Religion as a figment of human imagination?

Ever wondered why animals don't practice religion? It's a fair question, especially when considering the multitude of beliefs humans have held. The answer, according to economist Maurice Bloch is that animals didn't evolve the proper mechanics to imagine a universal order.

That leaves hanging a really strange chicken-and-egg question about creation and evolution, but it's worth reading Bloch's essay, published here in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and discussed in this article on NewScientist.com. As you may have surmised from Bloch's background, his article is based more conjecture than lab work:

Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.

No animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this, argues Bloch. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the mundane and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life, of sparring every day with contemporaries for status and resources.

And the reason is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans can.

Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.

At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the "transcendental social".

Once humans had crossed this divide, there was no going back.

Feline fuhrer

What do you see in the above photo? What you should see is an ad by Germany's Green Party attacking xenophobic right wingers. What does it say? "You can't always recognize Nazis at first glance."

The poster has, not surprisingly, unleashed some sort of public debate, though over what I'm not sure. Haaretz has the story. What I find most amusing is the identity of one of the aggrieved parties: CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com.

Happy New Year to everyone (belatedly). And in today's news, get this, the German Green Party have elected to use Kitlers in their latest electoral literature. (Click the picture for bigification!) It's a shame they had to use a Photoshopped Kitler - there are lots of resident furry Furhers on here who would have loved, I'm sure, to be a model for the Greens!

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

Raising your dog Jewish

Two years ago, both my late childhood dogs died. It was a sad month for my family. Those dogs were members of the Greenberg tribe, and we knew they were gone for good.

The grief we experienced at the loss of such little loved ones made it all the more interesting to learn about the unenviable place dogs traditionally held in Jewish culture.

An elderly friend who likes to pretend he comes from the old country but in fact comes from Detroit tells me that my two dogs make me look, well, goyish. He’s got 3,000 years of Jewish opinion to back him up. Dogs don’t do so well in the Tanakh or in the Talmud. To maintain, as Ecclesiastes does, that a live dog is better than a dead lion doesn’t say much for the dog. To argue, as the rabbis do, that breeding dogs is like breeding swine doesn’t say much for the breeder. It seems that dogs can’t get a break. They are either savage or wild. They drive away the Shekhina; they scare away the needy; they bring blood upon a house. For the tradition, it all comes down to the bark and the bite.

But the tradition doesn’t know about the modern Jewish dog.

In the rest of this short piece from The Forward, David Kaufman argues that his dogs are in fact Jewish. To start, they are so racked by guilt that they can't bark or bite.

They are relatively obedient and remarkably stubborn. They show an annoying curiosity, and their skepticism is tempered by an overbearing, even pushy, eagerness. Most important, though, they will wait. My dogs, bless them, are capable of an astonishing patience where it counts. And in this way, they really seem like Jews: They can sustain whole eternities of impossible hope.