What survival benefits does religion give humans?
Humans didnt evolve into “religious creatures.” Religion is a cultural concept. Concepts are based in the mind and evolution is based in the physiology. Religions are cultural articulations of our environments, and then deified. They have taken a few decades to centuries to develop. But we developed culture, it is not evolutionary. The difference is that evolution results in different species. Even races are differentiations and not evolutionary. A race is the expression of the differences in the human genome, like a cattle breed or a breed of dog. Science will displace religion because it accurately explains our environment rather than substituting myths for factual knowledge. Science is a developmental system of knowledge, whereas religion is based completely upon guesswork and dogma. There is no such thing as evolutionary “guesswork” or evolutionary dogma.
It makes the common people obey their leaders without question. Their leaders were viewed as divine or the messengers to and from the divine, as such their authority couldn’t be questioned. It also keeps the simple folk from boggling their minds with the tougher questions in life. Without religion any early civilization would have had a hard time controlling the masses.
Humans are created with the need to satify not ony our physical needs, but spiritual needs as well. Jesus Christ himself said “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need” – Matthew 5:3 some render it “poor in spirit” Religion plays a big role in one’s life but it is the “obedience” or “living” with God’s standards that will give survival benefit to man.
That’s one major problem evolutionists have with Humans. There is no “survival -of-the fittest” benefit by compassion, religion or general alturistic nature. Even if you use religion as an attempt to explain who we started thinking about the world around us, there should be at lest as many religions as there are nations today. In fact, Christianity, Judiasm and Islam all stem from the same root. Those that say its a method of control, don’t understand history. Certainly, Islam was more or less founded that way, but Christianity and Judiasm were not. They way Jews and Christians have been persecuted through history, their lake of power and economic strength–there’s no way those religions should have survived. How many times has Israel been sacked and occupied and temples destroyed, only to come back stronger than ever. Jesus and his apostles had no money, no political strength, no military. In fact, besides Jesus being crucified (which did not cause any type of revolt or uprising), at
