What makes religions so sticky?

REFERENCES

1. Wynot, J. (2002). Monasteries without Walls: Secret Monasticism in the Soviet Union, 1928-39. Church History, 71(1), 63-79. Retrieved March 13, 2021, from 1. www.jstor.org.
2. Madsen, R. (2013). Religion under Communism, 2. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, Retrieved March 13, 2021, from 2. www.oxfordhandbooks.com.
3. Froese, P. (2004). Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43(1), 35–50.
4. Smith, S. R. (2011). Religion under Communism: State Regulation, Atheist Competition, and the Dynamics of Supply and Demand, The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, Retrieved March 13, 2021, from 4. www.oxfordhandbooks.com.
5. Magli, G. Sirius and the project of the megalithic enclosures at Gobekli Tepe. Nexus Netw J 18, 337–346 (2016).
6. Rossano, M. J. (2006). The religious mind and the evolution of religion. Review of General Psychology, 10(4), 346–364.
7. Barham, L. S. (2002). Systematic Pigment Use in the Middle Pleistocene of South‐Central Africa. Current Anthropology, 43(1), 181–190.
8. Porr, M. (2010). The Hohle Fels “Venus”: Some Remarks on Animals, Humans and Metaphorical Relationships in Early Upper Palaeolithic Art. Rock Art Research, 27(2), 147–159.
9. Guthrie, Stewart. (1980). A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Current Anthropology – CURR ANTHROPOL.
10. Barrett, J. L. (2000). Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29–34.
11. Atran, S., Henrich, J. The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions. Biol Theory 5, 18–30 (2010).
12. Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 243-259.
13. Gergely G, Nádasdy Z, Csibra G, Bíró S. Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition. 1995 Aug;56(2):165-93.
14. Johnson, S. C., Booth, A., & O’Hearn, K. (2001). Inferring the goals of a nonhuman agent. Cognitive Development, 16(1), 637–656.
15. Kapogiannis D, Barbey AK, Su M, Zamboni G, Krueger F, Grafman J. Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Mar 24;106(12):4876-81.
16. Atran, S., Henrich, J. The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions. Biol Theory 5, 18–30 (2010).
17. Boyer, P. and Ramble, C. (2001), Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 25: 535-564.
18. Norenzayan, Ara & Atran, Scott & Faulkner, Jason & Schaller, Mark. (2006). Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives. Cognitive science. 30. 531-53.

TRANSCRIPT

After coming to power the Bolsheviks under Lenin instituted state atheism and sought to overthrow existing religious institutions through antireligious campaigns.

Through dissemination of state sponsored propaganda and educational reforms aimed at fostering secular culture, it systematically reduced the influence of religious institutions.

The state arrested, exiled and killed religious leaders and seized assets of the Orthodox Church.
The campaign reached its genocidal peak under Stalin who shared Lenin’s vision of a godless utopia. He instituted an “Atheistic five-year plan” to completely eradicate religion from the Soviet Union. Those five years from 1932 to 1937, is now known as the Great Purge.

According to the soviet historian Alexander Yakovlev nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns were murdered during the Great Purge (1). Many priests were sent to forced labour camps, religious schools were banned outright and anti-religious education in schools intensified.

The number of Orthodox churches dwindled from nearly 46,000 before the October Revolution to a few hundred in 1939. However, in the 1937 soviet census, over 56 percent of the population said they were religious believers (3).

The state’s relationship with the Orthodox Church took a miraculous turn in 1941, shortly after Nazi Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler’s army had reopened churches in the territory it had captured to garner local support.

Stalin promptly decommissioned all organs of anti-religious propaganda and reopened churches. In 1943, Stalin met with the de facto patriarch of the Orthodox Church (Patriarch Sergius I) and offered to help revive the church in exchange for its support of the war effort, and he accepted. Patriarch Sergius I was elected by a Council of Bishops (formed with the permission of Stalin) as the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. The position had been vacant for 18 years since 1925, when elections were banned by Stalin’s government.

In the end, the Orthodox Church and organised religion outlasted the Soviet Union. Not only in the Soviet Union but in China, Cuba, Hungary, and Poland attempts at forced secularisation failed miserably (4).

What makes religion so resilient and able to thrive in the human psyche? What makes it stick?
Lenin believed that religion was a tool of the bourgeois, crafted to justify their exploitation of the working class. Karl Marx believed that religion was an illusion subscribed to by the proletariat to ease the pain of despondency.

