No, wait! Surely you're just kidding, right?
Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.
That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.
Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.
On the other hand, would we recognize a chimpanzee religion as such if we saw it?
1 comment:
I can agree on many fronts that religion is just imagination, but I think it can still be just as "real" as anything else in this world; Since it is purely metaphysical, and completely personal.
No matter how it manifests, I believe that since the inception of organized religion - tainted by the touch of man - has been in place to control the vast majority of the population.
I'll be covering religion extensively in the coming weeks. I hope you have time to stop by my blog and take a look:
diablogical.wordpress.com
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