From: Bernt Budde <bug@arachne.udac.uu.se>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: Why theism is widespread
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 18:28:39 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: UDAC, Uppsala, Sweden

ahles@cis.ohio-state.edu (mark ahles) writes:
>Why is belief in God almost universal among societies (not individuals)?
>I believe it must be either:
> 
> -A benefit exists evoluutionarily for theistic societies.  This might be
> explained by 'working towards a common goal, self sacrificing, etc'.  But
> I know of NO successful socity that was atheistic.

It depends. I'm not sure I'd call Sweden successful, but we've got
an unique(?) level of freedom from religious cults. (We've got less
violence, lower crime rates, fewer unemployed, a lower number of
high-school pregnancies (and sex education in schools) and a few
other things better than USA. Of course other things are worse.)

In Sweden we have about 5% of the population that regularly attends
meetings in churches. (THAT is something to be proud about!) People
that styles themselves 'Believing in a higher authority' but goes
to churches for funerals and marriages are ca 40 to 50%.

When generalizing, I usually say that the nice thing about Sweden
is that we have few fanatics of ANY kind.

>                                  OR
> -God put a belief in God in man.
> 
>In either case, I see no advantage to atheism.  It is bad for the individual
>(if divinely inspired) and/or society (if an evolutionary advantage).

Lets specify "terms". Religious societies contra theistic. If you go
back to when we had tribal structures (hunter/gatherer or early farming)
then there were no modern-day religions. They DID have a lot of rites
and tabus to keep information, etc. Their religious beliefs was something
that among other things gave the tribe a unity. Their culture and
intellectual property was to a large part formed into a mythos form. I'm
sure some anthropologs will correct me, but I think this is the basic
idea.

In this view, there is an obvious advantage to have a "religion". The
cultural (meme-?) evolution took care of the rest. And then we got large
and complex societies with quite a lot of people with free time.

For the first part, if god put a belief or need of god into man, why did
monotheism take so long to surface? Why is it only here in the regions
that imported our religions from the Middle East that are monotheistic?
(I here presume that there was A 'god' that installed the belief.)

If there was an evolutionary advantage once in religion it's long gone;
or changed.



Bernt Budde                            |Religion, n: A daughter of
bug@arachne.udac.uu.se                 |Hope and Fear, explaining to
UDAC (Uppsala Univ. Computing Centre)  |Ignorance the Nature of the
                                       |Unknowable.
Don't for a moment believe UDAC,       |
while being a nice place, have         |-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's
opinions like me!!                     |                 Dictionary
                                       |"Nuke 'em till they glow and
                                       | then shoot them in the dark!"
                                       |- from a supplement to Car Wars,
                                       |  Steve Jackson Games