Tell me though, when was the last time you actually heard of a cow hit by a train? Uh?
Or saw a train with an old fashioned ‘cow catcher’? Uh?
I’m just saying, maybe cows have evolved? Or perhaps learned?
^ Well, they have tools.
It also works if you’re standing next to an oscilloscope displaying a sine wave.
They don’t have verbal language, so the concept of “name” is meaningless to their theology.
YouTube and other sources provide the answer you’re seeking.
Cows is dumb. But at least they don’t wear special thousand-stitch belts* in a vain attempt to protect themselves from train collisions.
*many Japanese troops in WWII went into battle wearing these amulets, which were suppose to repel bullets. They didn’t work so well.
You’re taking this a lot more seriously than I did. I understand what you are saying about evolving some aspect of this, animals may have spirituality of some kind, but I think we can define human religion clearly enough to see that it’s not practiced by other animals. And we can also see enough of animal behavior that some animals have emotions and empathy and culture and aren’t just blindly following survival instincts.
Wittgenstein’s lion seems relevant here. The quote, roughly paraphrased and expanded upon: “If a lion could speak [our language], we [still] couldn’t understand him.” Absent some degree of shared understanding and experience, communication is impossible. Language is a social phenomenon, not a way of transmitting logical propositions or whatever from one mind to another.
For example, depending on social context, “be my guest” may serve as an invitation to partake of hospitality free of charge, permission to bend or break a rule (such as cutting in line), or a resigned acknowledgement that someone is about to do something really stupid. Or something else. We only know, when we know, because of shared understanding, context, experience, and so on.
I’d struggle to say (in a non-joking way) that I understood the “beliefs” of any of the animals I’ve known best. I could talk about their “personalities,” and we certainly developed something like primitive “languages” based on our shared experiences, but our communication never got much beyond stuff like “this is yummy” or “I need something” or “that feels good” or “stop that.” Or, of course, “I love you.”
I’m willing to say it’s possible that some animals have sufficiently coherent beliefs about the world that we could say they’re religious, or something like it; absent a much stronger degree of understanding and communication between species than is possible now (or probably ever), I’m very confident saying we can’t really know.
(Religion, like language, is a social phenomenon. Even mystics who have private religions have at some point become aware of the concept of religion and one or more traditions in their lives. They didn’t invent it on their own. If you want to find religious animals, look to the ones with language and transmitted cultural knowledge.)
I wrote a story in which scientists attempt to communicate with honeybees with a hologram of a honeybee. (The idea was to see if they could convince the foragers to feed from flowers which hadn’t been sprayed with pesticides.) The scientists were disappointed when the bees didn’t fly to the flowers they were supposed to.
Then they found out that the bees were freaked out by the fact that they couldn’t touch or smell the hologram bee, so they started to rip off the wings and legs of any members of the hive that died. “We made them believe in ghosts.”
I challenge the over-generalized premise that “Religion clearly serves a very important psychological and social need for humans.”. Keep in mind that humans survived quite well for a hundred thousand of years before organized religion was ever invented. Early man may have worshiped the Sun, but as we know praying to the Sun is no different than praying to a rock. The results are roughly the same… a 50/50 chance of getting what you pray for.
In this day and age, many humans ARE dependent on religion to provide the “certainty” of an afterlife. Of course, religion doesn’t provide any proof of an afterlife. Nobody has died and then a week later comes back to life and tells us about the afterlife.
Humans fear the unknown, so they cling to whatever comfort they can get from whatever religion they happen to be exposed to as children. Some would call it brainwashing. Why would animals care if there was a supernatural being or not? They don’t think about dying someday, they live in the moment… just as we should. If you can prove to me that animals think about dying I would love to see your proof.
My understanding (though I’m no expert) is that it’s not that they didn’t have religion; it’s that they didn’t have religion as a separate category. They didn’t have religion as distinct from not-religion.
Again, I think that what people usually mean by “religion” is made up of different components. Some of those components are indeed essentially social – the sense of unity with a group, the explanatory functions about how the world works, the system of rules/social regulation that tends to build up around those first two. But another is a private religious experience which I don’t think is essentially social at all, and which I don’t think in its essence depends on anything that’s been learned; but the mind interprets it differently depending on what’s been learned, and that interpretation is indeed socially created. Whether somebody hears Jesus talking to them, or Coyote, or the rocky hill they’re sitting on, depends on the stories they’ve heard from others. But the underlying sense of communion – that there’s something there doing the talking, not necessarily in words – that I don’t think is socially constructed. I think it’s in some fashion built into the brain. Not everybody seems to have it, even if they’re quite religious in the other senses; and some atheists do have it.
We have no idea what prehistoric humans believed, about religion or about much of anything else (we do have a pretty good idea of what some particular groups believed was edible.)
