Historical Foundations of Soul Beliefs #2 Part I
Вера в душу: причины и следствия - Часть 1: Историческая подоплёка
Ратгерский университет штата Нью-Джерси
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Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a "soul." While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 1.
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Historical Foundations of Soul Beliefs #2
Historical Foundations of Soul Beliefs #2 Part I22:25
Prof. Daniel M. Ogilvie
Professor of Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. Hamilton
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There are people, some people maybe in positions of great power, who are responsive to the idea that maybe it's time to get on with it. And assist God in keeping His word and bringing this life on this planet to an end. I mean, it could happen, folks. That's one of my motivations for putting together this course. I mean, I, I, I would like to just announce to the world, say, just stop it, stop it. And a lot of people are doing that. But underneath, a lot of what I think we see or, I think, beneath a lot of it, are beliefs about the soul and, and afterlife. So, that, that's, that's my approach. That's why, it's an important reason why this course exists, to get people to think about their assumptions about the soul and how the soul gets involved in their overall world views. So, it's a, that's, that's an easy assignment, but I want you to take it very seriously and think about it. And I hope from, from that point on you will be able to discern the, the degree to which religious differences and religious hostilities are involved in world events. I want to review some things that we covered last time. Whether I'll do this every time or not I'm not sure, but I felt like next, this time it was necessary. I talked about pre-humans, formed societies, apparently, at least that's the theory. The way they survived was to create and generate and maintain egali, egalitarian societies where no particular person ruled. Now, prior to the, the separation of chimpanzees and apes on one tree, and pre-human beings on another tree. We all came from a common ancestor. And, I've heard peop, many people say well, no I ain't no chimp. Well that's right, you're not. Might have had a common ancestor to, to a chimp. Other people's objections to some of the things that we will talk about in this course is I ain't no animal. I'm not an animal. Eh, I think you are. Every time I take a poop, I'm reminded that, that I'm an animal, you know. I'm doing it in a toilet instead of a forest. But I, I think that we're pretty clear on, on, on that. And, chimps maintain probably what our common ancestor was driven by, and that is to, to get, be organized in a top-down way. Some, somebody was in charge. And and it had an alpha male in charge. An alpha female in charge of her men since that's how things got accomplished. And that's still true of, of, of chimpanzees. You probably know enough about them to know that some, usually there's a, a fight and somebody is in charge. Well, that didn't really work for a pre-human society at least as we got closer and closer to legitimately what we call hunter and gathering tribes. What they learned was to be be cooperative. Now how did that happen? Well you're not sure, but, but perhaps the ones who tried to be the dominant males were, were killed. Or excluded somehow because it was apparently shown time and time again is that, is groups that survive were the groups that were egalitarian and worked together. Hunted together, shared the, the, the food that was that was brought to the, was brought to the table. Now, as Wade points out, adherents of the ancestral religions sought to secure survival in the real world. In the world that existed then. In the day to day world and they found that cooperative hunting, cooperative sharing and egalitarianism worked. Those of modern religions are more focused on salvation in the next life. Now that's an interesting perspective. Our job, early on, as hunter gatherers was to survive, to get through the day. And gradually over time that became it became an issue of surviving forever. I'll talk a little bit about that today and give some examples. The, the, the book that, that a chapter is, is taken from, which is the first part of your, in your reader, is from, Wade. And that, that the, the title of his book is The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures. How religion evolves and why it endures. Now Wade says that, that we have an instinct, basically, for faith. A faith, faith instinct. I don't know if we have a faith instinct. But, but that's his perspective. And, and one of the things I want you to think about in this course is, is, is our instincts. Are our instincts driving us? Do we have an instinct for faith? My good idea in that regard is we probably have all inherited an instinct. Or, or a set of genes that lead us to bond with other people. To, to, to form groups because we survived early on in groups. And I suspect we all still survive in groups. And it could be that religion emerged in order to have common belief systems that kept the group together. Now I'm not going to take Wade on that, but I'm encouraging you as students to be, to question what it is that you read. To, to see if, if you, if other things that you know support that. And, and, and take it seriously, and think about what you, about what you read. So I just gave you an alternative to think about, with regards to what, what