Quote:
Originally Posted by Pedestrian
Terror Management Theory suggests that religion (and culture) developed as a tool to comfort the human mind when confronted with its own mortality; the idea is that being a species that can foresee our deaths and be preoccupied with the prospect, religion was developed to help keep us from coming unglued about knowing we're all going to die.
It is of course a theory, but studies indicate that feelings of mortality and one's strength of beliefs are linked; if subjects have their mortality made salient in an experiment and are afterwards prompted openly or covertly about their thoughts on other cultures, people tend to feel stronger in their own beliefs and feel more threatened and closed-off by those of anyone else.
|
That's probably a contributing factor, but I think anthropomorphization goes a long way too. Even when biologists discuss evolution, they often refer to it as goal-seeking or otherwise give evolution human characteristics (she even has a persona: mother nature). They don't literally mean that evolution is human-like, but it's the easiest language you can quickly grab to convey concepts.
Most religions ascribe very human-like characteristics to their gods in both appearance and behavior. Particularly characteristics of the male patriarchy (power, jealousy, moral authority) which, I guess, isn't surprising, given that males ruled the sociopolitical religious sphere for so long in human history.
Another interesting theory that's probably not true is bicameralism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
Which basically ascribes the voice of god to our early development of language and our inability to decipher our own voices from external voices (also possibly the mechanism for schizophrenia).