Humans are physically weak. We may be smart, but a wooden spear doesn't help much against a sabre-tooth unless you have a few buddies backing you up.
It doesn't matter that society does not share common genes, the human mind was shaped by millennia of tribe-based socialization. A successful tribe can only have one (or a few) leaders, while all the rest have to follow orders. This evolutionary pressure is why most people are "sheep".
it's a weak analysis. You only look at the advantagous side of living in a herd to support your theory. I can just easily build imaginary scenarios where living in a herd is bad for suvival to support a theory that humans are, by evolution, anti-social. When we dig up primative human skeletons, we didn't find all that many died of sabre-tooth attack but a whole lot more victims of tribal warfare. We can also look at 20th century, where death by war and tyrannical rule outstripe untimely death by all other causes. Does that give me the right to say Human societies are evolutionary malformation?
The fact is that anything you find in human, you can
retrospectively build an unverifiable story of evolution to justify its existance. Why humans torture each other? evolution. why humans have morality? evolution. why humans follow leaders? evolution. why humans rebel? evolution.
People believe what they *want* to believe. That's what you are missing from your hypothesis. You are assuming that people prefer knowing the "truth", when really all they want is to feel good about themselves.
Humans have an innate desire to feel a part of something bigger, and to find purpose and meaning in their lives. People don't like to feel ignorant, and they don't like admitting their ignorance. They are also lazy. All this combined explains why most people are so ready to believe in simple answers about the purpose of life.
You assume belief is a matter of preference. Think again whether that is true. I know for a fact that If I believe in chirstianity I could have a better social life, can I make myself believe in chirstianity?
People do want to believe something that makes themslaves feel better. You say it's nature, I say it's culture.
Faith and honesty have only the faintest relation to each other. Trust is not built on honesty, it's built own relationships. A child trusts his mother because she is his caretaker, not because she is honest. School kids trust their teachers because they are also caretakers. People trust policemen and doctors because they're authority figures.
Moral education, religious or patriotic, fail not because they're simplistic, but because the students stop at the simple answers. You can't become a successful scientist by just reading textbooks. You have to go out and do your own experiments and draw your own conclusions. The same principle applies for morality.
You're mistaking two concepts of "trust". In my original, "trust" means "taking what someone said at facevalue". When you talk about "trust", you took it to be "trust someone to care for you". I trust my mother as a caregiver doesn't entail that I trust her advice and statements of facts. In fact, I don't trust my mother in that regard, nor my primary school teachers. Perhaps my way of saying trust is better tranlate into "credibility". Let's say faith comes from credibility, and credibility comes from honesty.
Speaking from experiance, I never give any credibility to my primary school and early secondary school teachers precisely becasue they were never "wrong". It doesn't take a child long to figure out the school is just a game where you try to guess the "right" answer to get the reward and avoid punishment. Most children go through education system that way and never been charmed by the beauty of knowledge. It's not like they believe in simple stuff either. Do they really believe in 1+1=2? I mean if after finishing school, some authority decleared 1+1=3, and anyone doesn't do so would face punishment, do you think they would offer resistance? In fact, students today graduate from schools believing in nothing, 1+1=2 is a rule of the game which can just easily be 1+1=3. They are disillusioned and cynical.
I never said being simple is the problem. I said lack of credibility on the part of teacher is the problem. In your theory, people turn to religion becuase it offers a simplistic world view. But a lot of virtues and morals offer just that too. All those we've been talking about: peace, alturism, self-sacrifice all assume a very simplistic worldview(simpler even than religion). These values are being taught early and encouraged throughout primary education in China, and I heard more and more talks about today's chinese youths' "lack of value and ethics". Why is that? becuase no one understand what "self-sacrifice" means? or no one believe in it? And can you blame student in not believing in self-sacrifice when they observe absolutely on one in their environment behave like that?
To summarize, I think education shouldn't aim at making its students saints. It should aim at making them
realistic, by being honest with them, by presenting them truth. I didn't see any saint out of our education system, I see a lot cynicism, I think realism is an improvement over cynicism.
