Social environment for religious belief education

This article is a complement required for everyone who reads this blog. It generally describes about, in addition to natural environment, social environment, which forms individuals, values, behavior rules, character, personality and, what really matters here, the religious belief education in people.

In my article “Paradox of religious twin”, found in this blog, I introduced it slightly, but I felt I needed to write only about this subject.

The large majority of people don’t know deeply what Theory of Evolution is and its mechanisms. In the simple example which describes changes in environment with natural selections for those who are more effective it’s already complicated, figure out if it’s about brain, the evolution of nervous system. It’s even hard to tell that all our feelings were created and formed by evolution¹, and faith, as being among them, is the strength for their belief base where these are relatives, depending on where people were born, grew up, and had their education and formation of their personalities.

So, first we have faith, the ‘understand’, like “rough” feelings. As we grow up, we learn with our parents, friends, schools, church, anyway, our social environment about religious values. Will people who born in Brazil, in Catholic Christian families and learned, like majority of friends, relatives, etc., about God, Christ, Bible, redemption, Ten Commandments, etc., have, from one moment to another, faith in values from other religions, themselves and some polytheists as Hinduism? No! Some people may change their religion, but then we can talk about a statistician fact: Will 2.3 billion of Christians in the world convert to Hindu from one moment to another? And will 1.2 billion of Hindus convert to Christian? I mean in total number of followers or in the great majority and, therefore, exceptions, few people are not considered because they are isolated cases.

Then comes another question: Can Christian people be considered happy, whether they are practicing Christianity or not or were practicing it, only because they perform it spiritually? ². No! The same way, can Hindu people, and not only them, but also Islamic, Buddhist, Shintoist people, etc., be considered happy and performed spiritually? No! And every single religion considers the own truths as absolute, as I mentioned in the introductory text of this blog, and about others, they call them as Pagan, even when they respect each other.

Every person from the religions mentioned grow up in a social environment where he/she learned truths from local religion in absolute way, as I mentioned in the third paragraph… Their feelings were directed, channelized to be accepted, respected, to be believed in what these religions passed on rite, information, concepts, dogma, etc., i.e., in all a form of religious education. And when I say focused feelings, I mean: first you teach a child about religion (yours, of course), beliefs, “truths”, etc. After then, he/she believing and trusting on these teachings, he/she starts having faith from what has been learned, follow his/her local religion with devotion, veneration.

Where do first beliefs of these religions mentioned in the text come from? From eternal search from human being looking for answer without immediate solutions until today: Who has created everything around us? Who are we? Where do we go after death? Is there any life after death? Etc. This happens everywhere in the word at all time. Not for nothing there have been registered more than sixty thousand religions and sects in our history around the world. And what would be the social environment when first belief had been created? There were some? Which would be?

Yes, there were, they were our ancestors who had passed from age of hunter-gatherer, groups of people, to tribes and after for something more similar to the structures of the cities today. They also wondered, philosophized and formulated answers about these existing issues. But it’s not only this: morality, ethics, rules, etc., grew together with beliefs. Is “Ten Commandments” like something to try to live better in the society? “Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill…” About sixty thousand years ago, human being have cared about “beyond death”, like archaeological records showed in a funeral from Neanderthal. If they were worried only about preparing funeral, this also happened because they also mediated about other questions from their existence.

The odyssey of man on Earth has been followed by attempts to answer to these deep issues since the day he had become aware of himself and the world around himself. Who I’m, what I’m doing here and what’s everything around me, who is the other, certainly started everything that came after: beliefs, religions, ethics, morality, rules for behavior, etc.

We are, in great majority, the fruit from environment we live. Social environment.

        

       

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Notes:

1 – Check my articles at electronic magazine "Cérebro & Mente" - "Brain & Mind" www.cerebromente.org.br -, from neuroscientists from UNICAMP - Campinas – São Paulo State - Brasil:

"The Material Basis of Feelings"

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n12/opiniao/sentimentos_i.html

 "The Material Basis of Feelings - II"

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n13/opiniao/material_i.html

"Our Feelings. Why Do We Have Them? (2) - II"

www.cerebromente.org.br/n15/opiniao/sentimentos2_i.html

These articles are also available at "System, Evolution Theory and Neuroscience"
http://sysevotheneu.blogspot.com.br

Obs.: in portuguese: "Sistemas, Teoria da Evolução e Neurociências"

http://sistemaevolucaoneurociencia.blogspot.com.br

2 – In this article, I mean "spiritually" but, actually, everything is psychological, emotional, phenomena studied from Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience.