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By: Shea Greentree and Danae Dasgupta

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Definition: Appeal to authority means that the information from a person of a higher power is considered accurate simply because of their possession. There doesn't have to be valid proof of their claim in order for people to believe the information.
Connection: We chose this article because it is a prime example of appealing to authority and how the president of the united states can be an unreliable source of information. Being in a position of such power, a lot of people would assume that anything the president says is factual and there is no need to doubt the information at hand. This article explains how Trump was seeking out a disinfecting injection to clean the body within minutes. Some people were quick to notice that ingesting disinfecting agents is a common way of suicide. This is why you shouldn't appeal to authority without doing your own research as well.

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Trump suggests ‘injection’ of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and ‘clean’ the lungs

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A Homeland Security official, under questioning from reporters, later said federal laboratories are not considering such a treatment option.

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Definition: Red herring is similar to a distraction or a decoy when it comes to a question or situation. A red herring is usually used when the speaker is trying to steer away from answering certain pieces of information by answering in a vague way of throwing in irrelevant information.
Connection: This case is very connected to the Red herring. Justin Trudeau promised to make amends with the native lands of Canada and help restore what was once theirs. This caused a lot of positive attention in the media, all while he was building pipelines through their land to gain proffit for himself. His promise was a distraction, so he could undergo his project of his 1,000km pipeline causing more harm to their land.

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Justin Trudeau promised to protect indigenous rights. He lied, again | Khelsilem

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One oil spill from the Trans Mountain pipeline would destroy Squamish territory. So much for Trudeau’s promise

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Post #4 Red Flag: Suppression by authority 

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Post #4 Red Flag: Suppression by authority 

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Definition: Suppression by authority is when the government, scientists, and other hierarchies don't fully reveal the truth about a product or situation in order to continue making a profit of some sort off of the topic. They also release information that the public is wanting to hear, but withhold and censor some of the truth.

Connection: This would be an example of Suppression by authority due to the fact that the government was literally supressing the rights of canadians by freezing their bank accounts while undergoing a convoy against the vaccine mandate. The government set the mandate that canadians need to be vaccinated in order to have freedom in canada, and when the public fought back for their rights, they were shut down and punished.

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Canada says it will freeze the bank accounts of ‘Freedom Convoy’ truckers who continue their anti-vaccine mandate blockades

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Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the truckers may have their vehicle insurance suspended and urged them to take their vehicles home.

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Definition: the term mystical energy comes from the claim in pseudoscience that everything holds a certain vibration and energy that is sensible. People often use the term when they are talking about a person's emotional state, or when referring to a spirit/entity.
Connection: We believe this article fits the claim of mystical energy because of the idea of having a colour-coordinated glow for a person depending on the vibrations they give off. This article explained that a lady went to get her aura read, and she felt it was accurate to her personality traits. An aura is supposed to be a coloured hue that surrounds a person, but there is no scientific proof that there is a definite truth behind each aura reading.

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A Portland-based visual artist offers aura readings with a rare camera that can translate your body's electricity into color.

She offers readings through her touring Radiant Human popup photo studio for $35.

There's no such thing as a "wrong" aura - it's simply a reflection of your energy and personality traits.

When you're a well-documented natural wellness nerd with a hobbyist-level interest in the zodiac, explaining to your coworkers at happy hour that you've got to run so you can make your aura-reading appointment feels like an inevitability realized. At least, that's how it felt last May when I informed my team I was heading to Philadelphia's Moon + Arrow to get my aura photo taken and read by Christina Lonsdale at the Radiant Human pop-up. It's something I'd been dying to do since I heard Lonsdale explaining her practice on the That's So Retrograde podcast in 2015, so I more-than-happily forked over the $35 to reserve my spot in line for a session (her readings sell out, and they sell out fast).

That's right - Lonsdale, a Portland-based visual artist with a family connection to the cosmic (more on that in a bit) has a (rare) camera that photographs your aura. Designed and built by Guy Coggins in the 1970s, the camera is connected to silver-plated sensors and "those sensors are able to identify your body's electricity and translate that into a color, since both have wavelengths, and that color shows up as a secondary exposure," Lonsdale explains. In essence, the camera works as a visual biofeedback monitor to outwardly express your inner vibe.

