Do you think humans are born with some sort of need for spirituality?

I was thinking about this the other day and I'm come to the conclusion that some of us must be.  What led me to this was the thought "How is it that there has always been some sort of spirituality in almost all cultures?"

What I mean by that is that even in the most remote tribe of humans on  the most isolated continents, humans had adopted a form of religion, ie the native indian spiritual culture, tribes deep in jungles and in aboriginals in Australia.

What are your thoughts on this?

I don't think we are born with that urge, to imagine supernatural causes for the world we see, but it is only natural that especially in prehistoric times people couldn't cope with the environment and give explanations for physical phenomena (lightning, earthquake, the rain, the sun etc.). But as all being we are creatures who need protection from things we cannot understand and from ignarance which creates fear. The natural tendency is to first seek the answers from somebody else (ie gods) and not to search the answers ourselves.

On a foot note I will say that this god has to be superior in nature, the way off-course we choose to depict him, because we unconsciously want to trust our questions to something which will not be wrong in any case and since we as humans make mistakes, the only way we can feel that the answers we receive from the imagined gods are correct is if the imageries of those gods are perfect, unattainable in nature (ie better) and superior. But from the minute we conceived the idea of gods we actually used our own capability to understand the world. Hence that the character of gods especially in ancient times was not much different from the people who created him/her/them. That's why ancient religions were flat-out fairy-tales and very simple in nature and represented what the people needed to know at that time.

Another reason why we feel the urge to have superior gods in my very personal opinion is just a substitute of parenthood. Besides all the physical phenomena that were turned into gods were great in size and made a huge impression on primitive men and women so the cause had to be something equivalently great and terrible in the cases such as the earthquake and thunder or something else.

Now when a god has the role to be related to concepts and notions such as morality, death and life that's because these are things thatare beyond the scope of the physical world and thus we have gods who exist beyond the physical realm as well. But the non-physical realm as well is something unknown and causes fear, so the god who "dwells" in such properties has to be even greater and non-defiable, just because a human cannot defy what he cannot know while living in the physical realm. But in the process of creating a god who knows what is beyond the physical realm we ourselves start imogining and presumingwhat there is outside the physical realm and attribute this "knowledge" to the god so as this knowledge to acquire validity.

Historically viewing the subject, gods in ancient times where compensating for the lack of understanding of simple things such as physical phenomena, which as time passed and became understood, gods turned into thoughts that handled more complex issues such as morality, ethics and deep meaning of life. As time passes by more and more things will be conceivable and understandable and gods will be shifting their roles to what humanity needs because of what lack it faces.

Much like a person needs a parent to be guided, that's how humanity collectively needs a god in its first steps.

Metaphorically speaking, 10000 years ago when humanity was at it's early childhood it needed parent-gods that explained the very simple things. 2500 years ago humanity was right before puberty and had different concerns and that's how gods like the Christian god appeared (preceded by the ancient greek gods who although did not realy answered to issues like moralit, still we see from the philosophers of that time that such issues were important, and off-course ancient greek philosophers were one of the sources of Christianity) who dealt with deeper issues. Then in the Dark Ages humanity reached it'spuberty and after it it should have matured enough to start thinking about not needing parents but...

Those are just my thoughts. I hope my answer was relevant.

I think fear is the cause of religion
when we die our mind memories and opinions will all be lost and our remains eaten by worms/turned into ashes

that end is scary so people picture rebirth or heaven/hell to cope better


its in some peoples DNA to be religious
I read it in a monthly science magazine

Wow, long post there Teenaged. But I agree (yes I actually read it).Stryder1212

"How is it that there has always been some sort of spirituality in almost all cultures?"

I don't think we're born with some sort of need for spirituality. We are born as rational beings. We search for answers to the unknown and spirituality happens to somewhere a lot further down this road with lots of other stufffs like god etc somewhere along the way...

Not all cultures started their journey at the same time. When one group of people comes up with the idea of a supreme concious being, they pass it on to other tribes and thus how it spreads to other cultures, I think, and I doubt any tribes back in those times had the intelect to think otherwise or disprove anything abut these claims.

I think Teenaged's explanation is clear enough.

Thanks for the responses.  I think I'd agree with Teenaged.  Nice analogy about humans progressing through "life" and maturing.

"Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God" - Cicero

I think the word spirituality is more exact to the original meaning than "the idea of God" because of the modern connotations of the phrase in question. There definitely lies some truth to the statement in that nature in all its complexity does attract religious explanations. I also believe people are more complete if they are informed and have made the conscious decision to trust in something based on that information - atheism being one alternative.

"Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God" - Cicero

 

inoperativeRS

Religion was invented by people to explain the unexplainable.helium_flash

I think people are just vulnerable to the kind of stimulation religion has.  These tribe's you're discussing are most likely just seeing the things around them, can't explain them, and figuring must be a god or spirit(s) or whatever controlling the weather/situation they're in.  

Religion is undeniably there to make you feel warm and happy about yourself even if you've screwed up, or most of them are so who wouldn't be drawn to this kind of feeling?   In that case, where we have a need to feel happy and content, I guess you could say there is a need for spirituality.  Is that reality though?  I do not think so, there are too many different religions for only one to be right, and that just leads me even further away from religion.

Here is a nice metaphor from the realm of evolutionary psychology before it was ever really called such:

There were test done on pigeons and what they would do for rewards (food.)  During some of the tests food was designed to be released when the bird did a certain action.  There birds naturally were conditioned to perform the task.  This could be comparable to people learning how the world works and using it for their benefit.  

