On 10 December 2014 at 06:29, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > You can't separate religion from authority. Religion is > institutionalized Platonism. From prehistoric times every tribe had their > shaman who explained the world and predicted things based on his visions > and revelations (often chemically aided) of a greater, mystical world > beyond the senses. They explained why the tribe had to paint themselves > blue or women had to sleep apart during their menstruation or why they > couldn't eat the meat of cloven hooved animals. This bound the tribe > together and distinguished it from those other, inferior, barbarian tribes > that painted themselves red and ate beans. It was the invention of > religion and it was an evolutionary step in cultural Darwinism. Plato was > just the most famous shaman of the Greeks. His ideas were incorporated > into Christianity by St Augustine. >
This is certainly one aspect of authoritarian religion, and one that was important to survival at the time. Basically, religious mores were codified knowledge about what was important for people to know and trust automatically and unquestioningly. So they were told not to eat a certain animal because they knew that eating it tended to make people sick. Since they didn't know why it made people sick, they blamed it on evil spirits or whatever. And they had prohibitions against things that would cause social unrest, and they tried to encourage practices that would lead to more children being born and surviving, and so on. We see the ghosts of all these practices which appear to have no modern relevance (but they would if we were suddenly plunged into a world like the one of 3000BC). So essentially religion was an early form of science - a set of rules of thumb that helped people survive and produce children (hence helped the society survive). Rather than long winded explanations that could be argued with, people were told to do X and not to go Y because God said so. Again we see the shadow of this in the present and it seems very oppressive and authoritarian, but 5000 years ago daily life was full of even more dangers than it is now. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