Lonsdale's traveling photo studio setup is appropriately otherworldly in its aesthetic - a white geodesic dome that would look just as at home in a Mars exploration movie as it does in the middle of a vintage store. Once you're inside the tent for your session, Lonsdale situates you on a small stool and places the "reader" - a rectangular box topped with two silver sensor plates for your hands - on your lap. Then you sit perfectly still while she snaps a Polaroid-esque photo. In time, all will be revealed.

Before she actually took my photo, Lonsdale explained to me that she doesn't technically identify as a healer and considers Radiant Human an art project rather than a psychic one, explaining "as an artist, your work does the talking; your primary responsibility is to create the experience or to start the conversation, not to guide people to a certain outcome. As a healer, you are working for a particular outcome." In fact, Lonsdale actually began Radiant Human back in 2013 as a simple social media photography project, posting aura portraits on Instagram for fun.

It wasn't long before the project started to grow and Lonsdale began driving around the country, setting up shop for everything from a 10-day residency at the Whitney Museum in New York to a two-day stint at a local crystal shop in Los Angeles. There's also the time she got invited to the GOOP offices to photograph Gwyneth Paltrow, and the night she had a session with Zosia Mamet at her wedding. This gal is cosmically cool.

That wasn't always the way, however. Lonsdale explains that she grew up on a commune (that her dad started) and her mother is an artist who "will paint a particular dream or vision that she's had, and in these paintings, there are typically auras and spirits that create the energetic backdrop of the story in the painting." But if you'd asked her teenage self if she ever thought she'd be photographing auras as an adult, she says "like most kids, I resisted. If you asked me about auras in my teens, I WOULD HAVE GAGGED." Now, though, she admits that "when you look at [her mother's paintings] you can see that this is clearly some kind of subconscious influence for me."

So what is an aura, anyway? Lonsdale explains it as "your energy field, so of course, that can change and fluctuate because energy changes and fluctuates. Although we do have key personality traits that typically stick with us throughout our lives, and our attitudes or personalities obviously affect our energy," which means it can fluctuate over time, mood, and experience.

Each aura color corresponds to a connected grouping of characteristics and emotions, and Lonsdale is quick to point out that there's no "wrong" aura (people often freak out if their aura turns out to be mostly red, since they identify that as a "negative" color). Turns out, mine is an inky mix of purples and blues, which signifies loyal, nurturing, emotionally sensitive, and nonjudgmental traits - I like to be surrounded by people who inspire me, and my friendships are important to me. There's just a little bit of white in the left-hand corner, which Lonsdale said could mean I'm feeling some confusion with too many options in one area of my life. Accurate.

Lonsdale is on tour constantly, like some kind of cosmic rockstar, complete with sold-out shows and followers who keep coming back. With just over 21,000 aura portraits taken (and counting!), Lonsdale understands that her work is more than just a navel-gazey extension of our current selfie culture. She says, "To capture your own energetic evolution throughout these moments of being a complex human... THAT is what makes the concept of a selfie in this context so interesting and is really one of the most rewarding aspects of this project for both my subjects and myself." I have to agree - even if you don't fully believe in the concept of auras, talking with a stranger about the innermost workings of your being is a strangely comforting and vulnerable experience.

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I had an aura reading - and it was surprisingly accurate

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A Portland-based visual artist offers aura readings with a rare camera that can translate your body's electricity into color. She offers readings through her touring Radiant Human popup photo studio for $35. There's no such thing as a "wrong" aura - it's simply a reflection of your energy and personality traits.

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Description: Ancient wisdom relates to how people thousands of years ago thought things worked. Although during the ancient periods, there wasn't much scientific proof to back up their belief systems, over time people have made connections to their recordings and imply them to today's world.
Connection: In today's modern world, we still practice values that our ancestors did back in the day. For example, in this article, explains how culture, morals, and religous belifes have been passed down through many generations. There is no scientific proof that there is a god or higher celestial being, yet so much of the worlds population follows some sort of religion. Some religons go back billions of years, and theres no way of proving if they hold any truth, yet we still follow them to this day.

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"This is my body."

