I don’t quite follow you.
I’ve observed people who explain that they don’t believe anything is sacred – and yet, there they are, conscious and functioning, holding down jobs and raising families, all busily living their lives as if they weren’t missing a structural component. I take it you’ve met people like that? Or, if not: what do you figure it would look like, if there were someone for whom it was just a stage and not a structural component?
Agnostic here, with deistic tendencies. What I have noticed is that anecdote is not data. If the sacred was a structural component of consciousness it does not explain why the most advanced and developed nations are more secular and more human based on how they treat their less well to do in their countries. (more reformation in their prisons rather than punishment, less of a war against drugs, universal health care, etc)
More from David Voas:
(Minute 9:00)
I certainly wouldn’t say that the current secular trend will never be reversed (pun not originally intended). The world has gone through cycles before of greater and lesser degrees of religion.
Of course, the modern civilization can collapse and then we are bound to have more degrees of religion (One reason IMHO that several extreme religious leaders are in practice encouraging the destruction of modern civilization)
As the writer of Guns Germs and Steel told us, the collapse of old societies have many causes and one can be a dogma that is not willing to change as fast as society is or should when conditions change. (The collapse is caused by issues like the destruction/depletion of their natural resources, climate change, trade loss, warfare, an inability to change their ideology/culture when confronted to changing conditions -this includes religion)
Sure, but we’ve gone through those cycles without general societal collapse, too. Look at the Enlightenment Era, when religion was very weak, compared to the Great Revival that followed.
I have to point out that the enlightenment was mostly concentrated on the elites of the day, old time religion was still a big part of most of the population. As the recent data shows one can make the point that we are currently getting into an enlightenment that is more popular.
Forgot to add:
And hence the reason why Voas made the point that it would be harder now to reverse the trend.
Any aspect of human society that is universal to all known historical groups is more likely to be instinctual, or at minimum to have some instinctual basis for some of the pieces that make it up. Likewise, any aspect of human society that is not universal across all known societies is less likely to have a basis in inherent human nature, and more likely to be based on random historical contingencies and culture.
In your extensive reading, did you encounter any historical examples of a human society that lacked what we today refer to as “religious belief”? Even a single one?
I’m guessing the answer to that is “no”.
If there are literally no counter-examples, then that makes religious belief a universal in human societies. And that, in turn, means that quite contrary to having “ZERO” evidence, there is in fact extremely strong evidence that the building blocks of religious belief are based on some instinctual human tendencies that are shared across all human groups. One of the most notable human tendencies is to assign agency to non-conscious objects, to attribute good- or ill-will to objects that have no will at all. This seems to be one of the primary building blocks of religious belief in many cultures.
Then I must suggest that your readings in human psychological development are much less extensive than your readings in history.
The “animistic” phase of childhood development is quite extensively talked about in the psychological literature. It goes back at least to the 1920s, and even modern psychiatrists still talk about the animism that seems inherent in childhood thinking. From a very early age, human beings tend to assign agency to inanimate, or non-conscious objects. And in fact, the least organized religious beliefs across the world, from the smallest tribes, tend to be animistic. (This is, I believe, a point that should already be well known to anyone with extensive exposure to history.)
Psychology is tough, and that this idea is discussed does not mean that it is a definite fact. But when not just a single child, but many different children seem to speak of inanimate objects as having purpose – such as the TV no longer working because it’s “angry” at us – then we should be prepared at minimum to entertain the notion that assigning agency is such a powerful force in our minds that we can readily do so with inanimate objects in a fashion that seems religious. I would also point it that it doesn’t take too much reading in psychology to come across this notion.
No, you don’t.
That is not how human memory works.
Human memories are not accessed “directly”. The very act of remembering something from the past acts to re-write the memory in our brains. This is exactly why human memory is so terribly unreliable. We do not directly remember what happened when we were infants, not even remotely. We remember the re-written memories, from the many previous times when we accessed those memories. The more we remember some event, the more often that the original memory gets re-written into a form that fits the pre-conceptions that we have after we become older.
I have no doubt that you perceive that you still have “memories” from what you thought and observed “as an infant”. But there is no reason for any human being – most especially you – to believe that your own memories are even remotely close to accurate, rather than filtered repeatedly through the inherent biases of a much older brain. Just as important is the fact that even if our memories of childhood were accurate, any one individual’s memories would be merely a sample size of one. There is next to no cause to extrapolate general human tendencies from the experiences of a single individual, even if it were the case that we could rely on the accuracy of that single individual’s experience. (And in the case of human memory, we absolutely cannot rely on any such accuracy.)
This is, again, why it is more beneficial to look at the historical record of many human cultures. That gives us a broad basis of evidence. And any such aspect of human culture that is universal across all cultures is more likely to be based in human nature than a behavior that only shows up in a small subset of cultures.
