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Norman Friend's avatar

Very interesting — as always. Not to disagree with anything you’ve said but I’d like to make mention of why the “clinical” explanation for our “souls” and (hence) lack of an afterlife, gods, etc are so “psychologically unsatisfying to many people.”

I think (I dare not say “I believe”) that this lack of satisfaction emanates from instincts rooted in our early human DNA. When the first pro-humans gained the first glimmers of insight about their natural environment and about themselves, they would have been confronted with a host of unanswerable questions. (This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”in which a sperm whale spontaneously manifests at some considerable altitude above the surface of a planet… and it has about 2 minutes to come to terms with its own existence before it becomes raspberry jam!)

It became very useful, and conferred considerable survival advantage for groups of pro-hominids to invoke gods as the causes of the many events and processes that occurred in and around their lives: these events of course included deaths of parents, siblings and offspring, pleasant weather, foul weather, abundance of food and water or lacks thereof.

Point being that groups of similarly minded individuals with a common belief system for things that were inexplicable would gradually learn to work together—greatly increasing their chances of survival.

Over millennia some members of “tribes” somehow acquired the skills to become priests: either because through some accident they were thought to be closer to the gods, or quite possibly, because they were crafty and self-interested and found ways to exert influence over other members of the tribe.

100,000 years or so later, these survival traits are still ingrained in our “souls”…. And leave us with delusions about gods and the afterlife. They are there for us to overcome, using common knowledge and rational thought. But not everyone can do this (or wants to).

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Chris Fagg's avatar

Terrific, as always. So reification, that’s the name of the game…

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