on spiritual emotion

In my last post I gave some reasons why we as a species have a spiritual 'emotion' and how this manifests itself in religion, which in turn satisfies this emotion. Catalysing the last post in one single sentence made me think about religion in another way, namely that we as a human created religion to satisfy our emotion. Just in the same way that we create food to satisfy our hunger and have sex to satisfy our desire. I know we are actually having sex to procreate, but people who have sex only as a means to procreate are a rare and frustrated species. But that's just a remark in between.

Back to the point I wanted to make, which is that religion is man-made. Seen from the perspective of satisfying an emotion,religion is self-indulgence. Humans as well as animals are guided by their emotions and their longing to satisfy them. Hunger and lust are easy to satisfy by eating and copulating. The spiritual emotion is much more complicated because it makes us seek answers to things we cannot grasp ourselves, like where we come from and how everything around us came into existence. I don't believe our system of morality is due to this emotion, as you can have a system of ethics without religion. Religions just picked up on ethics as a by-product. A bit like the video-shop next door that also sells crisps and fizzy drinks.

In the early stages of man-kind, people would worship the sun or trees to satisfy this emotion. They didn't know as much as we do now about physics and chemistry and such, and thought they could make a rain-dance to get some rain for their crops, for example. Or they took a thunderstorm as a sign of their 'god' being angry with them.
Then when more and more people lived on this planet and started living together, they started to look for answers together. That's where the big religions came in, and as the amount of followers grew, so did the power of the religions. It wasn't long until religious leaders realised how much power they had over believers who sought to satisfy their spiritual emotions, and started to feed them with dogma that conveniently fitted into the religions' hunger for power. As long as the believers' emotion was satisfied they could feed almost anything they wanted to the people, and make them do all kinds of things. Both good and bad. And sooner or later the church was the state. In some countries it still is, and we can see this spiritual emotion (which initially was meant to be an evolutionary advantage) has actually become an evolutionary disadvantage.

Another thing that I find amusing to notice in believers, and which strengthens my opinion that spiritual belief stems from emotions, is that believers can get very excited when you discuss religious topics with them. The stronger the emotion and passion about their religion, the easier they get 'worked up' about it. I have met very reasonable and highly educated people with whom at one moment you can discuss with them about the weather or politics and they are perfectly fine. But start telling them anything blasphemous and it's like opening a flood gate. They are so overwhelmed by their spiritual emotion that their sense of practical reasoning gets a kick in the balls. That's why it's so hard to de-convert people, and why this blog is not an attempt to do so. Once their environment has taken hold of their spiritual emotion, they will hardly ever step away from it.

Unfortunately, having an emotional feeling about something does not constitute for a proof of existence, it doesn't decide about whether something exists or not. Neither does a logical conclusion about something decide about the existence of the thing itself. We can make up a conclusion, but the validity of that conclusion has to be proven in reality.
If I feel that something exists (e.g. martians) that doesn't mean there are people from mars. As long as there is no proof for martians, rational thinking forces us to assume they don't. We can say that there was water on mars and therefore martians may exist, but so far no martians were seen. They either left, died out or never existed. They may exist in my head, but then it is another form of existence than what the religions are about. I don't doubt that God exists in the head of Christians for example, but in their heads! And there only!