Sweden is among the least religious of countries in the world along with Estonia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Norway and Japan. So, naturally I balk at associating it, clumsily though it might be, to this concept of ‘falling’ in love with an oppressor as is the requirement for any of the fastidiously religious. Religious folk vehemently stand up for the ‘gods’ that create us sick and command us to be healthy – at the risk, in most cases, of everlasting punishment. In 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson botched up a bank robbery but succeeded in creating a psychiatric field of study – the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. His four captors connected with him at a level that the police and other legal professionals could not comprehend… at the time. They have since tried to unravel the psychological vectors and baggage that cause victims of oppression to stick up for the oppressor. This alignment is sometimes skewed enough that the prey end up supporting, enabling and encouraging the predator even in the face of emancipation.
Olsson-esque gods have been in place for millennia in the evolution of our species. The power dynamic within survival groups and tribes of the species working together requires leaders and followers. Leader genes have to fight through higher levels of risk being at the top of a food chain to be naturally selected and though these ‘alpha’ gene carriers have more of the pick of the opposite sex population, and therefore more opportunities to multiply, ‘follower’ genes’ survivability succeed off sheer volume. They succeed because they support and follow leaders through the tough, risky aspects of establishing rights on food and reproduction territory. This serfdom magnifies itself via a double-edged sword of genetic perception bias – where the leader takes on an exaggerated position of power and the serfs fall over backwards enabling them to have it. Both are gene-survival techniques gone awry but which result in innate security that most people (the sheep) find in placing leaders (the lion) in positions of power.
Natural selection of ascribing hyperbolic, legendary, mythical and supernatural powers, eventually result in throwing up the gods of recent history. And by recent I mean the blink of our evolutionary timeline since humanity started keeping written records of spoken lore and tales – a few millennia. The Stockholm syndrome of the religious protecting and justifying the ‘necessity’ of a non-existing god to people who challenge their belief system, whether through lens of competing religions or by the fairly smudged mirror that scientific reflection is holding up to them, is slowly eroding. Scientific epistemology has had this see-saw battle in society which the fearful and close-minded have fought tooth and nail, winning some and losing some, against the few who have championed the need to understand the deeper motivations that have guided our actions through history.
There will be a time, about 100 to 200 years from now, where natural selection should have propped a more stable foundation of social leaders and where irrationality would lurk only as a recognizable outlier. The existence of religion, god and other superstitious baggage from our past will be studied and regarded just as we consider the Stockholm Syndrome as something that barely even makes it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of mental disorders. I give religion less of a position than that in humanity’s progress as a cerebral species rather than a giving itself to the baser drives of our memetic imperative.
My 2 cents 