Rational Religions - for rational nations

Based on an evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, understanding of human nature and the power structures it has given rise to

In response to the article, “Don't believe in God? Read this”, by Fred Edwords, which appeared last Thursday in Comment is Free:

I love the ads, which are short, to the point and inoffensive.

However, there are two aspect of religion (L. religare = to bind together) which I think are absolutely vital, both for the individual and for society at large, which established religions hijacked from the very beginning and have exploited ever since.

Far from getting rid of religion, we need a religious revival, new religions (belief and values systems which bind individuals, groups, and groups of groups together, locally, from the bottom up, progressing to a global level), based not on "sacred scripture" (which puts power into the hands of priestly elites), but on reason and scientific understanding, especially relating to human evolutionary origins and our deeply tribal (but academically taboo) nature.

Man evolved, emotionally and behaviourally, long before the advent of civilisation, as a tribal animal, who was then essentially domesticated by the STATE (in an unconscious process of collective self-domestication), much as he more consciously domesticated certain animals, and for the same purpose, i.e. to facilitate their exploitation in his primordial struggle for survival and reproductive success.

In Europe the STATE was created originally and developed (a process still on-going) by a coalition of aristocracy (who ruled by the sword) and clergy (who rule by the word), thus facilitating the exploitation of the human environment to their own mutual advantage, and thereby tricking us (and themselves) into believing that, in their different ways, state and Catholic church represented the original tribe evolution hard-wired us to identify with and feel loyalty towards.

It is all very confused and complicated (especially in modern democracies, where, in principle, everyone is now “free” to exploit their socio-economic environment, while maintain the deception of it being their “tribe”) and we devote much of our prodigious intellect to rationalising it, but this is because we no longer live in the two distinct environments (tribal and extra-tribal) evolution adapted us to, but in an artificial, socio-economic, environment which conflates and confounds them both.