As a nineteen year old seeking the face of God, I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1975.  I prayed about the Book of Mormon as the missionaries instructed, and received what I felt certain was a clear response from God.  Despite the fact that God would never answer my prayer about Joseph Smith's prophetic calling, I still joined the church and remained a devout, somewhat intense, convert for fifteen years.  My falling away from the faith occurred gradually, over the course of years of regular study and prayer.  It was a painful experience, because the lens through which I viewed, and sought to understand, the world, was suddenly too flawed to retain.  In exchange for that lens, of which I had been so certain for so long, I received a dose of humility, and skepticism regarding my, and perhaps mankind's, ability to truly see ourselves objectively, as well as the continuing desire to attempt to do so, nonetheless.  So it is with a different sort of spirit that I offer the following thoughts about religion. No longer the spirit of certitude of truth, but the spirit of truth seeking, with a nod to the ever present possibility that I may, in the end, turn out to be quite wrong.

A few years after losing my faith, I stumbled upon the internet community of ex-mormons, and the believing Mormons willing to converse with those ex-mormons, or doubting mormons, as well.  As my own beliefs gradually drifted towards atheism, I also became somewhat involved in more generic dialogues between believers and nonbelievers.  I was somewhat surprised, and taken aback, by the intensity of these dialogues on both sides, including, at times, my own.  It reminded me of the slamming doors, angry looks, and loud shouts I had often experienced as a missionary in France, knocking on endless catholic doors.  Religion, like politics, seems to regularly incite the strongest of opinions, and sometimes the harshest of words.  The cliché that polite people do not discuss religion or politics seemed quite the truism, from my perspective.  I couldn't help but wonder why.  Why did this topic incite such passion?  Why did being confronted with a religious opponent sometimes bring out the ugliest parts of our nature, even in believers striving to emulate Jesus?

My obsession with human nature has led me to a library of books regarding the social and moral evolution, as well as physical evolution, of mankind.  With the understanding that I have no formal training in the field, or pretend to no particular expertise, I still feel compelled to label myself as an "evolutionist", in order to clarify my thoughts on religion as tribe.

The books I read regarding human evolution, particularly Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, all stressed that to understand the impact of evolution on human beings, we must look back to the environment in which our ancestors lived during the time they were evolving to our present state.  Evolution is a slow process, too slow to successfully imagine at times, so while we still remain an evolving species, the traits that impact us today as a species evolved at a time in history far past.  Our ancestors evolved during a period in which human beings grouped themselves into small tribal units.  The tribal units were familial in nature, in that it was highly likely that the people we saw on a regular basis, in our tribe, shared a certain percentage of our own genetic make-up, hence, we had a genetic interest in their survival, after our own.  Moreover, this was the unit upon which we heavily relied for aid in our individual survival, in the form of reciprocal altruism.  We offer good will and help when we are able to do so, with the trust that the recipient will likewise extend good will and help back to us when we are in time of need.  Tribal loyalty was natural.  These were the people who would help us survive: these were the people with whom we shared genetic interests.  Other tribes were often overtly threatening, or at the very least, presented competition over limited resources, and hence, could be seen as the "enemy".

Today, of course, human beings do not normally live in these small tribal units.  We live in towns, in cities, in suburbs, where most of the people we face on a daily basis do not share our genetic interest, aside from our immediate family.  We still form tribes with those people, and experience tribal unity with our neighborhood, our town, our state, our country.  But these are often such large groups of people that human beings still are looking, so to speak, for our smaller tribe in which to nest.  Religion, as well as other divisions, like politics, sexual orientation, race, gender, can become such a tribe.

Tribal loyalty is strong, and is the filter through which we view our own interactions, and our interactions with strange tribes.  This filter can create an obstacle in an objective analysis of our own behavior, our interactions with members of other tribes.  We have a natural bias towards our own tribe, a bias that compels us to view ourselves, and our tribal members, of being more right, more deserving, more worthy, than our opponents'.  This bias results in our sensitivity to the sins of our opposing tribe, while often ignoring the very same sins of our own tribe.  We jostle and elbow one another, sometimes quite aggressively, all the while being certain that it is the "other" who began the contention, it is the "other" too stubborn to see reality, it is the "other" too prone to generalize, to insult, to even lie.  We protect our own tribe, because it is our tribe who nutures and protects us, in turn.  

Our ancestors served us well.  Without their tribal units, loyalties and boundaries, human beings would not have successfully evolved as we have today.  We owe our ancestors a debt of gratitude.  At the same time, we evolved into beings capable of meta-cognition, and perhaps it is time to utilize that ability in the hopes of recognizing the root of some of our baser instincts to judge and condemn "strange tribes", and perhaps resisting some of these instincts.  Until we do, we remain destined to jostle, elbow, provoke in self- righteous indignation, without ever really hearing the voice, and sometimes the legitimate opinions, of our "opponents".  The cost for such inability to respect one's own beliefs, but yet be able to rise above the tribal instincts such beliefs may trigger, can vary from familial aggravation in discussions with members of varying faiths, all the way to the devastation of a physical attack from an enemy clothed in the garb of True Belief.  Now, more than ever, we need to find a way to speak beyond our tribal boundaries.