ACT I
Scene 1
Are you on my side?
Am I on your side?
If we want to be on the same side but we don’t know each other, what should we do?
Do we believe in the same things?
Can we trust each other?
People of different religions have been looking for ways to see themselves as part of the same story for a long time. Archeology and evolutionary psychology make that a lot simpler. This is a story that leads from the Big Bang to star dust to sunlight shining on muddy water to chimpanzees climbing in trees and living in groups to people making
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in.
To some religious people this will seem like a strange way to talk about religion.
That’s because this isn’t mainly a story about any one religion. This is a story about all the religions at the same time.
Scene 2
How can we say when religion began?
Think about religions today. What do religions have that you don’t see anywhere else?
There’s churches or other religious buildings. There’s religious leaders and religious symbols. There’s religious books and religious music and religious holidays. There’s also things that people do outside of religion now, but that started as parts of religions. Things like weddings and funerals.
So what are the oldest clues archeologists have found of people doing one of those things? That’s when we can say religion began.
That leads us back to the intelligence revolution from 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. That was the origin of behaviorally modern humans. That’s when our ancestors started creating much more complicated things than they’d ever made before. Like multi-piece tools, sewn clothing, musical instruments, and jewelry.
That’s also when they also started burying some of that stuff in graves with dead people. From zoology we know two things about how they thought that are true for all animal species. They were making
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in,
and most of their mental activity was subconscious.
All of these roughly simultaneous inventions along with their new burial practices show they’d evolved a new level of abstract thinking. From all of the clues that have been found, what can we tell about what they were thinking?
The tools, clothes, blankets, jewelry, musical instruments, and such that they were burying with their dead are valuable in life, and they take time and effort to create. If they bury things that are valuable to living people with dead people, it means one way or another they were thinking of them being alive. More specifically, in some important sense, they still felt they were alive.
Scene 3
People still have that feeling. Today that’s a clue the police use to help catch people who murder their family members.
When someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly, how long does it take for their mother to come to terms with the fact that they’re dead? Weeks? Months?
If a mother calls 911 and tells the operator that she found her child dead a couple minutes ago, what does that tell the police?
It means she’s had time to process their death. That means she’s been thinking about it for weeks or months. That’s a big clue that this is a premeditated murder that she committed. Now she’s calling 911 to try to throw off suspicion from herself.
When the police find a dead body that’s been arranged to look like it’s resting peacefully, what does that tell them?
It means the person who arranged them that way doesn’t want to believe they’re dead. That means the person regrets their death so much that they cared more about laying them to rest than they cared about fleeing the scene of a murder.
Usually that means the person who disposed of the body was a family member or close friend of the victim.
Scene 4
What that tells us about people 80,000 years ago is that the fact that a person was dead wasn’t enough to overcome the feelings of the people closest to them that they were supposed to be alive.
The people accepted that the person was dead enough to dig a grave and lay them in it. But before they filled in the grave, making
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situation
they were in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they cared about
meant giving the person things they would need if they were alive, as if they were asleep and were going to wake up, or as if they were going on a journey they would never return from.
That started with a feeling when individual people did it. Then it turned into a story when they tried to explain the feeling to other people. It also turned into visual art somewhere in the process, because the last time they saw their dead friend or family member they were surrounded by things they could use when they were alive.
Creating art means intentionally changing how something looks in order to change how people feel about it. Now everyone’s last memory of seeing the dead person helped tell the story that they were still alive somewhere.
The step from that to religion is pretty clear now. In a group of 150 people with an average lifespan of 30, an average of five people would die every year. When people started telling stories about dead people still being alive somewhere, it was easy to keep telling the same story every time.
ACT II
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Now let’s look at how the five traits of human mental activity fit into that.
Our instincts for survival and reproduction are our two most powerful feelings. We remember, imagine, and communicate to decide what to do about those feelings.
Self awareness is the ability to think about our lives and plan ahead. We learn about the world by remembering and communicating, and we think ahead by imagining.
At some point our ancestors got so good at those things they realized that everyone they knew, and everyone they’d heard about, died eventually. But our survival instincts make us do everything we can to stay alive. Our reproductive instincts make us do almost anything we can, or maybe even sacrifice our lives, to keep our family members alive.
What are we supposed to do about our instincts when we realize that no matter what we do we’re going to die eventually and so is our whole family? That would make everyone spend their whole lives fearing death, and nobody wants that. So what’s a better solution?
For some people a story about how their friends and relatives sleep forever under the dirt would be good enough to make them feel like they were still with them in a sense. But many people want to add more to that story.