came first? Did religion come first or did the need to be together, to bond, to work together as groups came early on? So, I say that the roots of modern religion probably go back to early agricultural set, settlement. Remember last time, I talked about moving from hunters and gatherers to a more efficient way, really to, to, to feed groups of people by the development of agricultural communities, agricultural settlements. And, when you have a, a larger settlement, there is a division of responsibility. A division of responsibility that was not, not like what was true of hunter and gathering tribes. I mean, you might've, one, one person might've been a better hunter and, and another one a better fisherman or gatherer of nuts and this sort of thing. But, but the, the, the, the point was not to stand out, to become a member of the group. If you want to stand out, forget it. You're, you're, you're going to be either killed or isolated from the group when, where survival would be very, very difficult. So when there's division of responsibility, there's a diversity of roles, and gradually emerges a top-down structure. Another thing I want to mention about that is, and this becomes important later on, farming and, and herding required planning. Planning. You're specialists in planning. You have things planned for today. You, you plan to go to the library tonight, or plan to clean up the mess you've already made in your room or whatever or, or, or, or meet up with somebody for dinner. We're planning. We're always involved in what's coming up next. Later on in the course we'll be call it, we'll call it nexting. Nexting, what's he talking about? Nexting? Planning, projecting yourself into the future. Folks, that's how we get through the day, isn't it? Well, we, we're, that's how you got yourself here. And, and that is, you imagine you're, now that you're familiar with the, the room, you imagined yourself here before you were even here. And it offered you guidance. And we're, we're, we're constantly thinking about what's coming next, and imagining what's coming next. And it's a wonderful, wonder that we can even live in the now, the present, because we're always thinking about the future. Well, we had the cape, capacity of doing that, and we had to have the capacity of doing that, it, and in agricultural settlements. Because plants, seeds need to be sown at a proper time. And you have to be patient, because they're not going to bear anything until later on. And then once later on, we learned to to, to save them, to save the crops, preserve them. Maybe for exchange with, with other tribes, other settlements, other communities that had other resources. So it all involves planning. They were not the, the, the immediate return societies that I mentioned last time. Like the Bra, Bra, Barahas, and the Hadzas, where you got food, you eat it now. No. Not with agricultural communities. Planning ahead also requires looking ahead, what I just mentioned, projecting images of yourself in the future. I mean, I can't underplay that. You know, what, why, why are you in school? Well you have an image of what the school was going to, what going to school and getting a degree is going to lead, lead to. You have images of what your life is going to be like. You know they, they, they, they're very rich and, and, and usually very colorful images, and images full of hope. And, and you know what you, you, you don't want to be because you have a, a, an image of a, a di, an absolute disaster happening. And, you know, if etc., etc., it all has to do with images internalized images that we project in the future, oftentimes with images of us in the picture. But as we do that, as we project ourselves into the future. It may come about, imagine yourself in this role, in that role. And you can imagine yourself doing this, and doing that. And you can also imagine yourself [SOUND] dead. We don't like that. We, we don't like, I mean death really frightens us. We don't know how to handle it. Why is that? Well, first of all, we're really attached. To life. What, this is what we know, we know about life. And, and, and we know how it, it can be really exciting. I was sitting outside with Professor Hamilton a little while ago and we were sitting on these cool steps, man really nice, really comfortable. I mean, this is, this is comfortable, don't, you know, I, I don't, I mean, it's a little warm, but outside you could feel the breeze. It's a beautiful day. I look around here, and there's lots of colors. I mean it, it's, it really is a gas to be alive. You've noticed? I mean, if you haven't noticed recently, notice! No, no, notice that it, it's, it's, it, it, it's, it's fun to see things, to be stimulated, to use your senses. Some of you, I mean, I'll bet you at, at there're a few people in here, who, between, Dennis' class and, and, whatever, you're going to go out running. Why? Because it feels good. It used to feel good to me. No it doesn't lo, fe, feel very good to me. We like to plan. We like to, we don't like to think about death because how much will we miss tomorrow? Tomorrow I plan to go out with some friends, one of which, he's ten years older than me, you can imagine how much fun we're going to have. >> [LAUGH] >> But, but we're going to go fishing! We, we pay our, you know, senior fees to the, on, on this boat and we go out and, and I'm looking, really looking forward to it. And I know when I get out there I am going to be saying, why am I here? I don't even like this. >> [LAUGH]. >> But I'll, I'll get