going) with science, and so religion is alive and well, and will doubtless continue until we do answer those questions--if we ever do.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 2:12 PM on January 2, 2006

I think you could easily make the argument that it's evolutionarily advantageous for humans to believe in a higher power.

Consider that, generally speaking, people live longer in a society bound by moral standards. Moral standards are hard to imbue without some punishment and reward system.

The state's punishment and reward system, either not being enough or not having existed in earlier ages, was overshadowed by a much more intriguing, difficult to prove spiritual and cosmic feedback system. If you mess up, you'll burn forever.

Believing in a greater power also puts people at ease.
posted by disillusioned at 2:16 PM on January 2, 2006

Now that is funny.

I know Dave exists because I saw him today.

You know nothing about what I'm talking about. Do you just assume that Dave doesn't really exist, and that I didn't really see Dave today? Of course not. You don't even know who Dave is. And yes, I did see Dave today.

What if I tell you that I know a higher being exists because I saw a higher being today?

You still know nothing about what I'm talking about. Do you assume I'm lying? If you do, it's because you make assumptions about what you know nothing about. Why would you do that? What firsthand knowledge do you have that allows you to assume that my statement is false?
posted by JekPorkins at 2:17 PM on January 2, 2006

Any rational person must believe that there is some higher being than man

I don't think you can order beings into "higher" and "lower" in any meaningful way. I think they're just different.
posted by martinrebas at 2:18 PM on January 2, 2006

I don't think you can order beings into "higher" and "lower" in any meaningful way.

Then you're taking issue with the term used in the original question, which I simply used in my answer.

But I can think of lots of meaningful ways of classifying beings as "higher" or "lower." You should talk to a biologist sometime. They have lots of classifications of beings that you might be interested in. There are few people who would (unless they were just being argumentative) disagree with the statement that a whale is a higher being than an amoeba.
posted by JekPorkins at 2:22 PM on January 2, 2006

Huh. I would take a more general tack. There are a lot of questions about life and how to live it that don't have obvious answers, and religion is one way (along with, for example, philosophy) of answering those questions.

For example: how should I bring up my children? What kind of work will be most fulfulling? How do I make moral judgments? How should I treat my friends and my enemies? What are the basic tenets -- for example, a tenet like the Golden Rule -- upon which my moral system should be founded?

A religion, like a philosophy, is very often a system or an approach to thinking about these types of problems.
posted by josh at 2:25 PM on January 2, 2006

I don't think this nut is crackable. Its an age old question and your own perspective pretty much will answer if for you. For instance which of the two do you think is most likely:

1. Psychological need/human development. An artifact of being human leads to religious belief and religious institutions. This artifact has been identified as many things, most famously as neurosis by Frued.

2. People occasionally peer into a paranormal world and become prophets, buddhas, etc which leads to religious belief and thus religious institutions.

So, a person who is skeptical in nature would say "I only believe in things thoroughly proven to my standards" would go with number 1. A religious person would go with number 2. An agnostic wouldn't take any position and usually claims both positions are fatally flawed for a variety of reasons.

Also, I don't think your premise is correct either. The first "religion" arguably was animism which is the belief that things in the world are infused with some kind of spiritual or paranormal power.

Previous to neolithic man's animism there was no belief at all. To be able to comprehend concepts this abstract requires quite a bit of thinking and to communicate them requires some level of speech. So its a safe assumption to say that there was no religion prior to animism, thus man has not always been religious.

Also, you can't really say animism involved "worship" in the pagan or monotheist tradition. Animists may have rituals but the kind of "debase yourself in front of the gods" attitude doesn't really apply. Hope this helps.
posted by skallas at 2:26 PM on January 2, 2006

Religion was (and still is, to a large degree) mankind's attempts to understand and explain the universe and everything that encompasses. It was/is a primitive form of philosophy.
posted by davidmsc at 2:30 PM on January 2, 2006

@skallas: Also, you can't really say animism involved "worship" in the pagan or monotheist tradition. Animists may have rituals but the kind of "debase yourself in front of the gods" attitude doesn't really apply.

But surely any kind of ritual in praise of something is a debasement? Aren't you saying, whether by praying, sacrificing or just believing that something bigger and/or better exisits that you're not as good as that entity?
posted by TheDonF at 2:37 PM on January 2, 2006

I agree with skallas. But people certainly do love clear answers to this question, no matter how unprovable. Case in point, geoff.'s recommendation of that crackpot Julian Jaynes. Another, from the teaser to that Atlantic article linked by pdb:

this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry

Sure it is! That explains everything! It's the 21st-century equivalent of "the world is on the back of an elephant that's standing on the back of a turtle." It sounds good to us, but our grandchildren will mock us.
posted by languagehat at 2:45 PM on January 2, 2006

What firsthand knowledge do you have that allows you to assume that my statement is false?

