GODS AND SPIRITS ARE PARASITIC
Religious concepts are particularly successful because people repre-
sent them in a way that makes use of capacities they have anyway. At
the beginning of this book, I mentioned that religious concepts are
parasitic upon intuitive ontology. If you have all the inference systems
that are found in a normal human brain, then some concepts become
particularly easy to represent and will generate all sorts of salient
inferences. This is what makes a floating island or a bleeding statue or
a talking tree likely to have some cultural success. But then we also
[202] have social mind inference systems. We have a system of moral infer-
ences that produces very special representations. It suggests that some
qualities of behavior in the context of social interaction are com-
pletely clear to any agent that has all the relevant information. Once
you have such assumptions, as all normal children and adults do, the
concept of an agent with full access to information becomes both very
easy to represent—the necessary system is already in place—and rich
in consequences. This is why, far from religion supporting morality,
as we might think, what happens is that our intuitive moral thinking
makes some religious concepts easier to acquire, store and communi-
cate to others. In the case of misfortune, our propensity to think of
salient events in terms of social interaction creates a context where
supposedly powerful agents become more convincingly powerful. In
both cases religious concepts are parasitic, which is just a colorful way
of describing what would be technically called a relevance effect. The
concepts are parasitic in the sense that their successful transmission is
greatly enhanced by mental capacities that would be there, gods or no
gods.
RELIGION EXPLAINED