Why We Believe: Let's Look At This Again

by Dr. Impossible

I had to respond to Ajora's posting since, however well-intended, it is just plain wrong...it's the right conclusion if you stop looking at a certain level, but it breaks if you look just a little bit deeper. Here's Ajora's original posting, which makes a good jumping-off point:

"First of all, there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on this planet. But the human mind can't comprehend that. There are some things we just dont 'get'. The same thing goes for death. We have never been dead, and we cannot imagine what it would be like. We can assume the perspective of others, but nobody really knows what it is like to die.

"This is why we pro-create. By sending your own genetic material on, in a sense, you can live forever. Though not in the same body, a collective conscious is passed down from generation to generation. This is also why most people resemble their parents most of the time in personality. By trying to imprint themselves into their own offspring, flesh and blood, they can live on and overcome death.

"Since the mind cant comprehend death, we also look for other solutions to immortality. Thus, religion was born. If you notice, Christianity sends its 'evil' people to hell to be tortured forever. Even then we are not extinguished, we simply live on in pain. Nobody wants to be forgotten, or excluded, so no matter what we do, religion will ensure that we live on forever in our next life.

"You can understand why a majority of the population does not understand aetheism. (and if you are, i feel your pain) There must be more to life than this, and all our of hard pains will not be in vain. Religion ties free will to the floor.

"In the end, nobody wants to die. And under no circumstances, be forgotten.

Why do we believe? There is an answer. But it's not an answer people want to hear. We believe because the alternative is too grisly to contemplate. Do we want the truth? We can't handle the truth...and that's the fact of the matter right there. You need a good sense of balance to really handle reality as it is, and considering how few people have even a vague sense that the whole species is completely cocked, the whole damn species must be seriously off-balance, and just plain unable to handle the truth.

What is this grisly truth? Hopelessness...the realization that life just doesn't cut it, and that there is no apparent way to correct this problem. Solve your own hopelessness, and your eyes open to the hopelessness around you, and since the solution opens you up to the rest of the world, the prospect of living your life surrounded by a hopelessness so profound that religion, drugs and escapism are the only alternatives becomes so painful that...well...the whole notion of freeing yourself from hope was hardly worth it.

Don't think for a second that this is just defeatist bullshit. Ever wonder, for example, why the enlightened masters always seem to attract followers who build religions around them? Think about this for a moment...you've just achieved enlightenment, grasped the nature of life itself and understood your place in it, and probably endured more than most people could even imagine to get there. It ought to be Miller Time. At the very least, you ought to be able to create your own eternal Disneyland. But that ain't what happens, is it? Jesus went to war. Mohammed took the statesman's path. Buddha hit the lecture circuit. These guys all got stuck in the same shitty quagmire as the rest of us even after achieving what we're told is life's ultimate prize.

Does this make the least sense to you? Did Jesus really take up arms (in a spiritual sense, of course) against the Roman tyranny voluntarily, on the impulse of the God within him, or was he just so unbelievably pissed at having his heart sliced open to the point where he could feel his own pain reflected in every blade of grass that war seemed like the only way to make it tolerable? Don't give me this shit that Jesus felt the grass' pain and that grass suffers too. Any ecosystem that survives as long as our planet's has got to produce life with balance, and any thinking species that comes out of that life has to have a sense of its own place in that balance, which we don't have. What Jesus saw in the proverbial blade of grass was the realization that the grass is doing okay, by and large...it's us who are fucked.

Did Buddha really believe for one second that he wouldn't leave behind one hell of a theological mess when he began conducting classes from his Sakyamuni U. travelling tent show, or did he instead realize that the only way to truly appreciate the nature he had finally sensed himself "one" with was to offer the camp followers some half-baked philosophy to chew on which would allow him to at least produce enough confusion to buy him the occasional afternoon of tiptoeing through the tulips?

If you want a real insight into the problems spiritual leaders have, look at U.G. Krishamurti (not that fatuous scumwad Jiddu Krishnamurti). U.G. is a bastard and doesn't give a shit about it, and a hell of a lot of people consider him one of the wisest people on Earth. Pretty odd combination, that.... And when you read the interviews he gives, you get the distinct feeling that he is yanking your chain and would rather that just everybody goes away...except for one problem: he's a human being, born with social genes, and condemned for life to having to put up with the likes of us (unless he wants to suffer, which no living thing tolerates) and forced to walk a pretty thin edge to keep from losing access to the kinds of things every human needs, and losing whatever sense of a life he's managed to get for himself from his own personal struggles. He's easy to figure out if you look at the dynamic of his conversations and not just their content. And once you get what U.G.'s all about, it ain't hard to see a step or two beyond to see how Jesus, Buddha, and just about every "master" who ever skulked across the face of the Earth had the same goddam problem: how to live with a foothold on sanity in a world insane with suffering?