I know that human minds are fallible and often mistaken about "higher beings". I know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you assume I'm lying if I tell you that I met an elf today who will kill a million innocent puppies unless you give me all your money?


You should talk to a biologist sometime.

To me, the whole higher/lower being thing sounds like the medieval concept of the "great chain of being", which was later replaced with darwinian biology, where every living being is considered equally "modern" and "evolved".


a whale is a higher being than an amoeba

What, exactly, makes it a "higher" being? Its size? Its intelligence? Its more complex metabolism? Let's say I have a friend whose IQ is 170. Is he a "higher being" than I am?

If you wanted to measure whether a penguin is a higher being than a gerbil, how would you go about it?
posted by martinrebas at 2:45 PM on January 2, 2006

The DonF: But surely any kind of ritual in praise of something is a debasement?

No. I think worship is very much a specific act. If I was an animist and had a ritual to move the anima around me to produce better results hunting bison, then what am I worshipping exactly? Nothing. There's a real difference between using an animal totem for spiritual purposes and worshipping an animal.

>that you're not as good as that entity?

In my example of animism there are no entities. Can you have animism with entities, I'm sure you can, but that's a deviation. At that point you're a pagan/pantheist.
posted by skallas at 2:54 PM on January 2, 2006

Humans have an uncanny ability to recognize patterns within what would normally be complete chaos. Because of this, we tend to also attribute seemingly amazing patterns to something "more important" than us or what we perceive. In actuality, many of these patterns aren't really that amazing, and are in fact, completely commonplace and easily explained. People don't like to be purposeless, and would rather let someone else do the driving instead of living their life by accepting full responsibility for their actions instead of attributing it to something else's will.
posted by cellphone at 2:55 PM on January 2, 2006

What, exactly, makes it a "higher" being?

Again, arguing with the original question. You've proposed several meaningful ways of classifying beings as higher or lower, which I think answers your earlier question.

Do you assume I'm lying if I tell you that I met an elf today who will kill a million innocent puppies unless you give me all your money?

In the context of your previous statements, yes. Out of context, no. How do I know what you mean by "elf?"

I know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If there are myriad ways of classifying beings as "higher" or "lower," then how is a claim to have seen a "higher being" an extraordinary claim? Maybe I just saw your friend with a 170 IQ. What's extraordinary about that?

But this shouldn't be an argument about whether it's stupid to believe in a deity. The question was why people believe. There is no single answer to that question. What's certain, though, is that those of us who believe in God do so in spite of the silly mockery of those who do not believe.
posted by JekPorkins at 2:55 PM on January 2, 2006

I assume that religious belief is a form of superstition. Why did the crops fail? Why did my child sicken and die? Why did my other child sicken and then get better? I think that the Animists may have done something like remember that when the second child was ill, people acted or spoke a certain way. Could that have had something to do with the cause of her cure? Maybe if I think properly, hold my hands in a certain way, touch wood, all will be well. Maybe the spirits have powers to change outcomes, to bring good things or bad things.
I also believe that the priesthood has a lot to do with the continuation of this superstitious practice. Very early on, Shamans must have begun to understand the tremendous power inherent in being the one who best understood the spirits, who could talk to them, and who could intercede between mere humans and higher beings. This continues today, to my great dismay.
posted by Hobgoblin at 2:59 PM on January 2, 2006

What if I tell you that I know a higher being exists because I saw a higher being today?

Then I will always counter your such statement with one of my own, claiming that my higher being routinely beats yours up and takes its lunch money :) Your argument is really quite silly and illogical.


As for the higher/lower being concept, in addition to what I said before, I want to A) agree with martinrebas, and B) ask why it matters? Why should anyone give a rat's arse about what beings are higher or lower--unless of course one is trying to boost one's own ego or something.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 3:04 PM on January 2, 2006

What's certain, though, is that those of us who believe in God do so in spite of the silly mockery of those who do not believe.

