by dosssman | 2026-03-14 12:23:43+00:00
> This is a naive world view. Religion became a tool for the powerful to suppress the masses. I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story.

It is hardly a naive world view. It is instead grounded in reality and the evolutionary luggage of humans and its various consequences on our cultures.
We all probably agree, but there seems to be a misunderstanding of the grand parent's comment.
Namely, you stated that "Religion became a tool ...", but what GP is referring to is "before it became such tool, what was it ?"

> "I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story."
I think both GP and I will agree. It is not "for the good of the tribal man", at the same time it does not imply the other alternative that you seem to suggest: "for the benefit of the ruler class".

For example, the selfish gene theory offers a compelling explanation that will not only fit both perspective ("good for tribal man / tribe", "good for ruler"), but also provide insight to similar cultural aspects such as religion, patriotism, to only cite a few.
Namely, genes influence their containers, i.e. "survival machines" (SV) in their environment, and natural selection favors genes that induce behaviors leading to increasing the number of copies of said genes in the population.
Compared to other animals, humans evolved a complex social dimension as part of their behavior.

Among the various "humans" populations (probably even more distant ancestors), the genes that led to the heuristic behavior of "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" happen to grant a differential survival advantage to its carriers: indeed, the elder is an "elder" in virtue of having living long, and more generally, a "leader" is such in virtue of having lived long enough and gathered large social and "financial" capital. So "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" is a useful rule for you to survive. Over time, the gene becomes spread through the general population.

Due to the inability of our ancestors to properly establish causal relationship, while passing "useful rules for survival of the group" , they also happened to pass a lot of superstition and irrational principles, namely because they failed at establishing causal relationship ("is the crop yield bad because I looked wrong at the sun god statue ?" and so on).
Those rules are "simple", easy to follow for the tribal man, and to make matters worse, his genes have likely conditioned him to follow those rules (mostly) unquestioned anyway.
Whether we like it or not, the rule of "behave well now for a better life after death" was useful at the time, at a surface level for both the "tribal man" but also his "powerful people / leader", and at a deeper level for their shared genes.

Like many other "heuristics" for decision-making that humanity has carried over, it is not immune from exploitation from "more selfish", "mutant" actor: snake oils salesman, politicians promising easy solution to what are actually difficult problems.
Religion might have at some point been useful for the good of the tribal man, and incidentally his tribe leaders, which only reinforced the pattern, but the evolutionary blueprints these religion rides on now get exploited by what we nowadays call "powerful people", as you say:
> But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing.
> People are wired to follow their leaders.
But it is not just a matter of indoctrination and blunt force, it is unfortunately a matter of predisposition of the human mind.
But the leaders have not "wired" them, they are just plugging into already existing circuits, and channeling their current to enact their desired outcomes (however perverted they may be).

To leave on a optimistic note, by a chain of serendipitous events, despite religions dominating not so long ago, secularism has somehow emerged and helped us separate the wheat from the chaff in many aspects of our lives.
As humans, we already have come a long way in untangling our messy evolutionary baggage and the various side effect of natural selection of genes and their extended behaviors (religion, culture, etc...)
Just as how we have to upset the genes' goals through methods such as contraception, there is no reason why we couldn't free ourselves from their other machinations.

> I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.

I think this statement suggest a confusion / mix-match of philosophical, moral and ethical questions that are still grounded in the material world, and "spiritual" that are by most common definitions pertaining to super natural assumption (intangible human soul never measured so far).
If anything, deeper examination suggests that religion hardly helps much when it comes to those grand questions either.
Most people probably have the capacity to question the "why" and other such questions, but not all necessarily them have the luxury of exercising it.