Posted by:
amos
(
)
Date: March 19, 2011 01:30AM
I read Daniel Dennett's book Breaking the Spell.
He argues that there are natural reasons why religion evolved.
He uses a concept he calls a "good trick" to mean something that has some inherent biological stability, such as the observed phenomena of independently evolving analogous traits (as opposed to homologous, for example, all wings are analogous to each other, but bird and bat wings are homologous to other vertebrate's limbs whereas insect wings aren't). Anyway, there seems to be a "good trick" that the Koran and Book of Mormon share in common.
Maybe it was intentional (and thereby homologous). Maybe not.
But I think there's a pattern that "works" (ie is inherently persuasive and manipulative), a psychosocial "good trick".
What that is I can only guess.
But, my guess is simple...the age old prophet scam combined with the test-of-faith scam. It's a self-contained circular feedback loop.
Only the prophet is privy to God because the commoner is the subject of a test. The test is that the subject needs to suspend empirical reason and believe for its own sake (Dennett calls this "belief in belief"). Some absurdities will be thrown at you, just to test whether you're using pure faith or still falling back on some reason. The more you suspend reason, the more absurdities you buy, a positive feedback loop that can lead to a final state where absurdity is reality and reality is absurdity.
Meanwhile, the prophet is collecting a dividend, which represents an equilibrating or stabilizing factor. If the absurdity goes too far, you get Koresh and Jones-like outcomes that naturally limit the reproductive "fitness" of that religion. If the absurdity doesn't go far enough, subjects haven't been sufficiently stripped of reason and aren't captured in the feedback loop. If the absurdity is "just right", you get a balance where the subjects are captured but don't crash, and the dividend to the prophet supports a virtual R&D operation where a priest-class is a self-justifying occupation.
Religions stabilize at this bench...until something comes along and breaks the feedback loop. For example, Catholicism is still around but it's never been the same since the printing press. After 500 years of exposition it's no longer vastly imminent over governments and militaries, and it's safe almost anywhere to criticize and reject it. It is widely disbelieved by its own members, and resorting to a very soft-handed existence.
Mormonism is heading down the same road. No doubt it will be around for centuries, but not as the authoritarian regime it has been and still is. The new printing press of the internet is spilling all the beans, and Mormonism increasingly, albeit stubbornly, has to stand in its own excrement in the open, no longer able to ignore absurdities that are increasingly apparent.
Islam, on the other hand, is going to be a tough trunk to dig up. It is still imminent over governments and militaries, and still has a monopoly on the cultural paradigm in Islamic countries.
But it's not in a vacuum. The culture clash between Islam and the rest of the world will reach an equilibrium, inevitably, but how many will suffer and die first?