Religion 1.0 - Why the oldest models are sometimes the best.

Everything we do unconscious or subconscious is a habit. When we reach a point of conflict with the environment we exist in, we become momentarily conscious. This moment is our limited chance to potentially change the way we live concerning the particular habit brought to temporary light.

All things that exist are mirror images of the same things in other forms greater or smaller in the scheme of existence. This is a concept I relate to fractals. The reason this relates to habits, is because a habit is something that exists at the individual level. It comes about due to a point in life we had to become conscious due to conflict with our environment. When all the pieces fell where they may landed after our struggle, we incorporated or traded off a habit in order to better survive that current environment. As we travel through life, we enter new environments, and sometimes these environments are conducive to our habits, and our ability to feel happy with them. In other cases, our old habits become impediments to our new surroundings, and only with continual attacking of our cognitive dissonance we may finally change a habit. The more ingrained the habit, the longer and more fierce the attacks against us must be. If we do not adapt, we are left a habit that leads to greater misery or death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal).

The reason I bring up habits is because incorporating this concept with the idea of fractals leads me to believe that habits are more than an individual phenomenon. They can exist in a group, institution, culture, or society. This can translate into mass habits, or the way a population adjusts to environmental threats that force them to change the way they perceive their environments and life itself. A couple of similar ideas relating to large scale habits can be seen in historical institutionalism and neoinstitutionalism. Each institution is full of many individuals that compete for survival and power against other institutions and/or the environment they all exist in. Just like habits we may take on as individuals, these institutions may have incorporated some bad habits that no longer serve their their ability to flourish in a future environment. This too leads to increased misery or death of an institution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_theory).

Habits not only come about due to the physical confrontations we have with environments, but also the verbal confrontations. The perception we have of the physical interacting with the natural world, our technological inventions, the words used to describe these new inventions, and the abstractions to explain the intangible we believe in are all ways we perpetuate hyperreality. Hyperreality is the hypothetical world that is merely a reflection of the real world. An example of this is a copy machine, where we have a reflection of the original, and can be deceived into thinking we have the original. This exists on larger scales throughout history, like when Renaissance Italy began to mimic the classics of the Ancient Greeks art, writings, and architecture. We see it in status symbols like the cars we drive, and how much they represent our prestige. The thing we perceive is a social construction that may have been invented in our own time, or a time long ago, and when we buy into the hyperreal, we are no longer interacting with the real, but reflected ideas that give us psychological comfort in our current environment. Sometimes these comforts will stay in place even when the environment changes leading to greater misery or death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality).

At some point in history, all social constructs were created to reflect something physical in the environment we existed in as individuals or larger scale units of people. Before real things were replaced with human inventions to represent the real, whether those inventions were physical or not, we had no words, and only actions. With these actions came substances that gave us the ability to survive and/or flourish. We had the warm sun on our bodies, food from the world around us, and animal hides that kept us warm at night. This was the state of nature with the religion of animism. Although the explanations for the actions of nature always relied on a soul possessing every aspect of it, the social construction of the soul was a representation of the original physical world before humans manipulated it. The first words were reflections of the physical things humans interacted with on a daily basis, and whatever souls they thought possessed those objects. In time humans began inventing tools, growing their own food,building towns, and each step of the way, the old words and abstractions of the past were passed along into cultural habits of hyperreality that slowly became further removed their source. Eventually, there are words that no longer have a physical object, but instead are abstractions of the intangible shadows that reflect what used to be. These shadows then became integrated with the new physical environment's ideas and vocabulary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism#Animism_and_religion) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism).

At this point I borrow some ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. The idea is there was a religious state of nature. It was a state where animism was a reflection of the physical environment, and what it could do for us and to us. Each step we took further from that initial nature imprisoned us more by giving us less equality with the souls we interacted with, because the shadows they became were no longer among us, but were abstractions of the originals layered upon each other over time, with words that could only explain each new abstraction, and no longer the source they came from. Each new religion was a hyperreal version of several others, and other aspects the new environments they existed in. These new social constructs became a prison for us, because we could no longer believe in ourselves and our equality with the religious state nature. The newer the religions, the more they made us slaves to other people, religious institutions, and the intangible abstractions we put in power over ourselves. Just as Rousseau knew we could not go back to the state of nature, we cannot go back to the religious state of nature. The only thing we can do is reintroduce animism in the current environment and state we are at, and once again begin to worship the physical world we interact with each day. Just as the general will could only be understood by having regular assemblies, we need to have continual struggles with our current environments, and should worship nothing more than the objects we give souls to around us. These struggles need to seen as something in themselves relating to a particular environment, and if the old beliefs and habits of what benefits us in the physical is not compatible with new environments we should abandon them. Since we cannot get rid of our human made inventions, we can learn to worship them as equals to ourselves too, but always remember that they only have as much power as we choose to give them, and the people we interact with. In other words, we should be the head god in the pantheon in our newly formed techno-animistic worlds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality).