How have the dominant species of religions evolved over human history? And why? Archeology suggests that some religious practices go back tens of thousands of years or more. However these ancient religious practices among hunter-gatherers bear little resemblance to organized religion today. Religions centered around morality emerged in early farming societies; a leading hypothesis is that such moralizing religions enabled trust and cooperation within these tight knit communities. High gods emerged about the time large scale societies formed; a leading hypothesis is that those gods functioned to give legitimacy to rulers. Dr Mark Reimers will discuss the evidence for and against these hypotheses as well as consider how priests and kings coöpted religious authority in the Bronze Age. A pivotal change in religious sensibility occurred in the first millennium BCE as the leaders in religious thinking attempted to disentangle religion and politics, giving rise to further attempts at reforms which eventually gave birth to Christianity and Islam. This talk will also include a discussion on the rapidly evolving religions of modern post-industrial societies.

Dr. Mark Reimers is a computational neuroscientist at Michigan State University where he researches how animal brains work and how human genes affect brain function. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology. Dr. Reimers was raised Christian but found a path to humanism in his twenties. Since then he has been a humanist leader and speaker for over a decade in Virginia and now in Michigan.

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