Were the neanderthals atheists?

I was standing in a small temple in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, looking at a statue that had apparently appeared out of the blue one day on top of a hill, and observing people paying obeisance to it. This could be one of the smallest religions in the world, with only a couple of hundred worshippers.

Down the road from this temple is the Cao Dai temple. This is another small religion that worships, amongst other things, Victor Hugo.

There's a cargo cult in the South Seas that worships Prince Philip.

As I watched people praying to this statue, I had an epiphany: people will worship anything.

It was at this moment that I lost any residual faith I may have retained following my confirmation into the Church of England.

I have experienced a perception from some religious people that atheism is a 'faith'. A Venn diagram of how the world's faiths, by this token, would look like this:

It is my view that this is markedly - and obtusely - wrong. Atheism is an absence of something, not a different form of the thing that it lacks. The Venn diagram as I see it is as follows:

To me, there are only three choices in belief structure (and let me know if this is a false er... trichotomy. Is that even a word?).

1. One religion is the only true way, and all others are bunk.
2. All (or some) religions are worshipping the same thing, but in their own way.
3. All religions are bunk.

In the above diagram, we can see the religious moving in tolerance from point 1 to point 2, with the atheists in a totally different grouping.

Clearly point 1 is the view shared by religious fundamentalists. "I'm right, everyone else is wrong."

Point 2 is shared by the liberal religious, theists, and possibly some agnostics.

Point 3 is atheism (note: I use atheism in the 'weak' definition: atheists who would convert to religion given incontrovertible evidence; not the 'strong' one, which would not accept any form of religion despite evidence, and strikes me as completely illogical - fundamentalist atheism, if you will).

In my opinion, point 1 is easily dismissable. It's too much of a coincidence that of all the fundamentalist proponents of dozens of individual religions, or the thousands of sub-branches thereof, only the version that they worship is the One True Way, and that all others are barking up the wrong tree. Only points 2 or 3 could possibly be true.

The problem I have is that the supposedly tolerant religious mentioned point 2 are inconsistent. They feel that the fundamentalists in point 1 may be correct in the object or form of their worship, but not their exclusivity. Indeed the tolerant religious of Religion A frequently complain that the fundamentalists of Religion A don't accurately represent Religion A. The supposedly tolerant are, in fact, intolerant of fundamentalists.

Furthermore, despite many claims to the contrary by these tolerant religious people, the 'truths' taught by these religions are often contradictory. Polytheism and monotheism are mutually exclusive. While the tolerant monotheist may argue that Hindu gods may are all avatars of the one Godhead, the gods of Greece and Rome were definitely separate entities, as were the Norse gods. Animist religions such as Shinto accept the existence of ancestoral and environmental spirits; many branches of Christianity, for example, directly contradict the existence of a spirit world. As religioustolerance.org puts it:

And that's just what's being worshipped: not how to worship, which creates myriad further subdivisions of practice and belief (e.g. Orthodox vs. Reform Judaism, Sunni vs. Shia Muslim, Catholic vs. non-Catholic Christian, etc. ad infinitum).

I propose that the tolerant religious of point 2 are ultimately unable to reconcile their position logically, based on the 'different ways of worshipping the same thing' argument, since the different ways are in fact often mutually exclusive.

Now I turn to theists. Theists don't necessarily know what it is they're worshipping, nor 'correct' way of worshipping - or indeed they 'worship in their own way'. They observe the followers of religion and reckon that perhaps some of them are right. However, because of the aforementioned mutual exclusivity of belief, theists would surely have to conclude that at least some worshippers are incorrect in that which they worship. Thus the theist, unsure, or following their own object and method of worship that is not shared by any others (I'd call this a 'religion of one'), are in fact unable logically to reconcile their position of tolerance either.

Next, the agnostic concludes that there may or may not be anything 'out there', but believes the answer is unknowable. Which, I suppose, is entirely true. A deity, or deities, or cloud-of-love, or whatever, may indeed have constructed the universe so that its existence is utterly and permanently unknowable. If this were true, however, there may as well be no deity at all, since it is irrelevant, due to being forever unknown and unobservable. However, the overwhelming absence of observable, repeatable evidence for religious phenomena, and the many contradictory messages, and mutually exclusive 'realities' being dictated by different religions, should indicate to the agnostic that in all likelihood it's all bunk.

Then I considered religious distribution: does not a Muslim in Saudi Arabia, a Hindu in India, or a Catholic in Ireland, think it utterly serendiptious that they just so happen to worship in exactly the same way as the majority of their peers, and this just so happens to be the One True Way? Or do they ascribe it to divine providence? How, therefore, do they reconcile the people born in other parts of the world that worship different religions? This strikes me as nothing more than a mechanism of the ego, rather than divinity.