Now where it gets really interesting is in another group; instead of food being triggered by the birds actual behavior, the food is dropped at random intervals.  The thing is, the birds still thought it was due to something they did.  So they would try and mimic certain behaviors to make it happen again.  Essentially, the pigeons became superstitious and developed rituals.  Some birds would repeat funny actions with their heads, others turned counterclockwise for no reason, so on and so forth.  All these actions were completely frivolous, but it nicely shows how ignorant creatures try to understand and manipulate the world.

I think this is the reason why religion originates in different areas, but there are many more reasons why/how they develop and are passed on. 

Here is a little more detailed explaination of the story for anyone interested:  http://psychcla$$ics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/

Hmmmmm you have to change the "$" to "s"s, due to gamespot formating.

I was thinking about this the other day and I'm come to the conclusion that some of us must be. What led me to this was the thought "How is it that there has always been some sort of spirituality in almost all cultures?"

AnObscureName

It's natural to fill the gap of something unknown with something ridiculous because that person doesn't have the knowledge to figure out the real answer. Think of a caveman: they must've thought that a god was responsible for causing fire as well as raising the sun every morning. Today we know that both of those are false. Ancient civilization fits with an ancient belief system.

As the years go by we are seeing religions getting more and more irrelevant due to the ever increasing pool of scientific knowledge. You can't have ancient beliefs but also appreciate how far science has brought us. Even the youngest religion, Sikhism, has ancient beliefs because some of them were borrowed from another religion.

*post*Sitri_

Wow, that's extremely interesting! 

[QUOTE="Sitri_"]*post*Forerunner-117

Wow, that's extremely interesting! 

[QUOTE="Forerunner-117"]

[QUOTE="Sitri_"]*post*Teenaged

Wow, that's extremely interesting! 

As a matter of fact we're pretty much the same way... Bloody humans!:P

[QUOTE="Teenaged"][QUOTE="Forerunner-117"]

[QUOTE="Sitri_"]*post*7guns

Wow, that's extremely interesting! 

As a matter of fact we're pretty much the same way... Bloody humans!:P

I think it's natural for us to fear what we don't understand.  And having a higher power that dictates what happens in our life and what will happen after we die can help us cope with said fear.  So, yes, to answer your question. 

On a foot note I will say that this god has to be superior in nature, the way off-course we choose to depict him, because we unconsciously want to trust our questions to something which will not be wrong in any case and since we as humans make mistakes, the only way we can feel that the answers we receive from the imagined gods are correct is if the imageries of those gods are perfect, unattainable in nature (ie better) and superior. But from the minute we conceived the idea of gods we actually used our own capability to understand the world. Hence that the character of gods especially in ancient times was not much different from the people who created him/her/them. That's why ancient religions were flat-out fairy-tales and very simple in nature and represented what the people needed to know at that time.

Teenaged

[QUOTE="Teenaged"]

On a foot note I will say that this god has to be superior in nature, the way off-course we choose to depict him, because we unconsciously want to trust our questions to something which will not be wrong in any case and since we as humans make mistakes, the only way we can feel that the answers we receive from the imagined gods are correct is if the imageries of those gods are perfect, unattainable in nature (ie better) and superior. But from the minute we conceived the idea of gods we actually used our own capability to understand the world. Hence that the character of gods especially in ancient times was not much different from the people who created him/her/them. That's why ancient religions were flat-out fairy-tales and very simple in nature and represented what the people needed to know at that time.

Elraptor

It puzzles me too, how such gods like the gods of the ancient greek ones (who can be considered in cases as very bad role-models) were in "reign" in a time where philosophers  suggested ways of life a hundred times more moral than their gods' characters!

Judging very arbitrary in this case by my own people's attributes in modern Greece, I would say that the devine world is one largely built for amusement and one that gives opportunities to start basic societal formations for the Greeks. I mean if you read Hesiode's version of the genesis of the universe, it's like watching a block-buster movie :P. Off-course the excitement and the supernatural themes exists in every ancient religion but imo the Greeks were trying also to entertain themselves through religion. They had imo no restriction to break barriers as to how they will use religion.

I don't know when exactly or how, but surely at the time of Socrates the gods played no significant role in the lives of people, other that the festivals, the tragic poetry competitions etc. There is a theory that says that the form and the intensity of a religion is majorly affected by the climate in which the people who started it lived (the same theory goes for language and maybe for the attributes/characteristics of a culture). But I cannot use it to support this because I don't know what heppened in other parts of the Mediterranean Sea at that time.

But I can surely say that Greeks as a people are very happy and somewhat care-free. But only relatively, not totally.

EDIT: Now that I remembered, Socrates had a wife but also a female lover who lived inside his house. Those things were quite acceptable at those times; even homosexuality if I remember correctly. So the examples of the gods were passed into the people, but interestingly enough never affected the society in a way.

Thus sometimes when we talk about imoral acts, it's simply the way we relate to them and the way we do them that makes them harmful to society. Maybe in this case preaching to much about morality (like Christianity) causes even greater immoral actions (not thoughts). I mean it is clear that the Greeks had no effect in their society while doing those things, and we -ironically enough- have been taught that those things mustn't be allowed for the harmony of the society (off course not terribe things like murder but you get what I mean).

EDIT: Now that I look at my answer again I think I got derailed regarding what you actually asked :P . Only the first paragraph is relevant... But so be it...