Sometimes I think there is! But more likely it’s in our wiring to (A) impose patterns where there are none, and (B) to come up with simplistic just-so stories to account for things that are actually the result of extremely complex systems. I think we are all wired to be greedy reductionists ;-)
—Beo

Re the larger question of why there’s a market for this sort of pseudoscience, I refer people to Ben Goldacre’s column, which the Guardian, to its credit, publishes: http://www.badscience.net/ While he’s mainly going after quack medicine, the larger pattern of eagerness for simple, sciencey-sounding answers to complex questions is there. People are looking for shortcuts because they don’t want to think.

Sigh, no. I think genetic approach is pretty much a useless tool for looking at differences between societies. And I would suggest that membership in formal religious groups is not a very good proxy for religiosity. It strikes me that the cognitive tendencies underlying religious faith have a great deal of overlap with those underlying ‘devout’ environmentalism and ‘devout’ socialism.

I agree with the above, though I would put it differently. Maybe (I’m no expert and am agnostic, ha ha, on the question) there’s a gene that compels humans to seek meaning, to believe in an unseen power, an afterlife, etc. Surely there’s not a gene that compels us to go to Catholic mass. Religious institutions don’t exactly change quickly, but I bet they change faster than our DNA.

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/press/pressitem.asp?ref=288

“The Irish and Italians, two name but two, don’t seem especially religious at the moment, but go back a generation or three …. I doubt very much that their genetic stock has changed that much.”

Well, no, genetic change is obviously not responsible, but does that then rule out the possibility that there are genes that tend to produce religiousity? Might such genes not be expressed in other ways? Perhaps in an intolerance for ambiguity? A tendency toward conformism? A preference for comprehensive orthodoxies? People with such tendencies tend to find ways to express them even in secular societies, no?

Their genes may not have changed, but perhaps the external situations that prompt them to fall back on their religious beliefs have, analogous to “there are no atheists in the foxhole,” if you will.

That does not entirely explain why we Americans are so obsessed with religion. Of course, it is inculcated into the upbringing of so many American children. Our Catholic and Lutheran schools are everywhere. Our own brand of Christian madrassas have proliferated in the last 20+ years, as nearly every town or city of 10-20,000 has at least one Christian Academy.

Could the fact we haven’t had a war on our soil since the Civil War have an effect? After all, the senseless deaths of millions of innocent people that WWI and WWII brought about clearly shook the faith of Europeans, to say nothing of the fact that the necessity to rebuild one’s life and economy required a good deal more action than contemplation.

I am no believer, but I was brought up to be one. I still get what others may call religious or spiritual feelings, whatever the brain chemicals involved may be. If I had to be Christian to listen to Verdi’s Requiem, I might indeed convert.