I think, "belief" is a survival-technique rather than a means of revelation.

[DetlefK]

Obey. Follow the rules. No second-guessing. No questions.

This sounds like a rather... incompetent way of trying to decipher the workings of the universe.

However, it makes perfect sense as a survival-technique:

Imagine living in the Stone-Age or Bronze-Age or Iron-Age.
Wild animals are a real-life threat.
Starvation is a real-life threat.
Illnesses are a real-life threat.
Strangers are a real-life threat.
Social conflicts are a real-life threat.

You know what's keeping you alive in these times?
"Do not question what you are told, just do it. Why? No idea, but we have always done it this way and unlike some other guys we're not dead yet, so that must count for something."

Mankind and the earliest attempts to understand the universe come from an era when unconventional thinking got you killed.
"Yeah, there was this guy who tried to store pork-meat in a desert-climate. The meat spoiled and he ate it and he's dead now."
"Yeah, there was this family that didn't cook their meat properly and it was full of parasites and now they are dead."
"Yeah, there was this village where everybody fucked around with whomever they wanted. It didn't take long for arguments to break out over who gets to fuck whom. The community broke apart, some people starved to death, some people moved away, and the village is no more."




After reading around on that issue, I have come to the conclusion that this is how the concept of "belief" earned itself its fundamental spot in the human mind.
Evolutionary pressure.
Because all the curious and anarchist people died gruesome deaths in the wilderness.




IMO, "religions", as explanations for the workings of the universe, came later and built upon the foundation of belief. (The concept of religion and gods is a rather simple psychological projection: The human saw his own power to shape the world and postulated that someone else had shaped the world before his arrival.)

The material teachings of the elders were considered infallible. The cultural credo was that figures of authority shall not be doubted. (Why else would the first societies form around chieftains and lords and kings?) And then new teachings appeared. Spiritual teachings that complemented the material teachings. (What happened if the spiritual teachings contradicted the material teachings? People violating the material teachings died. Problem solved.)




It's important to realize the philosophical journey of mankind. The philosophers of Ancient Greece postulated a great many theories on the nature of the universe. However, older theories always held primacy over newer theories by way of being older. (When the Ancient Romans came around, trade-routes were established with the Middle-East. The teachings of the greek philosophers were promptly tossed into the garbage-can because the teachings of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Persians were even older.) The philosophical concept of DOUBTING the elders, of verifying their claims in EXPERIMENTS, DID NOT EXIST.

Additionally, religion claimed that nature and the divine powers were one. If something had happened in nature, it had happened because the divine powers had WANTED it to happen. (The concept "laws of nature" didn't exist, because that would have implied powers beyond the gods' powers, which just would have been an even more powerful set of gods.)

The very concepts of doubting an explanation and of experimentally testing that explanation DID NOT EXIST. Oh, there was trial-and-error and technological progress in engineering, but no concerted effort to understand the mysteries of the universe by personally checking them out with material means.




IMO, the problem is that mankind hasn't been able to shake off this evolutionairy primacy of infallible belief. In practice, we could. Because we are no longer in imminent mortal danger. Nowadays, human society has the luxury of testing "what if"-scenarios without the risk of participants dying. Cultural traditions aside, we no longer need belief.

IMO, the problem of religion is not the theological side. A god is as good a theory to test in your experiment as any other. (All you need is to derive a prediction from your theory and then to compare that prediction to the data.) The problem is the notion that religious claims are defined as absolute and infallible, just like the teachings of our Stone-Age elders.

[TygrBright]

1. The problem, then, as you define it, seems to be doctrine, not belief itself.

And I definitely concur.

ANY time you set up a doctrine as all-encompassing, absolute and infallible, you distort the fabric of the human spirit.

That applies to secular doctrines as much as to religious doctrines, it's just that at this moment in history religion has a good deal more prominence.

But in the 20th Century we saw several secular regimes founded on the absolute and infallible basis, and they, too, led to genocide, torture, horror, and inhumanity.

thoughtfully,
Bright

[trotsky]

3. Something that is "all-encompassing, absolute and infallible"...

you mean, like a god?

Totalitarian systems fail because eventually, they have to put up or shut up. Communism in the USSR could rail against the evils of Western capitalism all day, but when your people are queuing up for toilet paper, they're gonna eventually reject your political system.

That's where religious beliefs are different. Their promises can't be verified. Do this, do that, and you'll have a reward after you die! Sweet!

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2009/11/armor-of-god.html

[rug]

6. There was no longer-lasting totalitarian system than the Roman Empire.

I hope you don't seriously think the Roman Empire was driven to religious ends.

[cleanhippie]

2. In Michael Shermers book The Believing Brain, this is exactly what belief is...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/1250008808

An excellent book, describing how the human brain is a "belief engine", for that exact purpose: survival.

[MasonDreams]

4. I'll believe it when I see it. Unless it's something Inconvienent like Global Warming.

Ya know, now that I have thought about it a little, I've decided to believe anything. If it makes life easier for me.
I don't want to wrestle with moral questions, or feel guilty. I'll just let the Donald make my decisions!
All discourse ends right after the words "I Believe" unless a better choice of words is "I Think"
These things are not absolute though, there is Gnosis.

[rug]

5. If that is essentially true, why don't animals have religion?