Every religion today has stories that help people think bigger than death in some way or other. Many have stories about an afterlife. Others have stories about how life and death make us part of something much bigger than ourselves.
Scene 2
Every religion has five other things in common. Almost all of them have a sixth.
The first four are other questions about life that our abstract thinking leads to. The other two are ways to tie ideas together into stories.
Around the time people got smart enough to be self aware they would’ve started asking big questions about the rest of the world too. And like people do today, they would’ve used what they knew about the world to try to answer them.
Scene 3
The first is a creation story.
Wonder is part of imagination. Imagining anything starts with asking, “Why?” and, “What if?”
Second, every religion has stories about how the world works.
Many of the ideas in those stories are completely imaginary. But many others are based on some grain of truth. Others are real observations that are wrapped up in stories to make them memorable, which older people use to pass down valuable information to younger generations.
That’s why there are so many stories from thousands of years ago about the changing of the seasons. When it starts getting cold, it always gets warmer again a few months later.
If you live on the same river your ancestors have lived on for 10,000 years, which some Americans do, and every year fish from the ocean swim up your river to mate, and then swim back out into the ocean, your religious stories about what the fish do out in the ocean where your ancestors never saw them could be completely made up, while your stories about what they do while they’re in the river essentially could be a biology textbook.
Anthropologists call stories like those folk science. It means the information in the story is real, even though it doesn’t frame it in terms of science.
Scene 4
Third is morality.
Every society has rules that restrict some kinds of behavior. All over the world people have discovered that societies function better when people don’t act impulsively on every feeling they have. Morality is the foundation for coexisting.
Being part of a group is always a trade off. If you don’t have any responsibilities to anyone else, you can do anything you want, any time you want. But you don’t have anyone there to help you with anything either. When you join a group you trade some of your independence for interdependence.
Long term cooperation depends on trust. Stories that give us a shared moral framework give us a foundation for trusting each other. Trust is the foundation of any functional society.
Scene 5
Fourth is purpose.
A purpose framework is a framework for cooperation. You might call that a mission statement.
Life is often hard. Stories about purpose give us a sense of what we’re working toward when we feel like we’re making sacrifices that we don’t see any reason for. They also give us a sense of direction when we need to figure out what to do. A shared feeling of what we should do helps us work together to deal with unexpected situations.
The Star Spangled Banner is a song about purpose. It’s a song about a flag, and about a battle between the US Army and enemies of our government. In the end, the people who who fighting for our flag won.
Every movie where a hero makes a decision to do something that’s dangerous but important is a story about purpose, because it’s a story about why and how the hero made that decision.
Morality and purpose combined give us a much stronger framework for working together. Morality is the stick. Purpose is the carrot.
ACT III
Scene 1
Fifth, every religion uses symbols and rituals.
Symbols are images that people know represent ideas. In America, red octagons mean stop. The fact that I don’t have to explain it any better than that shows you how well we know that symbol.
A ritual is a symbolic event. A ritual is a symbol that people participate in, where they combine symbols into a bigger symbol.
How many things do people make symbols with? Paintings, sculptures, clothes, and jewelry are some obvious ones. Music, singing, dancing, public speaking, and architecture are some others.
Religions start with stories about important ideas, and then symbols remind people of the stories. People have feelings about the ideas, and the symbols evoke those feelings.
Rituals tell the stories more powerfully than they can be told with words alone. That’s the difference between going to a wedding and someone telling you that two people are married.
A ritual is a sensory experience. The symbols in the ritual connect to ideas you know from stories, and that makes you feel that those ideas are happening.
Scene 2
A wedding is a ritual about purpose and morality. Marriage is an idea that two people will cooperate in a type of relationship they won’t have with anyone else.
Think of all the things you see and hear at a wedding that you never see or hear any other time. The bride and groom… or bride and bride, or groom and groom, or bride and groom and groom, or whoever it is… go to the wedding unmarried and leave married.
The bride and groom put on what might be the fanciest and most expensive clothes they’ll ever wear, they go to a building that was built specifically for religious purposes, they walk into a big and very highly decorated room full of many of their family and friends who are probably also wearing some of their best clothes, they walk to the most decorated end of the room accompanied by music that people rarely or never hear outside of weddings, they stand up there with someone who they and other people recognize as a religious leader because he or she is very good at telling religious stories, the three of them say words in front of everyone that people never say outside of weddings, and then the bride and groom exchange jewelry that they both plan to wear for the rest of their lives and that everyone will recognize as a symbol that they’re married.