There really should be a Godwin's Law sort of thing for religious folk playing the "boo hoo poor old prosecuted me" card.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 3:06 PM on January 2, 2006

I think that being intellectually aware of the extraordinarily temporary nature of our existence causes humans to have a psychological need to believe that we serve an greater purpose--one that gives meaning to our short, painful lives.
posted by xyzzy at 3:11 PM on January 2, 2006

cyrusdogstar:

1. The higher/lower being distinction is the basis for this entire thread. See the question. It looks like your answer to the question is that people believe in a higher being because it somehow boosts their ego to believe there's something better than them out there. Am I far off?

2. Why do people mock what they don't understand? I think it might have something to do with that "trying to boost one's own ego or something" thing you referred to.
posted by JekPorkins at 3:12 PM on January 2, 2006

There's a book I like called Faces in the Clouds which explains religion thusly:

Because other humans are the biggest threat to their safety, humans are constantly vigilant for the presence of other humans in their environment. So if I see a light far off in the forest I am going to interpret it as a human with a flashlight instead of a star because the former is a bigger threat -- it's a safe bet.

I end up also interpreting other events (like earthquakes, floods, and lightning) as having been initiated by humans. And only a very powerful human -- god -- could cause those things in the parentheses to happen.

A side result of this tendency of ours is that we see faces in the clouds and UFO's.
posted by eighth_excerpt at 3:15 PM on January 2, 2006

Because we are mammals, and so suckling, nurturing, the father, the mother, etc. are all hard-wired in.
posted by A189Nut at 3:21 PM on January 2, 2006

It looks like your answer to the question is that people believe in a higher being because it somehow boosts their ego to believe there's something better than them out there.

No, I meant that the general tendency to classify things in a hierarchy trends towards being used to elevate oneself above one's peers ('peers' used loosely here, e.g. 'other organisms', 'other species', etc). Anyway, I think we've all hashed this particular subtopic to death.


Why do people mock what they don't understand?

It's more that we see people behaving in illogical or non-rational ways, and being the types who strive for logic and rational thinking ourselves, this disturbs us.

Trying to actually argue with someone whose thinking is on a totally different plane of existence doesn't work too well, and so both sides--the religious, who can't fathom people who don't believe in God, and the nonreligious, who can't fathom people who persist in what they see as silly superstition--end up resorting to petty bickering and name-calling.

It's not very constructive, but it makes both of us feel better, I suppose. You all get to feel like we're poor, misguided sinners who don't see the light, and we all get to feel like you're poor, misguided fools who have been suckered by manipulative priests (or whatever).


Anyway, hopefully the OP has gotten at least some good out of the thread, although they probably should've realized it would turn into this eventually =)
posted by cyrusdogstar at 3:26 PM on January 2, 2006

Here's my personal belief:

When we stub our toe in the middle of the night, we otherwise rational 21st century beings briefly, ever so briefly, get angry at the coffee table. As though the coffee table wanted us to hurt ourselves, and tricked us somehow into doing it.

Primitive man saw agency in everything. Lightning was the manifestation of some powerful, angry god. Disease was punishment. Fire was an animal.

I think there's some small, ancient part of our lizard brain that tends to anthropomorphize the universe. It sees human motives in everything.

Maybe some things are "lower beings".. the coffee table is a lower being (though crafty in its way), because we can chop it into kindling if we have to. Lightning is from some "higher being", because it is devastating and uncontrollable. The universe itself (the creature whose center is everywhere and whose radius is infinity) is the highest order of being, naturally.

Thousands of years of philosophy, society and science tell our rational brains that this isn't true, but we can't actually escape our hindbrains, so when we're tired, or afraid, or when we're under the influence of something, it takes over and we believe in that particular type of ridiculousness again.
posted by Hildago at 4:26 PM on January 2, 2006

Fear, cowardice, stupidity.

People fear death. They fear pain, illness, disease, bereavment, loss, personal disaster. It takes a degree of courage, stoicism, resilience and intellectual honesty to accept that these things come to us only via chance and/or natural causes, not because of some malign supernatural influence or because we didn't appease some powerful entity or force.

So, for many - arguably for most - religious people, merely believing in a god simply isn't enough. They also need to worship it, pray to it, kid themselves they can have a conversation with it, hope for intercession and help from it. This is craven and reprehensible, but sadly that seems to be the way most human beings are. Certainly, the idea that any god bearing even 10% of the powers and characteristics ascribed to it by the major religions requires worship is absurd. Petty tyrants require worship, not allegedly benevolent creators. No, people worship to satisfy their own need, not that of any god. And a further sign of the innate cravenness of this behaviour is the way so many survivors of disasters will selfishly thank god for their deliverance instead of cursing him for the thousands he let suffer and die.

