Contributors

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A Massive Eugenics Program?

I was reading this conversation on the New York Times about why theists believe in gods. The first order answer is simple: the vast majority of people believe in gods because they were brought up to do so.

But why, when there's utterly no physical evidence whatsoever that gods act in the real world, are we so easily convinced of the existence of a super Santa who keeps track of who's naughty and who's nice? The answer might be found in evolutionary biology.

For literally thousands of years of humanity has been conducting one pogrom after another against people who don't believe in god. The Egyptians deified pharaohs as living gods and forced their subjects to worship them. The Romans required citizens to pay obeisance to their deities. Christians hounded pagans across Europe to convert, and killed those would not. Muslims scoured Asia, Europe and North Africa and forced infidels to convert or die.

American settlers killed countless Indians through disease and war. The remaining few had their religion, culture, and their very names stripped away when the government sent their children away to Christian boarding schools.

Many conservative Christians deny the existence of evolution. But they know from personal experience that you can breed desirable traits into domesticated animals, and eliminate the undesirable traits.

For millennia most of the world has been conducting an intensive selective breeding program to cull non-believers from their ranks. How long would it take this kind of selection to result in physical changes in the brain that predispose people to believe in the existence of supernatural beings? Some researchers believe there is a "god spot" in the brain; has that structure in the brain been bred to be more prominent over thousands of years by believers?

When you factor in the commandments of so many religions, including Catholicism and Mormonism, to have large families, the admonitions of Catholicism to eschew birth control, and Islam encouraging men to have multiple wives, it's clear that they're trying to inflate their numbers on the supply side as well.

So you gotta wonder: is religion a massive eugenics experiment?

No comments: