Sometimes religion doesn't make sense, but people often believe it anyway. There's a slot in (nearly) all human minds for religion or spirituality. If you lived 100,000 years ago, the slot was probably filled with tribal religion - like the volcano itself is a god of some kind. Even thought it's incorrect, apparently these tribal religious views (such as anthropamorphizing volcanoes) were useful. If it was not useful, it probably would not have evolved. Those with the "slot" in their minds for religion actually survived and reproduced better than those without it.
Today, the slot is typically filled in with a modern religion. I think that the slot is designed so that the human does not use logic to question the religion very much. So, even people who are capable of logic are able to keep the religion in a "separate place" and avoid criticizing it too harshly. This is somewhat similar to the way a parent will tend to appreciate good qualities of his or her children and overlook the bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment