I love religion!

[lukec]

There’s also recent research that I need to look into that suggests that religious belief and experience could also be biological (certain centres in the brain are more active in the very religious). I can’t comment on this yet, but it will be a new thing for me to get into soon. If it is biological, then it’s a bit inescapable.

I think I read something on what you mean- it seems to me to fit very well with the idea that social evolution happened alongside biological evolution of the human brain. Idea being that as the religion "meme" was spreading it was probably upped the survival rate of communities in that groups which are "related" are more likely to aid each other. This comes back to the idea of altruism (or gene selfishness) which is actually helping others which have your gene survive. So groups with common belief systems may have tended to propagate better than those without. So perhaps that area of the brain which promotes or is involved with "being religious" became more potent over the generations since and redoubled the rate at which the religion "meme" spread. If this is the case, then religion should be something we can indeed "get away from" in that the meme is not biological- it's more like a program which is reaaally good at "occupying" a certain part of our brain hardware.

Also @ Zen Badger- I think that Buddhism actually does qualify as a religion, at least semantically. Supreme being not necessary.