So, in my world history class, we started watching a movie called “The Other Son”. Long story short, two religious families, one Arabic and one Jewish, had their sons switched at birth. The problem is, the fathers are very “politically and religiously involved” especially since this is a major time period in the Israel-Palestine conflict; which means that they did not take this well. Joseph, the boy raised by the Jewish family, went to see a religious figure to ask about converting to the respective Arabic religion that his biological family was a part of. The figure tells him that Yacine, the boy raised by the Arabic family, is a lot more Jewish than he is, even though Joseph spent 18 years being Jewish. All because Joseph's biological mother was Arabic.
What do you guys think? Is religion genetic?
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Seems reasonable that religion has a significant genetic component.
Superstition provided an evolutionary advantage way back and for centuries since non believers had a high chance of being removed from the gene pool very painfully.
Perhaps what you mean is more, it is a genetic component that people more readily accept conversion to whichever religion is militarily dominant in their area. A non believer of whichever religion that suddenly swept into power, (almost always by force for most of human history,) would more likely be "removed" from the gene pool painfully. Of course, once you already have had some kids, you do not get removed from the gene pool. So perhaps later in life we genetically grow more firm in our ways and beliefs and less likely to change.
Even me at as a "strong" atheist, I would happily tell what ever person holding me at gun/knifepoint (or some other real threat of violence,) whatever they wanted to hear and "convert" to that religion. Even easier for atheist because we have no god or religion or whatever that we are abandoning, instead we are doing the logical thing to save our own lives. Atheist already are in many places persecuted and reviled for not "believing" as most others do. Can fake it easily enough, quite often us atheist know more about religions then lots of "religious" folks.
LogicForTW,
"Even me at as a "strong" atheist, I would happily tell what ever person holding me at gun/knifepoint (or some other real threat of violence,) whatever they wanted to hear and "convert" to that religion."
That's the biblical "fake it until you can kill them" strategy. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Jacopo_Amigoni...
Hah, well a simple easy lie to save your skin now so you can can later win freedom from the oppressors is an effective one. Cant overthrow anything if you are dead.
@ TermDog
Re: " Seems reasonable that religion has a significant genetic component."
This came up on another atheist forum I'm a member of a few months ago. It seemed reasonable to me, too, and I said so. A few members there work in the relevant fields and they tore the idea to shreds. I don't have the knowledge to thoroughly demolish it like they did, and I'm too lazy to go back to the thread, but here's what I learned:
The God Gene hypothesis has been around since 2004. It was proposed by geneticist Dean Hamer, who claimed that human spirituality is influenced by heredity and that a specific gene, called vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2), predisposes humans towards spiritual or mystic experiences.
Both the religious and scientific response to the hypothesis has been negative, but the story grew legs anyway. It seems intuitively correct, since atheists have always been persecuted, and others picked up on it- notably a science journalist named Nicholas Wade. He wrote a book called The Faith Instinct: the Evolution of the Faith Gene. A Washington Post review notes ' the book is devoted to quotations from anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, psychologists, commentators and pundits. Quotations from geneticists are as scarce here as the proverbial hens' teeth. Safely tucked away in a footnote comes this throw-away caveat: "Because most genetically based human behaviors are flexible, not deterministic, it is probably unrealistic to require that a behavior be exhibited by every known society in order to be accepted as having a genetic basis." '
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR200912...
This article by Jeff Schweitzer, a neurobiologist specializing in evolutionary biology, is well worth a read.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/the-fallacy-of-the-god-ge...
Tl:dr? Religion does not have a genetic component, it perpetuates itself through cultural transmission.
"Is religion genetic?"
No!
No! Not in the example you give., It is much more complected than this simple story and also more complected than a simple yes or no answer.
Human beings are Tribal Animals. We survive in groups together. A human in the wild is not much more than a walking hamburger. We do not have the speed of a Cheetah, the armor of the rhino, the size of an elephant, the strength of a gorilla. We can not fly like the birds nor swim like the crocodile. We do not have claws like a bear, venom like a snake, camouflage like the lizards, or stealth like the puma. What we do have is an ability to think and plan together. The human being is the only animal that has learned to kill from a distance. We can build a trap today and come back tomorrow for our reward. Nothing has been more important to the survival of human beings than our ability to bond... and that ability is written into our DNA through the process of evolution. Every time some dumb human thought they could make it on their own they would wander away from the tribe and get eaten. We are hard wired to stay together.