These words, recorded in the Gospels as being spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper, are said daily at Church services around the world before the communion meal is eaten. When Christians hear these words spoken in the present, we're reminded of the past, which is always with us, which never goes away.

Just how much past are Christians reminded of? Certainly the last two millennia, which, in addition to devout celebrations of the Eucharist, are rife with doctrinal disputes, church splits, episodes of violence, excommunications, papal pronouncements, and various metaphysical debates, all revolving around the communion meal.

But we can rewind further back, to the development of the oral traditions that got fixed into texts that were incorporated into the canonical New Testament. We can also wonder about the historical meal on which the various Last Supper texts are based.

We can travel further back still, long before even the emergence of Christianity. After all, Jesus was a Jew, and so his act of breaking bread with the disciples reminds us of the entire history of the Jewish people, including their harrowing escape from Egyptian slavery and their receiving of the Torah at Sinai.

But we can go back even further. Any religious meal is, before it is anything else, a meal. It is an act of table-sharing, certainly an important ritual in the ancient Near East. Seder, and later communion, were "taken up" theologically and liturgically, but the positive feelings around table-sharing were already in place. They'd already been in place since the emergence of modern humans, about 200,000 years ago.

And yet - Homo s apiens wasn't the only species to discover the benefits of food-sharing. Neanderthals certainly pooled their resources, as did the several other Homo species dating back two million years.

"Think of uber pro-social hunter-gatherers having a meal," one of my theology professors told me when I wondered about the deep evolutionary history behind the Eucharist. "The hunters feel proud to have done well and shared with their family; those who prepared the food are recognised and appreciated; everyone's belly is getting filled and feeling good; and so many positive social interactions are taking place. No wonder so much mythological content is built up around the meal."

But food-sharing even predates our Homo ancestors, and is currently observed in chimpanzees and bonobos. In fact, one recent paper even documented research of bonobos sharing food with bonobos outside of their own social group. Barbara Fruth, one of the study's authors, told the digital magazine Sapiens that meal-sharing "must have its roots in our last common ancestor". Based on the molecular clock, the last common ancestor, or LCA, of humans and Great Apes lived about 19 million years ago.

When I hear the words "This is my Body," then, my mind immediately launches into a race to the evolutionary starting line, if you will.
Deep religion
I begin with a discussion of the Eucharist because my particular religious tradition is Christian. But the point I'm making - that religious experiences emerge from very specific, very long histories - could be made with most religious phenomena. That's because, in the words of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, "Nothing is ever lost." History goes all the way back, and who and how and where we are now is the result of its winding forward. Any human phenomenon that exists is a human phenomenon that became what it is. This is no less true of religion.

If we're going to think about the deep history of religion, then we need to be clear about what religion is. In his book The Bonobo and the Atheist, the primatologist Frans de Waal shares a funny story about participating in a panel hosted by the American Academy of Religion. When one participant suggested they start with defining religion, someone was quick to note that last time they tried to do that, "half the audience had angrily stomped out of the room". Quipped de Waal: "And this in an academy named after the topic!"

Still, we need to start somewhere, so de Waal suggests this definition: religion is "the shared reverence for the supernatural, sacred, or spiritual as well as the symbols, rituals, and worship that are associated with it". De Waal's definition echoes one given by sociologist Émile Durkheim, who also emphasised the importance of shared experiences that "unite into one single moral community".

The importance of shared experience can't be overstated since, in the story we're telling, the evolution of human religion is inseparable from the ever-increasing sociality of the hominin line. As Bellah points out, religion is as a way of being. We might also view it as a way of feeling, as a way of feeling together.

While much of the scientific study of religion is on theology-based doctrinal religions, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar thinks this is a narrow way of studying the phenomenon because it "completely ignores the fact that for most of human history religions have had a very different shamanic-like form that lacks gods and moral codes". (By shamanic, Dunbar means religions of experience that commonly involve trance and travel in spirit worlds.) While the theology-based forms are only a few thousand years old and characteristic of post-agricultural societies, Dunbar argues that the shamanic forms date back 500,000 years. These, he claims, are characteristic of hunter-gatherers.
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If we want to understand how and why religion evolved, Dunbar says we need to start out by examining religions "with the cultural accretions stripped away". We need to focus less on questions about Big Gods and creeds, and more on questions about the capacities that emerged in our ancient ancestors that allowed them to achieve a religious way of being together.
Adaptation or by-product?
All societies, after all, seem to have religions of some sort. "There are no exceptions to this," de Waal told me over the phone.

