I could be mistaken but i think i read somewhere that theres some evidence to indicate that religosity is a genetic predisposition. The god gene i think it was called. Could be just that some humans (like myself) need some sort of religion or spiritual system whereas others (like yourself) dont. Maybe asking if humans need religion is a little too general?
The suggestion put forward in
The God Gene, as I read it, is that "spirituality" [as defined and measured by the researcher] is correlated with a particular gene variation.
Extract from Nature vs. nurture "Gay"gene pioneer tackles God Philadephia Gay News, Oct. 1-7, 2004
" [. . .] the "god gene" really is a single gene, VMAT2. It makes a protein that transports monoamines, a chemical in the brain. A single variation in the gene affects people's consciousness or the way they perceive the world, and [Dean] Hamer has linked that to spirituality.
"All of the spiritual people, all of the great spiritual experiences involved seeing reality in a fundamentally different way," he said. "For a lot of people that is tantamount to nuttiness, or schizophrenia, or something like that, but it's a very intimate part of spirituality.
With Paul "on the road to Tarsus" obviously, that was a very dramatic instance of that. Or when Mohammed went flying around in his dreams. But I think that it plays a role in people's everyday life too. Just sitting at the beach, looking at the waves, people can have spiritual experiences and it's because all of a sudden you just see the world in a little bit different light. I think that's pretty cool.
"Everything is not as it normally appears."
"Spirituality is measured by something called the self-transcendence aspect of personality," a category created by psychologists "that looks at things like, to what degree do people identify with the whole world around them, compared to just themselves," he continued. "And to what degree do people feel that everything in the universe is connected by some sort of spiritual force."
When Hamer compared people's behavioral and personality surveys with their DNA, a variation of the VMAT2 gene popped out as having a strong correlation.
"It's interesting, not because it is the gene that makes people believers or not, but because just finding that one gene, we think, tells us something about the whole brain biochemistry of spirituality; he said.
He says that VMAT2 is but one of what may well be hundreds of genes that play a role in spirituality.
Hamer carefully distinguishes between religion and the biological aspect of spirituality.
"Religion is a cultural phenomena where the rules are made up by man or come down from God, depending on your point of view, but they are things that you learn, things that can be changed culturally.
"The interesting thing about cultural stuff is that it is not necessarily stuff that is good for people; its just good for the culture or the organization that creates it. Which gets into the people who profit from it, who are priests and bureaucrats." http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Dean%20Hamer/Hamer%20PGN%20Article/Hamer%20PGN%20Article.html
emphasis mine
It is an interesting piece of research but scarcely qualifies VMAT2 as a "god gene". More interestingly from my personal point of view as an atheist [ yeah, I know, I'm an atheist so sue me
] I would suggest that Hamer's findings are equally supportive of my atheism, (which I would describe as highly spiritual) than of religiosity which, while it may be spiritual for some people is not invariably so. Hamer's findings may be right, but spirituality is not actually the sole property of the religious. However, going back to Kai's OP, the discussion he seems to looking for is not about social hierarchies or spirituality or mythology but specifically about religion and although people are hedging around and are asking for a tighter definition I think that in many ways that is just avoiding the issue.
So my answer Kai is that No, religion is not necessary nor has it ever been. Religion is a learned behaviour and, as writers in this thread have indicated multiple times, could easily be subsumed into other social forms.
Is it relevant in an age where science has superseded its power to explain the universe? Personally I really doubt it though, as one of Dok Howl's comments upthread suggested, if it were to miraculously disappear overnight there would probably be quite a few unhappy campers who would feel a deep lack in their lives if religion wasn't around.
Would Discordianism fit into that
necessity or
lack of and why? For me definitely yes. I first heard about research into a "god gene" back in the late 90's, long before Hamer's paper was published, so there were no real specifics known about what the work was focussed on. The idea of a "god gene" was intriguing though and I was already familiar with Hamer's work on the so-called "gay" gene. This came at a point for me when my ideas on personal, atheistic, spirituality were changing and coalescing around what I'd read about Discordianism. The model of irreligion I eventually adopted for myself came out thinking about how a god gene might actually operate. It seemed obvious to me as an atheist with a very well defined spiritual life that if there were such a thing that it would be more a
spirituality gene than a
god gene. A spirituality gene might help to explain many puzzling things about our complex relationships with ourselves, each other and the universe, whereas a "god-gene" while being a killer title for a provocative, [and still controversial] book really begs more questions than it could answer. Round about the same time I was looking at Discordianism as a "religion" and decided it was like a Polo mint, sweet and mouthwatering but there was a decided hole in the middle where spirituality would fit in a traditional religion. Of course I soon decided it wasn't like that at all but it gave me the idea of trying to find a way of thinking about Discordian "irreligion" as a physical
process entity, as though there really was a god gene. So for the last many years I have taken the view that religion is a physical property of the body, which is common to everybody, and which has receptors in the brain and therefore requires that something fit on those receptors. I don't have anything better to lock onto those receptors so Discordianism will just damn well have to do. Surprisingly I have found that this ridiculous idea actually works for me, it provides a satisfying explanation of my current 'spiritual' situation.
tl;dr jeez but that old biddy is a fruit loop
also @Twid, I always get the impression that Kai is one of the most spiritual people on the forum [Kai, correct me if I've misread that] so I don't think that the religio-spiritual / or not dichotomy applies here.
edit to extend the emphasis