Think, people, THINK! If even the most revered "masters" of the ages had to pull tricks like this just to find their own peace of mind, however temporary, then let's be realistic...it ain't about what we think it's about. And not one of the great religions that gained a strong following ever preached that life could be good in the here and now. We know that's bullshit. Whether it's the karma or dharma of the east, or the original sin of the west, religion starts by assuring us that our perceptions are not off...we really are getting boned up the ass. What religion "cures" is the hopelessness, by telling us ITS reasons for this cocked situation.

And listen good...if you really think you're immune to religion, think again. If you ain't facing death at every moment, living in perfect balance with nature (as we might expect from any species produced by this ecosystem) or otherwise in the groove at every moment, you're gonna run headlong into the same damn wall as Buddha, Jesus, "Pissnamurti" and every other poor fool who managed to crack the kozmik mystery. Art, love, power, works, actions...everything we think we do to put the boots to hopelessness eventually develops a tolerance. We all come back time after time to the realization that life sucks. Of course, that's just your adherence to bad karma or Satan talking through you, so you can avoid having to deal with that, can't you?

And let's not even let immortality come into this, okay? It's a red herring. The mind can comprehend mortality. But just like we don't comprehend sex until we've got the physical goods to appreciate it, we can't comprehend death until we're sufficiently developed to grasp its meaning. We've known for a long time that death can be understood at a very deep level - and accepted, too - by the time we hit about middle age. But until then, we don't have the neural sophistication to grasp it. (Don't forget...even after the brain stops growing, it continues to develop new connections and create more and more folds. And we know that there are "threshold effects" that trigger new abilities when certain milestones of learning are reached...this is partly why the "bonus" concept in games seems so natural and acceptable.)

The real reason we believe in religions is because life itself sucks so badly. The real question, on the other hand, is why we have religion in the first place, and why life sucks as badly as it does.

This is the question we can't answer yet. But anyone with eyes in their head knows that life does suck. And anyone with an ounce of empathy has had at least a sense that for some reason, life sucks more for humans than for just about anything else in nature. Ever looked at insects or plants and wondered if they suffered like we do, and had the unbearable impression that they don't? Ever wondered if the blast of endorphin that the rat gets when its neck is snapped in the beak of the hawk is compensation for this unexpected insult to life?

And here's one to really knock the grease out of your brainpan: ever wondered why food actually tastes good? I mean, we all know that the meat from animals who we know have suffered doesn't taste good at all, and the same is true of most plants stressed to shit before harvesting. But most food tastes good! And if you've ever had kobe beef, or an apple from a well-loved organic grove, you know intuitively that the better the life of the source of that food, the better it tastes. Doesn't that suggest a quality of life that we just don't get to have? It damn well ought to.

Now just step back a minute and think about this: how is it possible that life can suck so badly for the species which seems most able to make its own life better? This question will inevitably take you into the realm of gods, cosmic radiation accidents and alien genetics experiments, because frankly, there's no other rational explanation...except one...and there's got to be a rational explanation for this. The one thing we don't yet know is whether the ecosystem we live in evolved us this way for a specific purpose...if it made us miserable, cruel, rapacious sons of bitches for some purpose we still haven't fulfilled. We might be as nasty as we are precisely because the planet needs some form of accelerated waste cycle at this time in its history. We might be pushed in the direction we're going to produce some protective effect on the ecosystem whose nature can only be known when we come face-to-face with some off-planet influence that the Earth has had some advance warning of for hundreds of thousands of years. (Don't think this is a possibility? Then just imagine...how many billions of lives would have to be exploited to accelerate the evolution of the top-feeding species to the point where it can artificially create a biological shield for, perhaps, some massive radiation event coming in, oh let's say, the next hundred years or so? Perhaps this is the most efficient means the planet has to protect itself.)

But you can speculate from here to doomsday, and it won't get you far. What will get you far - at least in terms of dealing with the situation on a day-to-day basis, is a basic understanding of where this came from. And it goes back farther than the dawn of civilization.

We've had religion very likely for tens of thousands of years longer than that in the form of the shamanic traditions. Tribes of protohumans have had shamans and witches since the days of the Neanderthal and earlier. And this is where religion comes from. Organized religion as we know it only dates back to the dawn of civilization. But religion itself is much, much older.

Look, if life was really good, we wouldn't have been attracted to creating civilizations in the first place. But we did. We have to assume that life has been sub-par for all humanity a lot longer than we ever thought. We might be able to go back even farther, but right now it looks like the whole business started with the shaman/witch traditions.