Similarly, religion is considered either a prescientific method of truthfinding – explaining how universe came to be, how it works and what our place is within it or conversely as wishful thinking, a way to deal with existential angst – the feeling of isolation, the apparent meaninglessness of life or the inevitability of death.

None of these theories fully explain religious thinking, a phenomenon which can be divided into its experiential component (the perceived presence of supernatural agents) and doctrinal component (the belief in stories with no evidence). A good theory also needs to explain why anthropologists have discovered religion in every society, no matter how isolated and why religion has been with us for a very, very long time.

The oldest temple ever discovered, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, believed to have been built to celebrate the appearance of the star Sirius is 12,000 years old (5).

Evidence for belief in animal and human spirits, in the form of cave paintings (6), and ritualized burials( like those involving red ochre, a natural red earth pigment (7), Venus figurines (8) and animal bones) extend back tens of thousands of years, suggesting that religious thinking is much older, and was possibly present in our hominin cousins like the Neanderthals.

Moreover, we reinvent religions all the time. It is estimated that Two or three religions are created every day. All of this has led researchers to theorize than human minds are particularly susceptible to religious thinking due to its Darwinian roots – specifically, evolutionarily adaptive features of cognition.

The most predominant, culturally universal feature of religion are concepts of supernatural agents – gods, elves, fairies, angels, goblins and demons. And more and more in newer religions, aliens. Why do we perceive agency where there isn’t any?

In 1980, a paper published by anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued that religious thinking is an extension of practical human cognition. Humans have an ability to attribute beliefs, goals, intentions, and emotions to others. We now know that evolution endowed many species with this piece of cognitive software, because it helps predict the behavior of others. This ability called theory of mind is particularly powerful and appears early in life in humans.

In his landmark paper, Guthrie examined how this cognitive software responds to mysterious natural phenomenon. For much of human history, at times, what appears to be harmless phenomenon – the rustling of leaves, sound of the wind, or twigs snapping could have been a predator or, given that fact that in prehistory, human societies consisted of warring tribes, a murderous intruder.

Someone who perceived agency in ambiguous events had an advantage over someone who couldn’t be bothered to investigate. A non-trivial adaptation that natural selection acted on in shaping human cognition.

In a majority of instances, the ambiguous phenomena were actually harmless, and you would be correct most of the time to perceive them as such, but every once in a while when a mistake was made, you paid with your life and your genes were removed from the genepool. As Guthrie puts it, a real enemy justifies a hundred false alarms.

Since being prejudiced towards perceiving agency was evolutionarily advantageous, humans came to possess a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device.

In an experiment done in the 1940s, researchers FRITZ HEIER and MARIANNE SIMMEL showed subjects in a 2 1/2 minute video involving 3 geometrical shapes – a large triangle, a small triangle and a circle. In the video, the shapes move around the screen, and interact with each other and a rectangular house fitted with a door. When asked to describe what they had seen, a large majority of the participants described the shapes as intentional agents, and in most cases as humans.

More than half of the subjects came up with a complete story for what had happened involving among others a husband’s confrontation with his adulteress wife and her boyfriend, a mom who is angry at her two kids for coming home late or an argument between a husband and wife over child.

People also readily attributed personalities to the shapes, sometimes with surprising uniformity. For example, 97% of the people thought the big triangle was a quarrelsome bully.
How much we anthropomorphise is a reflection of our evolutionary past – a time when to a human, nothing was more important than other humans – because they were indispensable allies and the most dangerous enemies. Given that this evolutionary past made us who we are, it is not surprising that people hear voices in the wind and see faces in clouds, sometimes even ones that are familiar.

In 1996, an employee at a coffee shop in Nashville saw the likeness of Mother Teresa in a Cinnamon bun which has come to be called the Nun-Bun. People have seen the likeness of Jesus in just about every kind of food including – potato chips, Cheetos, fish sticks, bananas, naan breads, and pizzas. Two finds are worth mentioning – Pirate Jesus on a taco and angry Jesus on a pita bread. “I can’t believe I died for you ungrateful sons if bitches”.

The tendency to overattribute agency appears to be hardwired because we see evidence for it in infants. Children as young as 12 months perceive geometrical figures on screens as having goals (Gergely G, Nádasdy Z, Csibra G, Bíró ).

