Humanistic theories of religion

- Wishfulfillment group: holds that people create religion in order to alleviate unpleasant
emotions.
- Social functionalist: views religion as an attempt to sustain a social order.
- intellectualist group: sees religion as an attempt to interpret and influence the world.

1º Wishfulfillment group
Malinowski thinks religion is self-delusion. Religion attempts not to explain experience, but
to contradict it, for example, it deny death. He finds the roots of religion, and of magic, in
uncertainty and insecurity.
Another version of the wish-fulfillment theory recognizes the desire for interpretation, for
information and meaning, as fundamental. (Miguel de Unamuno, Daniel Stern). The religion
become a kind of interpretation os the world, although the world depicted may be far from
comforting. In this alternative, wish fulfillment becomes much less like irrational "hope against
hope" and very much like intellectualism.

2º Social functionalist

Anthropomorphism
Familiarity account
holds that in order to explain the nonhuman world, we rely on our understandings of ourselves
because these are easiest or most reliable. The familiarity account has two chief versions:
"confusion" and "analogy". They differ in that the confusion version assumes this extension is
involuntary, unconscious, and indiscriminate, while the analogy version assumes it is voluntary,
conscious, and discriminating.

Confusion
Freud and Piaget think this confusion typical of children and of people in simple or primitive
societies. Such people supposedly cannot distinguish their minds from events in the external world
and therefore indiscriminately attribute their own thoughts and feelings to the world around them.
They attribute to the world not only life but also such human capacities.
Feuerbach saya that t God exists in human experience and he exists only there. By saying that God
is an externalized reification of individual consciousness, Feuerbach complements Durkheim, who
says God is an externalized, collective reification of society.
Lange and Nietzsche see no possibility of not anthropomorphizing. In their view, it is not that we
mix human perspectives with independent ones but that independent perspectives are inaccessible.
According to Nietzsche, our senses do not receive information passively, but shape, select, and
simplify it according to our interests. Hence the only world we can apprehend or even imagine
corresponds to our preoccupations.

Analogy
In contrast, the analogy version of the familiarity theory makes using ourselves and other people as
models a reasonable, limited extension of what is familiar to what is not. Fontenelle finds analogy
in classical mythology, where explanations of unfamiliar phenomena always are copied from
familiar ones.
Agassi calls anthropomorphism a projection of human qualities. He largely identifies
anthropomorphism with animism: the "standard and most important variant of anthropomorphism is
animism which sees a soul in everything in nature". This identification implicitly makes two
assumptions: that humans and only humans have souls and that animism is belief in these, rather
than being the more general attribution of life to the lifeless (visión etnocentrista).
Horton details such similarities between science and religion, as the concerns to unify experience
and to reduce apparent complexity to simplicity, apparent disorder to order, and apparent anomaly
to regularity. Both science and religion do these by finding familiar principles in unfamiliar
phenomena; that is, by positing analogies. Horton later gives up the comfort thesis for a cognitive
one.
Views of anthropomorphism as the use of the familiar to comprehend the unfamiliar, then, vary
widely. They range from seeing anthropomorphism as a failure of cognition, based in an inability to
distinguish self from other, to seeing it as a success at mctaphoric and analogical model building,
based in the pattern recognition that is a principle of science as well.

The other standard theory of anthropomorphism, that it relies on the familiar to explain the
unfamiliar, is stronger than the comfort theory but again is insufficient. However, the analogy
version of the familiarity theory requires self-knowledge that is both relatively significant and
relatively reliable, while the confusion version requires that we be unable to tell self from other. The
two requirements contradict each other and neither is clearly satisfied.
The other version of the familiarity theory, confusion: we cannot tell where we leave off and where
the rest of the world begins. Thus we mix our notions of ourselves with notions of the world.
In the first, Vico, Comte, Feuerbach, Piaget, Freud, and White point to a primitive but remediable
failure to distinguish self and other. In the second, Lange and Nietzsche claim we cannot extricate
observation from interest and therefore can only anthropomorphize. Both versions have elements of
truth but again both have limitations.

Nietzsche says we inevitably perceive the world in terms of social relations and of ideas about
ourselves.
The idiosyncratic meaning is attributing to things and events only those characteristics relevant to
human needs and interests. This is better called anthropocentrism. For example, we see in
wildflowers only those patterns reflecting light visible to humans, that is, that between infrared and
ultraviolet, and we assume we see all there is to see about flowers. In contrast insects, whose view
of flowers is privileged by highly evolved relations with them, see flower patterns visible by
ultraviolet as well.
Three limitations may be mentioned. First, emphasizing human anthropocentrism, he
underemphasizes the similarity of human perception to perception in other animals. Although he
calls our entire sensory world anthropomorphic, some forms of anthropomorphism clearly are
stronger or weaker than others. Anthropomorphism, as he notes, is an illusion, even though like
many illusions it is one result of a strategy that otherwise works well. But illusions often do not
serve our interests, as when we are frightened by a dim shape that turns out to be a tree stump. (¡!).
Anthropomorphism may best be explained as the result: of an attempt to see not what we want to
see or what is easy to see, but what is important to see.

Europeans often think such classification of people into human and nonhuman is especially
ethnocentric and peculiar to tribal societies, but some Europeans initially thought American Indians
were nonhuman. The Spanish government and church, for example, debated the humanity of
Central and South American Indians to decide whether they should be accorded souls and
converted, or denied souls, expropriated, and exterminated. The line between human and nonhuman
was different from that now current.
Anthropomorphism, like other products of cognition, results not so much from a desire to find any
particular pattern as from our more general need to find whatever pattern is most important. The
most important pattern in most contexts is that with the highest organization. The highest
organization we know is that of human thought and action. Therefore we typically scan the world
with humanlike models. Scanning the world with humanlike models, we frequently suppose we find
what we are looking for where in fact it does not exist. This is most apparent when we are most
aware of ambiguities (a sound in the night, a shadow on our path, an unexpected death); but such
cases are not aberrant. All perception is interpretive and all interpretation follows a pattern: we look
first for what matters most.