How People Construct Religions 

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Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. -George Carlin

"I have a dream" that one day people will see the world without the slur of old man tales! I'm not very smart or intelectual but I find it so easy to see a world ruled by logic, science and in our case life given by our sun. I don't pray to the sun, I live with the knowledge that I don't need any devine deity!

Not only are religions man made. But, most religious people I know fail to acknowledge the fact that they don't question their religions. Like the ten commandments, they view the Bible as if its so-called "truths" were literally engraved in stone. And should not be questioned.

Coming from an abusive, religiously corrupt, racist, slaver religion like the hard shell southern Baptist church, it was extremely difficult to let that conditioning go. In this culture I was raped, sexually, physically, and emotionally abused. All at a very young age. It’s taken years of therapy, education and personal endeavor to finally be able to say that I’m free from religion. It’s a scary and sometimes almost impossible challenge to get through it, but I can personally attest that it’s worth it.

*_Religions are created to fill the gaps in human knowledge. Humans have a need to understand the world we live in._* Science accepts what we don't know and looks for the *_REAL_* answers. And they find them all the time! That's why we have flight, trips to the moon, phones, cars and everything else that's useful. God is an intellectual copout! EVERY time religion makes a testable claim, it turns out to be wrong unless it's something trivial like Jerusalem is a real city.

As Dave Warnock said, "we don't remember days, we remember moments"

Religious types believe they know everything while being all perfect. Self righteousness inevitably leads to treachery. An affliction of the weak minded

Well now I know why I talk to trees. Aside from they being better listeners than people.

The thing he missed was that many religions are not created in an altruistic spirit to answer questions of existence. Many were created for the sole purpose of separating people from their money.

The Bible is evidence of religion, not God.

7:00 What's it for? What purpose does it serve? Well, that's to fall prey to exactly the same phenomenon that we're discussing, that is the need to find causation, to find a meaning behind everything.... Our need to find an agent also means we need to find a reason for everything in life

When I told my dad I was an atheist, he said I'd grow out of it, but you can't grow out of something you GREW INTO

It is difficult for city people to understand what nature is. Not in the physical sense, but in the psychological sense'. I think we have to think like the ancient Greeks did or the vikings did. You are sitting on a hill watching the sun go down and a child asks how does it do that. And after thinking about it for days you imagine that the sun is "carried" by a boat to the other side of the world during the night (viking mythology). and you start asking more questions and come up with more ideas. and you build a world of beings (invisible) that rule the world with the same references of your life. The rulers have a father and his wife and brothers and sisters etc. And the have conflicts that cause natural catastrophes like storms, droughts etc. Another point is that we grow up in a family with a person head of the family (a father) and that is imprinted in our way of thinking, so when the family head dies we need a replacement. A replacement that can guide us, lead us and give advice. Many simpler cultures have a council of elders, but that helps only a bit. So cultures established priests as a source for this guidance and the priest needed something to legitimize this position, so spirits and later a pantheon was created. A pantheon of imaginary beings that could explain how the world works and could be contacted for guidance. Just like younger people ask their parents for guidance. Same mechanism. The human mind has a large capacity for imagination and is looking for patterns everywhere.and often makes the mistake to take one incident as a pattern. Finally we must not forget diseases. One disease that most likely has had a great influence is malaria. Malaria often causes nightmares that in uneducated culture let the person believe that a nightmare is something that really happened. Nightmarish dreams create images of strange creatures and ghosts etc. Because malaria can have recurring attacks that can gradually go away if they survive, it leaves a strong impression. In ancient Mesopotamia where some of our religious ideas come from we must also remember that wars was a common thing leaving people with post traumatic stress disorders etc. All these things have contributed to the forming of religion as we know it.

Religion = Mythology

One positive action we could take is simply including critical thinking skills in our public school's curricula.

Science and religion are not enemies. It does not ask you to follow it blindly, if you think it does you probably haven’t done much research or study. Jesus himself said to use evidence and reason to decide for yourself if he’s who he says he is. Many foundations of science were made by religious people who were inspired by the world he made.

It should be why people created religions, not so much as how.