a kick out of it because he, they, I'm there's going to be a breeze there, and, and who knows, we might catch some fish. And usually throwbacks because, you, I, I'm one of the worst fishermen you can imagine. I mean, I, I go out from time to time and, and the mates on the boat, they make fun of me. Oh [LAUGH] here he is again, no work for us. >> [LAUGH]. >> And, and oftentimes this time of year you'll catch sea robins. And ha, has anybody here ever caught a sea robin? Okay. Ha, have you looked at the sea robin's eyes? Blue, right? Oh, I mean you, you, you throw them back but, but before you throw them back you look at their eyes and they're beautiful! I mean, it's it's makes it so wonderful to be alive. I mean you, you all love, whether you know it or not, being alive. And, and the idea of being dead is unthinkable. Well along with the hierarchical structure of society, we have the emergence of priesthoods. I don't know whether that's the right name of it, but re, religious leaders, religious specialists. Where as before in hunter and gathering tribes, everybody in that, in, in the dance and, and, and the trances they could be in touch with the spirits. Now you have specialists emerge who are the only ones who communicate with the Gods. And so, human beings in those settlements were reliant on, on those specialists to come back and, and transmit the rules that were transmitted to them by the gods about how to behave. Moses was given the Ten Commands. Most religions have, have commandments. These are rules. And what was really kind of interesting to me. I think this is right, I'm not quite sure, but one of the rules, if you obey the rules then it might be. You're going to die but not really. I mean, that's pretty appealing, right? You think, I, I don't want to die. And somebody comes along. Well, you know, your body's going to go. But you're not going to die, really. Because if you behave yourself. You will continue on and go someplace where life will be pretty interesting. A lot of fun, no pain, no death, no sorrow. Well, I'll buy that. What do I have to do? You've got to obey the rules, and by obeying the rules, see. You're a good member of your community. You know, you're a cooperative member of the of the community because some of the rules indicate you should do that. But more than that, you get to go to a good place because, because you've been good down here. You've followed the rules, and you're going to be rewarded for that, later on. So what do we have? Why rules? It's necessary to keep society functioning. We need to have rules. Yeah, we're not born with rules. We learn rules. We learn rules and in our, at home. We have some people here on stage here today who said well, I, I, I didn't take religion from my family. They were not particularly religious. Well then, are they operating with no rules? No. I think everyone of them, or most of them mentioned that their, their, their parents emphasized that moral behavior. What's moral behavior? Oh, there's a view that we spoke of here. You, you sort of learn the rules and you, the consequences of the rules with regards to after ever after, life ever after. Another thing for rules and bi, binding rules is you gotta get rid of the freeloaders, people who want a free ride. There's usually in the rules and, and, and, and how society functions. Particularly, smaller societies, you want to have, you need to have everybody carrying the load. And also keep people in line. And I also mentioned this, the, the notion that's important to behave for only, not only for the goodness of one's society, but also for your own well being afterlife. And the idea of a soul, its survival. The necessary of do, nec, necessity of doing the right thing to assure its survival are all packaged into a powerful source of social control. Okay, next topic. It's not a new topic. This is an example of the sorts of things that I was just talking about. Particularly what you need to do in order to be assured a good afterlife. So early on in, in early religion. And this religion is two, three, 4,000 years old in ancient Egypt. Fortunately there's lots of records they kept and we got a pretty good. Handle on, on what they believed and what, what some of their rituals are, are, were. Now, mind you, it, it was in existence for like 2,500 years, so it was modified over time. Religions are always modified over time. They have to adapt to, to life circumstances as they're, as they exist now. But this is what, what we've learned from, from what people have written about Ancient Egyptian religion. Now what I want you to pay attention to is, how these get translated in to some of the religious views that you know about. There's a lot of intermixing of, of ideas of, of mythology within religions. There's lots of migration. This, almost every religions myth from around the world for as time, that. All kind of things have been written about it. There's a flood! There's a flood. And so there's a flood that appears in the Bible. There's floods that might appear in, in, in other myths. There's a lot of intermixing and see if you can find instances of where some of the things that we currently believe came from. The whole idea here is religions just didn't happen. Your religion just didn't happen. All, all religions have a history behind them. And I think it's important, in a course like this, to notice that. That, that, it, it, you were handed a book of codes, ethics, of some rules to live by. They have a history.
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