There are two major perspectives on why this might be. One is called functionalism or adaptationism: the idea that religion brings positive evolutionary benefits, which are most often framed in terms of its contribution to group living. As de Waal puts it: "If all societies have [religion], it must have a social purpose."

Others take the view that religion is a spandrel, or by-product of evolutionary processes. The word spandrel refers to an architectural shape that emerges as a by-product between arches and ceiling. Religion, on this interpretation, is akin to a vestigial organ. Perhaps it was adaptive in the environments it originally evolved in, but in this environment it's maladaptive. Or perhaps religious beliefs are the result of psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve ecological problems unrelated to religion. Either way, evolution didn't "aim" at religion; religion just emerged as evolution "aimed" at other things.

While folks on both sides of this debate have their reasons, it seems unhelpful to frame the evolution of religion in such either/or terms. Something that was merely a by-product of a blind evolutionary process could well be taken up by human beings to perform a specific function or solve a specific problem. ( Read about what the future of religion could be like.)

This can be true for many behaviours - including music - but religion presents a particular puzzle, since it often involves extremely costly behaviours, such as altruism and, at times, even self-sacrifice.

For this reason, some theorists such as Dunbar argue that we should also look beyond the individual to the survival of the group.

This is known as multilevel selection, which "recognises that fitness benefits can sometimes accrue to individuals through group-level effects, rather than always being the direct product of the individual's own actions", as Dunbar defines it.

An example is cooperative hunting, which enables groups to catch bigger prey than any members could catch as individuals. Bigger prey means more for me, even if I have to share the meat (since the animal being shared is already larger than anything I could catch alone). Such group-level processes "require the individual to be sensitive to the needs of other members of the group", says Dunbar.

There is no history of the religion of an individual creature. Our story is about us.
Feeling first
If we are to understand religion, then, we first need to look back into your deep history to understand how human ancestors evolved to live in groups in the first place.

We are, after all, descended from a long line of ancestral hominoids with "weak social ties and no permanent group structures", says Jonathan Turner, author of The Emergence and Evolution of Religion. That leads Turner to what he considers the million-dollar question: "How did Darwinian selection work on the neuroanatomy of hominins to make them more social so they could generate cohesive social bonds to form primary groups?" he asked me on the phone. "That's not a natural thing for apes."

Our ape line evolved from our last common ancestor around 19 million years ago. Orangutans broke away about 13-16 million years ago, while the gorilla line branched away about 8-9 million years ago. The hominin line then branched into two about 5-7 million years ago, with one line leading to the chimpanzees and bonobos, and the other leading to us. We modern humans share 99% of our genes with living chimpanzees - which means we're the two most closely related apes in the whole line.

The similarities between humans and chimps are well known, but one important difference has to do with group size. Chimpanzees, on average, can maintain a group size of about 45, says Dunbar. "This appears to be the largest group size that can be maintained through grooming alone," he says. In contrast, the average human group is about 150, known as Dunbar's Number. The reason for this, says Dunbar, is that humans have the capacity to reach three times as many social contacts as chimps for a given amount of social effort. Human religion emerges out of this increased capacity for sociality.

How come? As our ape ancestors moved from receding forest habitats to more open environments, like the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa, Darwinian pressures acted on them to make them more social for increased protection from predators and better access to food; it also made it easier to find a mate. Without the ability to maintain new structures - like small groups of five or six so-called nuclear families, says Turner - these apes wouldn't have been able to survive.

So how did nature achieve this socialisation process? Turner says the key isn't with what we typically think of as intelligence, but rather with the emotions, which was accompanied by some important changes to our brain structure. Although the neocortex figures prominently in many theories of the evolution of religion, Turner says the more important alterations concerned the subcortical parts of the brain, which gave hominins the capacity to experience a broader range of emotions. These enhanced emotions promoted bonding, a crucial achievement for the development of religion.

