Where Does Religion Come From?

• Where Does Religion Come From?
  • the beginnings of drama, of plays, were so close to ritual that the difference between the actors and the audience was minimal
  • The idea of utopia is always a kind of play, because we know it's not real--it's just what we can imagine. But it has the serious possibility of  saying, "Look, the world the way it is didn't have to be that way. It could be different."
  • dealing with a complex band of people you don't know if you  can trust or not, and you love some of them and you hate some of them—that's a pretty high demand on your cognitive growth. I think the brain grows  fast when groups get larger and more complicated and maneuvering yourself in a social world starts to be at the heart of what your life is all about.  Since our intelligence grew above all in relating to other people, it is natural that we think of the world in general in interpersonal terms
  • The world is full of questions and we can't take anything for granted, because the more we know, the  more questions are raised
• How Come We Exist?
  • A vote of thanks to the bacteria is surely in order” because, as Bellah explains, “The Age of Bacteria transformed the earth from a cratered moonlike terrain of volcanic glassy rocks into the fertile planet in which we make our home
  • The DNA in cells presaged a fundamental trait of biological life—an ability to conserve its past and to introduce change into the past. Indeed, in evolution, something like “agency” comes into the world, an ability of a cell not only to adapt to its environment but to shape and respond to its environment.
  • Thanks to these prophets, we humans are free to think and act in terms of “universals.” Prompted by revelations unique to the human scene, religion provides its believers with a platform for understanding truth and duty that cannot be reduced to genetic origins or the commands of the powerful.
  • From the Big Bang to an Einstein and the Internet, there intervened a lot of unpredictable evolution of atoms into self-conscious organisms. Strangest of all, came human creatures who could describe and take account of this universal history, who have been freed to be in direct, living relation to the world
  • Bellah liberates us to live more consciously in a home affirmed for us in Psalm 8: “all the earth.” In their accounts of our common humanity, Isaiah, Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius freed us, in mind, spirit, and heart, for caring about each other and also a universe. We are part of this universe. We have been equipped to study, love, and know gratitude for the whole of it
• Review : The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong : Books : The Guardian
  • Life is a bastard, and then you are dead: this is a basic philosophy of religion available to all of us.
  • So systems of religion flourish: they reveal their inadequacies, and in their collapse, leave behind a residue for some new experiment in imagination: in turn that collapses, and so on, until often all that is left is a profound and rueful silence. But human beings still feel the wonder
  • in all statements about God there must be paradox and silence - a sense of the absurdity of us poor mortals talking at all about such things
  • The Jaspers thesis is a baggy monster, which tries to bundle up all sorts of diversities over four very different civilisations, only two of which had much contact with each other during the six centuries
  • I suggest (hardly originally) that we are seeing an optical illusion in the apparent start of the axial age
  • scepticism or mysticism don't generally require or leave much infrastructure. Only gradually did the sceptics and mystics usurp the aristocrats, hierarchical priests and bureaucrats who had invented writing, got their hands on the new technology and recorded their thoughts. Over the previous millennia all is now silence, because we cannot now hear the cacophony. Human beings have been physically much the same and have enjoyed the same brain capacity for around 150,000 years. It is to exercise the worst sort of condescension of posterity to think that only in the last 3,000 of those long years did humankind jack itself up to think creatively and variously about the tragedy of existence

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