What a clear, thorough communicator.

Beautifully edited clip! well done

This is 100 percent spot on... This is exactly what is happening now in the world. Religious leaders and people who control the masses are trying to revise religion by force... we just have to see right through it 🙌👍

My brother literally stopped using the internet so he can be closer to god. It's sad seeing family members choose ignorance over information.

Cults and religions are all around us. Some less obvious than others. Worship comes from an older word, Worthship. Whatever the highest worth is , that is what is worshipped

0:53 Hearth 0:54 Slid off 0:56 Thud 1:00 Growl 1:29 Startling 2:09 Leprechaun 4:02 Hunch 5:45 Ubiquitous 6:04 exploit 8:44 contingency 10:09 complicit 10:14 Inquisitive 11:17 on the cusp

Great video, but I must register my resistance to Dennett's optimism towards the end: Religious people, in my experience, are usually so indoctrinated that, regardless of intelligence, they're unable or unwilling to question the veracity of their faith. Perhaps they lack courage or honesty, but it seems to me that no amount of exposure to other (ridiculous) belief systems will inspire scepticism of their own (ridiculous) belief system. All of the others are wrong, but not theirs. It's a peculiar, maddening form of anti-intellectualism, and no known cure exists.

loving your videos! please make longer documentaries

Everytime i hear people speaking logically about life it simply makes me feel human!❤

the “why” that never stops asking can not be answered by finite reason because the question is of infinite nature

I firmly believe that, let's say you resue a dog or cat,they think you're a divine being..an angel or a saint. I've worked with them so long,and I know how much else we have in common with them. My apologies to my many Atheist friends, but Spirituality isn't going away anytime soon. I believe we have an evolutionary predisposition to religiosity. It served us far too well for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. The great Afghan -american author,Tamim Ansary said,"faith is as necessary as food and water to human beings". I ascribe to that belief.

Plato wrote the allegory of the cave around the year 345BCE. It's a story of how to get people loyal to you, even to death. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the world, the size of the known land accounting for only half the earth (especially the gold). Fifty years later, the Jewish sect (the jews in Palestine were in real trouble) retreated to the caves and began writing - getting their story straight. To rescue the jews, the continuity between the old testament, the prophets and the new testament were edited into their story. The idea was to keep the people loyal and to give up the profits of their labors to the bosses (church/temple) until such a time as they could use the gold to develop the technology to conquer those "promised lands" and to keep the people to go too far away from land thus preventing an unauthorized discovery of said promised lands. They were also engaged in subversive activities against their government and were all killed before they could get their plan going. It took centuries to salvage the plan. Flat earth stories, sea monster stories and the new testament grew out of this impetus. You don't really think that any of the people who knew about the land (and the gold) were going to tell anyone else, do you? No, they didn't; they invented christianity.

There are things in life that we don't need to know in order to have a good life.

I realized that most secular books about religions were written by highly educated people and were not getting the message to the average person because of the high-level language they use. I wrote “The Creation of Gods and Religions, A Simple Explanation” and “Problems of the Gods, Children to the Rescue” to help reach people at a lower level of education and those that would not read a large book. I believe that religion needs to be challenged.

I agree with most of this video, but the essense of religion creation really comes from the basic element that all mammals share, and that is curiosity. We want to find out, to learn to know things. And the big question hits humans hardest because he is right we communicate. The issue happens of being impatient. We want answers now. And if we dont find them then the next human element takes over, and that is creativity. We simply make up answers. The big question of existance is shared with all human life on earth, and all humans have curiosity and creativity. If we dont get an immediate answer we simply make one up taking what info we do have on hand. Well something bigger must have created everything. A simple answer as shared throughout the world as the ability to get food. I beleive humanity is going through a new phase of evelution, and this one is one of knowledge gathering. More and more people are seeing religion is too easy of answer and we need to be looking for the real answers and are turning away from it.

Man is a measure of all things. And a maker of all man made things and thoughts.