As it happens, the historical record is quite clear about religion, at least for anyone who has read extensively in history. Human religious belief is a universal. Therefore, some of the building blocks that make up such religious belief are very likely to be instinctual.
Having said all that, I still think that’s a really dumb article.
IMHO it is more complicated than that. while it is true that animistic religion was there early, the “old time region” many are talking about and defending in articles like in the OP ** are not then the religions that we should then be following** then if we follow that “logic” that it should be instinctual.
http://www.nature.com/news/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-all-powerful-deity-1.17040
So, gods with “small g” as like in the new “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie? I have to say here that I’m open to that possibility, but so far no good candidate has showed up yet although I’m a bit partial to Coyote. Personally speaking I do think that there is (or are) entities out there that could qualify, but it is also likely that they are not interested in us… yet.
Since humans seem to resort to religion instinctually and the sacred is a structural component of consciousness, how come there are people for whom the sacred plays no role in their lives and developed countries tend to be more secular?
Social groups are dynamic systems where people’s instincts are kept under control in elaborate ways. Depending on the system, people are either encouraged or discouraged to express their greed. Depending on the system, people are either encouraged or discouraged to cheat while pursuing their greed. And so on. Since humans are to a large extent products of their environment, the result is that the manner and extent an instinct becomes manifest differ across societies. Back to the religious instinct, I would say that a developed society is organized in ways that tend to discourage reliance on religion, which does not mean the instinct is not there. In my opinion, it is either suppressed or expressed in sublimed forms such as preoccupations with ghosts, paranormal activities, alien visitors and the like.
As for the people for whom the sacred plays no role, things are equally complicated and need multiple approaches. First, since every human being is a mutant, the number of ingredients and the proportion in which they can be found in every person’s dough vary considerably. For instance, there may be a person who is naturally less endowed with intelligence, which does not exclude that person from our ranks. Second, our competitive advantage is the way we use our brains, both as individuals and society, to shape the environment we live in, the group we belong to and its members. People’s abilities and inclinations are shaped and channeled so that they will fulfill social functions, and thus the sacred component of their consciousness can be directed to worship the political leader or to join the tribal loyalty instinct and sacrifice themselves for the cause. Last but not least, people are active participants to the process of their formation as human beings and they can decide which aspects of their personality they can develop or inhibit in order to achieve their goals. My conviction is that there are a number of people who choose to make use of their reason and keep their emotional or instinctual inclinations in check when trying to understand the world they live in and deciding what type of live they’re going to lead.
The vermiform appendix in humans is there, but it may have no function anymore. Dinosaurs developed feathers for other reasons than flying and ended up turning into birds. I think the notions of religious instinct and the sacred component of consciousness can be considered similarly.
We are not instinctually religious. Religions have to be taught. We may have an instinctual desire to assign purpose for things we can’t explain, but that instinct, like everything else, is an evolved trait and there is nothing religious about it. It just makes us ripe for the pickin’ if anyone can convince us that there is actually a purpose.
Atheists often hold sacred beliefs regarding:
People seem to have an instinct to do the following:
One umbrella term for this is David Chapman’s concept of eternalism, which is the opposite of nihilism. Eternalism says there is objective meaning in the world, often combined with a drive to stamp out the nebulous. I find this useful because there are so many beliefs people treat like religion but which lack explicitly supernatural elements so at best you say they are “like a religion.”
Religion is the most obvious example of eternalism, but there’s plenty of non-theistic eternalism to go around. Besides the ones listed above, there’s also:
I don’t think free will is terribly relevant to religious debate since factions on either side believe or reject it, though God is often used in thought experiments as a stand-in for an omniscient observer, like: “If God knew what you would do ahead of time then do you have free will?”
Well, they could be, I suppose, if you felt the need. But my question remains.
Imagine you meet a man who, if asked, replies that he’s deeply religious and worships a deity; I suppose you’d react by declaring that here is the instinct in question, on display and in full flower. And imagine you then meet a second man, who (a) believes in no deities but (b) is preoccupied with ghost sightings or UFO sightings; I suppose you’d react by saying he’s suppressed or sublimed the instinct.
Imagine you meet a third man, an atheist who (a) has no interest in alien visits or paranormal activities, but (b) is a loyal-unto-death follower of some political figure; again you can claim victory, still tossing around words like “sacred” and “instinct” by tossing around words like “shaped” and “channeled”. And imagine you then meet a fourth man, who fits your “last but not least” category by simply displaying reason while keeping various inclinations in check – like a guy who develops certain aspects of his personality and inhibits others, like you were just saying.
