Neanderthals

The article on the Singing Neanderthals was very interesting and informative but after reading it once I didn’t get any sense of religion at all. I mostly read if for the facts and was waiting for religious ideas to be mentioned. When the topic of religion didn’t pop up in the text I was sort of shocked and disappointed that I just read this for religion and didn’t see any sign of it. I then looked over it again for the major concepts and to my surprise found quite a few connections to religion. The majority of the article is about the ‘Hmmmmm’ and I was trying to relate it back to religion some how and all I could think of was the singing I as a Christen do in church. I then ran across the quote “’Hmmmmm’ music-making not only when their groups were challenged by death and injury, but also during the ‘good times’ of Neanderthal life.” This made reread the part about Neanderthal burial and connect it to most religions of today, and of all time, that burial is a major part of all of them. I found it interesting that these beings have no symbolic logic yet they buried there dead. I found it reasonable that they could have done if for some of the same reasons Catholics, Egyptians, Muslims, or almost all religions that bury for purely religious reasons. I then tough about the opposite of death, birth, or one good times of the Neanderthals, and found some similar connections. They sang to there babies just as is done by mothers now and in rituals such as baptism. It is also said that they used gestures and other movements to communicate as Catholic parents no make gestures such as having the holy cross up in the child’s room or other religious gifts given to them by godparents or other relatives. I still have some of the crosses and other religious gifts from when was born just as I remember my parents prying next to the child’s bed every night. I could imagine some of the Neanderthals had some similar practices even if more related to nature such as the Native Americans. I then came across the part about the empty space for performance out side of the cave and could it not have been a religious building for worship such as churches, synagogues, pyramids, and other religious buildings.

Why Do WE Believe?/Genesis

The article by Robin Henig was very interesting from my view point. I was brought up Catholic and never questioned why religion was and has been around for hundreds of years. I never wondered why it was first created because for me it was just as it was. My religion nether hindered my survival nor facilitated it, it was just kind of another thing I did ever Sunday. But reading this article made me think about it more and question why things are the way the are. It seemed right that there the reason religion stated was to help survival. This is when I became interested and then, other scientific reasoning proposed made a lot of sense. On the other hand I still wanted to believe as I did before. This is when the whole article came together for me and said “ Why wouldn’t God design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural.”(Barett 78) This made complete sense to me and gave closer to the article but then it made me think back about Gennesis which I have just read.

When I grew up I just accepted things such as Genesis and the other stories and listened to Gospels about them connecting them to life now but never dealt with the truthfulness or symbolic nature of them at all. I always just took the stories as they were even though in the back of my head I didn’t truly believe their entirety. The is no way the being as scientist such as my self could just believe that God created ever thing in six days. But looking at it the way that Justin Barett does it would make sense that God created the world using the big bang and he is behind all of the scientific reasoning that we have today. The question for me now is, is there true science or is God just letting us in on the way he has created the world and made things work previously.