I've read a norwegian book, roughly translated "the souls hunger". It's about religion.

According to this book, all shamanistic communities share striking similarities.
By researching small tribes of people who still live by hunting and gathering, they found that these similarities are found across the globe, from africa, to america and sibir.
The large geographic distances makes it unplausible that this is a coincident, so there must be some inherent qualities in mankind that make us think and believe in this matter.

According to the author, these qualities are shared by all cultures.
The tendency to have rituals, gatherings, sacrifice (real or symbolic) and morals are all indications of certain way of thinking.
The idea is that we are hardwired to think in a certain way, and that this hardwiring has not vanished by civilization, but are rather absorbed and altered by this.
Shamanism lead to religion, religion lead to ideology. Not that they are all the same, but they share certain characteristics.
Characteristics like believing to have moral superiority, having the right answer ( no matter how simplistic or unrealistic ) and a sense of community.

This again made me think of jungs archetypes, that there is a collective uncouncious and "stories" that we are drawn to by instinct/nature.
Perhaps there are no such thing as a coincidence, and we are all designed to experience everything in the matter we experience them.

Okay, a bit too much crack-pot theory?

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Is the cup half-full or half-empty? Neither, the cup is the rightful domain of air,
and water are the imperialistic invader that must be fought by all means neccesary.
Drink it.

the first part makes a lot of sense... our brains are wired to work in a certain way and so we tend to form beliefs similarly in similar circumstances, regardless of many culturally specific details. this would also explain why we are all drawn to similar stories, since at base we all process information in a similar way. on the other hand, i don't understand how you make the link between this and there being no coincidences... could you expand on that a bit more?

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Isn't it pretty to think so?

In another thread, Bailiwick introduced the pioneering work of Dr. Andrew Newberg in the infant field of biotheology (see: http://andrewnewberg.com/). In a nutshell, there is an organic basis for the development of religious qualia. Also, I think that our genetic capacity for religion, philosophy and metaphysics is what separates us from other animals - whether this arose out of evolution or intelligent design. So yes, I think that as a species, we are inherently religious.

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Sorry, my intuition runs faster then my thoughts.

The idea is that nothing is relative in that matter that everything we see and do and think and all our mind are in a way designed to experience reality in the way we experience it.
I better elaborate on that too. The input we get from our senses, and the thoughts we make based on it, are all designed by our physical makeup.
Therefor we cannot experience something that we're not physically applicable to experience.
We see something because we are created (by nature) to be able to see it. If there exist something we're not created to see, we'll never know about it.

Everything we can think of is hardwired in a way. Just as our body has limitations, so has the mind.
Both our body and mind are just vessel's, with possibilities and limitations. This does need to be negative, because we have a whole world within those limitations.
This goes against the "everything is possible" style of thinking, but we still don't know everything that is not possible

Does this make any sense?

I suppose this might be quite a comon view, I can clearly see links to Plato and this. Sometimes you have to "experience" the idea for yourself before it fits.

_________________
Is the cup half-full or half-empty? Neither, the cup is the rightful domain of air,
and water are the imperialistic invader that must be fought by all means neccesary.
Drink it.

I like your thoughts, though would like to question this particular one. One of the traits of humanity is the ever-existing need to push beyond the limitations given to us by nature. For instance, trying to fly when we're not meant to fly, travelling to places we're not meant to go, learning about things that require insane enhancements of human abilities (eg. extreme magnification) to learn about. Spiritually, a lot of us seem to look for things 'unseen' as well (or if not spiritually, we look for explanations for what we see)... this seems to be in the human wiring as well. Perhaps it's a part of your theory in that we were created to know these things exist, and try to see them?

Rethinking this, I think that there will always be something unknown, not that we'll never advance. We cannot fully understand everything, because we are a integrated part of everything and with a specific point of view. You can say my thoughts are a mix of "the matrix" and a lack of faith that we'll find that "theory about everything".

_________________
Is the cup half-full or half-empty? Neither, the cup is the rightful domain of air,
and water are the imperialistic invader that must be fought by all means neccesary.
Drink it.