Littlebangtheories’s Blog

Part 2

Running with the ideas of religion evolution from my last post…

the parent child hierarchy is strongest in the middle classes…it almost defines it ( read my post on classes and how ‘expectations’ define the classes in the simplest of abstractions)

well…duh…religion must be strongest in the middle classes then.Why I never thought of that simple maths before.

Thomas Barnett has been predicting the rise of the middlle classes through Globilization and the Religion having a piggy back revival through that rise.I’ve been reading his posts blankly while knowing intimately that the Middle classes in Pakistan are the most religious of all the classes.

Pious through success ( like the Dutch in the 17th century)  , religious because of the forces I have described in all my Religion evolution posts.

Welcome  to the religious century.The Brits had their Victorian era with the rise of the middle classes…so will the Chinese ( who may increasingly choose Christianity as a middle class option) and the also the Turks ( Erdogan and the rise of the economy / middle classes there ).

Also …the Arab discontent is aligned the youthful demographics and poised to peak with the aging of the bulge ( TB’s thinking here..exceptional thinker as ever ) and then dissipate with aging.

But I see Saudis rise from Nomadic peoples to stratified and rapidly rising Middle classes as the key as the fertile ground and carrier for the Wahabbi contagion.

Religion has still some headway to make..its on the march upwards.If the UK is any indicator..it takes a  100 years of growth to become pass the secular tipping point.Economic growth creates security = less stress within the parent-child hierarchy = no psychic stress to cause religion in the first place = atheism.

Re-introduce stress ( war ) = child -parent stress= re-surgence of religion= more larger society = re-growth  ( unfortunately ..larger forces at play that are not allowing  this process to continue in Somalia and Afghanistan ).

Just a slightly better abstraction of my earlier posts/theories on the cause of religion.

Parent -child hierarchy ( non existant in Hunter gatherers ) causes  the child to subjugate a part of their Self to the authority of the larger outer force ( the parent(= private authority figure vs God/king = public authority figure )) .This causes a great sense of injury/violation to  the biological sense of innate fairness ( the insula becomes the address that remembers this loss and is the seat of negative emotions ).

In tight close packed communities ..such as caves ..or denser villages/hamlet/ towns….this loss causes a pyschic trace damage within which the biological( hardware)  sense of fairness..the personal sense of fairness gives way to an imaginary ( software ) re-institution of that sense of fairness..but in a public application…ie Religion.Headed by an idealised authority figure who is public as well .

Simply put….A LOSS OF PERSONAL  OWNED BIOLOGICAL FAIRNESS ( hardware) is replaced by A PUBLICLY OWNED AND OPERATED SENSE OF FAIRNESS ( software )

The original reason to cut the child down to size is to alleviate the pressures of close high density living …allowing larger groups to aggregate.The loss of fairness is replaced by the public version which re-inforces the ability of the group to live in close quarters.

The child Parent hierarchy then lends itself to the ‘layerfication’ of society as  once the ‘hardware ‘ for individuality is broken….mass conducted human behaviour by small groups of authority figures becomes enabled.

The pyramidally structured society is born.