beliefs have them because a lot of inferential work in the basement
makes them apparently plausible.
So my advice to religious proselytes would be to avoid bombarding
people with cogent and coherent arguments for particular metaphysi-
cal claims and to provide them instead with many occasions where the
claims in question can be used to produce relevant interpretations of
particular situations. But religions do not need expert consultants, for
they all do that anyway. This distribution among systems is in fact a
familiar feature to anthropologists, who know that religions the world
over tend to be multimedia, multisystem affairs. That is, we know that
religious concepts are transmitted in a variety of manners and contexts [317]
in any single human group. People sing, tell anecdotes, use moral
intuitions, use evocation of dangerous situations, dance, take drugs,
fall into trances, etc. Naturally, the particular panoply of techniques
used varies a lot from one group to another, but there is generally no
religion that is confined to one and only one kind of experience.
WHY INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IS MYSTERIOUS
As Richard Dawkins once remarked, there seems to be one simple
process whereby people "get" their religion, and that is heredity.After
all, the best way to predict people's religion is to find out their par-
ents' religion. Now this does not mean, obviously, that being a Bud-
dhist or a Mormon comes with a particular chromosomal configura-
tion. Dawkins's tongue-in-cheek remark was meant to emphasize
something that religious people often take for granted but that is a
source of constant amazement to outsiders: that people generally
adhere to the specific religious commitments of their community and
ignore other variants as largely irrelevant.
This is one of the recurrent themes in the endless and indeed inter-
minable debates between religious and nonreligious people in modern
conditions. The insiders produce all sorts of ingenious reasons why a
materialistic or nonreligious worldview is incomplete or dispiriting,
and why religion offers a better or richer outlook on human existence.
The outsiders want to know why these general metaphysical worries
so often lead people, as if by some extraordinary coincidence, to
espouse precisely the same variety of religion as their forebears, par-
ents or other influential elders.
WHYBELIEF?