Religion, nihilism, bears.

There is no god.
This is officially true-- I have full truth.
I have been up since 5 am. It is now ten.
FIVE GODDAMN HOURS. AS OF TEN.


Anyway, I'm actually going to put a real post in here. It should probably start below, but I'm going to get this out of my system. I despise getting up early. It is my bane; my nemesis; Sodom to my Gomorrah, or whatever that one is. Didn't one of those places get smote because there were gay guys there? Or because they didn't want to get pregnant, or something? The Bible is weird.

Hmm... I have mentioned Christianity/God several times already... Perhaps I'll blaze that trail. If
I'm going to explore religion, I apologize beforehand to any religious readers. I will show your beliefs no more respect than I would any other system of thought that I find silly. That might get me into trouble later on.

Anyways, religion.
Why?

Religion is essentially culturally ubiquitous. I have never heard of a culture that has not developed religion, and have never heard of a cultural advance or decline that was not either affected of effected an effect on religion. (Ambiguous grammar, w00t!) So, why is religion everywhere? Is it necessary? If so, why?

Alright, first question. I have seen it assumed that religion is common, and therefore necessary. I disagree with this reasoning. Not everything that is must be. Take, for example, wisdom teeth. At one point, they were necessary: our diet was composed of various rough and chewy things, and it was likely that we would lose a couple of teeth. Wisdom teeth come in, push other teeth into empty slots, fill molar slots, nom. However, they are now useless, and we get them removed most of the time. Religion might be sort of like that. If, at one point, religion worked as a survival tool, it would become dominant, regardless of accuracy. Let me add a dab of context.

Alright, humans evolve. We get our numbers high enough, and reach, say, generation F6, which is composed of 1,000 individuals. Now, let's say that F6 is split 50/50 between nihilists and deists. What happens? Remember, this is the wild, so we thinking folk don't have the luxuries we do now (sorry for implying you don't think, Thomas Payne. You were smart enough, but too radical for the church, and not enough for me.) So, anywho, the deists think that God wants them to live, so they hunt/ forage/ reproduce. The nihilists aren't so sure, so they spend slightly less time hunting, and more time trying to figure out why they should bother hunt if it doesn't change a damn thing in the greater universe. This doesn't matter yet at this point-- nihilism works fine from a survivalist standpoint with no pressures. Now, however, bears. Let's say that once a season, bears attack. Being organized, the early humans fight them off with a 90% success rating. Let's also say that their numbers double yearly. So, the bears keep some of the population in check-- if we assume that the doubling occurs all at one time, we gain around 300 humans the first year, and around 3/10 increases from that point. But, nihilists. Let's say bears attack-- deists will always try to fight them off, but nihilists have an 80% chance of saying "Why?" and getting nommed. So, each attack should weed off .1 of the population (remember, .9 success), with .02 more of that being nihilists. In that case, a deist has a 20% better chance of surviving to make babies, which is a gynormous evolutionary advantage. As such, if we assume that deists teach their kids about God, and nihilists teach theirs about Sartre. Therefore, nihilism gets the boot pretty quickly, and deists populate the planet. What conclusion can we draw here? If a significant pressure is present, religion is evolutionarily favorable. Jesus Christ, that's ironic.

Oh, also, bears and nihilists don't mix.

Second question-- necessary? No. I will repeat this. No. We do not need to believe in Jesus&friends to maintain our existence. In reality, the effects of religion on survival are intensely more subtle than I projected, and the chances are something like .02 percent better, not 20. Regardless, there is little to no chance of bear attack in the civilized world today, and religion is probably not the only thing holding the modern world up-- and if it were, I would have few problems with letting that world fall. Weare not that world, however, and we do not need religion to stat afloat-- maybe in the past it helped a little, maybe its prevalence is not but a fluke, but anyways, we don't need it now.

By the way, due to computer problems, this is not being posted until the day after its composition. Oh, and my sister just graduated from Wellesley Magna Cum Laude. Top that, fools.