The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

‘The Supernatural and Natural Selection: Religion and Evolutionary Success’ by Lyle B. Steadman and Craig T. Palmer

‘A fundamentally new approach to religion that differs from all other
explanations by defining religion not in terms of unidentifiable beliefs
in the supernatural, but by the identifiable behavior of communicating
acceptance of supernatural claims. This approach distinguishes different
forms of religious behavior, from the ancestor worship, totemism, and
shamanism of traditional societies, to the behavior of prophets that
started the world religions, by their different supernatural claims.
Communicating acceptance of any supernatural claim tends to promote
cooperative social relationships because it communicates a willingness
to accept unskeptically the influence of the speaker in a way similar to
a child’s acceptance of the influence of a parent. This is why the
clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of
cooperative family-like social relationships: parent/child- like
relationships between the individuals making and accepting the
supernatural claims and sibling-like relationships among coacceptors of
those claims. As religious behaviors, and the increased cooperation they
produce, are copied from one generation to the next, the number of
cooperating codescendants has tended to increase. Thus, religion can be
seen as a descendant-leaving strategy of our ancestors that has been
favored by natural selection and has become a human universal found in
all known cultures.’

Source.

Humanity cannot stand too much reality…see also Most believe in angels.

Charles Darwin to receive apology from the Church of England for rejecting evolution. [Oooops! We were wrong!]