Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
I wish I knew how we came to be hard-wired for religion, because there has to be some hard-wiring involved, otherwise religious or magical beliefs wouldn't be so universal.
|
Trascendency, religion, magical beliefs are certainly linked but are quite different things.
Formal religions, with priests, temples, liturgies and the like often resulted in structures of power. The God of the Bible warns about this: "the altar will not be morally ruined by tools". Meaning, keep it as simple as possible. The citation is sloppy on purpose. Christ says to Peter You are stone and on this stone you will build my Church, both a quote of the ancient word of God and and exortation to keep it simple. The results were and are under the eyes of everyone.
Other forms are different. I have a personal experience that might be of interest. Since more than 40 years I am friend with a certified and full fledged American Indian shaman. He is a renown sculptor, and for a while was Minister of Culture of his Mexican Republic. He knows a number of things. He told me that the shaman function within the tribe was, is, to keep everybody sane of mind, with the highly stressful life they had to live, nature, enemies, an incredible amount of physical , emotional and spiritual violence in their ways.
These arguments are very well described in any handbook of Antropology.
For the "official" religions I use what is recognized as a standard introductory text. Huston Smith The World's Religions.1958. I have a pocket book by HarperCollins that I paid $16.95
For trascendency and magic beliefs and other similar subjects it is too complex a subject to synthesize it in few words in a post. Be enough to consider that of the earliest forms of civilizations (paeleolithic), what we know we learned from burials.