Which religion is right?

[Dill]

(04-19-2021, 02:00 PM)treee Wrote: I don't think your proposal is necessarily mutually exclusive with the Darwinian model; Rather, it fits in it rather nicely. If a religion gave one group an incentive to dominate another, it would almost certainly follow that it would be giving the former group a comparative advantage in the gathering of resources among other things. I do think that is an interesting variable to add onto the others I listed. 


I think it is important to remember that a social behavior being "bad" or "good" is contextual. For example with human sacrifice, it is obviously bad in the sense of personal liberty. Depriving someone of the right to live randomly or by some archaic (and often sexist) criteria could have negative consequences on the group as a whole. However, if we're in a situation where a community is overcrowded for example, then it's possible that the action could have possibly been a net benefit for the group. 

I agree with you that almost any religion is going to have some sort of positive feedback loop acting as a cohesive element to keep the people within it increasingly bound to each other and the belief system itself.

Might be "Darwinian" in a sense of selection for survival, but I wouldn't call it evolutionary, as it doesn't present changes in religious belief as qualitative improvements, even if they enhance the power of one group over another. 

So I'm likely in agreement with your assertion regrading the "contextual" evaluation of social behavior. Individual rights and such are a modern invention. We can always find violations of those rights in past societies.  

From a wholly biological perspective, human sacrifice might, under the right circumstances, enhance chances of group survival, if say culling were needed. However, that's only a hypothetical possibility; I can't think of any actual examples.  Also from the bio-perspective war can be positive, culling overpopulation in the absence of non-human predators, etc.  But that's why I don't like to evaluate human behavior from that perspective.   

Even from the biological perspective, it is hard to judge the "success" of human beliefs/cultural practices because in evolutionary terms, they are so short lived.  Going from natural to social/cultural change, one moves from the scale of hundreds of thousands of years suddenly to a few hundred or few thousand years. The longest continuous administration of a state that I can think of is Rome, from the 5th century BCE to 1453, if you count the Eastern Empire. Almost 2,000 years, but hardly the "same" social organization over all that time. The founding Republican form lasted barely 350 years. The "strength" of the Republican period, the willingness to incorporate conquered people into the state, went by the wayside once they started controlling/exploiting territory outside the peninsula. The remaining history is full of "evolutionary" innovations (Marian reforms, Diocletian Tetrarchy) which initially enhanced power, but then came back to bite them in the ass.

There is a kind of advance or development of civilization for sure, in the sense that we incorporate and build on past achievements, resulting in more complex and larger societies, but I don't think this accurately described as "evolution."  And I don't see anything like "providence" or "design" in this either. In the social world, speaking metaphorically, seeds scattered by one species of plant tend to sprout entirely new and unpredictable species and hybrids. "Punctuated equilibrium" is a constant.