The word Religion, comes from the Latin word- relegare meaning - tie up again in God, so therefore, religion is a relationship with God. It is our reponsibility our relationship to God

LIke it or not, the religious instinct is something that arose as evolving humans began asking "WHO ( not "what") am I and what is the Meaning of it all." That instinct needed expression. And that expression took many forms. That is how religion started. It was a response to something deep in the human psyche.

Religion is talking to yourself

Creates cohesion (and then division)

"Religion was created when the first conman met the first fool". -Mark Twain Unfortunately, the lineage of fools is unending.

Eye Opening

Two plus two is equal to four, Everything else, is Religion.

RIP Daniel Dennett, April 19th, 2024. He is gone but his words and ideas live on.

This is not true at all. I recently translated a pre-histerical text written by the Mamamias of the land just a few miles west of Isreal. Translates as follows: Kregah hits Gungun with big rock on head. Gungun now theist. Gubgun hits Kregah with big rock on head. Kregah now theist. Rinse. Repeat. I know. I was surprised when i finished tranlating it. I used Google translate.

It's all cuz of mind which resides in a complex functional brain. Any species without mind don't need the idea of god ,temple or religion. But always remember humans are not truth seeking animals but social animals. And that's what religion is ... To organise people

Informing doesn't do it. Information has been wide spread for centuries, the Internet has been around for 30 years. Religion is not the result of people being kept in the dark but of people wanting to be there. Priests are only taking advantage of something that's already there.

Guys, the word "religion" implies living with a steady schedule. Sundays start the week, remember?

The foundation of thinking about agency is our innate capacity for envisioning another person's mind when we interact with them. We not only envision other minds but we project them outward to the source which also causes us to project minds onto entities without brains. We evolved to be highly social as our greatest trait for survival which results in our social attributes being over applied to the world.

I ´m a believer and I would say that it is not because "I´m looking for an agent" that I am a deeply believing christian. It is because many factors and observations together, as far as I can analysze, (even if of course I - l ike all other people in the world-can be wrong on several things) point in the direction that at least the main features of classic christian beliefs are probably true. The early christian movment didn´t rise as some philosophical quest to get answers about philosophical matters about a general god of general nature, or an agent as it is put here - but maybe I can describe it more as a response on partly unexpected events in the 1:st century. I do not claim to be able to prove anything. I would be less serious if i did so, but I think that what many people forget is that there are many levels between something being formally proven and just being taken out of thin air. Some things that are not proved can still have many interesting observations making it reasonable to believe or at least se as probably true. To my faith contributes also my own experience. I think there is more to reality as a whole than the directly visible world. Besides that there simply don´t exist practical scientific methods to absolutely prove and understand everything in existence. Some atheists are really much more "fundamentslistic in approach" than some of us christians.

Well, religion and ideology in general are a big problem. Ironically, in 2024 it seems like there is more nonsense ideology around than ever before. The USA is a good example, on one side we have these religious lunatics, and on the other we have people who rightfully dunk on them and then act in the EXACT same way. It's somewhat pathetic, left vs right, blue vs red, woke cult vs religious cult, one ideology vs the other. And it seems like the people who still have some sense left are rare and often shut out of discussion.

Disagree with his eliminative materialism. Largely agree with his view of religion.

Subscribed and shared because of.

So people created God, and not the other way around, and their religion's are the way that the man-made stories are kept alive 😮

At 6:01, you said, "It [religion] survives because it can. It just happens to be able to exploit human hosts and spread... It's not for anything but itself." You then compare it to the common cold. You overlooked an important point: what gives religion the power to exploit human hosts and spread? You need to realize that many people accept religion-and in some cases gravitate towards it- because it seems to help them in some way. Whether or not it does is debatable and irrelevant when understanding how religion spreads. Bottom line: What you said at [6:01] should be rephrased in this way: "It [religion] survives-and originated-because it's appealing to humans; it comes across as something that can help them in some way."

Now you understand why spelling "God" backward is "dog".

When he started talking about memes, he had my vote

The background music is for? Awe.

Step 1. Magic Mushrooms

Tad's moved nearby, Lefty's is eight years gone, Original Joes now in North Beach still has that magic.

