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Warren Stupidity

(48,181 posts)
Fri Aug 28, 2015, 07:16 PM Aug 2015

Feature: Why big societies need big gods


An ancient Egyptian spent her whole life preparing for the moment when her heart would be weighed. After death, she was escorted before a divine scale. In one pan rested an ostrich feather belonging to Maat, the goddess of social order. The other pan held her heart. The deceased had been buried with a list of her virtues: “I have not uttered lies.” “I have not slain men and women.” “I have not stopped the flow of water [of the Nile.]” Any sins would weigh down her heart. When the scale settled, her fate would be clear: If her heart weighed no more than Maat’s feather, she was escorted to paradise. If her heart was too heavy, the crocodile demon Amemet reared up and devoured it, obliterating her soul.

Although much of Egyptian cosmology is alien today, some is strikingly familiar: The gods of today’s major religions are also moralizing gods, who encourage virtue and punish selfish and cruel people after death. But for most of human history, moralizing gods have been the exception. If today’s hunter-gatherers are any guide, for thousands of years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly indifferent to the human realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly.

To crack the mystery of why and how people around the world came to believe in moralizing gods, researchers are using a novel tool in religious studies: the scientific method. By combining laboratory experiments, cross-cultural fieldwork, and analysis of the historical record, an interdisciplinary team has put forward a hypothesis that has the small community of researchers who study the evolution of religion abuzz. A culture like ancient Egypt didn’t just stumble on the idea of moralizing gods, says psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, who synthesized the new idea in his 2013 book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Instead, belief in those judgmental deities, or “big gods,” was key to the cooperation needed to build and sustain Egyptians’ large, complex society.


http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/08/feature-why-big-societies-need-big-gods
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Warren Stupidity

(48,181 posts)
2. it is an interesting article. The theory has problems of course, but looking at religion
Fri Aug 28, 2015, 07:56 PM
Aug 2015

this way is interesting.

TygrBright

(20,733 posts)
3. It is interesting, indeed.
Fri Aug 28, 2015, 08:02 PM
Aug 2015

The meat and potatoes are that the model works to promote prosocial and cooperative behaviors, but ONLY among the orthodox believers.

Once you bring even larger social structures that permit religious diversity into the model, its functionality collapses, and even becomes a liability rather than an asset.

The exception may be the 'karmic' belief systems, depending on how they define the workings of karma and whether/how they relate to 'believer' status.

We *are* evolving new ethical and faith models for the purpose of enabling survival in more complex/diverse social structures, but at the rate we're killing our planet, we might not get there in time.

resignedly,
Bright

Silent3

(15,020 posts)
4. In the modern world, however, in developed countries...
Fri Aug 28, 2015, 10:09 PM
Aug 2015

...there seems to be a threshold a society can pass where there's abundant commerce, low crime, access to plenty of energy, a solid economic safety net, and yet there's less religion than other societies. We apparently can, at least outside the US, now create social cohesion without moralizing gods hanging over our heads and looking over our shoulders.

 

Warren Stupidity

(48,181 posts)
5. I don't think the proponents of this theory would disagree.
Sat Aug 29, 2015, 10:43 AM
Aug 2015

They are trying to explain why big societies and big moralistic god religions co-developed. The theory has some problems - like for example the roman empire, and the claims about the Egyptian religion seem weak, but it is an interesting theory.

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