552. Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion

552.   Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion


In entry 547 I compared two videos revealing the atrocities suffered by the children in Kinsey's research.    While one was as seemingly unbiased documentary, the other was biased by the christian religion.  

This brought me back to the old question, why a level of intelligence in the human brain inventing advanced technology did co-evolve with a level of irrationality causing delusions like the one of the existence of deities and all subsequent nonsense.   

Gullibility to delusional beliefs did evolve for a reason.   Falling for such beliefs was in some way beneficial in the adaptation to coping with the challenges of the survival of the species, no matter how unfortunate it is for the oblivious individuals.

To declare not harming and not be harmed as the essence of a good life is a part of the wisdom of Epicurus.    Harm is the key explanation of the evolved susceptibility to religious beliefs, because the success of the survival of any species is enhanced and enabled by harm to individuals.  

Generally speaking, instincts lead often to behaviors, which as a side effect cause harm to the self and to other individuals of the same species. 

Procreation:   In mammals, pregnancy is a hazard, burden and source of pain for the female.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Herds and groups of animals hunt and eat members of their own species not belonging to the own group.   They kill outgroup members in defense of their territory.   They rob and steal outgroup members' prey from hunting and cause their starvation.  All this is done by instinct to enhance the resources for the own offspring.

Hierarchy and competition:   Male animals fight to become alpha males and to gain control over as many females as there are.  These fights sometimes lead to serious wounds, mutilations and deaths.   Sometimes new alpha male not only usurp control over all the females, but also over their fertility by infanticide.  

Spider cannibalism is an example.  

"...a female spider kills and eats a male of the same species before, during, or after copulation."
"his indirectly contributing nutrition to the eggs. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_cannibalism.

Male spiders have observed other males being eaten are nevertheless unaware, that by following their instinctive urges to get near the female spider, they will also be eaten.   Had the male spiders a conscious choice to run away and keep at a safe distance from all female spiders, they would prevent being harmed as individuals, but their species of spiders would get extinct.  
The female spider also has no cognitive option to refrain from eating the male as a choice to spare him harm.   Would she do this, this may lead to less surviving offspring due to malnutrition.  

Animals are determined to follow their instinctive urges, because they have no cognition sufficiently evolved to allow them to anticipate future events, nor to attribute effects correctly to their own behavior, even in the case of empathy.  They lack the consciousness of having a choice.   Animals suffer harm at the moment, when it happens, there is no cognitive anticipation.    Following their instincts but lacking cognition, animals cannot be held responsible for harming.   


In humans, the instinctive behaviors leading to the successful survival of the species are the same as in animals, but the human cognition adds unique aspects to the subjective experience of the collateral suffering of the harm.  There is an unfortunate correlation between reproductive success and its price of harm suffered by individuals.  

1.  Mirror neurons, empathy, remembering own experiences and understanding causality enable humans to anticipate the harm inflicted by their intended behavior before acting.  Humans have a conscious choice between harming and not harming.
2.  Human cognition includes abstract emotions and intellectual needs, which can be invisibly and non-physically harmed.    Humans do not suffer only momentarily, but for a long time and sometimes in advance. 

3.  The victim and the perpetrator both know, that harm is a decision and a choice of someone being responsible. 

Examples of the harm to humans due to the major instincts

Procreation:  Jerks harm women emotionally by commodifying and objectifying them due to their need for sexual homeostation.
Men harm women physically by inflicting pregnancy upon them.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Victims are seriously harmed by varieties of exploitation like war, slavery, colonization used as methods to acquire resources for successful procreation:

Hierarchy and competition:   In every competition, where there is a winner, the loser at least suffers emotionally.   But in more drastic fights for higher places in hierarchies, the harm can be much worse, serious material damage, physical mutilations or even death.  

The evolution of the cognition and the evolution of being determined as animals to pursue instinctively the advantages for the survival of the fittest seem to be mutually exclusive.

To live without or with reduced harming is possible, when people remain childfree and cooperate in peace and harmony.   But with such people, the human species would get extinct.

    
Being determined by instincts became a cognitive problem as a by product of the evolution of the human cognition.  As the result of the developing understanding of causality and the awareness of the self as an actor, at some point of their evolution humans started to comprehend the responsibility of how specific behaviors cause harm to others and of having the option to either inflict the harm or to refrain from doing so.    The brain's mirror neurons and ability to experience some empathy added the knowledge of the other's experiencing harm.
 

From that time on, harming seized to be an animal's automatic behavior, instead it required moral justification, that rationally does not exist.    

The evolution of the gullibility to irrational beliefs including the imagination of one or more deities with ascribed responsibility solved the problem.    The delusion of the deities justifying harming and the existence of harm has solved the evolutionary contradiction.

  

Religions are very outspoken to point out the benefits for the recipients of harm.   The side effect of the delusion of being rewarded after death does indeed
- make some people more resilient to suffering.
- motivate people to choose to suffer by making specific sacrifices to earn the reward.

But religions seldom admit the other side of the coin.   Religions also create, enable and enhance the suffering, which requires the resilience to cope with.      

The Milgram experiment has shown, that people are prone to harm others and accept it as justified to do so, whenever someone of authority takes the responsibility.   Generalizing this supplies an explanation of the attraction of religion.  
 
