Todd, Regarding the ideas I have expressed in my theory . . you say "from my perspective the only criticism I have of it is that I take much of it for granted" . . yet, when you write some of these posts about religion I have trouble seeing how that can be true.
For example, you seem to be struggling with whether religion can cause people to do "bad" things, or not. Just the framing of that question seems pretty foreign to me.
First, as you know, good and bad have different frames of reference. There's the "moral" good and bad - which are quite relative to the systems they exist in. There are many thing that we westerners see as terribly immoral about Muslim Sharia law - like cutting off the hands of a thief or stoning to death an adultress - yet members of the Taliban see those as the pinnacle of morality and "good" beyond question.
The only absolute notion of good and bad is one we can only make educated guesses about - and that is that our "good" behavior choices will result in more of our dna existing in future generations than if a less "good" behavior is selected. There are a thousand steps between a given behavior choice and the aggregated abundance of our dna in the human population a thousand or a million years from now. We will only be here for one generation so those will always be guesses.
But the latter version is the only one we can be expected to be bound by - in the larger biological sense. This explanation of "good and bad" seems more like an explanation for EP - which purports to connect behaviour choice to evolutionary success via psychology - and not so much about my theory, directly.
Back to religion. Like "good and bad" religious belief is very relative. There are Christians who believe in a redemptive Christ, who is a nurturing and forgiving God. These Christians enshrine the Beattitudes in their belief system. There are other who believe in a vengefull God who does not suffer non-believers kindly. He does a lot of smiting of those Christians' enemies. Or, at least he does that, when they pray sufficiently.
And that brings us to my theory:
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Belief is the strongest source of the emotions that guide most human decisions. Our brains are not so large because we can reason - they are large to hold our many millions of beliefs that we use to guide our decisions in life.
Maturing is mostly a matter of populating our belief system with a large set of useful sources for behavior guiding emotions. As we mature we build up our belief system from those memes available in our culture that best satisfy our psychological needs. Generally, we can see those psychological forces at any given time and in any given person, as existing along a liberal / conservative spectrum - and for their belief system in general to be structured from the top along those lines.
But, as adults our psychogical mind-set along that spectrum, that general bias, will have been largely determined by things that occured in our lives at earlier times as we were maturing. Psychological conservatism is born of insecurity - fear of being out of control in a scary universe. Psychological liberalism is born of security - a feeling of being in control of our own happiness in a somewhat benevolent universe that we share with other creatures that mean us no harm - even though they may be designed by evolution to eat us for dinner.
But that mind-set remains very adaptable during our lives. We apply conservative or liberal beliefs differently depending on the context - like in how we deal with family vs. strangers. Also, external events can greatly affect our mind-set at any time. It is said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged - and there is great truth in that. We also compartmentalize our liberal and conservative beliefs. For example, many who consider themselves politically liberal - like me - have very conservative feelings about terrorists who would kill many Americans if they could - and how we should deal with them - again like me.
I have lately moved even further in this direction - I come to the conclusion that our brains hold memes of both conservative and liberal design. The environment we matured in will give us a default bias as to which memes we we embrace as strong beliefs - which memes become a part of our personality - our cognitive identity. As time goes by though, we have a great ability to convert memes from that pool to "belief" status and demote others back to just memes - as conditions change during our lives. That's another way that we mammals adapt to our environment in very sohisticated ways. In this way we can become more conservative - such as if circumstance require us to join the police force - or more liberal - if we find a necessary job working for Planned Parenthood, for example - but we still remain basically the same person.
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So, the question of whether religion causes humans to do good or bad things - is a non-sequiter on two levels. Within any epistomological system, a native religion can only do good things - by definition. When asked to compare religions on that scale - the adherents of each religion will tend to see the other religion as "bad" - and their own religion as "good".
On the other level, that of evolution, I'd say it is not so easy to predict that the dna within the cells of followers of a "smiting" God might not become more numerous in succeeding generations than the dna of a more charitable and forgiving deity.
My guess is that, for good evolutionary reasons, societies where resources are plentiful and enemies few, engender liberal belief systems where "live and let live" and "do unto others" are the guiding principles - and those where resources are scarce (or becoming so) and enemies abound, produce belief systems that are conservative where "don't take chances with anybody who is different or not from here" is the rule. (I will not go into the interesting parallels in religion where both liberal and conservative memes are available for harvest depending on the context - as this post is becoming way too long already.)
Even within larger societies, those who grow up in a harsh environment where others are constantly trying to harm them - and often succeeding - will develop a psychological preference for belief systems that are conservative in nature - and vice versa. Note that love, help and nurturance are the first "resources" that an infant must find - and that psychological preferences seen later in life are often established during the first months of life.
Finally, beliefs are the source of the most powerful emotions that guide our "cognitive" behavior choices. I can say that again and again - and you can agree and even say that it is (rationally) obvious. But, rationality is not knowing. Knowing is an emotional process. Rationality is worthless in terms of behavior choice. Only when rational conclusions become beliefs (and acquire the necessary emotional tags) - can rationality, imperfect as it is, influence behavior choice.
I must add (for some here) that religions are just belief systems. There is no difference between communism or National Socialism, the Taliban or the Catholic Church in any motivational sense. They are all very psychologically conservative belief systems that were produced from the cultural memes and historical contexts that Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, Muhammed and the Apostle Paul found themselves in at the time. And they all contain liberal memes that can be applied according the needs of their current leaders, as needed.
Conservative belief systems by nature have very strong emotional tags - and will tend to displace psychologically liberal systems (with their weaker tags) where they exist side by side. Built from very strong emotional tags they also try to destroy each other.
I would guess that the numbers of violent deaths that eventually resulted from each of these fundamentally conservative systems is somewhat comparable - give or take a few percent of the available polpulation here, a few percent there. Also, that comparing them on their violent death quotient - is beside the point, anyway - in that the violent attacks against heretics may or may not result in the propogation of one's dna. In WWII we killed far more Germans and Japanese than they did of us.
And I'd guess that most of us carry in our cells the dna of the majority of our ancestors who found themselves in a violent, unpredictable world where fundamentally conservative beliefs enhanced their survival - rather than the few who found themselves in more benign times and circumstances where they had the luxury to foster more psychologically liberal belief systems in their minds.
Best regards, Margaret