Your chances of getting what you pray for, whether you’re praying to the sun, a rock, the essence of cave bears, or in the form of an organized religion complete with priests and heirarchies, are likely to be either a whole lot less or a whole lot more than 50/50 depending on what it is that you’re praying for. Praying for the Nile to rise more or less at its proper season? The odds are, or at least used to be, pretty good. Praying for childbirth to result in a living child and mother? Still considerably over 50/50, or none of us would be here, because the species wouldn’t have survived this long.
Not all religions are focused on an afterlife.
And we don’t know enough to be able to tell whether non-human animals think about death or not. I can’t prove that they do, and you can’t prove that they don’t. I can tell you, though I haven’t tried to run a scientific test on it, that the ones that I’ve known react differently to the dead body of one of their friends than they do to the same creature while living; and often react differently while the dying is in process; and that I’ve never known one to hunt for a missing friend if they’ve been shown the body, though I’ve known it to happen when the friend left the house alive and was buried without their having had the chance to see the body. Whether this means that they either fear that or realize they themselves are going to die is an additional question.
All organized religions I am aware of talk about the afterlife. Some are highly focused on it, others not so much. Apparently to get a largely uneducated population to behave in a certain way requires both the carrot and a stick approach. Since nobody knows what happens after you die most religions preach a path to a good place or a bad place based on their holy writings. It seems one of the key benefits of belonging to a religion is it provides you with this path and answers what happens to you after you die. I don’t believe any creature other than a human has come up with this key concept of religion. Prove me wrong.
If I’m reading you correctly, I don’t think you could be more wronger. In my experience, people consistently over overrate the sentience and intelligence of animals. There is a reason we have the word anthropomorphism. People love to attribute human like properties to all kinds of animals, way beyond pets.
You are not reading me correctly. There is a vast difference between misattributing human traits to animals, and truly seeing animals as they are. Thinking they are ‘just dumb brutes’ is simply the reverse of anthropomorphism – both are all about human beings.
Seeing animals as they are is one of the main things I have done with my life.
However, you are correct in one thing, people are really stupid about animals, generally speaking.
Aside from whether that’s actually a key concept of religion: this is obviously unprovable. Whether we’ll ever be able to prove it one way or another I have no idea. But whether anybody other than humans believes in an afterlife has very little to do with whether other animals experience some aspects of what we call religion – which is also currently unprovable. We’re barely at the stage of being able to see what areas of the brain neurons light up in during similar circumstances, or what happens with hormone levels in various species when perceiving those they like as opposed to strangers.
I never claimed that other animals have exactly what we call religion – though there seems to be considerable disagreement about “exactly what we call religion”, even within this thread, with different people picking out different elements that they think of as essential to it. What I said on this originally was:
This isn’t even likely, much less a given.
Religion is a means humans use to answer some questions. Animals don’t ask those questions so they don’t need that answer.
You are free to believe that animals have something akin to religion, but my main point was that they don’t need to have religion and there is no evidence they have it. I don’t have to prove a negative. Humans, which are animals, also don’t need religion to survive. To say that “Religion clearly serves a very important psychological and social need for humans” is at best a gross generalization. As I said, there are countless humans who did and do just fine without any religion whatsoever, so it can’t be all that important. If you still believe religion is very important to the psychological and social needs of humans so be it. I can’t argue with your belief system…
If it’s not fulfilling any need for most humans, it seems to me very odd that so many human societies go in for it. I’m not sure if there are any known human societies that have no form of religion.
It’s obviously not important to the needs of a number of individual humans. But then, neither is sex, or raising children. Or ball games, which a very high percentage of human societies also seem to go in for; it seems to me clear that there’s something about humans and ball games, though whatever it is I haven’t got it. Doesn’t mean they don’t fill a need for those who do, though.
“I’m not sure if there are any known human societies that have no form of religion.”
Pirahã people in Brazil. They have no concept of the supernatural, and when a missionary tried to talk to them about Jesus, they lost interest quickly when they realized that he had never seen them. He left them having been converted away from Christianity.
“If it’s not fulfilling any need for most humans, it seems to me very odd that so many human societies go in for it.”
Why is it so odd to think that people would flock to something out of sheer ignorance or indoctrination versus fulfilling some biological need? Religion is just another form of tribalism. Joining a group because your family and friends all belong to the same group provides comfort and protection from rival groups.
2,000 years ago people didn’t understand lightning, why people got sick, or the fact that the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around. Maybe people flocked to anyone who could tell them how the earth was formed, why wicked people should be stoned to death, and where we go when we die? Religion provided answers even if they were completely made up answers. They believed them because there was no reason not to believe them. They didn’t know any better.
Many people like the idea of an invisible man in the sky who protects them, and that when they die they can live forever in paradise with their dead relatives even though there is no reason to believe such a man or place exists. It could just be a made-up story to get people to join and provide money. To then somehow think that feral animals, living their lives out in the wild, have something akin to human religion is complete nonsense.
From your own link:
Sounds supernatural to me.