The Religious Syndrome

The Common Diagnosis

A common perspective of religion on a gross level by Atheism is something which typically states an error of psychological profile of an adherent to a given religion; in some degree and fashion.
This view, for instance, is pushed to its zenith of radical representation in the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

The conflict in this perspective is that for a person to accept that religion is a psychological error of deficiency in any regard and of any degree would mean that they would have to accept that every current believer in a religion was at least slightly psychologically deficient by comparison to the non-religious. That may produce a good comedy, however, the statistics are rather unlikely. It would mean that around 80% of the world's population is psychologically deficient. While that could be argued as possible by some, that is not where this tangent ends. It continues on to consider all of the human race over all of the human race's existence, and it includes considering and reflecting on this proposition's applications to the rules of evolution.

Epidemic of Normality

The current estimates hold that from the information available today, around 106 Billion humans have lived so far in accountable history of the human race.
If we assume 80% has at least been the average percentage of religious adherents on Earth throughout human history (and that is probably a conservative number to use), then that would mean that 84 Billion humans have been psychologically deficient in their perception of reality and functional understanding of it; cardinally.

This isn't a misunderstanding of which planet or star orbits which, or how the Earth is shaped or not. This would be a misunderstanding of whether or not causal empathy exists at all in the human species. For instance, if it is a psychological deficiency that produces the belief in religious concepts, then an individual believing in a religion with metaphysical figures, afterlives, and transitive spirits or souls would also have a neurological formation that would prevent the ability of the individual from grasping even basic Newtonian physics of causality.

The neurological possibilities that consequently facilitate religion show a landscape of inquiry that tends to respect human evolution more than belittle it, as stating a psychological deficiency does.

If religion were a psychological deficiency, and the matter at hand is as cardinal as the condition of existence of objects and states, and how they can interact with each other, then the neurology of the individual would be so radically different that it would be incapable of applying the inductive logic of comprehending the physical world they exist in.
In a manner of thinking, they would be causally autistic.
If a plate fell, then such an individual could be incapable of trying to catch it for it simply may not occur to them that it was about to break.

The problem of this is a simple violation of the rules of evolution.
It doesn't really seem plausible for our natural biology to retain a deficiency that would be so ill suited to help us, and instead would hinder our functional comprehension of reality, and expectations of it therein, in such massive over-scaled populations for over an estimated two hundred thousand years or more. Such logic requires a leap of faith almost equal to that of any given theistic religious theology, because it requires a belief that a fundamental rule of evolutionary trait retention is being clearly violated; survival and adaptation.
It is a simplistic way to dismiss religion for conversations regarding moving beyond religion, but it offers no counter supporting argument for why religion exists with account for evolutionary behavior in a surviving and then thriving species from a neurological standpoint.
In other words, saying someone is delusional doesn't answer the question about why religion exists.

It is akin to someone asking why someone with hallucinogenic psychosis is so delusional and the answer provided being that the individual is crazy. It doesn't neurologically answer the question of capacity.
What function do religions provide that are evolutionarily productive?
What neurological function still exists in humanity that permits for the complete sensation of reality actually being as any given religious belief holds?
Stating that religion is a security blanket does not answer the neurological capacity question, because not every religion has a preservation system built into it. Many have no comment on the after-life at all.
Why do these versions exist as well?

It is simple enough too, to understand why environmental religious concepts have existed, such as deities that govern weather patterns in various manners.
This is where most people go to in their mind when thinking of why religion exists, and it is easy to answer that this is due to a psychological deficiency, or immaturity. However, these sorts of propositions are absent the discussion of what a human being is described as being in any one given religion; the ontological existence of humanity.

The Intangible Newtonian Karma

If you read through any given religious narrative, then you can determine some concepts merely by reading the assumptions taken by the religion even when they are not directly addressed by the religion itself in its narrative. This is similar to the effect where an author writes a set of instructions without a title; the assumption about the author would be that the author assumed the reader knew the purpose of the instructions.

For example, why are we thought to exist forever in some religions?
Why are we thought to have energy within our selves that can be harmonized in other religions?
Why are we thought to have morphological capacity of our physical bodies in other religions?
Why did we ever think we had a soul, or spirit, or that our breath is this transient thing which contains our conscious animation?