A religious ritual is a performance art that uses a lot of visual art, and all of those symbols connect to the religious stories about what makes the world function. That makes everyone there feel that the couple has been joined in a lifelong bond by the force that makes everything else in the world function, and now the idea that they’re married is as real as gravity.
Scene 3
Weddings are one of the rituals we all know about.
Funerals are the other. That’s the one where we lay people to rest, or send them on their final journeys.
There are also rituals for initiating new members to the religion, like baptisms.
There are rituals for newborns, which baptisms are also used for.
There are coming of age rituals, like ba’mitzvahs.
There are rituals for holidays, like Christmas and Easter.
There are rituals for annual events like the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes.
Many religions use rituals to begin important events, like hunting, harvests, and wars.
Pow-wows started as rituals for people from neighboring villages meeting to trade and feast and make friends with each other.
Scene 4
Religions also use rituals to tell their stories. Now people also use movies for that.
The Passion of the Christ is a movie where actors act out the parts in a story that many people already know, because it’s one of the most central parts of its religion. There weren’t any unexpected plot twists in the movie, or a surprise ending. People loved the movie because it made the story they all knew feel more real.
ACT IV
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There’s one more thing that almost all religions have in common.
They use metaphors that compare their main ideas to the decisions of intelligent beings. They use a deity or a pantheon of deities to tie together their stories about the origin of the world, how it functions, life, death, morality, and purpose.
The world is very complicated. Human behavior is also very complicated. Our brains evolved in large part to figure out how people think and feel.
That makes it easy for us to overgeneralize and feel that an intelligence is at work in any complicated process. That’s why it’s easy for people today to think of their cars and computers as entities, and talk to them as if they can hear us, even though they aren’t even alive. That’s why it feels like it makes sense to ask how genes know how to evolve, and ask how plants know how to grow toward the sun and the water, even though we’re talking about things that don’t have brains.
Scene 2
Since everyone has these instincts for interpreting human behavior, that makes stories about people, their personalities, and their decisions, the easiest to get people to visualize and remember. That makes it easy for people to think about the world in terms of a personality, and to use a personality as a unifying theme among their stories of the world.
Here’s the one we’ve all heard. The world began by the decision of an extremely powerful person. It works by the decisions of that extremely powerful person. People are judged for doing the right or wrong things by that extremely powerful person.And what happens to them after they die depends on how they’re judged. People all over the world tell stories like that.
Scene 3
Why do so many things happen that seem to conflict with each other? Why is the world so unpredictable to us?
Is the whole world controlled by one god with a personality we can never completely understand? Or is the world controlled by multiple gods with conflicting personalities?
Is there a god of the sky and a god of the ocean and a god of the underworld where dead people are buried, and a god of the sun and a god of the moon and a god of love and a god of war and a god of invention and a god of homes and a god of farming and a god of wisdom and a god of communication and a god of celebration In a Gadda Da Vida…
Are all the gods equally powerful, or is there a hierarchy among them?
Did some gods create other gods?
Are there other beings we can’t see that are less powerful than gods that also make decisions?
Are all the gods people, or are some of them animals, or are some of them part human and part animal?
Are some of them other things?
ACT V
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A good book about this part of the story is Why God Won’t Go Away, by Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili. They’re both doctors of neurology.
The crime psychology part comes from any of a number of books by John Douglas, a former FBI agent who helped to pioneer the field of forensic psychology.
Scene 2
Every religion in the world is a reasonable answer to the same set of questions people asked thousands of years ago.
The problem that religion leads to is that the factual understanding of the world that we’ve built up over the centuries conflicts with many of the answers to those five questions that people found, based on the information they had to work with, thousands of years ago.
Any religious story can be convincing to people with the right level of factual understanding of the world. That’s why effective education in the 21st century is a threat to religious fundamentalism. The more people learn about the world, the less sense their religious stories make.
There are also religious people who don’t use their religions to try to limit what other people learn, but simply to fill in the parts of the story of the world they don’t know how to tell with facts. Almost all religious people accept facts eventually, given enough time and convincing reasons.
Everyone today who believes the Earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun revolving around the Earth believes in Galileo’s discovery that Pope Urban VIII excommunicated him from the Catholic Church for in 1633. But it took a lot of time and convincing reasons for leaders of the Catholic Church to change their minds about that fact. Galileo’s excommunication was only reversed by Pope John Paul II in 1992.
This is the 21st century, and climate change is upon us. We don’t have 359 years to solve the problem. So the more we learn about why people believe the things they believe, and how we fit ideas together into stories of the world, the better off we are.