The authority of the real life researcher in Milgram's experiment can be replaced by the authority, power or superiority of a delusional and imaginary figure of a deity.  
The specific proactive act of harming by the application of electrical shocks when being told can be replaced by the permission to do every act of harm, unless it is explicitly forbidden as a sin.   In this case the authority's ascribed responsibility is not limited to one act, but to all behaviors unless they are explicitly excluded.    Everything appears as allowed, which the deity has not explicitly forbidden and everything allowed is done under the deity's responsibility.   
Taking own responsibility is based upon the subjective conscious and sufficient justification for the choice of a behavior.   Acting under someone else responsibility implies to be void of an own justification but considering someone else having a hidden and elusive justification.    When the justification is ascribed to a deity, who does not even exist, then anything can be believed, ascribed or defined as justified.  

All religions, that I know of, allow harm caused by instincts to a certain degree.   The specific definitions of sins have indirectly also favored the evolution of the fittest religions.   These are those religions, in which the definition of sin is an optimized balance between enhancing reproduction by disregarding the individual suffering and limiting all harm bad enough to damage the reproductive success.

But the deity as an imaginary figure of authority is not only considered as the one justifying all harming, which is not defined as a sin.   This figure is also a bargaining partner for prospective and retrospective deals to earn permission to sin.   In such deals, the harmed person is insignificant.   

Sin is bought in advance or compensated for afterwards by sacrifices.   The definition of sacrifices is also ascribed to the deity.   This is most successful in those religions, where sinning and paying is more attractive than not sinning.  

In this sense, here is my definition of religion:

  

Religion is the purposeful invention of an imaginary authority, who is believed to be able to justify harming other people, whenever the own hidden reasons for harming are instinctive and therefore cannot be rationally justified.    

The deity's permission serves as a sufficient justification to harm, either due to the deity having alleged unknown rational reason or by having earned it as part of a deal.    Religion frees the harming person from any consideration for the victim.        

539. Movies Are Contributing To The Harm Done By Promiscuous Jerks

539.   Movies Are Contributing To The Harm Done By Promiscuous Jerks

I have been mentioning before, that promiscuous jerks are predisposed by instinctive animal urges, but that the harm done to the victims is magnified by the sad influence of the media propagating, enhancing and reinforcing the social norm of oversexation.  

A recent study gives some evidence, that the influence of movies is contributing to women's plight by supplying the wrong role models.    

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120717162743.htm

"Adolescents who are exposed to more sexual content in movies start having sex at younger ages, have more sexual partners, and are less likely to use condoms with casual sexual partners,"

"Many adolescents turn to movies to acquire "sexual scripts" that offer examples of how to behave when confronted with complicated emotional situations. For 57 percent of American adolescents between the ages of 14 and 16, the media is their greatest source of sexual information. They often don't differentiate between what they see on the screen and what they must confront in daily life ."

What this study indicates as the fatal influence of sexual scenes in general movies, can logically be expected to be even worse in pornographic movies. 


There are other sources providing some further contextual explanations.    

1.  Kanazawa has pointed out, that people are misled to confound the mere moving pictures of people on TV with personal friends, because the evolution of the human cognition had no yet enough time to adapt to the realistic technical representations of people.   The spontaneous and subconscious human perception does not distinguish sufficiently.    

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/ehb2002.pdf

This has fatal consequences.   

Commercial movies are made to entertain people, not to educate them towards responsibility and consideration.   The stories of movies are not realistic.  They are in some way extreme and often dangerously pseudo-realistic.   Women are often abused in a drastic way, which in real life would be legally punished, but the severe harm experienced by them is omitted in the movies, because it is not entertaining.    They are damaged as objects, not harmed as humans.

Adolescents need the valid and beneficial role model of the happy serenity of a bonded monogamous couple.   But what should be encouraged most for imitation lacks any entertaining thrill.  Such a couple's happiness is as beneficial for the two partners themselves as it is dull and boring to the curiosity of gossiping and scandal enjoying bystanders, not matter if in real life or on a screen.    

Therefore the perception of the adolescents watching movies is mislead by confounding the images of the role models on the screen with real people appearing as an extension of their social environment.   Thus the influence of such role models to be imitated is dangerously strong.   

The adolescents are misled to consider the unreal, fantastic and extreme events and activities of the observed stories as if this were a valid representation of real life.

For the consumers of the movies and even more of pornography, abuse seems to end without any consequences, when the movie ends.  But in real life, abuse not only concerns a transgressor, but also a victim.   The abuser's onesided perception of having terminated the abusive event does not really end it.   Real life jerks cannot fully avoid to witness the visible reactions of the victims.  Even those jerks, who are not bothered or insensitive to whatever they do themselves often do notice the suffering, when the victims are their family members harmed by other jerks.

In short, real life harm has more or less observable consequences, which serve as a deterrent.   This deterrent is lacking in the movies.  The harm done by the promiscuity shown in the movies is hidden and omitted as if it did not exist.  Thus the movies mislead adolescents towards oblivion and denial of what they do to their victims by imitating the abuse.

2.   Milgram's experiment have been lately reinterpreted:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120718164947.htm

"The researchers hypothesized that, rather than obedience to authority, the participants' behavior might be better explained by their patterns of social identification. They surmised that conditions that encouraged identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) led participants to follow the experimenters' orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) led participants to defy the experimenters' orders."

Explaining the physically barbaric act of applying electro shocks by identification can be generalized to explain the emotionally barbaric act of men's promiscuous objectifying of women's bodies also by the identification with the imitated actors in the movies.