At 15 months old, children can infer the goal of a puppet that they saw fail at a task and perform the task successfully. FMRI studies have shown that people consistently engage their theory of mind regions of the brain when talking about gods intentions or god’s level of involvement in our lives.

Ofcourse, not all personal ghosts in the attic or imaginary friends birth religions. And that’s because successful gods and spirits, just like successful movie or game characters have to be embedded in persuassive backstories.

Having studied hundreds of religions, anthropologists have discovered a curious fact true to stories in almost all of their doctrines. Most of the concepts in religious texts are mundane.
As the anthropologist Scott Atran points out, much of what happens in the famous religious stories – the Bible, the Koran, Mahabharatam or Ramayana are ordinary. People walking, eating, talking, fighting, sleeping etc. (Atran, S., Henrich, 2010).

The bits of these texts that are out of the ordinary are usually a few nuggets of minimally counterintuitive concepts. A bush that is on fire but not consumed by it, a flying horse, a man who is ooo so big, so absolutely huge or has so many extra limbs he can’t possibily put them to good use.

The most successful religions prop up the progenitor of the universe, the creator of it’s cosmic expanses and its quantum weirdness on minimally counterintuitive concepts. There is no reason our ape brains should be able to comprehend much less know the mind of god. So shouldn’t the most successful god concepts be bizarre, bordering on incomprehensible?

It turns out that successful religions are made of not the most seemingly accurate, or sophisticated stories but the most memorable ones. Stories that can thrive in the human psyche, be recounted easily and and thus, be transmitted to more hosts.

Minimally counterintuitive (barrett 2000) refers to a particular template of concepts that does this especially well. According to the anthropologist Pascal Boyer the template has certain peculiar features.

Firstly, most supernatural religious concepts conform to a certain domain or category – either person, artifact, animal, inanimate natural object, plant etc. These categories are distinguished based on the set of ontological principles that we can apply to them. For example we can apply biological principles like growth and metabolism to persons, animals and plants, those of self propulsion to animals and persons but not plants and principles of psychology only to persons.

The domain is the part of a religious concept that is intuitive and familiar and when an object is identified as belonging to a domain it activates a rich network of beliefs and expectations related to that domain in our minds. A flying horse belongs to the domain horse. The concept horse comes installed with the tacit ideas that it is an animal, lives on land usually deserts or grasslands, has four legs, can be ridden, can run fast etc.

Secondly, MCI concepts explicitly violate certain core expectations associated with these domain concepts. For example, it’s an elephant but this one’s white. or the concept tranfers a feature from one domain to another. Transferring the features wings and flight from it’s intuitive domain – birds to the domain horse creates a flying horse. Transferring speech from it’s intuitive domain – persons, to the counterintuitive domain trees, creates a talking tree.

A person with human a like mind except they defy laws of physics – can turn invisible and move through solid objects is a variant of this template found in many cultures. So is a person who cares about everything we humans care about except he can be everywhere at once, see everything, including the past and the future, and knows everything.

In a study by Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble, participants were asked to read a story about a diplomat who is about to be sent as an ambassador to a distant galaxy called Zenon 3. He visits a local museum to get an idea of what to expect in this alien galaxy.

Some of the objects and persons in the museum are similar to what you would find on Earth, intuitive and familiar. for example – objects made by people as a hobby and people who don’t like being bossed around.

The other objects were bizarre to various extents – for example, objects that hide away when they’re scared and people you put together with a screwdriver. The participants were asked to recall the list of objects and persons in the museum shortly after they had read the story and after 3 months. In samples from the United States, France, Gabon and Nepal, people recalled minimally counterintuitive items more than completely intuitive items or maximally counterintuitive ones.

Explicit violations of expectations about an item seems to be attention arresting leading to better memorization. However, items did not become more memorable the more bizarre they became. After a sweet spot, memorability dropped. It seems concepts that are too bizarre are less memorable because unlike MCI concepts, they fail to activate a network of familiar domain ideas and require too much cognitive effort to memorize.

The fact that concepts in religious texts, folk tales and myths conform to the template that is naturally most memorable, suggests that these stories are products of selection in human brains extending back several generations. Religion, much like language or music is part of what it means to be human.

Which is why projects that look to rid the world of religion are bound to fail.