Just finished Jared Diamond’s latest – The World Until Yesterday – excellent book comparing hunter-gather societies with modern societies, looking for ways that we may be able to learn from these societies and apply the lessons learned today. He covers many things from how children are brought up to how we deal with injustice, religion, the treatment of the elderly.
For starters Diamond has come up with a new acronym for us living in advanced societies.
WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Pg. 8-9 
I am not going into most thing he covers in the book, but as most of you know I like to study religion and society so I am going to post some things that Diamond pointed out.
One is that he has a table of definitions of religion by various people that could be useful.
Okay some quotes:
. . . religion must bring some compensating benefits; otherwise atheistic societies not burdened by the time and resource drains and those suicidal impulses {human sacrifice, etc. GRH} would have replaced religious societies.
Pg. 326
Attributes of Religion
1. Religion is the belief in a supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give us evidence, but which is inferred to explain things of which our senses do give evidence. Pg. 329
2. they are social movements of people who identify themselves as sharing deeply held beliefs. Pg. 330
3. their adherents make costly or painful sacrifices that convincingly display to others the adherents commitment to the group. Pg. 330
4. that the belief in gods and other postulated supernatural agents has practical consequences for how people should behave. Pg. 331
5. . . . many religions teach that supernatural agents not only reward virtuous rule-obeying people and punish the evil-doers and rule breakers, but can also be induced by prayers, donations, and sacrifices to intervene on behalf of mortal petitioners. Pg. 321
A brief summary of the fundamental approach might be to assert something like this; religion was invented in order to carry out certain functions and solve certain problems, such as maintaining social order, comforting anxious people and teaching political obedience. Pg. 333 { This doesn’t go far enough – it can also be empower the non-elites, the upcoming new elites vs. the elites currently controlling the society. GRH}
Think on this one for a while:
controlled experiments and scientific methods to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are counterintuitive and unnatural and thus not found in traditional societies. Pg. 343
The functions of religion:
1. Explanation – now usurped by science. {As far as the natural world is concerned-GRPg. 346
2. defusing anxiety over problems and dangers beyond our control. Pg.346
-when doctors can’t predict a patient’s outcome with high probability and especially when doctors admit they are helpless, that when people are especially likely to pray. Pg. 350
3. Providing comfort –
In the face of death
Hell’s functions – smiting one’s enemies
- motivate you to obey your religious moral commands.
The comforting function has increased in more populous and recent societies; it’s simply because those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort.
This comforting role of religion helps explain the frequent observation that misfortune tends to make people more religious, and that poorer social strata and countries tend to be more religious than
richer ones. Pg. 354
That religion nevertheless shows no sign signs of dying out may be due our persistent request
for “meaning.” We humans have always sought meaning in our lives that can otherwise seem
meaningless, purposeless and evanescent and except as packages of genes for which the measure of
success is just self-propagation. Pg. 354
{This lack of providing meaning is one of the main problems with Sec. Humanism today – Darwin wrote
Origin of Species not Origin of the Individual – The modern myth of the individual while protecting many
human rights, ignores the fact that we are always individuals acting within and upon a society. The
meaning of life is that are is to make the world around us a better place, what immortality there is
comes only from the memories we leave behind with the living. GRH}
4. Organization and obedience.
- organizational features of religion arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer, more populous, and both obliged and enabled to become more centralized. Pg. 356
5. Codes of behavior toward strangers
- from the rise of chiefdoms until the recent rise of secular states, religion justified codes of behavior and thereby enabled people to live harmoniously in large societies where one encounters strangers frequently. Pg. 359
6. Justifying War
- most religions claim to have a monopoly on truth, and that all other religions are wrong. Commonly in the past, and all to often today as well, citizens are taught they are not merely permitted, but actually obliged, to kill and steal from believers in the wrong religion. Pg. 359
{Or enemies of the state – GRH}
7. Badges and commitment.
- . . . the need for adherents of a particular religion to display some reliable “badge” of commitment to that religion. Believers spend their lives with each other and constantly count on each other for support, in a world where many or most other people adhere to other religions, may be hostile to your religion, or may be skeptical to all religions. Your safety, prosperity, and life will depend on your identifying your fellow believers, and on your convincing them that they can trust you as you trust them.
Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive . . . Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better. David Sloan Wilson quote. Pg. 366
OK this should be long enough.
Sure, there’s some need to compare and contrast the different thinking/approaches in the two fields, but sheeeessh!
