What is real | Forum

It is a strong belief of mine that Goverments should be secular and so should education. But we are still quite primitive and religion still has massive influence as you pointed out. In the UK the Church of England still has influence even though most British subjects dont really follow it. An interesting point.

Nikey69: I think it's possible that religions were the first cultures. Think about it: if your little tribe all believes in the same 'gods' or whatever and have the same beliefs about the world -- the religion of yout little tribe is also your entire culture.

I know I'm going to sound like a total dork geeking out when I say this, but :

It's fascinating to consider how communication developed from simple animal grunts to the way we communicate today. If you do this by progressively building up a workable model of communication by considering what must be there for it to work, you'll get some worthwhile insights. For example, the first requirement of communication is that people know what a specific grunt means, and for that to work they all have to have a sort of shared dictionary.

Hi Shawn

Early religions did enhance tribe cohesion. As a worker/hunter you probably left it to the priests to do their suff. There was plently of ignorance and fear in those days and so what if the religious types said particular things. To be part of the tribe you just accepted it and probably believed it.

You point about communication is interesting. I listened to a radio program that postulated that the first communication were about certain sounds i.e danger a predator is near. The progrm postulated that this was the beginnng of song because these sounds were musical in nature.

To Greg

I beleive religion was probably brought about by the human imagination and possibly mental illness and its ability to psychose. These fantastic ideas and the charisma of the individuals in questions may have entralled the other members of the communty to follow. When you have no answers it must have been very attractive to listen to the individual who believed he had talked to our dead family or the lion was a good omen. I have no evidence for this its just an idea. Off course you are completely right about religion as control by the ruling classes. I believe Marx summed this up!

This leads me to the 21st century and the after effects of these early survival cultural phenomenom. If we just antromorphised our confussion about being sentient animals what place is there for religion in our modern society?

There are all sorts of ways our brains don't properly take in the world around us and create illusions. Like seeing things out of the corner of your eye, for instance. That can be caused by several things, including subsonic frequencies. Or seeing a white light in a near-death experience as a result of the chemicals your body is producing. There's a huge list of experiences that people have that cause them to believe in the supernatural, and in the absence of any real-world explanation, it's easy to believe your lying eyes. And don't forget good old fashioned wishful thinking (my dead relatives aren't gone forever, right?) to muck things up even more. 

None of that is any kind of psychosis. On the contrary, it's us functioning totally normally. Our survival instincts tell us to believe what we see and avoid scary unknowns because even if we're wrong about the danger it's better to be safe. Believing something to be true because just you want it to be is something pretty much every person does unless you learn to avoid doing so, and then it's still easy to fall back into old habits. We wouldn't need a scientific method or rules for logical debate if those things came naturally to us. We didn't evolve to search for and find truth. We evolved to survive. The aspects of our minds that serve the latter really like to make a mess when we're trying to do the former.

Julian Jaynes developed a hypothesis called Bicameralism where human mind, before being conscious, was then divided into two parts: one in command, called God (taking its foundations in the right hemisphere), and the other part obeyed, housed in the left hemisphere, called Man. This bipartition was the modus operandi of the bicameral mind. In the bicameral mind, volition/will, development and initiative organized themselves without the help of awareness in the right hemisphere and were then sent to the person in the language she/he knows, in the left hemisphere, sometimes accompanied by the appearance of a friend, an authority figure or a god. The person then obeyed the voice because she/he didn't know what to do alone. In all her/his actions, the Man was with a response such as ours (nowadays), but the decision during a moment of stress was performed using a voice that collected the admonitory wisdom accumulated during his life . These voices rumbled, comforted, commanded or announced what would happen: they were also producing eventually visual hallucination, a figure.

