"...an intelligent conversation about the effect of religion on society is always welcome..."
This thread started off with the word demographics. And it is blatantly, obviously, observable that religion is almost exclusively a geographic phenomena. You are what your tribe is mostly through a series of socialization, steered education and well, honestly - brainwashing. There are some converts. Sure. Some people are easy converts to religion or anything. Any phase, or a fad even. How about that energy, wrist bracelet commercial on TV?
But Moralism does exist. There is a right and a wrong and sometimes wrong gets you hurt or killed. Then right seems to survive. Has survived, painfully, barely at times, through animal and human history. Its risky, but it survives. And big and small survival is a hard wired, multi-faceted thing.
Two driving principles for the human race, (and all creatures)
1- The individual instinct/desire to live and survive.
2 -The instinct desire of a species to live and survive.
This is in the DNA. Those that have lived and survived "since the beginning", have handled, wrestled and manipulated these two genetic drives. Through many a moon, these tendencies have shaped development, evolution and progress and even morality. These developments have become highly, highly social and incredibly nuanced. You see this in small tribes and big tribes. Even in ant colonies.
Morality, right and wrong have developed from issues of survival. From this forms our religions, trade, countries and governments. Its a delicate slow evolutionary growth that is based on many levels of pure, animalistic survival.
In the beginning...some sort of supreme being, some entity hard-wired those genes. You can still believe in a God, your God and it fits like a glove. A "God" did all this. A God made evolution. What it comes in conflict with is words scribbled out in holy books which are supposed to be direct dictation from God's mouth as taken by holy stenographers. (Carl Sagan's line, not mine.) As debated by many a smart religious mind, there is a split between people who believe every syllable in Genesis as historical fact, or those who take Genesis as some cool stories (as my Catholic church did when I was a kid).
I am not interested in religion, only the "religion of religions." I am not interested in psychology, only the "psychology of psychologies." The overall philosophies of philosophy.
This simple commons sense overview, explains EVERYTHING for me. Organizes everything. Still sees the wonder of the universe. That is the prism from which I view all topics, such as morality. I believe in pulling back the curtains of everything as far as they can be pulled. Each row. The Wizard of Oz is back there working the switches.
Anyway a certain amount of survival-morality has evolved to exist as a matter of sheer survival. The driving embedded force of a specie. How'd it get there? I think it was embedded by the grand designer. Tribes of the human race have been selecting their grand designer names since we have been kicking rocks around.
I think we can outsmart ourselves by over thinking and out-thinking our wits. I think that genetic survival as a person and as a species have created a code of morality in order to survive in both the small geography and the bigger geographies.
Someday, we will have to become one big tribe. And someday, all the women will look like Vanessa Williams.
Hock
