Littlebangtheories’s Blog

This is my angle ..

Hunter Gatherers have the lightest density footprint and have a flat hierarchy , little or no religion and a looser or no specific bonding between children and parents( unstratified) .They are the baseline of our evolution.
Tribes have lineages ( requires a strong child-parent bond) and require alot of co-operation ,leadership , division of clans = hierarchy ) to compete with other tribes ( high population density) .Hunter Gatherers skim of the landscape and can only exist in a low density pattern.

The Toba event caused the population worldwide to decrease synchronously 60k years ago
and the population increases thereafter synchronised the rise of religions/civilisations
to the last 30k years as population densities recovered.

The first border war we fight as individuals is for the personal/self space we feel that
is ours.An authority figure will puncture this space and demand modulation to your behavioural
output ( the same pathway that makes you vunerable to hypnotherapy in later life…I’m sure Hunter
Gatherers are not hypnotizable ).This involves a loss of self and a gain for the larger group.
The benefits to the larger group eventually accrue back to the individual..which is why religion is so sucessful..This border skirmish is usually a singular event and the parent always win .They are larger physically ( as is God) , all powerful as compared to the child ( as God is), and can punish and withhold their love…all attributes of Gods.
If the insecurity of that breach causes you to seek more security , you are a right -winger ( good for the group).
If it causes some insecurity but only enough for you to despise the cause of the insecurity..
you will become a revolutionary , anarchist anti-authoutarian personality ( no good for
the group).If the insecurity leaves you in neither camp..you can empathise both ways ..you become a
liberal.
If you seek spirituality from a sense of weakness within..you will seek the comfort of the
the establised ‘ church’.This is a religious person in the fullest sense ( a follower , never a prophet)
A spiritual person …has a sense that the locus of the events that matter in a religious sense…are
within them selves..( quite correctly) and not in institutions..more the individual.
These people are irrelevent to the group hierarchy but become nucleators when a large grouping needs to re-align and politically re-define itself.These spiritiual nucleators are always around , but at oppurtune times , the larger group will re-orient itself using a nucleator …a new prophet is born.

The left+up vs the right+down arena of the brain and the relationship of these two are the backbone
for this interplay .

3rd post

I was going by Alan MacFarlane’s description of Hunter Gatherer societies.( less to no religion ..less to no heirarchy …both not characteristics of large scale societies)
I’ve tried an overall wide arc-ing view.Its not binary choices anywhere along the line…
but I expect less religion in early populations as density decreases and religion as positively present in every large scale/ high density grouping.
We evolved under the environmental pressure of other human beings ( we were the environment ) ..so even under conditions 150k + years ago..we had already been exposed to population pressure.( smaller bodies but stable brain sizes indicate that) .But its close proximity living that causes religion.
And religion itself then helps close proximity living.
After a certain tipping point..the Religious memes would have fought each other into existence ( less organised Tribal , Hunter Gatherers get swept aside )..leaving aside a meme ( religion ) that is propagating itself.