Is there a hypothetical fifth man you could meet, such that you’d say “wait, does he have the instinct at all? I mean, I’ve been saying these other guys have channeled it or sublimed it or suppressed it or inhibited it – but this guy, he doesn’t seem to bother with it in the slightest; maybe he’s minus it? Should I rethink this?”
What would someone have to do, for you to see him as that fifth man?
Above all, I should point out that my previous post is a feeble shadow of what should be a real clarification of this phenomenon. To throw light on human religiosity, one ought to write at least an essay and I don’t think I am the right person to do it.
Second, regarding the five atheists in your hypothetical example… well, I’m afraid people are way more complicated than that. There are always multiple causes and conditions that lead to a person enjoying a non-religious life. Although, as **marshmallow **has just mentioned above, s/he might be religious without even realizing it.
But I don’t to eschew your question. The fifth man who showed no trace of potential religious instinct and whose consciousness didn’t include the sacred as a structural component at all should be a feral child or a member of our species who has failed to develop into a person, for people are cultural products whose development is shaped both by the social environment and their own conscious effort. Once there is language and consciousness, one is likely to instinctually believe in the supernatural and find something sacred. Only something like a feral child could qualify as the fifth ‘man’ because s/he would not be capable of complex mental processes such as personification and her/his consciousness would be quite rudimentary, lacking the power of abstraction that one needs to form the notion of the sacred.
That post from marshmallow was underwhelming to me. The first items like
"- human and animal rights
Have a basis on logic and evidence regarding how to have a society that does work and will continue to work in the long run and with more justice for all. There are some caveats, nationalism is not much appreciated among people that are basically against the current establishment, that includes using religion to keep the status quo; but like Hegel explained, there are some issues were nationalism can help societies develop if we can avoid the trap of using nationalism to incite warfare.
But the post is double underwhelming once one notices that virtually all the items mentioned are also seen among religious people, the point I make here is that what he describes as “sacred beliefs” of atheists are just another way to deflect the issue* that religion does ignore evidence to keep faith going, Atheists might also fall for biases but they are more open to evidence that unfortunately for many old time religions is not very supportive of their ancient texts.
I think it’s more complex than that. Religion is a manifestation of many human tendencies. We desire consolation in the face of death, both our own death and that of loved ones, we seek out parent figures etc.
As to why smarter people are statistically less likely to believe, I would say intelligence is a measure of the ability to accomplish goals. A key aspect this is being able to discriminate between true and false information. Religious claims are almost all, entirely false.
The free will/determinism debate strikes me as pretty irrelevant. A totally deterministic system can be capable of inference and logic. As our accumulated knowledge has grown, we have acquired better and better tools for evaluating evidence. We are capable of updating our internal models of the universe accordingly, and can reject previous, naive assumptions about how things work. All of this is true whether we are truly “free” or not.
Anyway, there is no real freedom in following a logical argument. Two different observers will be compelled to the same conclusion if the evidence leads there and they are both reasoning correctly.
I just can’t quite follow this.
You give examples: loyalty to one’s tribe, or to a political leader. You reference, with apparent approval, marshmallow’s list: dedication to nationalism, or to democracy, or to reason, or whatever. I’d maybe quibble with whether those necessarily count as a guy being “religious without even realizing it”, or as holding stuff “sacred” – but, well, for the sake of argument, let’s say I shrug at the proposed classification.
But if you are going to use “sacred” and “religious” in that way – robbing them of their supernatural component, to the point where they’re being used to describe atheists and agnostics who champion this or that secular ideology – then why turn around to slip the word “supernatural” back in? What the heck does that accomplish?
When I read this, and bust out laughing, and shouted, “Goddammit That’s Funny!”, the irony was not lost on me. 
It’s an attempt to hint at the fact that religiosity is a complex phenomenon. Being religious is not just the result of feeble minds making up stories stemming in ignorance and fear. It does include elaborate ways to deal with various fears, but it encompasses other things as well, such as a need to find meanings and a crave for the absolute (absolute knowledge, absolute justice, absolute principles, etc.). Indeed, in advanced and modern societies people have learned how to deal with their fears and craves without resorting to religion. But that does not rule out a universal propensity for religion, which given the proper conditions (i.e. the absence of a rigorous system of telling facts from non-facts and the tools to put this methodology into practice) will virtually turn everyone into New Age adepts, Muslims, Bahai followers, UFO cult members, Christians, and so on. For human beings cannot function properly unless they enjoy peace of mind, that is unless they are at peace with their mortal fate, with their own status, and with the way the world works. The power of religion resides in the fact that it can soothe people’s fears, confer their existence meaning or value, and quench their thirst for the absolute.
But there ARE atheist earworms. Or agnostic, at least.
Our troubles are many, they’re as deep as a well
I can swear there ain’t no Heaven and I pray there ain’t no Hell…
…But I’ll never know by livin’, only my dyin’ will tell…