Thus we have to remember that beyond conscious desires and conscious ideas concerning the existence of the soul, Man carried unknowingly the impulses of his unconscious and these too were projected into the outer world of spirits and divinities. Then Man's untried intellect made valiant efforts to order and rationalize all his imaginative projections and so devised stories concerning the origin of spirits, gods, and men and their relationships one with another that became a part of the body of belief. -Jacquetta Hawkes, from History of Mankind

This is the first interview/commentary by Damiel Dennett I have liked. In the past I have found him implacably and intolerantly anti-religionist. For once he has suggested religion may have a future in a transformed state. Along with Richard Dawkins his criticisms appear to be less strident of late.

The first King had a massive ego and knew enough people would believe him when he told them he was Divinely chosen by God to be their King and Leader. And not just him, but his Heirs. And the people were gullible enough and ignorant enough to believe him. Same principle for organized Religions. Priests and Popes know the people are ignorant and superstitious enough to believe that Priests and Popes are chosen by God to lead them back to God and to Heaven IF they pay their Tithes and Offerings and Confess their sins. "In God We Trust"!

Before you are born there was nothing ,you had no memory of anything ,when you die you have no memory of anything, and go no wear.

I practice Buddhism and it's founder Nichiren Daishonin. He learned all the other sects of Buddhism and realized they were holding back the truth of the chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Now this chant was not created by him. He came to the realization it was always here. He just put it into words. It's the universal law of cause and effect. Upon chanting you begin to realize your Buddha nature of which we are born with. The chant enlightens you to an understanding of life and death which they are one in the same.

All praise 🙌 be to the Great Pumpkin 🎃!!! 😳

World's religions, the main source of misunderstanding among people, should be reexamined.

The sad thing is, this vid shoud have 4.235.984.654 views with 5.456.545 comments, just as Gangnam Style does, but only the same science fans are watching it. The actual target group is indulging in other services...

Science did not displace religion for explaining how thingsvwork. It replaced som religions in that respect. Religion never was about explaining how things work. You cant 3 plain any system from within the system. The entire time space universe is a system. So most teligion is not about mechanistic causes but sgency causes. Obviously an entit outside time space caused time space to begin. Out of nothing nothing comes.

In today's day and age people are inundated with read ads yammering on about "ground news".

What are the names of the lecturers?

Men Power and money = Religion .

i'm pointing at the moon and you're focusing on my finger. And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music . thinking u understood everything while u didn't even research

Children often create _imaginary friends_ and I think religions take those concepts to the next level for adults. It provides them with someone to talk to and parent them once they've grown up. I think we need more belief systems that recognize that this is okay, providing that we recognize these deities as products of our own human psyche. Then there is someone to share human dialog with when no one else will listen that's based in an actual understanding of reality.

Did we change our channel name?

i think, judging by the type of video he keeps uploading, that this channel might have a particular agenda. the link in the description doesn't help

Civilization runs on religion.

Why assume that the lack of immunity against the common cold is maladaptive? What if it was selected for in order to remove those in a population whose immune system was so poor that they couldn’t fight it off?

It seems to me in the past people were longing for a reason and someone thought of a creator or some higher being. Then other people expanded upon it with thousands of years and eventually different religions formed based on the customs of that area.

Religion can be made from primitive beliefs, being filled in with more beliefs. Sometimes, Religion will derive from that Religion, whether someone questions it or makes a new religion based on it.

this is not how a religion starts, I know because I begged God and I was given a greater mind, told about creation

To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Question.

Running a continuous stream of subtitles right smack in the center of the screen is highly annoying! Why the eff do you do it? It literally distracts from thinking about the subject matter and borders on ruining your endeavor. I wish all you RU-vidrs would stop this.

What is the music playing during the ad? Its lovely

The family from which the Hebrew nation claimed descent belonged to the western branch of the Semitic people, the Amorites of the Old Testament. The name Terah is taken from the northern (Hurrite) name of the moon god who was worshipped as Terah in Harran and as Nannar in Ur. Hebrew religion, therefore, is rooted in that of Sumer. -Sir Leonard Woolley

one thing they all share..the ability to generate squillions of dollars from members trying to buy life insurance..amen

Judaism and Christianity paved the way for modern values and progressiveness, because they are not bound by fear from pantheistic gods but by a God who encourage to study His creation and appreciate the wonders and beauty in it. Because of this, advancements in Morality, Ethics, Science and Technology made possible.

