The former phrasing has a sense of inevitability to it, for one. It masks the fact that people created systems to exploit weaknesses in human psychology. Evolution led to a bias toward unsubstantiated pattern recognition and simple explanations for complex systems, not organized religion.
If religion has become "a part of our brain" then so has slavery, rape and the divine right of kings, for the same reasons. Yet no one argues that we just "have to learn to live with" the latter.
It isn't evolution, at least not in any genetic sense, it's simply culture. People believe religion is an immutable fact of life and the only possible source of meaning and morality when their culture teaches them as much. But there are cultures where religion matters far less than it does in, say, the US, where people get along just fine.
The former phrasing has a sense of inevitability to it, for one. It masks the fact that people created systems to exploit weaknesses in human psychology. Evolution led to a bias toward unsubstantiated pattern recognition and simple explanations for complex systems, not organized religion.
The inevitability (or not) is not what I wanted to focus on.
The point was that religion has become a part of our brain. How this happened (evolution, perhaps by accident), was not the important bit.
If religion has become "a part of our brain" then so has slavery, rape and the divine right of kings, for the same reasons. Yet no one argues that we just "have to learn to live with" the latter.
It isn't evolution, at least not in any genetic sense, it's simply culture. People believe religion is an immutable fact of life and the only possible source of meaning and morality when their culture teaches them as much. But there are cultures where religion matters far less than it does in, say, the US, where people get along just fine.