/siberia/ - Off-topic

it's on my watchlist already :)

it was a good vid, already watched it
>TL;DR babies arent born with religious beliefs but by 3.5 they develop a theory of mind, including a theory of mind for dead things
>they have to be socialized into believing specific religious ideas
>non-religiosity is surprisingly "sticky" and persists across generations in the same family through socialization even if the person themselves wasn't raised to be explicitly nonreligious. This is because modern 1st world societies subconsciously indoctrinates new generations into secular humanism.

it's a bit more nuanced than that but i'm going off memory here. watched it like 4 hours ago

>>801380
theres a part where he talks about superstitious beliefs and their link to childrens brains having difficulty to discern objects from agents, and that this is actually an evolutionary hiccup we have from prehistoric times, that made me think, if scared superstitious people are more likely to survive in nature, could it be that humans naturally evolved to be more religious? it mustve had at least some impact on our society right?

>>801429
superstitions are really just pattern recognition making false associations because of not having enough information, pretty much. other animals can be pretty readily develop similar "superstitious" behavior, not specifically a human thing. religion is though, because it entails having a narrative passed down through language which no other known animals have.

>>801429
that's probably just one of many reasons

>coping with death
>keeping the community together through shared belief
>ritually burying the dead instead of just letting their corpse lay around prevents disease
>ritual prayer and meditation reminds you to stop think about your actions and the impact they will have, and to consider the other people in your life and what they are going through
>you are more motivated to do complex social things like build temples and record the history of your society and ancestors if you believe the gods want you to do it
>if you think the gods are watching you and judging you morally then you can't really hide your bad actions even when you are by yourself and nobody is really watching. so you act as if the gods are watching at all times, and hold back your more cutthroat animalistic instincts to crush others for quick gain
>if humanity has some kind of ultimate purpose then you have a reason to care about future generations after you are gone, and to "plant trees whose fruit you won't be around to taste" so to speak
>the origin of the universe, matter and energy are genuinely confusing and so hypothesizing that matter came from the ultimate mind is actually pretty intuitive and it's unsurprising materialism is less intuitive at that pre-scientific stage of history
>religion enables you to abstract and symbolize things beyond the literal, leading to the invention of numbers and writing.