No God Required - Religions Spread Anyway.

One of life's great mysteries to me was how social systems spread from one grouping to another, in particularly ones, like religion, which seem both to do harm as well as good.

In the following post I hope to show how I think it works.

To start off with, here's a poll I conducted a couple of months ago on a philosophy site.

Okaaaay, so not exactly a humongous sample but the best I can do... So - to sum up the results:

Religions have benefit, but also have negative effects.
The benefits are mainly applied within the religion's host society.
The negative effects mainly effect other societies, outside of the host society.

No real shocks there.

Let's draw some pictures.

Okay, so this is some region of the planet [a bit of Spain actually] occupied by six distinct groups. At the moment, all of them are irreligious. The blue circle around the green group signifies their sphere of influence. The greens interact with the two groups on either side.

Now, let's say the greenies become religious. And add some arbitrary units of advantage/disadvantage. Let's take the values from the poll above.

ie. Benefit to believer group of adopting religion = 6
General negative effect of adopting religion = 7

This looks crazy - the net effect of adopting a religion to the host society is a detriment: -1.

However, there is a catch - and it depends on one crucial point. The benefits are applied only within the believer group, whereas the negative effects are applied within the entire sphere of influence.

So - The new situation looks like this:

So, though the effect to the religious group is detrimental, it is offset by the benefit, whereas the groups the believers influence only recieve the negative effect.

ie: Believer group net: -1
Irreligious within range net: -7

Which puts the believer group 6 points ahead overall.

Let's move on, and assume one irreligious group converts, and one does not.

Okay, so the righthand group that didn't convert gets another -7 from the initial religious group without any benefit.

The converted left also gets another -7, (but this time from the cost of adopting religion, rather than the penalty of living close to the initial religious group), and +6 religion benefit.

The initial group gets another -7, +6, as normal.

middle net 6-7+6-7 = -2
left net -7+6-7= -8
right net -7-7 = -14

ie. overall: middle's doing best by miles, left's doing so-so, but right is looking pretty screwed.

Also note the lower groups, now under the sphere of religious influence, starting to take a penalty.

Let's move on again.

Here we start to see another differential - because the two intitial religious groups' spheres of influence overlap, their bonus for being religious also extends to each other, as well as themselves - giving them a double dose.

Now the positive/negative for adopting religion changes to +12, -7, ie. finally, a net positive effect.

Notice that the two lower groups have also converted. And that the lowest group gets a double whammy of -7-7 = -14.

Let's move on one final time.

Now we see a mutally supportive network of religious groups beginning to arise, that will only develop further as more nodes enter the net, and add their bonuses to the total, as their spheres of influence widen to overlap further.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but for what it's worth my conclusion is much like the ones I've already drawn on the other threads:

Religion, once 'discovered', inevitably will spread, regardless of whether or not God actually exists.