The process of subcortical enhancement Turner refers to dates to about 4.5 million years ago, when the first Australopithecine emerged. Initially, says Turner, selection increased the size of their brains about 100 cubic centimetres (cc) beyond that of chimpanzees, to about 450 cc (in Australopithecus afarensis). For the sake of comparison, this is smaller than later hominins - Homo habilis had a cranial capacity of 775 cc, while Homo erectus was slightly larger at 800-850. Modern humans, in contrast, boast a brain size much bigger than any of these, with a cranial capacity of up to 1,400 cc.

But the comparably smaller brain size doesn't mean that nothing was happening to the hominin brain. Brain size is measured by an endocast, but Turner says these do not reflect the subcortical enhancement that was occurring between the emergence of Australopiths (around 4 million years ago) and Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago). "It is in the story of how these [subcortical] mechanisms evolved that, ultimately, the origins of religion are to be discovered."

Although the neocortex of humans is three times the size of apes', the subcortex is only twice as big - which leads Turner to believe that the enhancement of hominin emotion was well underway before the neocortex began to grow to its current human size.

Here's how nature pulled it off. You've probably heard talk of the so-called four primary emotions: aggression, fear, sadness, and happiness. Notice anything about that list? Three of the emotions are negative. But the promotion of solidarity requires positive emotions - so natural selection had to find a way to mute the negative emotions and enhance the positive ones, Turner says. The emotional capacities of great apes (particularly chimpanzees) were already more elaborate than many other mammals, so selection had something to work with.

At this point in his argument, Turner introduces the concept of first- and second-order elaborations, which are emotions that are the result of a combinations of two or more primary emotions. So, for example, the combination of happiness and anger generates vengeance, while jealousy is the result of combining anger and fear. Awe, which figures majorly in religion, is the combination of fear and happiness. Second-order elaborations are even more complex, and occurred in the evolution from Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) to Homo sapiens (about 200,000 years ago). Guilt and shame, for example, two crucial emotions for the development of religion, are the combination of sadness, fear, and anger.

It's difficult to imagine religion without the capacity to experience these emotional elaborations for the same reason it's difficult to imagine close social groups without them: such an emotional palette binds us to one another at a visceral level. "Human solidarities are only possible by emotional arousal revolving around positive emotions - love, happiness, satisfaction, caring, loyalty - and the mitigation of the power of negative emotions, or at least some negative emotions," says Turner. "And once these new valences of positive emotions are neurologically possible, they can become entwined with rituals and other emotion-arousing behaviours to enhance solidarities and, eventually, produce notions of power gods and supernatural forces."

Not to jump ahead too far, but it's important to understand how pivotal feeling is in the evolution of religion. As far as Darwin was convinced, there wasn't any difference between religious feeling and any other feeling. "It is an argument for materialism," he wrote in a journal entry, "that cold water brings on suddenly in head, a frame of mind, analogous to those feelings, which may be considered as truly spiritual." If this is true, then that means the causes of religious feelings can be pinpointed and studied just like any other feeling.
Ritual
As selection worked on existing brain structures, enhancing emotional and interpersonal capacities, certain behavioural propensities of apes began to evolve. Some of the propensities that Turner lists as already present in apes include: the ability to read eyes and faces and to imitate facial gestures; various capacities for empathy; the ability to become emotionally aroused in social settings; the capacity to perform rituals; a sense of reciprocity and justice; and the ability to see the self as an object in an environment. An increase in the emotional palette available to apes would, according to Turner, result in an increase in all of these behavioural capacities.

Though many if not all of these behaviours have been documented in apes, I want to concentrate on two of them - ritual and empathy - without which religion would be unthinkable.

