Emily Lake
Might be a replicant
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2014
- Messages
- 6,465
- Location
- It's a desert out there
- Gender
- Agenderist
- Basic Beliefs
- Atheist
There are two main reasons why religionists outnumber atheists. I'm just gonna go ahead and skip over the specificity of "christians" for this, because at the end of the day, the exact nature of the supernatural entity involved is pretty much irrelevant.
The first reason is psychological. Religion is an element of culture, and it's instilled pretty early in childhood. It goes into the same basket as a myriad of other unquestioned assumptions about how the word works, how people are expected to interact, and the roles we each play within our society. It's learned at a very young age. And unless something directly challenges or disrupts that assumption, it doesn't change. It's part of the underlying routine. We all have routines, we all do a lot less active decision making than we like to think. We use an assumption or a rule of thumb, and unless that fails in action, we just keep doing it over and over and over.
People change religions in times of stress. That can be personal stress or social. Sometimes it's a minor shift, like my MiL changing from a presbyterian to a lutheran church when my nephew came out as gay. The lutheran church she attended was not accepting of homosexuality, and for most of her life, neither was my MiL. Not through any actual dislike, but simply because that's what the assumption was, that's what she had learned, and she just kept rolling with it. To her, homosexuality was a sin. But my nephew wasn't a sinner, he's a good person, she loves him. Her view of her grandson couldn't be reconciled with the view of her church. So she changed her assumptions and also changed churches. Sometimes the changes are more dramatic, changing religions entirely rather than just sects.
A whole lot of the atheists out there grew up within a religion. And if you listen to their stories, there's frequently a stressor involved in them leaving their religions and rejection the existence of deities entirely. But it goes the other direction too - lots of people have no religion until a stressor arises, and they need an explanation, a reason that justifies the stressor, and they turn to religion.
This brings me to the second main reason, which is evolutionary. We evolved a very strong pattern finding tendency. Please note that I said "pattern finding" not "pattern recognition". This is important here, because we have a high probability of false positives. That's how we end up with faces on Mars.
Part of that pattern finding tendency is that our conscious mind is prompted to seek explanations for the patterns that our subconscious finds - even when those patterns are illusory. When our conscious mind cannot identify an explanation, we tend to experience anxiety. Often, that anxiety is minor, but not always, and it varies by person and by situation. That need for an explanation for a perceived pattern is at the root of mathematics and science... but it's also at the root of religion. As our understanding of the natural world grows, as our foundation of math and science expands, the role of religion is reduced. Even if it's not entirely eradicated, the role that religious entities play in our daily lives has dropped significantly as we've found non-illusory explanations for the patterns we see around us.
The first reason is psychological. Religion is an element of culture, and it's instilled pretty early in childhood. It goes into the same basket as a myriad of other unquestioned assumptions about how the word works, how people are expected to interact, and the roles we each play within our society. It's learned at a very young age. And unless something directly challenges or disrupts that assumption, it doesn't change. It's part of the underlying routine. We all have routines, we all do a lot less active decision making than we like to think. We use an assumption or a rule of thumb, and unless that fails in action, we just keep doing it over and over and over.
People change religions in times of stress. That can be personal stress or social. Sometimes it's a minor shift, like my MiL changing from a presbyterian to a lutheran church when my nephew came out as gay. The lutheran church she attended was not accepting of homosexuality, and for most of her life, neither was my MiL. Not through any actual dislike, but simply because that's what the assumption was, that's what she had learned, and she just kept rolling with it. To her, homosexuality was a sin. But my nephew wasn't a sinner, he's a good person, she loves him. Her view of her grandson couldn't be reconciled with the view of her church. So she changed her assumptions and also changed churches. Sometimes the changes are more dramatic, changing religions entirely rather than just sects.
A whole lot of the atheists out there grew up within a religion. And if you listen to their stories, there's frequently a stressor involved in them leaving their religions and rejection the existence of deities entirely. But it goes the other direction too - lots of people have no religion until a stressor arises, and they need an explanation, a reason that justifies the stressor, and they turn to religion.
This brings me to the second main reason, which is evolutionary. We evolved a very strong pattern finding tendency. Please note that I said "pattern finding" not "pattern recognition". This is important here, because we have a high probability of false positives. That's how we end up with faces on Mars.
Part of that pattern finding tendency is that our conscious mind is prompted to seek explanations for the patterns that our subconscious finds - even when those patterns are illusory. When our conscious mind cannot identify an explanation, we tend to experience anxiety. Often, that anxiety is minor, but not always, and it varies by person and by situation. That need for an explanation for a perceived pattern is at the root of mathematics and science... but it's also at the root of religion. As our understanding of the natural world grows, as our foundation of math and science expands, the role of religion is reduced. Even if it's not entirely eradicated, the role that religious entities play in our daily lives has dropped significantly as we've found non-illusory explanations for the patterns we see around us.