The Evolution Of Religions

We fashion our gods from our own experiences; what new gods will emerge from our modern world?

Image credit: On Verticality

We humans have a problem: our brains are evolved to cope with the relatively limited challenges of the African savanna and the primordial forests of Eurasia, but thanks to the inventiveness of a tiny number of clever people we now live in a complex technological world, the large-scale interdependence of which vastly exceeds our capacity to understand even the most basic causal chains. Thus we act without any conception of consequences and when those consequences arrive we fail to connect them to our actions. This is one reason why we are so very poor at self-government.

Our inability to comprehend the external world is mirrored by our inability to understand our internal representations by means of which we attempt — with extremely limited success — to organize our understanding. For reasons that are presently not understood, somewhere around 70,000 years ago or perhaps as long ago as 100,000 years ago, the human brain underwent changes that enabled the emergence of fantasy-based imagination. Whereas other primates seem capable of imagining future outcomes arising from concrete acts (such as taking time now to prepare food so as to make it easier to consume later) only we humans appear capable of conjuring up pure…