After reading this account by someone who attended a so-called "mega-church," I was struck by the many parallels between the methods used by that church and the methods used by Hitler. Slick propaganda, belittling and scapegoating of outsiders, blending religion with nationalism, using fear to manipulate emotions, praising self-interest, etc.,…
Why do people engage in religious rituals?
In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions. Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals. In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.
Many believers would answer this question by introspecting. Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.” [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!]. Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things. Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.
For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.] They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings. The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness). Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical. This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud recognized the many benefits of civilization, including beauty, cleanliness, order and the regulation of social relationships. For Freud, however, nothing better characterized civilization than "its esteem and encouragement of man's higher mental activities-his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements-and the leading role that assigns…
For centuries, established religions have asserted that science should be viewed through the lens of religion. Over the past few years, scientifically-oriented writers have turned that view on its head. They have asserted that it is more appropriate to view religious practices through the lens of science.
The recent flurry of books includes the following:
Though I own each of these books, I have completely read only half of them; I’m partly through the others. They are a priority on my reading list given the high stakes of failing to understand religious practices (religious tensions and wars everywhere one cares to look).
For anyone just getting started in this area, I recommend Dennett’s 2006 work, Breaking the Spell. This book is classic Dennett: eloquent, heartfelt and clear. He works extra hard so that he is not only preaching to the choir. He spends the first one-hundred pages working to convince Believers to give him a chance. It’s quite an extraordinary opening gambit.
Most of the above books concern …
Let's do a thought experiment. Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang some bananas by a string from the ceiling and place a ladder underneath it. Before long, one of the monkeys will go to the ladder and try to climb towards the bananas. As soon as…