Basically: fear and weakness.
posted by Decani at 6:26 PM on January 2, 2006

When I was a child of 8 or so, I was quite into religion, and believed quite strongly in the true existance of God. There were a fair few factors involved per my current interpretation:

1. I went to Roman Catholic schools, and thus taught a lot of this stuff, pretty much as fact, and accepting it was expected of my by these places and made out as being a good thing (and me wanting to be a good kid.. well, there we go).

2. The concept of God gave me a sense of control and meaning, while helpfully slotting in very nicely with all those juicy developing concepts of people, especially those that should have been filled by my crazy and distant parents.

3. The feelings invoked by 1 and 2. Many of the ideas involved resonated with some part of my brain, giving a sense of awe, love, importance (the greatest being in the universe has a vested interest in me, woa!), connectedness, even euphoria. And of course, a sizable dose of fear.

I think the feelings are a key aspect. Certain concepts/thoughts/rituals hook in to a personality somewhere and somehow feels *right*, and the whole thing snowballs as all these feelings and beliefs get associated together. Feelings are amazingly powerful things when interacting with higher level thoughts.

Create a system that resonates with a few suggestable and vulnerable people and you get yourself a cult. Create one that appeals to a whole society and there's your religion. Getting from one to another seems to me like a case of evolution for memes, and almost inevitable in the right conditions. Just like posts like this are almost inevitable at 3am after a couple of beers ;)
posted by Freaky at 6:53 PM on January 2, 2006

both sides--the religious, who can't fathom people who don't believe in God, and the nonreligious, who can't fathom people who persist in what they see as silly superstition

That may be the two sides that appear constantly in that kind of arguments that tend to go nowhere, but, the whole world in all its rich variety really cannot be reduced to those two positions...

Perhaps, talking about "religion" is really like talking about "life". As if it meant the same thing to everyone.
posted by funambulist at 7:30 PM on January 2, 2006

You know nothing about what I'm talking about. Do you just assume that Dave doesn't really exist, and that I didn't really see Dave today? Of course not. You don't even know who Dave is. And yes, I did see Dave today.

What if I tell you that I know a higher being exists because I saw a higher being today?

You still know nothing about what I'm talking about. Do you assume I'm lying? If you do, it's because you make assumptions about what you know nothing about. Why would you do that? What firsthand knowledge do you have that allows you to assume that my statement is false?

Wow that is so dumb, and yet I went out tonight and got so drunk that I am not even close to willing to sit down and debate you. So yeah, you win. You and your logically incongruent, stupid fooking fantasy world wins. Huzzah!

Now since I'm hanging out with the Beetle that pushes the sun in it's orbit (of which you have no knowledge) I gotta go back to keeping him entertained, or else you know, he kinda goes fooking nuts, Check ya later G.
posted by Jezztek at 11:00 PM on January 2, 2006

Thanks all for some really interesting replies. Looks like I've got a load of reading to do - hopefully stuff that won't be too hard to get my teeth into...
posted by TheDonF at 3:28 AM on January 3, 2006

1. Historically, gods aren't necessarily morally or intellectually "higher" or more advanced... they just have supernatural powers. The greek, roman, and old testament gods are examples.

2. Human beings are driven by the causal perspective - that is they constantly try to link events to one another to determine cause. When they can't come up with an immediate (natural) cause, they turn to the supernatural, i.e. Jesus, UFO's, etc.

3. People then come up with "people oriented" causal behaviors that can influence these supernatural events in turn, i.e. prayer, animal sacrifice, behavioral restrictions (ten commandments). When a certain notorious christian proselytizer earlier this year suggested that natural disasters were punishment for not teaching creationism and tolerating homosexuality, he was just following thousands of years of causal superstition.

There is no reason for bad luck. There is no reason for suffering and misery. Try to find one beyond poor personal choices or lack of information, and you'll have to make one up.
posted by ewkpates at 5:10 AM on January 3, 2006

Yikes, I was a bit *ahem* of a jerk there in my last comment.

So yeah, I apologize JekPorkins for my tone.

Remember kids, friends don't let friends drink and post.
posted by Jezztek at 6:39 AM on January 3, 2006

There's an essay by Rowan Williams called 'Butter Sculptures' (written long before he became Archbishop of Canterbury) which has always stuck in my mind. He begins by telling a story about a quiet evening at home when he was browsing through a book of photographs of old Tibet, while his wife, on the other side of the room, was working her way through a textbook on the nature of religion:

Sounds of mild exasperation came from across the room occasionally. After a bit, Jane said: "The trouble with this man is that he thinks religion is about the pursuit of goodness, beauty and truth." I replied by reading out a paragraph describing how Tibetan monks create elaborate sculptures in butter and mandalas in sand in preparation for great festivals, destroying them afterwards. We agreed that there was a rather basic difference between people who thought religion was oriented to beauty, truth and goodness and people who thought it was about butter sculptures.

