Lobsang, here are some different arguments that I’ve given in the past:
As a young kid I figured out a truism about people which is that you can convince yourself of anything. I told myself every day that “Pain exists to let your brain know that something is damaged. Once you’ve recognized the signal, there’s no more point in feeling pain.” And over time I was able to ignore pain whenever I wanted to. (Handy when you don’t have an aspirin.)
Another thing I figured out I call “The pschology of control.” The premise of this is that the thing people most care about is being able to control themselves. This makes sense since, controlling yourself is the only thing in the world you have any control over, and even here it’s not 100%. But the thing is, when people experience something that they can’t control, they will react wierdly to it, particularly if it’s something to do with their own body, and particularly if they are very young. This is why molestation of children really messes with their minds, is because the pleasurable feelings aren’t something that the child can control, while as the “I don’t want to be doing this”, logical part of their brain is forced to shush. It won’t necesarily mess up the child, but the odds are higher.
Now a third item to present is evolution. Evolution works to create a physical set of capabilites, and a socialogical set of impulses, desires, and fears that are ingrained into our bodies because these have been found to work successfully in perpetuating the species. These are largely independent of rational thought.
And a fourth item, as shown in the threads about the Stanford Prison Experiment, is that humans are liable to turn off their brains and accept what the alpha wolf says.
Now tying this all together:
God is (or gods are) was the creation of storytellers to raise children with so that they could learn about the history of their people, learn respect for their people, and go out and die for their people. The god stories taught you to be brave or meek, humble or proud, as the storyteller or as society thought was needed. In a land before scientific experiment and empirical evidence, though, these stories became legends, and eventually fact. The parents would tell their children that “Our people are descended from the God Uktamata, who brought the sun to the sky and made this land for us” so that the children felt safe in the world, and proud. And the parents let it rest at that because there was no need to say anything different because it made them feel good to say it.
Now the reason that the child likes to hear such things, and parents to tell such is because when kids are with their parents and when parents are spending time teaching their children, mother nature is happy. This is an approved human attribute that has been introduced by evolution to perpetuate the species. Humans care for their young. They don’t let the eggs hatch and fend for themselves.
Evolution enforces this behavior through chemicals in your brain which make you feel good. This is something that you have no control over. Just suddenly you feel good.
When you take care of your children, find a wife, fend for your family, grow food, look at green growing places and wide blue skies, fight for the the pack, we recognize these as being good things, and our brain gets drugged with endorphins. We experience a “high.”
And since we know that these things are now “good” things, we teach our children this, in the form of stories. “Uktamata took a wife. She bore his children. The gods gave gifts to the child, and swore to serve him. And the child would grow up to become the strongest fighter, the farest seeer, and he would lead the gods honestly, solving their struggles with the demons, or among themselves. And he protects us, for we are his children as well, and we give him gifts.” And how do you know that he protects you? You know it because when you do anything that the “gods” approve of, we get a good feeling that we can’t explain and that we don’t control. Certainly that is the gods?
Now it also happens that as people come to believe in these gods that the leaders of the people become enslaved to the gods. If keeping the gods pleased is required to make sure that the gods protect us, then the government must make sure this happens. And surely the gods chose Lokatil as the chieftan of the people because he was the fiercest fighter, and had the levelest head. And as the collecter of the tales of the gods, shaman Okraty should always be consulted to make sure that we are doing what the gods really want.
So suddenly Lokatil and Okraty are empowered by the existence of the gods. And surely what they think is right, is what the gods think is right, since they were the ones chosen to know about and appease the gods.
So as time goes on, the choices of Lokatil and Okraty become the law of the gods, the people teach it to their young children as fact, the children feel a high which enforces what their (always honest) parents tell them, and convince themselves that this is true. And when the gods need them to die for the people, they know it is true, for they have felt it, and learned it, and now convinced themselves that it is true.
So that’s my definition of what the gods are. People combining stories with a rationalization for what’s happening when endorphins are released into your brain, and reinforced through the generations because as a society, it was useful and felt “right.”
As an all-powerful being, God could simply snap his fingers and make me believe in him. Of course, an advanced species of aliens could just as easily turn on their telepathy inductance device and make me believe that they are gods. In a sense, by sheer virtue of me being a rather flimsy electro-chemical reaction under self locomotion, any proof of something like that is not trustworthy. Humans are incapable of a reliable belief in deities due to our limitations in comparison to that which is being posited.
People who are religious are primarily so because their parents taught them to be. I think you will find that vastly overwhelmingly, any select region generally holds the same religion, and isn’t a hodge-podge, buffet-style conglomeration where every other person “chose” a religion that was right for him. So either:
- People are lazy and go with whatever those about them believe
- People predominantly go with what their parents taught them
- Certain gods have more influence over select areas, thus leading people in those areas to believe in that specific god, rather than some other.
Now certainly #1 is fairly believable, and probably a strong force. But given as, for instance, the children of Jews are generally of the Jewishfaith , the children of Muslims generally subscribe to Islam, and so on–and that minorities quite often stay with their own religion rather than switching to the religion of the majority–I have to suspect that #2 is probably the deciding factor. Yes that will vary depending on time and place, but meh, close enough for anything worth debating.
#3 we shall just ignore.
If you can think of some #4 possibility, I would gladly listen to it, but otherwise we’re not accomplishing much.
(It should be noted that 92% of people share the same belief as their parents–including atheism.)