I don't want this to feel like I'm arguing with you, because you make good points. But I just don't believe that calling indoctrination the primary driver is correct.
Think of it this way: why would religion come into being in the first place? If our brains weren't innately wired for spiritualistic thinking, why would religion even exist?
I thought I'd laid out several reasons why. Not to mention exactly how our brains could be "innately wired."
Why would our pre-historic ancestors confabulate a bunch of creation stories, and force others to believe them for no reason?
Again, see the parts you snipped.
Just doesn't add up, and that's because these stories serve a psychological purpose for people.
The "purpose" you're talking about, however, is "an answer to my difficult question." Again, just think in terms of a parent/child relationship where the kid is constantly repeating "why" to everything the adult says until the adult is backed into a corner and has no more answers to give. What is that ultimate state? "Because I said so." Authoritative decree, iow. And what usually precedes that point? The adult getting farther and farther away from his or her actual knowledge base and more and more abstract and "mystical."
This is all to say that religion / religious followers are in a symbiotic relationship.
Agreed, but you seem to be arguing for a chicken/egg relationship where the egg has no origin; it's just genetically encoded. But in this case, we're not talking about genetics; we're talking about memes, basically. And while we may have a biological (or, perhaps better, neurological) "propensity" for memetic thought, that doesn't mean that the
content of the memes is necessarily the driver.
Iow, we want answers to questions for which most people don't have, so we make shit up that kind of sort of shuts up the kid asking the questions, at least for that session, if you will. But the adult knows the child may be placated for the moment, but shortly the whole "why? why? why?" OCD onslaught is going to start up again and if that adult doesn't have better and better answers, well, you see the dynamic I'm describing.
So, yes, symbiotic, but more in the sense of an ignorance based feedback loop that ultimately always stops at ignorance (and by that I mean in the strictest sense). We simply don't know the answer to the incessant question, so we make up magical beings as the explanation.
And because the question appears to have an answer, the child shuts up. Is that an innate thing? Is that something inheritable? Well, yes, in the sense that we seek answers and get perhaps too easily placated when the answers come from those we trust the most, which for every single child to have been born (well, most anyway), those first placaters are our parents. And then there are the secondary placaters and the tertiary placeters, etc., and when nearly every single person you meet during your formative years in particular ALL reinforce the same mystical thinking, then it sticks.
But for some of us, the exceptions that prove the rule, it doesn't and for US--the atheists--is is precisely the refusal to be placated and to keep asking deeper and deeper questions of "why" that typically leads us to our own deprogramming. But are we immune to the magical ponies answers? Clearly not as the recent unpleasantness with Sanders proves and just about every election underscores, when a candidate promises "hope" and polices that they know--and even confess outright--they can't possibly ever implement and yet people vote for those people anyway. They call it "voting their conscience" but it's
really voting for a messiah/savior/deus ex machina.
Is that innately triggered or simply deeply ingrained. You seem to be arguing for the innate over the ingrained, whereas I see it as a propensity to want answers and a laziness on the part of the people we naturualy first ask questions of to provide the proper responses.
Not necessarily out of malicious intent. Obviously the whole nonsense of life after death comes from a nearly impossible heartbreak to tell a child that they will in fact die and everyone they know and love will die and so we make shit up to placate them.
So is the need to be placated innate? I don't really know how to even frame that question in a way that would or could be meaningfully addressed. Sure. We want answers to our questions and we will accept even the most outlandish ones so long as they told to us by trusted individuals in our lives.
Especially during formative years.
Think of it another way: why would religions evolve in such a way that they resolve our cognitive dissonance, and not just straight up tell us that we're going to die eternally? It's because people want to believe the lie, and if religions were focused on truth people would just leave them. Which actually has been the case as religions that do a bad job of resolving our dissonance have faded.
Well, then, again, I think we're saying the same thing, just with slightly different terminology.
