I don't mean to ruin your fun by being careful. Feel free to run with scissors. But like Voltaire said, and here I paraphrase: If you would discuss with me, define your terms.
If people build a form like government, for example, whether or not there are psychological or instinctual drives behind it, that form may fairly be called a construct.
What religion is based upon as a form are feelings every child has, and carries into adulthood. Same with morality generally, that it is not a construct because it grows in that period of life when children are pre-rational.
Now; if you were to say that Law is a social construct that is built upon natural moral forms and relationships; then I could agree. Same with organized religions and dogma. All children, like many neurotics are given to magical thinking. For example: That if you follow a certain course of behavior, a certain result will occur. Or; If you wish hard enough, some particular end will be achieved. While this last sentence is not exactly correct since Wish was an old Scandinavian god, you may get my drift. And, the power of ritual. Like a Catholic crossing himself before he leaves the house- to make sure he has everything: Watch, Wallet, spectacles, testicle. That's a joke, But I once witnessed a woman making the sign of the cross over a slot machine every single time she pushed the play button; and I am sure she won something, but not while I watched.
I think that as with all people mired in ignorance, the imagination gives up answers as we seek them out of any available material. Think of something hidden. I would use the example of a light switch. Children do not know how it happens or why; but if they flip the switch, something happens. Do you think they never ask, never wonder, and never associate their own desire with the light being on, or off? The desire itself, their will, becomes for them the cause of the effect.
Consider a child who cannot walk, and cannot get out of bed. He wakes up in the night, and wants his mother. It is dark and he is afraid. Without a sound being made, his mother arrives. How; and why? The child will sooner make the connection with what he knows, that he desires his mother's company, and she comes- than with any possible unseen complex explanation. And don't get me wrong here, for the opposite message can be taken by a child who cries his eyes out for a mother at work; of the inefficiency of desire.
If morality is based upon a pre rational bonding of mother and child and that bond is too soon broken, the child may grow immoral. If the magical explanations of reality are robbed from a child before they will normally become second rather than first nature, the child may cling the harder to them, or become super rational and unfeeling. It is feeling after all that brings others into our hearts and into our space; is it not. And it is this invocation of emotion that forms the basis of organized religion.
Now; if you look at the course of human progress through anthropology, for example; you can see changes in our sense of the spiritual. You can also see the examples of magical thinking as thought, none the less, so that spiritualism, animism, naturalism etc, are all attempts at science with little actual knowledge, with people trying to grasp what is going on so they can manipulate the process to bring good their way. In all of these attempts at science there is pattern recognition, and this is a sign of intelligence, but if you turn those patterns so they are consciously controlled you have symbol rather than sign, and symbol has a great deal to do with religion.
While I cannot prove it, and don't know how I would go about proving it, it seems obvious, that children growing into an adult state go through all the steps of magical thinking that our primitive forebears went through in a telescoped fashion, coving space that may have taken primitive mankind thousands of years to cover in a matter of years. But just like humanity could never escape its roots stuck between ignorance and knowledge; children can never escape their roots, and always are the child they were. And for some, the neurotic, they are stuck at some stage of childhood and suffer a case of arrested development.
So religion, or religious feeling is part of our individual childhoods, and the childhood of mankind. There is no explanation of people or of humanity that does not involve this magical thinking, or the ritual, or symbology associated with it. So it can more accurately be seen as a natural form rather than a social form; but that does not mean that people do not construct social forms to fit the wide spread natural feeling. We can see when the social form of the feeling failed people, as when paganism, for the most part, died. Christianity has went through changes as a social form, and was a shoot off an older form that was seen to be failing people, and ditto for Islam.
And I think if you look, you will see that the moral form exists before the social form. Love is a moral feeling, a moral form, or a transcendent concept. This sense of love must exist before the social form of marriage. No one by choice would marry some one they do not love. The construct does not exist in vitro, but as part of natural relationships acknowledged.
When people say they are lucky, or fortunate, or blessed you may be certain they are seeking after a rational explanation for what had occured under the cloud of complexity and confusion called life, but they are still scientific in that they are looking for a specific cause for a specific event.
= new reply since forum marked as read
?v=1399080962