Further, the greatest religions in the world must have all started with one person, or a very small number of accolytes, in the manner of the statue-worshipping Vietnamese. What turns beliefs from crank cults into religions is nothing more than a matter of popularity. The majority of divine texts, and the genuine wisdom within them (as well as the dross), follow wholesale conversion, or borrow from their progenitor religions - no religion ever starts off with The Book in place already.

Thus, if one accepts that there isn't a divine hand spreading religion throughout the world (the rise and fall of huge faiths over the millenia indicates that the mutually contradictory deities involved are somewhat inconsistent and distincly non-omnipotent in their abilities), I believe they grow or cease in terms of Dawkins's 'meme' theory. The growth and survival of a religion will in part depend on the attractiveness of the idea behind it - its message and its advantages and threats - although forced conversion (e.g. 19th century Christian missionaries), as well as adherence to a particular religion being a function of a specific society (e.g. that of the Roman empire), may also contribute to their rise and fall. (Please note that I abhor Dawkins's support for the ridiculous and divisive term 'bright' for atheist - proponents of this word can't have been entirely unaware of the synonym with 'intelligent'.)

Based on the logical contradictions and paradoxes raised by points 1 and 2, I conclude that all religious beliefs, no matter how tolerant they claim to be, exclude at least some other religious beliefs: they all actually tend towards point 1. And point 1 is a fallacy (or an incredible piece of serendipity, depending on which fundamentalist you're talking to). To me, therefore, unless I'm seriously mistaken about the universe, point 3 is the only correct answer: all religious belief is bunk. Or to put it more succinctly:

So then why is religion so pervasive? Why does the majority of our highly intelligent and analytical species persist in worshipping diverse and mutually contradictory deities? My personal theory is that, in addition to habit and intellectual apathy, its origin is due to prehistoric evolutionary advantage. Off the top of my head I can think of several positive advantages to religious belief in early man:

• It would have been advantageous for early sentient humanity not to run screaming from inexplicable phenomena such as rainbows or lightning, but to accept the unexplained as an unknowable divine, and carry on with business as usual.
• It would be advantageous for tribes to adhere to a set of cultural rules. Adherence to cultural practices will prevent internal conflict, thus furthering the tribe's strength and interests. A supposedly divine actor is a more efficient delivery system for enforcing cultural rules than mere tribal custom, since divine retribution for transgression is much more frightening than mortal punishment, especially if that punishment happens to be eternal damnation.
• It would be advantageous to adhere to regular rituals, such as annual migration routes and farming practices. Again, religious belief promotes the practice of ritual - via the fear of not performing said rituals - far more successfully than mere secular practice.
• The offerings made to religions creates wealthy religious leaders, and the power inculcated in the 'special' status of religious leaders (e.g. tribal shamans, the Pope of the middle ages, the pre-invasion Dalai Lamas), allowing them to wield theocratic power successfully, leading to tribal strength.

The capacity for religious belief, and the resultant organisational structures behind the belief, would have been actively beneficial to early humanity, and tribes that followed religious practice would have had an advantage over secular or spiritually anarchic ones. In other words, we evolved the capacity for religious belief: any tribe that had the ability to ascribe divine intervention to the preponderance or scarcity of game for hunting would have coincidentally have been putting in place structures that would strengthen that tribe to the detriment of its secular neighbours, who would fare less well in reproduction and survival. The religious humans would dominate. And, if the recent 'religious gene' research is proven true, they would have passed this on to their offspring, with the capacity for religious belief growing to the strength it needed to be, until the point that it was no longer advantageous for it to grow, which would be extremely recently, in my opinion. Far too recent to have any kind of genetic effect - probably beginning around 1789.

Personally speaking, after some initial hostility, I have now concluded that religion should be tolerated and respected by atheists. It is, after all, an integral part of humanity. It's the basis for most of our laws and societal customs, even in secular societies. It's also a means by which public declarations of life-changing events can be celebrated. Also, people's one-to-one experiences of the divine should be tolerated too, even if one believes they are actually only in the mind - simply out of common decency.

I get annoyed by intolerant atheists who decline to participate in any religious ceremony. They should accept that religion is built into society, and that public celebration serves a useful sociological purpose. Why should it matter to you if you have to go to a wedding in a church? The church doesn't have some mystical hold over you, so why shouldn't you set foot through the door? You don't believe the words have any power, so where's the problem in singing the hymns? I don't seek them out, but when I have to attend, I find participating in forms of worship fascinating, out of casual anthropological interest. I apologise if that sounds patronising. The only time I would decline to participate is if I thought my participation would offend genuine worshippers.

That I have no faith, and think the capacity for religious belief is an appendage from early evolution, doesn't negate the strength of religion. If, for horrible example, Al Qaeda and their ilk continue their current highly succesful recruitment drive (no small thanks due to fundamentalist Christian GW Bush and his misguided foreign policy), and manage to cohese huge chunks of humanity into a Wahhabist empire, then perhaps it's an indication that religion is still a viable evolutionary and sociological tool.

Facetiously I propose this theory: maybe the Neanderthals died out because they were atheists.