It makes no sense what they do. They make one thing the focus of everything. They pass anything they're too tired to reason about through the eye of the needle of the book of the god.
In normal everyday Nature based life, this is a silly idea, because why would you waste all that time on something that doesn't even factor in to the very nature of things? What evolutionary (social or biological, what have you) channel would you benefit with considering that?
The short and dirty answer to what they have right is this: it gives as close to perfect social predictability as possible, which can vastly streamline inter-culture relations (due to human nature, this is most often destructive or exploitive to one party or another). Or maybe at worst, shut down the spark of tangent among the creators of the populace, keeping spontaneous eruptions of life's randomness from ever cropping up (it doesn't take much to topple the tower of babylon anyway).
The clean and complex answer has everything to do with top line thinking and how humans process information. I don't really know much or anything about cognitive science, but let me paint you a picture:
In the wild, humans are pattern-finders. We're better by far than any animal we've run across (insofar as we can understand, and considering all our close ancestors died out some time ago - hopefully we didn't kill them all) at finding patterns, and by our very nature, exploiting them as greatly as possible for our advantage. That's just what we do; what life does.
The wild animals that learned to find patterns in relation to one constant thing, all together as a society, other than gaining all the usual advantages that comes with religion (unity, zealotry, coping mechanisms, etc.), also gained the tendency to see patterns in a different way than all their wild neighbors.
To observe something is an act of communication with oneself, and we could think of that thing we're observing in any way - that is, in relation to anything else in our memory we have experience with. Hence we find patterns relating that which we know, to that which we don't; that which we see as a pattern already, and that which hasn't been integrated into our existing patterns to inform us of the future - that which we predict based on patterns.
To the wild ones, there is no way of predicting how the intellect will poise a new thing to be compared and contrasted. On individual scales, this gives feral humans (like me...well, not) the advantage of not having any particular blind spots; nothing they wouldn't have noticed or figured out had they been thinking like a religious person. On mass scales, the religious person, though here I'm going to start using the term 'spiritual person' as I transition into my point, the spiritual person makes better informed societal decisions based on their slightly (or largely in some cases) telescoped cognitive dimension. They don't just go with their crowd - we all do that. They also take small things to be big things and big things to be small things, and obvious things to be complex things and complex things to be obvious things, and so on down the line. If the brain were a three dimensional map (say, for simplicities sake), then this tendency to see things on the scale of spirituality is a point attractor for the many iterations of what the minds map would look like; a place of concentration over time where the architecture of thoughts begins to dance in a new twirling direction.
As a digression, I will say that my motivation for thinking of all this is that the world is supposedly (big if, to me) chock full of religious people, while religions make little sense to me, seeming full of bad and only lined with good intentions, even less good outcomes. Also, an argument in favor of religion I heard from my mom once when I was young, that religion tamed the most barbarous nature of much of humanity - not eating each other, that killing was wrong, instilling common moral values. There is some small validity to that, but I don't believe that before religion came, that humans couldn't help but act like crazed violent people all the time.
Oh and I just figured out while my mind was wandering, that the real reason I quit debating at UAA was because the people I was surrounded by, with a few exceptions, were bad listeners due to their NEED to talk; I'm sure they'd say, 'gasp!' but it's the truth. Their idea of what listening means is very very far removed from what a mute's idea of listening is....
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
So brains find patterns and holding something like 'the bible' or 'god' up in a vector in your brain on a mass scale (just as I suppose holding up 'social norms' or 'new and old customs' does) makes decision making marginally better in a smooth predictable society and in a smooth and predictable way. One of the biggest things I learned in Psychology is that people are cognitive misers...we only think about what we HAVE to think about and we put up as big a shortcut as possible for the rest. So to me, the more dogmatic and intractable you are, most likely, the more cognitive shortcuts you're taking. Good for you - you can still function on a lower calorie diet, or can still think even if you're exhausted from activity. Meanwhile, the rest of us who think as much as possible about every little decision and agonize over the many many perspectives any idea can be juxtaposed with, we have a more faltering way of getting along in the world, but it makes much much much more sense considering how much flexibility we have to adapt to a more and more rapidly changing environment.
