Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion

The most significant "takeaway" from religious development, stretching back into prehistory, is its strong organizing capabilities in creating human communities. Since the number of mysteries to humans was far greater in the past, the "fill-in-the-blank" effect of religions has served to create communities around particular explanations. In the polytheistic epoch, there were gods around to help with each natural need beyond human comprehension -- like making rain, sun, sea, etc. And there were extreme practices that welded people together -- such as human sacrifice and the like. As the number of natural mysteries in human understanding has decreased exponentially towards current time, we then figured out that the uniting elements of these structures were the useful part and the extreme practices were less so, and thus evolved monotheism with a single god in the abstract. Over time, however, the tendency of people to inject their own projection of power into these communities pointed back to the need for extreme, often illogical, practices to keep the subgroups welded together even though much rust had grown (and we see that even today with phenomena like contraception debate -- bifurcating logic from tradition -- actual practice from dogma -- etc.). By construction, this abstract single god enables many who want to preserve their legacy to project the justification of these practices upon it without logical explanation, but to their own benefit. As we mature as a species, we will hopefully realize we can still have the communities, but remove such dependence, and thus decrement the god count completely down to zero.

"In Good We Trust"

We humans, and life forms in general, seek to combat that "other" in the form of entropy -- which tends to degrade us in so many ways: various diseases, cancer, mind aging, etc.. The notion also factors in some of the other discussions about internal and external social entropy we've had. It's all kind of a hierarchy and we seek to find some kind of optimum position -- "minimum entropy for me", but also "minimum entropy for wider and wider circles of empathy" at the same time (special cases of which are various religious communities and tribes). It's a strange coincidence that "entropy" and "empathy" are so similar sounding words.

-Greg