In archival footage, primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall describes the well-known waterfall dance which has been widely observed in chimpanzees. Her comments are worth quoting at length:
When the chimpanzees approach, they hear this roaring sound, and you see their hair stands a little on end and then they move a bit quicker. When they get here, they'll rhythmically sway, often upright, picking up big rocks and throwing them for maybe 10 minutes. Sometimes climbing up the vines at the side and swinging out into the spray, and they're right down in the water which normally they avoid. Afterwards you'll see them sitting on a rock, actually in the stream, looking up, watching the water with their eyes as it falls down, and then watching it going away. I can't help feeling that this waterfall display or dance is perhaps triggered by feelings awe, wonder that we feel. The chimpanzee's brain is so like ours: they have emotions that are clearly similar to or the same as those that we call happiness, sad, fear, despair, and so forth - the incredible intellectual abilities that we used to think unique to us. So why wouldn't they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself?
Goodall has observed a similar phenomenon happen during a heavy rain. These observations have led her to conclude that chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are. "They can't analyse it, they don't talk about it, they can't describe what they feel. But you get the feeling that it's all locked up inside them and the only way they can express it is through this fantastic rhythmic dance." In addition to the displays that Goodall describes, others have observed various carnivalesque displays, drumming sessions, and various hooting rituals.

The roots of ritual are in what Bellah calls "serious play" - activities done for their own sake, which may not serve an immediate survival capacity, but which have "a very large potentiality of developing more capacities". This view fits with various theories in developmental science, showing that playful activities are often crucial for developing important abilities like theory of mind and counterfactual thinking.

Play, in this evolutionary sense, has many unique characteristics: it must be performed "in a relaxed field" - when the animal is fed and healthy and stress-free (which is why it is most common in species with extended parental care). Play also occurs in bouts: it has a clear beginning and ending. In dogs, for example, play is initiated with a "bow". Play involves a sense of justice, or at least equanimity: big animals need to self-handicap in order to not hurt smaller animals. And it might go without saying, but play is embodied.

Now compare that to ritual, which is enacted, which is embodied. Rituals begin and end. They require both shared intention and shared attention. There are norms involved. They take place in a time within time - beyond the time of the everyday. (Think, for example, of a football game in which balls can be caught "out of bounds" and time can be paused. We regularly participate in modes of reality in which we willingly bracket out "the real world". Play allows us to do this.) Most important of all, says Bellah, play is a practice in itself, and "not something with an external end".

Bellah calls ritual "the primordial form of serious play in human evolutionary history", which means that ritual is an enhancement of the capacities that make play first possible in the mammalian line. There is a continuity between the two. And while Turner acknowledges it might be pushing it to refer to a chimpanzee waterfall dance or carnival as Ritual with a capital R, it is possible to affirm that "these ritual-like behavioural propensities suggest that some of what is needed for religious behaviour is part of the genome of chimpanzees, and hence, hominins".
Empathy
The second trait we must consider is empathy. Empathy is not primarily in the head. It's in the body - at least that's how it started. It began, writes de Waal, "with the synchronisation of bodies, running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn".

Empathy is absolutely central to what we call morality, says de Waal. "Without empathy, you can't get human morality. It makes us interested in others. It makes us have an emotional stake in them." If religion, according to our definition, is a way of being together, then morality, which instructs us as to the best ways to be together, is an inextricable part of that.

De Waal has been criticised over the years for offering a rose-coloured interpretation of animal behaviour. Rather than view animal behaviour as altruistic, and therefore springing from a sense of empathy, we should, these wise scientists tell us, see this behaviour for what it is: selfishness. Animals want to survive. Period. Any action they take needs to be interpreted within that matrix.

But this is a misguided way of talking about altruism, de Waal says.

"We see animals want to share food even though it costs them. We do experiments on them and the general conclusion is that many animals' first tendency is to be altruistic and cooperative. Altruistic tendencies come very naturally to many mammals."

But isn't this just self-preservation? Aren't the animals just acting in their own best interests? If they behave in a way that appears altruistic, aren't they just preparing (so to speak) for a time when they will need help? "To call that selfish," says an incredulous de Waal, "because in the end of course these pro-social tendencies have benefits?" To do that, he says, is to define words into meaninglessness.

Yes, of course there are pleasurable sensations associated with the action of giving to others. But evolution has produced pleasurable sensations for behaviours we need to perform, like sex and eating and female-nursing. The same is true for altruism, says de Waal. That does not fundamentally alter what the behaviour is.

