Dear David F.,

Thank You for sharing your feelings on the subject.

Some form of religion has existed in every society
that we know of. Religious beliefs and practices
are so ancient that they can be traced into
prehistory. Even the primitive Neanderthal people
of that time, it seems, had some concept of a
supernatural realm that lay beyond everyday reality.

Among the fossilized remains of these cave dwellers,
anthropologists have found evidence of funeral
ceremonies in the form of flowers and artifacts that
were buried with the dead, presumably to accompany
them on their journey to an afterlife.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim believed that the origins
of religion were social, not supernatural. He pointed
out that, whatever their source, the rituals enacted
in any religion enhance the solidarity of the
community as well as its faith. Religious rituals
such as babtisms, bar mitzvah, weddings, Sabbath services,
Christian mass, and funerals - rituals like these
serve to bring people together, to remind them of their
common group membership, to
reaffirm their traditional values, to maintain prohibitions
and taboos, to offer comfort in times of crisis, and in
general to help transmit the cultural heritage from one
generation to the next.

Of course there are many people who no longer believe
deeply in traditional religion, but many also have not
found a satisfying substitute. You obviously have and I
respect that.

Dear Foxy,

I am familiar with Durkheim, and I accept his thesis that the origins of religion were social - not supernatural. It is quite possible that there were no societies without some form of religious belief. It is also possible that there were no societies without sceptics of that belief. There is evidence that societies had means of dealing with sceptics.

Believers in pre-literate societies leave artefacts such as burial mounds and figures of fertility goddesses. Doubters in those societies would not leave artefacts, but that does not mean they did not exist. Since they could be seen as a threat to the unity of the group they could have been dealt with harshly, and there is evidence that they were.

The Khazars, a pagan people, were converted to Judaism. Before their conversion the Khazars dealt with young men who had too many questions about the tribal beliefs by killing them.

A few years ago I was in New South Wales and went on a tour guided by an old Aborigine who told us about Aboriginal beliefs and customs. I asked him if there were those who questioned the beliefs. He said that boys who did not accept the beliefs did not survive the initiation ordeals.

Continued

continued

The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon wrote “Yanomamo, The Fierce People.” The Yanomamo are a South American tribal people. The following passage is from his book.

“...a spirit named Wadawadariwa asks the soul if it has been generous or stingy during its mortal life. If the person has been stingy and niggardly, Wadawadariwa directs the soul along one path leading to a place of fire: Shobari Waka. If the person was generous with his possessions and food, he is directed along the other the other path – to hedu proper, where a tranquil semi-mortal existence continues.
The Yanomamo do not take this seriously, that is, do not fear the possibility of being sent to the place of fire. When I asked why, I got the following kind of answer: “Well, Wadawadariwa is kind of stupid. We’ll just all lie and tell him we are generous, and he’ll send us to hedu!”

Sounds as though the tribe may have many sceptics.

The ancient Greeks were an early literate people who apparently contained both sceptics and believers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras

“Protagoras also was a proponent of agnosticism. Reportedly, in his lost work, On the Gods, he wrote: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life." According to Diogenes Laërtius, the outspoken, agnostic position taken by Protagoras aroused anger, causing the Athenians to expel him from the city, and all copies of his book were collected and burned in the marketplace. The deliberate destruction of his works also is mentioned by Cicero.

Continued

Continued

The classicist John Burnet doubts this account, however, as both Diogenes Laërtius and Cicero wrote hundreds of years later and as no such persecution of Protagoras is mentioned by contemporaries who make extensive references to this philosopher. Burnet notes that even if some copies of the Protagoras books were burned, enough of them survived to be known and discussed in the following century. A claim has been made that Protagoras is better classified as an atheist, since he held that if something is not able to be known it does not exist.”

Protagoras may or may not have been persecuted for his skepticism.

According to Plato Socrates was condemned to death for impiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

“Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial, when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life instead, to finance the time he spent as Athens' benefactor. He was, nevertheless, found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety ("not believing in the gods of the state"), and subsequently sentenced to death by drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock.”

Socrates was probably guilty of impiety, but I don’t think it should be a crime.

Continued

Continued

Open sceptics toward Christianity or Christian doctrines have attracted the attention of the Inquisition, witch hunts and other instruments to preserve the purity of Christian doctrine.

Currently those who don’t believe in Islam may be murdered in Bangladesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_by_Islamic_extremists_in_Bangladesh

“Attacks by Islamic extremists in Bangladesh refers to increased attacks since 2013 on a number of secularist and atheist writers, bloggers, and publishers in Bangladesh and foreigners, and religious minorities such as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Shias.[1][2][3] These attacks have been largely blamed by extremist groups such as Ansarullah Bangla Team and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The Bangladeshi government was criticized for its responses to the attacks, which included charging and jailing some of the secularist bloggers for allegedly defaming religious groups – a strategy seen as pandering to hard line elements within Bangladesh's majority Muslim population (about 89% of the population). The government's eventual crackdown in June 2016 was also criticized for its heavy-handedness, as more than 11,000 people were arrested in little more than a week (as of 18 June 2016).

As of 2 July 2016, a total of 48 people, including 20 foreign nationals, were killed in such attacks.”

However, perhaps religious believers and sceptics can play their part in the creation of a viable society. Religious ritual and affirmation of belief are collective acts, and doubt is an individual act. The Latin word, religio, means ‘to bind’, and doubt separates one from those bound together.

E. O. Lawrence wrote in “The Social Conquest of Earth”

“If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.”

Religion promotes stability within the community, and doubt promotes innovation. However, the stability that religion provides is often accompanied by an increase in tribalism which promotes war and conflict with other communities. In my opinion it is better that stability be provided by a more equitable distribution of income, wealth and resources.

We need both freedom of religion and the freedom to doubt any and all religions.

Dear David F.,

Thank You for your very eloquent posts.

I fully agree with you that we do need freedom of
religion and of course the right to doubt religion.

For many years it was widely felt that as science
progressively provided rational explanations for
the mysteries of the universe, religion would have
less and less of a role to play and would eventually
disappear, unmasked as nothing more than superstition.
But there are still gaps in our understanding that
science can never fill. On the meaning and purpose
of life and the nature of morality.

Few citizens of modern societies would utterly deny
the possibility of some higher power in the universe,
some supernatural, transcendental realm that lies
beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience, and in
this fundamental sense religion is probably here to
stay.