Religion can be explained as a biological phenomenon. From an evolutionary / biological point of view, without imagination, the human mind is a mistake, why? unlike animals, the human mind is aware of its coming death, which creates the risk of an over-powered mind, rationally giving up life knowing everything will be lost in the end. Therefore, imagination compensates, religion makes up a belief of an afterlife which gives a back sense of purpose. The human mind can refuse to be enslaved by nature and be defined by biological function, this is where rationality can contradict our desire to continue living and/or producing an offspring, as a part of our psychology, imagination can compensate and balance by visualizing life after death through religion with the afterlife or other forms of actively investing in the post-mortem-future. Rationally we can argue we should not care about the world after we die, because for us it would not exist anymore, it could matter emotionally if we are to have children or for the sake of the environment or if you are planning to get to heaven (or hell), but anyway it wouldn’t be a purely rational calculation. Imagination could be the only thing saving all of us from making a cold rational calculation of putting a stop to everything, just because – it’s going to happen anyhow. There might be more life-affirmative tricks to play with rationality against our death-drive. The use of afterlife constructions like heaven and hell and the sustainable world might not be the best of them. Our psychology is what happens as a tension between the rational and the emotional, they both can compensate over the other resulting in different patterns of behavior and creating strategies of handling with aspects of reality. Psychology can exist as a guideline for a better life, taking religion as an example there is a reason why it is not playing a big role in some people’s life anymore and it could be because it could not trick the rational aspect of life, making it blind to the cold facts of death, our private extinction. Fully accepting our own end, we would have to focus on more life-affirming values which makes life worth living also as a rational argument. Those have found the root in Existentialist arguments that life is worth living for being a phenomenon worth experiencing justifying itself, approach which continues to redefine ourselves and our relation to the world as an experience to this day.
Nature, mind, imagination
