(Vague shower thought, not standing strongly behind it)
Maybe it is the case that most people as individuals “just want frisbee and tea” but once religion (or rather the very broad class of ~”social practices” some subset/projection of which we round up to “religion”) evolved and lowered the activation energy of people’s hive switch, they became more inclined to appreciate the beauty of Cathedrals and Gregorian chants, etc.
In other words, people’s ability to want/appreciate/[see value/beauty in X] depends largely on the social structure they are embedded in, the framework they adopt to make sense of the world etc. (The selection pressures that led to religion didn’t entirely reduce to “somebody wanting something”, so at least that part is not question-begging [I think].)
(Vague shower thought, not standing strongly behind it)
Maybe it is the case that most people as individuals “just want frisbee and tea” but once religion (or rather the very broad class of ~”social practices” some subset/projection of which we round up to “religion”) evolved and lowered the activation energy of people’s hive switch, they became more inclined to appreciate the beauty of Cathedrals and Gregorian chants, etc.
In other words, people’s ability to want/appreciate/[see value/beauty in X] depends largely on the social structure they are embedded in, the framework they adopt to make sense of the world etc. (The selection pressures that led to religion didn’t entirely reduce to “somebody wanting something”, so at least that part is not question-begging [I think].)