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This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm and you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am for our open social. Followed by an extended discussion for a half hour. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

What can archeology and social science tell us about how religion came to be so prominent in human life? Social psychology suggests that religion builds on many traits that were crucial in forming our species. Archeology suggests that some religious practices go back tens of thousands of years or more. However religious practices or beliefs among hunter-gatherers bear little resemblance to organized religion today, and have little to do with morality. Moralizing religions emerged in early large-scale farming societies, and the leading hypothesis is that such religions enabled cooperation in large groups. Our featured speaker, Dr. Mark Reimers, will discuss the evidence for this hypothesis and then consider how priests and kings coopted religious authority, and the many attempts at reforms. He will conclude by considering the rapidly evolving roles of religion in modern societies and the prospects of religion for the future.

Dr. Mark Reimers works as a computational neuroscientist: he studies brain function by applying statistical methods to look for patterns in large-scale and high-resolution recordings of brain activity and behavior. He applies these methods to understand normal brain function in memory and to shed light on mental illness. Dr. Reimers has worked at the US National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, and now does research and teaches at Michigan State University. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology.

Dr. Reimers was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia for five years, and now leads the UU Forum in Lansing, and speaks frequently at humanist and science outreach events in Michigan.

People may also be interested in Dr. Reimers' recent talk for the AHA: How America Lost its Mind: The Neuropsychology of Dogmatic Delusion. Here’s a link to the recording of that talk: https://youtu.be/7zZ1mSP2ZgA

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

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