Religion was created to pray on the mind of man,and been very good at that.just look at thebuilding and wealth.

Mid-roll was not a good idea. Now I won't send this to anyone old who probably needs to hear it, because it'll confuse them.

Very interesting, even fascinating. However, we should keep in mind that we, human beings, have three special characteristics : we need to understand and explain the phenomena that we observe around us; we need to "vibrate", feel, be moved, laugh and cry, sing and dance... ; we need to give a meaning to our existence, our actions, to insert our existence in a larger picture, a larger project so that we are not " killed " by the apparent absurdity of the human existence (we come, we run, run, run, then we go). That’s why human societies invented science, art and religion. There is no questioning that the old religions are dying or at least struggling for their existence. This is because these religions come from another era, the era of the agricultural civilisations which started in the Neolithic. Since the 16th century, a slow transformation has taken place in Europe. After five centuries, this transformation gave birth to a new era : the era of the industrial civilisation. Everything has radically changed, especially in the Western world. The other parts of the world have also been rapidly affected. What's next ? Have the basic needs of human beings changed ? No. The human existence is still governed by the same fundamental rules. We still come, run, run, run, and go. We still need to understand and explain. We need to feel, laugh, cry, sing and dance. We still need to escape the apparent absurdity of the human existence...

You know, if, in the coming years, Churches change their repertoire to account for and support the new age of logical thinking most of the population has adopted by this point, that's good. But even then, there'd still be a huge dearth of comers to those glorified religious structures. And there's a good reason for that; there are many individuals who've had unpleasant experiences in church, and some would rather just live their lives without ever again setting foot inside a church. Doesn't matter if they changed for the better, the structure has too many negative connotations for them.

Religion is my conviction that your religion is greater than all because you are born in it.

Excellent! (Except for Dennett's picking on al-Assad, conveniently choosing one of the leaders in the Middle East that resist US hegemony. Not a good guy, this Bashar al-Assad, for sure. However, there are worse examples in that area of the world, from Saudi Arabia to the theocrats in Israel. Oh, but the latter are US allies, right?)

We generally have some insights into it. The issue is not religion. Its the books they call holy. Which are a filled with tales n other stories from ancient authors.

Religion was created when the first con man met the first fool

50,000 people saw the sun dance in Fatima Portugal in 1917, after 3 shepherd children said the Virgin Mary would show a miraculous sign that day, because we LOOK FOR AGENCY? Hahaha hahaha. A true sceptic doesn't OMIT history.

Religion was created to provide humans with spiritual confidence that there will be life after death and the experience there will be determine according to how you lived your life on earth...

You don’t live in a world made of matter, we are one eternal consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no death, life is a dream in which we are imagining ourselves. The agent is you.

There may or may not be a "god," but yours sounds poorly thought out and made up.

Sorry who is the speaker

You know I was born Muslim. I grew up listening to my parents as any child does. As i grew up, i remember what my parenta told me. Like one example is after we die, we will all be in the grave until god calls for us, and we then will have to wait for 500 years standing in the heat as the universe sun comes closer and closer. And those who sinned will drown in their sweat. I was a child. 4 probably, many other things too they told me. As i grew up, skip forward, im 30, i questioned them for why they told me this. They told me i was confusing things and they never said that. At that point i realised and not just for that reason but so many others. That i was just a mass conductor of ignorant gossip. We were raised to know that Adam was the first human put on earth, taught everything, then if thats so, why are people learning new things as history went. Non of it makes sense. And this isnt even the tip of the iceberg, its the micro tip of the tip of the iceberg. Its so sad.

God, Religions, (also Ghost, and Devils ) are man made. Period..However, these are necessary or low-cost therapy for self or social discipline or order.. In these times, it creates more trouble than intended purposes..