X-Message-Number: 4590
Date: 01 Jul 95 23:17:17 EDT
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS:Benzodiaezipine of the Masses

Regarding the evolutionary function of religion, my own best
guess is what I said in the introduction to my Eaton Science
Fiction Conference talk in the Summer of 1992, called "The 
Immortality Myth, Resurrection, and Technology," excerpted below:
--------------------------

  `Since the 1960's when the late Joseph Campbell's _The Hero
With a Thousand Faces_ began to be read on many campuses, and
most especially since the Bill Moyers interviews with Campbell
(1988) which made his work still more popular, many people have
begun to look at mythology in a new light.  We all know, or
thought we knew, what a myth was: a myth was one of those weird
stories that people in other cultures tell.  _Our_ stories, by
contrast, were called "religion," or "scripture," and were not
weird at all.  It was _other_ people's religions and creation
stories that were myths.  In fact, Joseph Campbell (following
Robert Graves, and with tongue firmly in cheek) once defined myth
as "someone else's religion."

   Myth is not only religion, of course, but something more
inclusive.  Myth might broadly encompass such things as rituals
and beliefs, but most especially myth is the collection of
primitive stories that we tell ourselves in order to have a
narrative psychological framework with which to deal with the
world.  In the largest sense, myth includes (but is not limited
to) any story which answers the difficult questions of life:  

* Who am I?
* Where did I come from?
* Where am I going?
* What is the far future going to be like?
* What is expected of me?
* Who are the heros?  (What is the Good?; What defines Cool?)
* What's going to happen to me when I die?

   In life it is important to answer these questions (even if the
answer is insupportable fantasy), since excessive worry about
them may detract from basic survival efficiency.  We know from
recent psychological experiments, for instance, that compared
with objective assessment, people with normal "healthy" mental
outlooks consistently _overestimate_ their own abilities and
strengths; whereas people who are depressed are far more realis-
tic in such judgments.  Why would human nature saddle us, as a
species, with a normal mental state which gives us an unrealistic
view of the world?  The answer may lie in the fact that anxiety
saps strength and ruins performance (as many an olympic athlete
has discovered).  Anxiety is so bad that sometimes it's worth a
small cost in objectivity to be rid of it.

   A major function of myth (and of a large part of human
culture) is to relieve anxiety by answering unanswerable ques-
tions.  Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate (anodyne)
of the masses, but perhaps what he would have said today (given
modern pharmacology) is that religion is the Valium (anxiolytic)
of the masses.  The same can be said of superstition. 
"Superstition," in fact, is also just another name for "other
people's religion."



                                          Steve Harris


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