The fact is that no independent social group has ever existed without creating its own pantheon first, and no state eschewing religion has survived for very long. While one might wish governments keep from interfering in matters religious, as it has in western Europe, the results speak for themselves. Low fecundity and high ‘multi-culti’ tolerance has left many of these states with a loss of identity. While my essay on Arcadianism shows the way forward for the secular group that forms this episteme, it still leaves a gap which Islam is filling in a hurry, and the outcome of this is bleak.
The mistake made by many an atheist, and not understood at all by religious types, is in not realising that atheism is a perspective, not a philosophy. It is a one-dimensional viewpoint carrying no values, that the world should be understood as not being created or influenced by gods. After that, atheists have to find their own path of exegesis.
Compare that to the solidity of religion which offers to fulfil the deep human needs of ritual, connection, and inspiration. But religious faith goes further than codifying mores, moving into areas of unverifiable conjecture.
There’s no question that the atheistic viewpoint is correct. The spiritual viewpoint lacks the coherence required to construct a realistic world-view; it will be too obsessed with revealing 'The Truth'. It requires explicit and exclusive use of the imagination with support of possibly psychopathic spruikers, and is thus strictly individual to all seven billion-odd of us, albeit channelled along cultural lines. On the other hand, atheism offers no way to run a society of an advanced species. For this you need a mechanism that has evolved in parallel with it to ensure societal cohesion through a belief in shared values.
I call this mechanism ‘doxogony’, meaning ‘the source of opinion’ (Greek, doxa, δοξα, opinion, + gonia, γονια, origin, coined from ‘orthodoxy’ etc. and ‘cosmogony’ etc.) and emanating from the limbic region, to avoid the confusing meanings of belief and faith. I use this to describe the human brain’s evolutionarily-derived process that subconsciously drives the conscious to form non-verifiable opinions such as religious beliefs. Thus, doxogony carries no values itself, but provides the motive to create convictions which depend on the individual’s genetic heritage, upbringing and environment. In my opinion, such convictions are completely unique to each and every individual, yet link individuals strongly to their group and to the episteme or cultural paradigm. It evolved through the need of mankind to form social collectives with common ground to establish rules of behaviour and rituals for the purposes of bonding. I further believe it to be the most powerful factor in civilisation.
Lewis Wolpert put it slightly differently, “There is a strong motive for explaining any phenomena that affect us in causal terms, an ingrained need to organise the world cognitively – both the external world and the internal world of the individual. This cognitive imperative, which has been called a belief engine, may have evolved because it was essential for human survival . . .” (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief)
For this reason mankind will never be free of religion. It offers control over highly destructive tendencies in human nature, as well as its excuse. For all its many faults, I suspect that were we to dispense with it society would be a lot worse off.
Probably non-existent.