Such a hard and fast line between altruism and selfishness, then, is naive at best and deceptive at worst. And we can see the same with discussions of social norms. Philosophers such as David Hume have made the distinction between what a behaviour "is" and what it "ought" to be, which is a staple of ethical deliberation. An animal may perform the behaviour X, but does it do so because it feels it should do so - thanks to an appreciation of a norm?

This distinction is one that de Waal has run into from philosophers who say that any of his observations of empathy or morality in animals can't possibly tell him about whether or not they have norms. De Waal disagrees, pointing out that animals do recognise norms:
The simplest example is a spider web or nest. If you disturb it, the animal's going to repair that right away because they have a norm for how it should look and function. They either abandon it, or start over and repair it. Animals are capable of having goals and striving towards them. In the social world, if they have a fight, they come together and try to repair damage. They try to get back to an ought state. They have norm of how this distribution should be. The idea that normativity is [restricted to] humans is not correct.
In the Bonobo and the Atheist, de Waal argues that animals seem to possess a mechanism for social repair. "About 30 different primate species reconcile after fights, and that reconciliation is not limited to the primates. There is evidence for this mechanism in hyenas, dolphins, wolves, domestic goats."

He also finds evidence that animals "actively try to preserve harmony within their social network ... by reconciling after conflict, protesting against unequal divisions, and breaking up fights among others. They behave normatively in the sense of correcting, or trying to correct, deviations from an ideal state. They also show emotional self-control and anticipatory conflict resolution in order to prevent such deviations. This makes moving from primate behaviour to human moral norms less of a leap than commonly thought."

There's obviously a gap between primate social repair and the institutionalisation of moral codes that lie at the heart of modern human societies. Still, says de Waal, all of these "human moral systems make use of primate tendencies".

How far back to these tendencies go? Probably, like those capacities that allowed for play (and ultimately ritual), to the advent of parental care. "During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring out-reproduced those who were cold and distant," says de Waal. Of course, nurturing is arguably seen in species of fish, crocodiles, and snakes, but the nurturing capabilities of mammals is really a giant leap forward in the evolutionary story.
The early dawn of religion
Our religious services of today may seem worlds away from the mammalian play and empathy that emerged in our deep past, and indeed institutionalised religion is much more advanced than a so-called waterfall dance. But evolution teaches us that complex, advanced phenomena develop from simple beginnings. As Bellah reminds us, we don't come from nowhere. "We are embedded in a deep biological and cosmological history."

As the ape line evolved from our last common ancestor in more open environments, it was necessary to pressure apes, who prefer to go it alone, to form more lasting social structures. Natural selection was able to accomplish this astonishing feat by enhancing the emotional palettes available that had long been available to our ancestors. With a broader set of emotions, the hominin brain was then able to enhance some of its capabilities, some of which quite naturally lent themselves a religious way of being. As these capacities got more acutely enhanced with the growth of the Homo brain and the development of the neocortex, behaviours such as play and ritual entered a new phase in hominin development, becoming the raw materials out of which cultural evolution would begin to institutionalise religion.

And though this history doesn't determine us - for with each new phase in life's story comes greater power of agency - this bio-cosmological history influences everything we do and are. Even the most seemingly autonomous human decision is made from within history. That's the big picture here. That's what we've been keeping in mind as we made our way back in time to the evolutionary seeds that would eventually - and quite slowly - blossom into human religion.

Though I often think theologically about the words "This is my body," I shouldn't overlook the basic fact that communion is about bodies - mine, yours, ours. Religion is an embodied phenomenon because the human religious way of being has evolved for millions of years as the bodies of our ancestors interacted with the other bodies around them. Whether or not one takes communion or even feels religious, we are at all times navigating our social worlds with our evolved capacities to play, to empathise, and to celebrate rituals with each other.
-- Brandon Ambrosino has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Politico, Economist, and other publications. He lives in Delaware. This is the first of a two-part special examining the evolutionary roots of religion.
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"This is my body." These words, recorded in the Gospels as being spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper, are said daily at Church services around the world before the communion meal is eaten. When Christians hear these words spoken in the present, we're reminded of the past, which is always with us, which never goes away.