Enter "RELIGION." Made up stories about the world that can be passed on from generation to generation that gives the tribe/clan a unique identity, history, and life meaning. These ancient myths, that eventually evolved into religious thinking, were essential to our survival. These myths gave us purpose, rules, and the rudiments of society and culture. As the human brain became more complex, so did our myths and our Gods. So, there actually is a biological component to religion. Religion, like mythology and superstition is an overt expression of our internal need to bond for our own survival.
That in no way implies that the religions we believe in are true. This biological component does not support one religion over another religion. It is just a "trait" of being human. The human brain does not like mysteries. It is curious and it want's answers. When there are no answers available, it tends to simply make them up. And so we get mythology, religion, superstition, and magical thinking. An argument can be made that the human mind is hardwired for religiosity. However; that, IN NO WAY, makes any religion REAL OR TRUE.
@Sophie800021: Is religion genetic?
I don't think so. Many Japanese people are followers of Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, Mormonism, and Islam, often at the same time. There are plenty of Christians of various types in China and South Korea. Religious affiliation is determined by family and cultural background, and life experiences. I suppose some people could be predisposed toward gullibility/religious imprinting by genetic factors, but I can't see how that would favor any particular religion.
Haven't read any other posts yet, but the very first question that popped into my head regarding the OP was, "Was the movie a real-life documentary type film, or was it a fictional drama?" Makes a biiiiig big difference.
Now I'm gonna read the other responses....
Is religion genetic? If you mean is religiosity transferred by genes from parent to child I'd say no.
My maternal gmother was an atheist, one of her two daughters was high anglican, the other, my mother, of no declared religion, claimed to talk with Jesus, my brother is a full blown cultist fundamentalist christian, my sister is a full blown racist bigot with God on her side and then theres me. So if my greatest hope is not true and I wasnt adopted then I would say religion is shaped by culture and society but I would allow genetics would affect gullibility of the individual, as Algebe has suggested..
Any particular religion is more of a memeplex than a...geneplex (?). But propensity to be religious does have a genetic influence.
Genes build brains and brains have rules of thumb and susceptibilities that are common to us all so in that sense there is a predisposition to superstition and the anthropomorphisation of nature. Religion is the building of more complex rules and story based moralities on top of this system that have been designed to group people together and get them to work together to one end or another.
It seems natural to me that we jump at noises and see shadows over our shoulders. Quick reflexes and a general precautionary assumption of danger in things... We know that the brain is a neural network (no matter what you believe this is a fundamental part of biology, just like the heart pumping blood). For those neurons there are no boundaries to transmission that occur precisely where something is true, factual, correct etc. That is as true for trying to work out 34*884/78.2 in your head as it is correctly determining whether something fell off of a shelf on its own. Nothing confines thought - nothing confines the neural activity in the brain / of the brain so that it exactly matches reality.
Therefore it doesn't exactly match reality, and the outcome of that is obvious.
Since we know that when something happens around us we pull together an understanding of that based on past experiences and memories I am not surprised that we overlay human type activity over everything else too. Why wouldn't the brain do this is the better question? OK, we might expect us not to evolve to the point where the brain gets it so wildly wrong all the time that it is a danger to self perpetuation, but there are cases of this too - we call it insanity.
There is also another experiment that gives us some insight too. The good old mirror neuron test a portion of the nerves in an arm are anethetised to stop the feedback from motor neurons in the arm and then they watch someone elses are touched, which activates the mirror neurons for touch (allowing the brain to understand that someone elses arm has been touched by reference to its own arms - or what an 'arm' even is), but without the motor neurons sending signals back the brain cannot determine that it is your own arm that has been touched, or not. So you'd feel your arm being touched at the sight of someone else's - as experiments have shown.
The relevance of that to this is that the understanding of self isn't even a solid thing. The brain is using feedback signals from multiple inputs just to build a model/image of the world it exists in, and what it, itself, even is. Again, there is no rule that says the neural network must process this information correctly, and therefore it doesn't. It literally cannot even really tell where its own body starts and stops without feedback from various neurons. I.e. it is overlaying itself right across all of its inputs and understanding these inputs with reference ONLY to itself.
So when you hear the rustling of leaves why be surprised that part of your brain processes that in terms of itself and ascribes possible human type variables to pretty much everything, at one point or another. That is likely exactly how it processes information. After all, its a neural network stuck in a skull with all these various inputs, but ultimately it can only use itself as the point of reference to understand any of those inputs.
Twits in the Congo think that praying will cure their Ebola infection. They might be right because Ebola hasn't kill all of them so they keep replicating.