As we read the news each day, religion plays a central role in almost everything. Religion is a much more common part of human thinking than the more recent science and rational thought that we hold up as a standard. This is not just my opinion, the evidence seems overwhelming.
One can make a case that far more wrong is done in the name of religion than can be traced to any other single source even though nationalism is high on the list.
In a world where even science is clearly a product of the human mind's incapacity to deal with complex reality, one has to wonder about what we, as a species, are really all about.
If this sounds strange to you read on below and I'll explain.
Religion goes back as far as we have knowledge of our history as a species. It must be a fundamental part of human thinking even though some claim to have escaped it. There seems to be no way to "explain" this even though it seems obvious.
One prominent feature of religious thought is its divisiveness. Name any major religion and look into its factions and this will be clear. Christianity is replete with division. It still goes on. For example, when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune North Carolina, the town of Jacksonville had 12 Baptist Churches eleven of which had split off from the First. The community I live in now has periodic splits in its congregations. This is an on going process and is more revealing than seems to be acknowledged.
Science is more recent in human history and it has never existed without a deep interaction with religious thought as well as the institutions that arise from religious thought.
I have written a lot about this relationship in the particular case of Western thought. The interaction with the Church had a lot to do with the way modern science turned out in spite of the apparent struggles and conflict.
I can make a case for the fact that the Cartesian reductionism and the machine metaphor that dominate modern scientific thought are not restricted to science. The human mind seems to need the reduction of complex reality into smaller machine like entities in order to deal with the world out there.
The cultures that are exceptions to this lost out in struggles with this dominant way of thinking. The effectiveness of the reductionist way of creating surrogate worlds to model the incomprehensible complex reality we are in is clearly established by what is.
There seems to be something about the human mind that requires explanations and models that are widely comprehensible and manipulable. The more perceptive among us can see beyond this but can not provide a substitute that satisfies this need. When you compare science and religion even at a superficial level it seems clear that religion satisfies the need in more ways than science does.
If you follow this line of thought, it should be clear to you that both science and religion arise from a need to be able to explain ourselves. The existential absurdity of our existence has never satisfied many.
Even now as evidence accumulates that our model of the world is very faulty, we see massive resistance to any of the evidence. Leaders arise among us with pseudo religious myths that make no real sense if one even superficially examines evidence. These people actually govern us. meanwhile we use the toys produced by science and technology as if they were part of our being and our culture changes before our eyes.
People among us here on this site are not really that much different from those they routinely attack and ridicule. The myths that dominate us are so much more powerful than the facts and rational thought we use to combat them. I will await those who will cry out that this is not so. I am now beginning my 80th years and I have seen too much that makes these denials invalid and part of the whole system that human minds have produced.
The concept of the "human condition" has many manifestations but what I am describing is my view of that very thing. I listen to NPR and am bombarded with the current resurrection myth and its egg laying bunnies seem appropriate symbols for the more "pagan" roots of current practice. This is our culture like it or not. The people around me organize their lives around these myths. The fact that every current practice can be traced back to before the current "resurrection" is supposed to have occurred has no impact on the situation for it is an ongoing part of human existence in our part of the world. Other places have theirs.
My thesis is that we are far more controlled by whatever impulses make us need this stuff than we want to admit. Rationality is a form of rationalization for some of us who do not want to play that game. It is an attempt to deny the reality that the evidence all around us screams out at us.
If this is so then our rationality can not and will not win out. With that I think I will eat a chocolate bunny and try to get through the next day with a minimum of cognitive dissonance.