This is something you just don't see in other species. Crippled, emotionally-damaged or mentally-defective members of the tribe just ain't allowed to feed at the trough unless there's more than enough for everyone. For some reason, though, we don't weed these types out of the tribe. These genetic or developmental fuck-ups somehow managed to demonstrate some special skill for "reading" the cycles of plants or the earthly forces in ways no one else could, and unbelievably, the entire species seems to have decided that these skills are so valuable that they make up for the eternal pain in the ass that these fucked-up individuals give the tribes in which they live. (Don't believe this? Then find one - just one - person with true shamanic or witch skills who isn't damaged goods in some way. You won't.)

So how does religion start? When some of the tribe get wise to the fact that it's wasting precious resources on a bunch of factory seconds who can't rationally justify their value to the tribe. Now, if you're damaged goods, you tend to be more sensitive to threats, and pretty creative if you don't have the usual tools to defend yourself. And how do you defend your ability to divine the patterns of the winds or the growth cycles of the local herbs to Nokk the Hunter who doesn't give a shit where the wind comes from as long as it brings game birds? Why, you invent a brother or sister bigger than Nokk's big brother Gror, is what you do. And why not? Nobody else can quite understand how these people know these things, and everyone knows that wisdom is passed from parent and older sibling, so why wouldn't invisible, all-powerful parents and siblings make sense as explanations for how these gifted freaks do what they do?

But wait...this gets a lot weirder. We not only found places for a handful of these fuck-ups in pre-civilized tribes, but made them valuable members of the community when we adopted civilization, and literally allowed these freaks of nature to survive in numbers that would never be tolerated in a more natural setting. Of course, once organized religion takes the place of tribal custom and oral tradition, you don't need the shaman and witch any more...you have science to uncover how everyday folk can do what the shaman and witch do intuitively...or out of desperation for their lives. But damn, don't those now-unemployed freaks paint purty pitchers and sing purty songs? And over time, we allow ever-larger numbers of these freaks of nature to survive and reproduce to produce the artists and artisans we crave. Of course, things ain't working out all around, because the art they produce never quite satisfies, and the artist is never quite satisfied...artists instinctively seem to crave the mystical powers of the witch and shaman, and the consumer of the art craves something more honest and satisfying than the art they get.

Science doesn't keep up, but once we figure out that the secrets of the witches and shamans CAN be known to "mere mortals", the need for them is gone. Priests, scholars and experimenters can take their places. Priests reinforce the "faith" that was necessary to accept the witch or shaman back when the only way these people could prove themselves was by getting results, scholars replace the knowledge that these people passed down only to those who were damaged in the same way (and needed the same advantage to find a meaningful place in the tribe), and experimenters take the place of the apprentices to the witches and shamans who advanced the "sacred" knowledge by trying out tricks and principles that the real witch and shaman would never have gotten away with.

Cute arrangement, no? Problem is, we get an ever-increasing cycle of discontent. Everyone's pushed farther and farther from any natural way of life. And you've got to believe that this increases everyone's discontent, since why would nature allow us to get more satisfaction out of what's unnatural than what's natural?

And that's the whole problem...not enough satisfaction. It's not that life is perfect...too much pleasure is just as intolerable as too much pain. It's that life isn't satisfying...it doesn't have enough balance for nearly enough people. Look at how other animals live and you get the picture that they go for "enough"...a good balance of fun and struggle, rest and work, you can figure out the rest of it. Yes, animals hunt for sport...but not to the rate that we do. Yes, animals can be cruel and ruthless...but not in the needless ways we are. And animals can also be curious, kind, sharing, just as nice as they are nasty over the long haul. Seems like a good arrangement to me...but not one we seem to be able to make for ourselves, eh wot?

So when you look back, you start to see that religion has to be at least as old as the shaman/witch traditions, when the shamans and witches had to invent cosmic forces or beings that explained why their skills worked better than those of "mortals" but didn't work all the time. And you see that if we didn't need witches and shamans, we would probably have found a way to produce a lot less of these factory-second humans with each generation (or a way to give them mercifully short lives, or some incentive for NOT reproducing themselves, or something similar) not more of them. as we've been doing for at least ten thousand years.

Religion could be about immortality for some people, but hey, for most people, that's not what it's there for. The ones who end up preaching the immortality stuff tend to be the most fucked-up products of human genetic reproduction walking on two legs. Only the severely deranged really want immortality. What most people want from religion isn't the promise of eternal life...it's the promise of payback for what they've had to suffer. After twenty years, most of us can imagine what immortality must be like, and have some sense that it ain't something a healthy human being should even want. But if you've been so severely stomped that you barely know who you are or remember what peace or happiness are, then yeah, you can believe that immortality is the only possible compensation for that kind of shitkicking.

Of course, none of this means anything if you don't also look at what life would be like if it didn't suck so much. We don't have to go far to imagine this, because we've all had at least a taste of "enough" in our lives, at least in most things.

If life was "enough", we wouldn't need to constantly know more about the world just for the sake of knowing. We'd acquire knowledge to solve problems as they occurred, or to amuse ourselves, but not out of any compulsion for knowledge itself. We'd have far less sophisticated technology than we have today, but it would be efficient and well-understood technology. Because the population would be righteously pissed at the thought of anyone bringing any new technology into mainstream use before we knew as much about its potential downside as its potential upside...I mean, if life is good, sure, we could make it better, but we wouldn't risk making it worse in the haste to bring New Stuff onstream. There would still be the odd war, because there would still be misunderstandings between peoples. But unlike the way it is today, resolving misunderstandings would stop wars cold in their tracks, not just explain the reason for the war itself.

If life was "enough", far more of us would have the sense nature gave a dog to realize that you don't fuck with your own future by fucking with someone's present. We'd treat each other better not because it's the "right" thing to do, but because it's the best way of insuring a satisfactory life for ourselves over the long haul. Greed, lust and addiction would all be fairly rare compared to what they are today, mainly because if you're fairly well in tune with your own best interests, tipping the balance of nature this way just plain doesn't feel good, and who wants to waste the years you've got feeling bad?

Life isn't "enough" for hardly anyone. We only hear from satisfied people because we crave good-news stories so badly. In a more balanced world, we'd hear 19 deathbed confessions of "I wish I'd never been born" for every "I've had a good life", and you can't look at world events without knowing that in your bones.

And that's the real crux of the issue here. Why the hell is life so bad for so many people? How did this planet evolve a species so badly fucked up that it requires - REQUIRES - religion just to feel good enough about itself to keep from killing either itself or every living thing on the surface of the planet? That's the question we can't answer yet. All we have are possibilities - a cosmic "accident" that mutated our DNA, alien or transdimensional intervention (in which case, what screwed THEIR lives up so badly that they had to screw up OURS?), or maybe there really is a God...but if there is, I mean, it would have to be so far beyond our level of development that how can we rationally assume that God gives any more of a damn about what we go through than we care about the fate of a single photon we're examining in a supercollider? And then there's the fourth possibility: that nature wants us this way for some purpose of its own, some purpose that can only be fulfilled by keeping us from knowing why we're so fucked up.

Well, as hard as we're working to find the answer to that question, we'll probably find it. We do get our questions answered eventually. But if you want to understand why religion exists, then you have to look at the question itself, and wonder why we even feel the need to ask it.

And that's the worst news of all. Because when you think about it, if we were evolved this way naturally to fulfill some purpose for nature, we might know we were fucked up, but would we be asking "why" in such large numbers? Probably not, because the time we spend on this question reduces our efficiency. The fourth possibility, then - that the Earth needs us this way for some reason - looks like a bad bet right now. And that's why computer games, drug traffic and pro sports make more money than eco-tourism. We've gotten smart enough, a lot of us, to realize that organized religion only turns a shitty life into a good one by tricking the mind into believing it's worthwhile. But we're not smart enough yet to do without the quasi-religious worship of being absorbed in some unnatural experience that temporarily takes us away from the ever-present awareness that life just plain sucks.

And this problem is still so far out of our control that it probably doesn't matter what fucked-up set of beliefs you cling to, since they're all unnatural and destructive, but probably better than believing nothing and facing the truth. And if those beliefs lead you to crime, drugs, sex, cruelty, power...well, it seems to me life is already bad enough without having to feel guilty for being screwed up the ass by it.

You'll note that I haven't said a lot about free will here. There's a reason for that. We evolved from a system of life which is far more complex than we'll ever be, and has needs and demands that we have no choice but to respect if we want to remain alive for very long. What free will we do have has to be limited by what the ecosystem will allow. And as fucked up as we know we are, and as little as we have ever been able to do to change that, you've got to conclude that whatever true freedom of choice we do have is far more limited than we probably realize. Maybe free will really is an illusion...but maybe that illusion is there in part as some natural defense against the sense of hopelessness that might exist if we didn't have this belief.

Oh, and why did I create this response in the first place? Because I'm one of the most miserable sons of bitches you're ever likely to meet. And few things relieve that misery more than passing on my understanding of the sheer hopelessness of the situation to others. Yeah, life in a human suit sucks. And once you've read this and realized how damnably logical and sensible this sounds and how difficult it is to refute, your life sucks a little more, and mine sucks a little less. And it's still hard for me to accept that if I had to go as far as I did to find all this info. and figure out this much of the picture, my life must suck a lot worse than even I know.

- Dr. Impossible -