This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief - Salon.com

This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief - Salon.com:

Nice excerpt from the book "We Are Our Brains"

"There are around 10,000 different religions, each of which is convinced that there’s only one Truth and that they alone possess it. Hating people with a different faith seems to be part of belief. Around the year 1500, the church reformer Martin Luther described Jews as a “brood of vipers.” Over the centuries the Christian hatred of the Jews led to pogroms and ultimately made the Holocaust possible. In 1947, over a million people were slaughtered when British India was partitioned into India for the Hindus and Pakistan for the Muslims. Nor has interfaith hatred diminished since then. Since the year 2000, 43 percent of civil wars have been of a religious nature."
"In 1996 a poll of American scientists revealed that only 39 percent were believers, a much smaller percentage than the national average. Only 7 percent of the country’s top scientists (defined for this poll as the members of the National Academy of Sciences) professed a belief in God, while almost no Nobel laureates are religious. A mere 3 percent of the eminent scientists who are members of Britain’s Royal Society are religious. Moreover, meta-analysis has shown a correlation among atheism, education, and IQ. So there are striking differences within populations, and it’s clear that degree of atheism is linked to intelligence, education, academic achievement, and a positive interest in natural science. Scientists also differ per discipline: Biologists are less prone to believe in God and the hereafter than physicists. So it isn’t surprising that the vast majority (78 percent) of eminent evolutionary biologists polled called themselves materialists (meaning that they believe physical matter to be the only reality). Almost three quarters (72 percent) of them regarded religion as a social phenomenon that had evolved along with Homo sapiens. They saw it as part of evolution, rather than conflicting with it."
"The religious programming of a child’s brain starts after birth. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is rightly incensed when reference is made to “Christian, Muslim, or Jewish children,” because young children don’t have any kind of faith of their own; faith is imprinted in them at a very impressionable stage by their Christian, Muslim, or Jewish parents. Dawkins rightly points out that society wouldn’t tolerate the notion of atheist, humanist, or agnostic four-year-olds and that you shouldn’t teach children what to think but how to think. Dawkins sees programmed belief as a byproduct of evolution. Children accept warnings and instructions issued by their parents and other authorities instantly and without argument, which protects them from danger. As a result, young children are credulous and therefore easy to indoctrinate. This might explain the universal tendency to retain the parental faith. Copying, the foundation of social learning, is an extremely efficient mechanism. We even have a separate system of mirror neurons for it. In this way, religious ideas like the belief that there’s life after death, that if you die as a martyr you go to paradise and are given 72 virgins as a reward, that unbelievers should be persecuted, and that nothing is more important than belief in God are also passed on from generation to generation and imprinted in our brain circuitry. We all know from those around us how hard it is to shed ideas that have been instilled in early development."

"The Evolutionary Advantage of Religion
(1) First, religion binds groups. Religions use various mechanisms to keep the group together: 
One is the message that it’s sinful to marry an unbeliever.. This principle is common to all religions, with attendant punishments and warnings. Segregating education according to faith makes it easier to reject others, because ignorance breeds contempt. 
Another is the imposition of numerous social rules on the individual in the name of God, sometimes accompanied by dire threats about the fate of those who don’t keep them. One of the Ten Commandments, for instance, is lent force by the threat of a curse “unto the fourth generation.” Blasphemy is severely punished in the Old Testament and is still a capital offense in Pakistan. Threats have also helped to make churches rich and powerful. In the Middle Ages, enormous sums were paid in return for “indulgences,” shortening the time that someone would spend in purgatory. 
A further binding mechanism is being recognizable as a member of the group. This can take the form of distinguishing signs, like black clothing, a yarmulke, a cross, a headscarf, or a burka; or physical characteristics, like the circumcision of boys or girls; or knowledge of the holy scriptures, prayers, and rituals. You must be able to see who belongs to the group in order to obtain protection from fellow members. This mechanism is so strong that it seems senseless to try to ban people from wearing distinguishing accessories or items of clothing like headscarves...The feeling of group kinship has been strengthened over the centuries by holy relics worshiped by the various faiths. It doesn’t matter that there are wagonloads of Buddha’s ashes in temples in China and Japan, nor that so many splinters of the True Cross have been preserved that, according to Erasmus, you could build a fleet of ships from them. The point is that such things keep the group together. The same applies to the 20 or so churches that claim to have Christ’s original foreskin in their possession.
Finally, most religions have rules that promote reproduction. This can entail a ban on contraception. The faith is spread by having children and then indoctrinating them, making the group bigger and therefore stronger.

(2) Traditionally, the commandments and prohibitions imposed by religions had a number of advantages. 
   Besides the protection offered by the group, the social contacts and prescriptions (like kosher food) had some beneficial effects on health...However, the causality of these correlations hasn’t been demonstrated, and the links aren’t conclusive...An Israeli study showed that, in complete opposition to the researchers’ hypothesis, a religious lifestyle was associated with a doubled risk of dementia 35 years later. 

(3) Having a religious faith is a source of comfort and help at difficult times, whereas atheists have to solve their difficulties without divine aid. Believers can also console themselves that God must have had a purpose in afflicting them. In other words, they see their problems as a test or punishment, that is, as having some meaning. “Because people have a sense of purpose, they assume that God, too, acts according to purpose,” Spinoza said. ...So they viewed all calamities, like earthquakes, accidents, volcanic eruptions, epidemics, and floods, as a punishment by that same being. According to Spinoza, religion emerged as a desperate attempt to ward off God’s wrath.

(4) God has the answer to everything that we don’t know or understand, and belief makes you optimistic .. Faith also gives you the assurance that even if times are hard now, things will be much better in the next life. Curiously, adherents of religion always claim that it adds “meaning” to their life, as if it were impossible to lead a meaningful life without divine intervention.

(5) Another advantage of religion, it would seem, is that it takes away the fear of death — all religions promise life after death. The belief in an afterlife goes back 100,000 years. We know this from all the items found in graves: food, water, tools, hunting weapons, and toys. Cro-Magnon people also buried their dead with large amounts of jewelry, as is still done in Asia today. You need to look good in the next life, too. Yet being religious doesn’t invariably make people less afraid of dying. The moderately religious fear death more than fervent believers and those who are only very slightly religious, which is understandable when you see how often religion uses fear as a binding agent. Yet many appear to feel a little uncertain about the promised life after death. Richard Dawkins rightly wondered, “If they were truly sincere, shouldn’t they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him: ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.’ ”

(6) A very important element of religion has always been that it sanctions killing other groups in the name of one’s own god. The evolutionary advantage of the combination of aggression, a group distinguishable by its belief, and discrimination of others is clear. Over millions of years, humans have developed in an environment where there was just enough food for one’s own group. Any other group encountered in the savanna posed a mortal threat and had to be destroyed. These evolutionary traits of aggression and tribalism can’t be wiped out by a few generations of centrally heated life. That explains why xenophobia is still so widespread in our society. The whole world is full of conflicts between groups with different faiths. Since time immemorial the “peace of God” has been imposed on others by fire and sword. That’s unlikely to change soon."

   
“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
"“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” -- Seneca
“Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.” — George Bernard Shaw