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Post #7 Reason for belief: Patternicity 

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Post #7 Reason for belief: Patternicity 

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Patternicity definition: The term patternicity is when someone perceives meaning from patterns that relatively have no real meaning or connection. People often say they see shapes in clouds or see multiple figures in one image.
Connection: We believe this photo is a good representation of patternicity because many people in this generation use the sighting of an angel number to directly correlate it to their lives. When seeing an angel number, such as the time on a clock saying "12:22", people take this as a sign that they were meant to see it and that it has meaning to their life specifically. There is no evidence or science behind whether or not this is accurate, but people still continue to believe in the art of guardian angels sending them signs.

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Definition: The term unexplained refers to things in life that we can see, hear or feel but cannot explain what it is yet. Some examples of things that are unexplained are ghosts and aliens.
Connection: UFO sighting reports are a very common thing because of how many things are always flying in the sky and in the distance it's hard to make out exactly what is it. We believe this link is a good representation of unexplained because there are many reports of UFO sightings but lots of them end of being something as simple as a balloon or drone. Of the reports that were not explained, they continue to be mystery as to whether or not they are UFO's and is not able to explained yet.

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UFO reports by US troops skyrocket to over 500

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The number of encounters has climbed from the 144 compiled by a top US spy agency in its 2021 report.

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post #9 Reason for belief: Emotional Connection 

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post #9 Reason for belief: Emotional Connection 

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Definition: Emotional connection is when our emotions override our rational thoughts. This is when we want to believe something bad enough that we convince ourselves it is real. An example of this would be seeing a medium to contact a dead relative or friend.
Connection: This link answers many questions about how to connect to a dead loved one through a psychic medium. Mediums are very popular and used by many people because of how badly they want to know something about theirselves or speak to someone who has died. They create such an emotional connection that they will believe anything whether or not it is real and whether or not there is any evidence backing it up.

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How to Communicate with Your Deceased Loved Ones

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/PRNewswire/ -- The best time to communicate with your deceased loved ones is when the Veil – the time and space between the physical and spirit worlds – is at...

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Post #10 Critical thinking process response

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Post #10 Critical thinking process response

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Define the problem: Are sightings enough to believe that aliens exist?
Gather information: This video talks about the large amount of UFO sightings reported in the US. They received 510 reports, almost half of them being something else but more than 100 of them remain unexplained. Many of them ended up being balloons, drones or just clutter. It states that the unexplained sightings were examined but not enough information was gathered to identify what it is. It says that some of them possess unusual flight characteristics that making it even harder to explain.
Evaluate evidence: I believe that this source is credible as it explains who examines the aircrafts and identifies what they are. These reports are known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). They are examined by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), an office in the Pentagon created last year to review UAP incidents. They receive and analyze information and work with intelligence agencies work through all the information provided and identify what was seen. The Pentagon stated that of all the sightings they have analyzed, none of them possessed any characteristics that lead them to believe they have any relation to aliens.
Recognize assumptions: The promotion of alien existence and UFO's in movies and online can convince people that it is real, leading them to believe any tiny aircraft they see in the sky that doesn't quite look like an airplane could be a UFO. People may also not believe that these things exist because of fear. Some are scared of the unknown and the thought of aliens potentially existing forces them to believe it is fake due to fear. The impacts cans swing both ways. Shutting down any thought of the existence of aliens can lead to people becoming more vanilla and close minded even when it comes to other things. Although, it can also negatively impact people if we encourage these sightings because it could send people in a spiral due to fear of what could happen.
Synthesize evidence: To avoid scaring society, these kinds of sightings can be privately done and only broadcasted if it is necessary. This would avoid fear but also continue the investigation. Another solution could be to begin to promote sightings and the chance of aliens being real more on the news and online to make people more accustomed to the idea and work through the fear of it, rather than avoid it. Lastly, one more solution could be to hide it all around. To stop the investigation and just assume aliens and UFO's do not exist.
Select best alternative: I think the best alternative would be to start to grow the promotion of it to make people accustomed. This continues the investigation, allows for those who are interested to stay on top of the latest updates and begins to help people work through their fear of the unknown.

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UFO reports by US troops skyrocket to over 500

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The number of encounters has climbed from the 144 compiled by a top US spy agency in its 2021 report.