Sunday Sermon ~ The God Gene
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Convince a lot of people of something and you can get things done.
Convince a lot of gullible people that they should make more gullible people
and you’ve got a religious movement
The evolution of religion
A look at the origins of religion:
The Evolution of the God Gene
IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
...
Continue reading
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/12wade.html
For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods,
since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.
comedians comedy cd "comedy central" "jon stewart" beatles gay snl judaism "brian epstein" british torah beatles atheism "george carlin" paul mccartney atheist 60s beatles homosexual john lennon beatles george harrison beatles news TV ringo starr amazon.com
Convince a lot of people of something and you can get things done.
Convince a lot of gullible people that they should make more gullible people
and you’ve got a religious movement
The evolution of religion
A look at the origins of religion:
The Evolution of the God Gene
IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
...
Continue reading
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/12wade.html
For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods,
since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.
comedians comedy cd "comedy central" "jon stewart" beatles gay snl judaism "brian epstein" british torah beatles atheism "george carlin" paul mccartney atheist 60s beatles homosexual john lennon beatles george harrison beatles news TV ringo starr amazon.com