The article linked by funambulist, above, makes a similar observation. (The author, incldentally, is Metafilter's very own alloneword, and one of the best religious journalists in the business.)

The shaman drinking reindeer piss to bring back a vision for his tribe is not performing the same functions as a Jesuit missionary at the court of a Chinese emperor in the 16th century. They aren't doing different versions of religion. They are doing entirely different things.

And that's the point. The diversity of religious behaviour is so vast, so extraordinary, that it makes you wonder whether there is any such thing as 'religion' at all. To paraphrase Brown slightly: the shaman and the Jesuit aren't just expressing the same thing in different ways; they are expressing different things in different ways.

The trouble with most attempts to explain religion is that they fail to apprehend this diversity. Instead, they treat modern Western Christianity as the normative form of religion, extract what they take to be its essential features (which usually have something to do with power, authority and control) and then project these onto other religious traditions. The result, predictably, is a mess.

I'll stick my neck out a bit here, and say that in my opinion, no attempt to explain the origins of religion has yet succeeded. A century ago, people were trying to explain religion in sociological terms (Durkheim), or anthropological terms (Tylor), or psychological terms (Freud). They all failed. Yes, they came up with some interesting and important insights; but none of them came close to a general theory of religion. There is no reason to suppose that today's fashionable theories, whether based in cognitive science or in social Darwinism, will be any more successful.

To me, the most convincing interpretations of religion are those which -- mostly coming at religion from the direction of cultural anthropology -- treat it as a ritual system, not just a belief system, and look at the way that ritual actually 'works' in everyday life. (Margaret Visser's The Geometry of Love comes to mind here.) But these are not general interpretations of religion. They are local interpretations, which focus on the ways that religion operates in specific social and cultural contexts.

The most one can say, in answer to the question 'why religion?' is that religion exists because it meets people's needs -- and as people's needs vary, so does religion. You may feel that this is not a very satisfactory answer -- but looking around me at the current state of research, I think it will take at least twenty or thirty years before anyone comes up with a better explanation.
posted by verstegan at 7:27 AM on January 3, 2006

Why, throughout history, has mankind always seen the need to worship some kind of higher being?

until electricity and high rises, mankind saw the cosmos every night.

many of the rituals that celebrate it may seem like worship of a higher being, but they are not necessarily literally suggesting there's a man in the sky. They're more likely suggesting there is beauty and order in the sky, and it's awe-inspiring. What "god" meant to ancients is not necessarily the same thing it means to atheists; a lot of philosophers are speaking of the inherent beauty and order of the universe, not of a conscious deity. They are awed by the existence of existence, that it is complex and regular, and that it Is at all. The being of being is the great mystery, and in a way the funny part is that we've gotten so used to it that we think being atheists makes the mystery disappear, as if science can explain it. But all science can do, which it does very well, is describe it. I love science, but I still think the metaphysical "question" (I put it in quotes because I don't think there can be an answer) is an essential part of human experience.

So I am not religious in any sort of conventional sense, but if you really look at the kosmos (which is just greek for "beauty and order") every night, I don't think it's surprising that people began to worship it. Incarnated gods are harder to make sense of, but not everyone takes those literally (eg, the greeks had zeus & mars & aphrodite etc, but plato & aristotle treat the myths as myth and speak of Zeus/Deus, the one god, as the mind or prime mover of the universe, not a guy with thunderbolts).

Languagehat, I'm surprised you think Jaynes a crackpot when you defended that time-travel-in-dreams guy a while ago... I read Jaynes many years ago but remember it being a very enjoyable book, even if the premise was a bit far-fetched. It was well researched and intelligently presented, at least.
posted by mdn at 12:40 PM on January 3, 2006

We evolved from the tribes of our apish ancestors that successfully vanquished other tribes without remorse. History shows that societies that have conquered the world have had religious beliefs that endowed them with a sense of superiority; their God/Gods were better.

Tribes with religion were better unified and morally prepared to kill, often in the name of their God/Gods. Their genes have been passed on to us and that is why we feel the need to worship 'higher' beings.
posted by idaniboy at 9:23 AM on January 7, 2006