Keep in mind, these are meant to be questioned in regards to neurological capacity; not rhetorical philosophy. What neurological function participates in positive neurological behaviors gainful to human evolutionary survival that are representative of these psychological behaviors?

That is to say, what is sensationally observed by the human neurology that provokes the sympathy to these ideas as being intuitively accurate summations of the observed sensations?

It is a game of Wheel of Fortune whereby our consciousness is trying to guess the words to the emotional phrasing that our precognitive subconsciousness feels

The neurological possibilities that consequently facilitate religion show a landscape of inquiry that tends to respect human evolution more than belittle it, as stating a psychological deficiency does.

An application of this perspective has us consider the evolutionary consequence of varying aspects of our consciousness and subconsciousness intertwining.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is the third fundamental basis of classic Newtonian physics. It is so cardinally basic and inductively witnessed naturally for humans that it even permeates through to moral constructs of conduct in human societies throughout history. In other words, it has been seen so often that humans adopted this prevalent physical observation's concept into non-physical applications such as human interpersonal relationships, socioeconomic infrastructures (such as social class systems), and moral calculations of sometimes metaphysical consequences (rewards and punishments by divine orchestrations). It is also the principle assumption of the standard human neurology in attempting to identify phenomena. On the extreme end, this consequently provides us with the weather gods of some cultures, but more on tangent, it determines how we evolved to define our awareness of existing and then being aware of it.

One of the most illusive observational existences in most of human history has been simply human breath. It lacks a tangible volume, shape, or body, and even lacks permanent residence at any one time; yet, it is exactly what was witnessed as leaving last when someone dies. This has been so well considered and meditated upon by so many of humanity that the word for breath is even the root for words relating to the spirit, soul, or other forms of life force powers in several ancient variations of languages.

This is not only due to our investigatory reasoning, but also due to our imaginative empathy.

For something to be close and personally important to us, we must emotionally attach to it as some kind of identity. This is due to our neurologically required form of acumen, or assessment. Empathetic relationship to something increases the imprinted assimilation of the concepts of that thing into the fabric of our psyche; our means of growth and living. It increases the value, and therefore the attention, to that thing unto our consciousness and subconsciousness. The reverence in which humanity has paid towards its breath of life over history by evidence of its spiritually influenced etymology, and more overtly with its theological interpretations of what a human is, is a relationship between our neurology naturally giving vitally related importance to our life.

Buying a Vowel

Even further beyond this, however, if we question why this behavior even occurs in human biology, then we can find that the human intuition is a neurological facilitation which efficiently and rapidly relays massive amounts of information into the brain using a precognitive processing that acts as a prescreening function which can react more quickly than consciousness. It acts faster than consciousness because it is what aids, in part, in determining if anything really needs to be brought to attention of the consciousness. As such, many assessments of information regarding existence from the senses are relayed without a linguistic lexicon, and instead rely more on an emotional lexicon. It is this that allows a race car driver the ability to stop suddenly to avoid serious injury or death without ever seeing consciously a reason to stop the car. When our consciousness assesses ourselves using our ability for self-awareness, it notices this gap in translation between the sensed, or intuited, and the consciously identified. It then focuses upon this gap by creating an identity for it in assessment in any manner with which it can satisfy the emotional sensation of what these types of intuitive senses feel like in consciously tangible lexicons that create a relationship between ourselves and this part of ourselves, which is a presence without a direct existence.

In essence, it is a game of Wheel of Fortune whereby our consciousness is trying to guess the words to the emotional phrasing that our precognitive subconsciousness feels about this part of ourselves, or relationship between something and ourselves.

So it is in manners like this, religion can be explained without belittling humanity to the idea of malformed psychological capacities that would challenge the laws of evolution. Instead, it transtheistically remains silent on whether or not any given theological and dogmatic proposition is correct or not, for even if any are correct, the human body requires a functioning capacity biologically as simply as electricity requires a conductive environment. And of relevance to this article's tangent the most, it allows for humanity to pursue its sustainability employing basic religious psychologies without spreading a neurological epidemic among the overwhelming mass of humanity.