On 1/30/2013 7:22 AM, Terren Suydam wrote:
Personally, my take on religion is that it has been an extraordinarily successful means
of organizing groups. I don't religion has ever been any one person's Machiavellian scheme,
Then perhaps you unaware of Joesph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard.
rather I think religion (and other cultural institutions) have been selected for in the
evolution of culture.
This is not contrary to them having been started by a single schemer. Note that many -
David Koresh, Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite,... schemers try but fail and some may come
to believe their own myths.
I also tend to see collectives of humans as organisms-in-themselves, in roughly the same
way that a hive of bees can be seen as an organism in itself; and that human genetics
has co-evolved with the cultural memetics.
As such, I tend to run religious dogma through this filter: does it promote values in
individuals, that, taken collectively, make the collective more likely to persist.
You don't care about anything but persistence?
Brent
When I run the above prayer through that filter I find that it is a pretty good fit for
that idea.
Terren
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:13 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
This is a pretty well-worn, oft-used, school prayer. Given it is recited or
sung by
the entire student body and staff at a good many schools and other
institutions you
would have to assume that it's all fundamentally good stuff.
Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deserves;
to give and not to count the cost;
to fight and not to heed the wounds;
to till, and not to seek for rest;
to labour, and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing we do thy will.
Amen.
But it's all incredibly bad advice, really - don't you think? Why do people
assume
God wants Earthlings to be such a bunch of try-hards?
I hate this prayer. It advertises values that no one can live up to and no
one need
live up to. Surely we can invent a better, less servile, less obsequious,
less
cringing, less Gollum-like take on what we think God wants for us.
All this servility, this grovelling at the feet of somebody. Is God really
into all
that? I don't believe it.
Kim Jones
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