The Invention of Religion by Drake Alexander

Author:Drake, Alexander [Drake, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science & Technical
ISBN: 9780976792390
Publisher: The Emperor Has No Clothes Press
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Now, we saw that some people do not believe in a just world, so it is conceivable that a religion could develop by people that the just-world hypothesis does not apply to. We will explore this consequence more in Chapter Six: The Evolution of Religion, but for now we will just investigate what happens when the just-world hypothesis does apply to our Man on an Island.

If we look at how our Man on an Island would react under the just-world hypothesis, we have to call upon the Other Man again.

We will assume that our Man on an Island has had no direct experience with injustice, so the just-world hypothesis applies to him. This means that if he sees something go wrong for the Other Man, he will think the Other Man is being punished for the wrongness within him or in his actions. And as he continues to see the Other Man being “punished” his conviction will grow that there is something meting out punishment. And since the only things that can distribute punishment are authority figures and he never sees the agent that is punishing the Other Man, he will most likely deduce that the punisher is a deity.

So we can see that under the just-world hypothesis the Man on an Island will ultimately conclude that there are deities that punish people for the wrongness within them or in their actions.

(On a side note: we have to remember that this doesn’t mean that every person who believes in a religion which has judgment believes in a just world, this is merely the phenomenon which invented the judgment aspect of afterlife.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.