Comment by amelius
5 days ago
The problem is that humans evolved to be religious, and you can't just ignore that and get rid of it in a generation or two. It is in our brains and we have to live with it somehow. So from that perspective ... maybe Jesus does cure depression.
Humans most certainly did not evolve to be religious. We evolved to look for and, if necessary (to our minds), invent meanings behind things which sometimes have truly no meaning at all, i.e. the existence of existence itself. We also evolved to be fearful of the unknown, e.g. the experience of death and afterward. It seems quite simple to see how those two things resulted in our eventual invention of religion, but we did not simply evolve to be religious per se.
I'm not saying that every possible path of evolution leads to religion, only that ours did.
By that logic, you may as well say evolution led to TikTok. "Religion taps into human psychology" seems more accurate.
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Our brains are also wired to kill for survival, rape for reproduction.
Religion is a coping mechanism for some, although its trivial to ignore. Religion is more likely than not a con-artist trick, that has lived on for centuries.
Except some of us consider ourselves to be quite evolved, not religious, AND absent of depression. Maybe depression (or the lack thereof) has nothing to do with religion at all.
If you're trying to establish if X is a cure for Y, then looking at people who don't have Y will not tell you much.
Anti-religion aka the religion of Scienc(TM) is still a religion.
Just because you call something a religion doesn't mean it is. There is no such thing as "religion of science"
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