Religion Explained

Religion Explained
May 2001, Random House (UK) and Basic Books (USA).
Pascal Boyer

(review)
The main theme of this book is that we now have a better understanding of religious representations, their causes and their role in human cognition, simply because we have a better and more precise understanding of the mind-brain, its evolution, its structure and its specific dispositions.

To understand religion, it may be a good thing to know what it is. (It is striking how few discussions of religion actually follow that principle). For example, most religion in the world is not about God, bot about immortality, and not about being rewarded for being good. The religions we are familiar with are only a small selection in a larger repertoire of supernatural ideas.

People do not have religion because there is a specific need for it, or a special part of the brain that creates religion. Religious ideas and norms happen to be highly "contagious" given the kinds of brains we humans have. You cannot hope to understand religion if you do not understand what is happening in the "mental basement": that is, in all sorts of cognitive processes that our conscious inspection cannot reach.



More detail...
http://artsci.wustl....r/BoyerBook.htm

(review)
The clearest virtue of this book is that of dealing with the real thing. Even today, most scholarly work on religion consists of apologetics in one form or another, and we are deluged by offers of grants to study “spirituality” or teach “religion and science”. This all serves to make us forget that religion is a collection of fantasies about spirits, and Boyer indeed aims to teach us about the world of the spirits in the grand tradition of the Enlightenment. Any general introduction to the world of the spirits must be ambitious because it hasn’t been done and also because it has been done intuitively by all of us.

More...
http://human-nature....s/02/boyer.html

In any discussion of religion, it's important to keep it tied to the following context, elaborated in a provocative essay written by Max More back in 1990, and revised in 1996. While I understand that a capacity for having any reasonable sense of the future may disappear in the next 15 to 40 years, I still think that having one is useful for keeping our individual and collective needs, values, goals and interests in perspective.

Here's the preamble ...

Religion, Eupraxophy, and Transhumanism

Humanity is in the early stages of a period of explosive expansion in knowledge, freedom, intelligence, lifespan, and wisdom. Yet our species persists in old conceptual structures and processes which act as a drag on progress. One of the worst is religious thinking. In this essay I will show how religion acts as an entropic force, standing against our advancement into transhumanity and our future as posthumans. At the same time I will acknowledge the necessary and positive role that religions have played in giving meaning and structure to our lives. The alternative to religion is not a despairing nihilism, nor a sterile scientism, but transhumanism. Humanism, while a major step in the right direction, contains too many outdated values and ideas. Extropianism, the principal form of transhumanism, moves beyond humanism, focusing on our evolutionary future. (emphasis mine)

The emphasis I've added reinforces the principle of extracting and transforming what is real, true, good, right and pure by objective standards into a sensible alternative. As the title suggests, the crucial link between religion and transhumanism is eupraxophy ...