It’s because we needed it to bring societies together he says.
For the social bonding and whatnot. Although he makes a unique argument about how Religion could have been born from the minds of imaginative people he doesn’t offer any scientific evidence to back it up. Anthropologists claim that “somewhere we evolved an imagination” but they have no evidence backing that up and considering that scientists today who specialize and study the brain have no real idea what “Imagination” really is or how the mind manages to do it they are pretty much just stuck with random thought trying to explain something.
Kinda like they are imagining a cause since there is no evidence to back up their claims.
See what I did there?
“What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination,” Bloch writes.
“One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it,” says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, “whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead.”
Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being “one body with Christ”, or the Islamic “Ummah” uniting Muslims.
Interesting to say the least. However, I could also build a similar argument supporting religious activity and supporting God by opposing the ideas of Evolution and atheism. I could build a similar hypothesis by saying that mankinds own hubris and egocentric selves needed to find a way to distance themselves from God and by creating a scientific based theology they could steer the human population away from their creators in an effort to “throw the shackles of servitude” aside.
“And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb” And all that good stuff.
While it is an interesting theory it is, like most theory that involves the appearance or creation of man and their societal changes, only speculation and an “imaginative scenario” in itself. It’s just as futile to try and claim that this is “fact” when it is just as intangible to prove as Faith is.
So, either we imagined God to save our lives, or we have imagined that God doesn’t exist so that we don’t have to be held accountable for our lives.