In addition, religious people have this knack of all predictably reacting to a new thing in the same way - take politics and headline news for example. Who knows which way the free-thinkers are going to take some foreign policy debacle - depends all upon the particulars of the case to the reasonable people. Yet, politics, like all things, requires this notion of continuity and unbroken predictability to really thrive - I think this is something that Karl Rove figured out because Rush Limbaugh kept shouting it in his ear every day. So as I'm writing things, trying to form a rhetorical foundation for the PKParty, I'm keeping in mind that the left needs something so so similar to what the far right has, but our Anarchists and Socialists just can't keep up with their Gun Nuts and King James Bible Thumpers (notice even the difference in the nomenclature of the two sides - I guess I could have said punks and hippies instead of Anarchists and Socialists, even then though - we're just a party of softies because we don't have that cognitive fall back position to avoid acting reasonable and aggressive like they do - not that we want to be just like them, I get it, but we DO have to figure out how to have all their advantages without all their disadvantages, for so is the nature of competition, and thus we will win the day with our reasonable moral philosophy against their all powerful dogma lock-in-step-yness). The biggest thing that pops out of me, and that goes right back to this notion of top line thinking and how human processing works, is that the left has to become much more socially cohesive. To avoid their disadvantages, we would want a system of cohesion that comes very naturally. Long long ago the thing that came most naturally and that worked for religion was for everybody to gather in a building and listen to a leader-person. Today, thousands of years later, I say the church is out-moded by the internet. The online grange would be a better analogy, and I'm going to be looking to granges (something I was lucky enough to experience a traditional version of while my mother's parents were alive) for inspiration as to how political-internet-church would run. A potluck of ideas it would be. (potlach is actually a native Alaskan term, but don't get me started on how our culture has to paradigm shift in its thinking toward native american philosophy...)
To be more socially cohesive then, we have to utilize top line thinking like they do. It's a silly phrase, What would Jesus do? Nobody knows more than a book or so about Jesus anyway, and no other robust sources exist for his existence. Yet, to the Christians, they avoid the pattern following pitfalls in a way, because they all reason through story and analogy - all the same stories and analogies too - so that they all roughly come to the same conclusions about things (not to mention what a gift this is to a rhetorician who wants to persuade a group of god-folk, a new pitfall for us to avoid in our quest to be kind of more like them). When we top line think, we don't fall into channels of lower and lower abstraction - we see a car commercial and we instantly imagine we're on the road - versus seeing a car commercial and thinking, what would Obama do? The way that we are free and free-thinking is also the way that we have a hard time all climbing into one small efficient tent. On any given issue, half of us will go one way, and half of us will go another, and this happens regardless of the truth or the circumstances or the outcomes. Evolution tells us that this fact means the religious people will tend to win in the long run (like a professional poker player who knows where one card is in every deck, versus the same professional poker player who doesn't know that one card each time - the former will eventually outperform the latter in winnings. Yeah, I too was thinking 'good thing we don't have a winner take all system' except that we kind of do in certain ways, but don't get me started on instant run-off voting).
Where reason is needed is here, and the time is now to bring reason back into fashion.
The alternative is the scary things I see on the web, and here in Alaska, often on the back of peoples' trucks, or worse: things like video that looks like a movie preview to a new horror movie starring all the leaders of the democrats (note that I didn't say all the PROGRESSIVE leaders) in scary still-photos with scary music and flashes of words, like SOCIALISM and NOT OUR REVOLUTION and OBAMACARE; the alternative to reason is that the loudest scariest TV commercial may well win the day.
The answer is in the schools, but also in a simple migration that has been easily achieved by places like myspace, facebook, netflix, and even Breast Cancer Awareness posts on facebook - just to name a few. Even the Obama campaign could be seen as a frontrunner, with their emphasis on community organizing web tools.
Coming up Next Post: THE SCHOOLS, what I'd do about them, and how I'm glad nobody pulled a gun in Public Speaking class today...
So, to recap: biology and evolution make for interesting things in brains and social matters with humans. Humans are cognitive misers and the more dogmatic and intractable you are, the more sugar your brain is tragically not burning. Yet, though religion is more dogmatic and intractable than anything else by far, it does have certain advantages, making spirituality a logical cause for reasonable people to support.
Interesting question: Is it possible to predict how thoughtful someone is in a meaningful way, by doing a PET scan or some other scan to determine how much energy their brain is using compared to the other organs in their body/parts of their nervous system?