The hypothesis of Jaynes is that the bicameral mind was the form of social control that allowed humanity to move from small groups of hunter-gatherers to large farming communities. The bicameral mind, controlled by the gods, would have developed as the final step in the evolution of language, and it is in this development that lies the source of civilization. Auditory hallucinations, developing as a side effect of language comprehension. It was no longer necessary for a chief/king to rely on repeated meetings with each person to exercise his domination. The hallucinations were particularly supported by the statues and funerary art, specific to reactivate the voices (the hypnotic state is encouraged by the predominance of eyes, staring with authority).

The profound and irreversible changes scoring the second millennium BC -the frequency of wars, disasters. In the space of a day, entire populations were forced into exodus, and the appearance of cruel king such as Tiglath-Pileser I in Assyria who massacred thousands of harmless villagers- gave birth to a loosening of the association between God and Man, divine voices could no longer meet the increased stress of the Man and couldn't allow him to avoid more death.

This chaos was durable: it was prolonged in Greece under the name of Dorian invasions. That voice was compensated by the importance given to writing. As for the observation of the difference in others (another language, another people, another god), it may be that it is the source of psychic space.

When the voice of the gods is silent, prayer appears to bring it back. The first king kneeling is the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I in 1230 BC.
The theme of World Religions appears for the first time : why the gods have they abandoned us? They must have been offended. Our troubles are punishment for our sins. We apologize to the gods. The chiefs/kings who have no gods are restless and uncertain, their authority is questionable, and they must turn to the omens and divination. One must ask the gods to speak again. Angels and demons appear as intermediate creatures, or messengers, and the heavens/skies as dwelling place of the gods.


The history of mankind after the disappearance of voices is intertwined with the search for the lost authorization. The gods no longer speak, but everything is organized by them: they record our births, define us, marry us, bury us, receive our confessions; our laws are based on values that without their divine counterpart, would be empty and unenforceable. The overwhelming importance of religion in the history of mankind is the trace: the man doesn't give up his fascination and nostalgia for a mystery with powers beyond the capacity of the left hemisphere.

The search continues. The search for a lost innocence. The search for a moment of authentic humanity before the descent into the irreversible line of civilization.

Hail to themelorist

I agree with you to a certain extent. mental health is a specrum and those in the middle will see images at the corner of their sight and probably dismiss it. But there are humans ( me included ) who have biplolar and can therefore come up with fantastic ideas which have no root in reality. I still have not found an evoltionary advantage to this type of mental illness. i am always fascinated to hear if anybody has an opinion. In the past ignorant peoples may have listened to these fantastic ideas ( I go back to Mohammed hearing load bells before his revelations). Today luckily in certain parts of the world we have a more rational approach to these things. In my own experience when i was manic I believed many types of religiosity including that spirits were talking to me. Once i commenced atypical antipyschotics I became athiest as my mind calmed ad I was left with what i really know.It therefore appears to me that psychosis even if mild cn contribute to spiritual phenomena. That siad for an interesting life I might choose to beleive in fantastic ideas tha have no grounding in realit.

Hail Suki

I do not know of this Bicarmelism of which you speak with apparent authority. Therefore I should research it. I would state that imaginaton is a great force and it is truely human. Now I will be controversial. Given that most of us will never know objective truth in our life times is there any harm in believing our probably false ideas of reality. Of course this assumes that those false beliefs are not harmful to us and lead us to grow as imaginative human beings. As long as we acknowledge that we simply do not know the absolute truth and at the present state of science of the mind. Isnt it better to call a truce and simply enjoy whats is a human expeirience?

Of course, that is why we are Satanist. Man is a transcendent instance.
And the methods of the search for objective "truth/reality" (not to be confused with objectivity) have no other task than the implementation of denial process of the man and thus reduction in existence and maybe human experience.

Hey, nikey69: 

I didn't mean to suggest that psychosis is never involved. I just meant that it doesn't have to be and that there are a lot of examples of normal brain functionality that are sort of stupid and can lead to mystical thinking. Certainly disorders can add more factors to it; I wouldn't dream of denying that.

A religion is akin to a secret handshake. It can be used to tell who is a part of the club and whom you know is safe.