On 12/9/2014 4:17 PM, LizR wrote:
On 10 December 2014 at 06:29, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[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.
In pre-historic times there was no distinction between science, magic, and religion (where
I identify science with empirically derived and tested knowledge). A lot of religious
prohibitions may have an empirical basis. But not all of them. Scott Atran observes that
origin stories always have striking, counter-empirical features. And this is true of many
cautionary religious stories. It makes them more striking, more memorable, and more
distinct from those of other tribes. So the supernatural, irrational aspects of religion
are not just incidental left-overs - they are essential to its cultural function of
binding together "us" and separating "us" from "them". One of the few intelligent things
Alberto has said is that religion, membership in a group, requires sacrifice. And it is a
significant sacrifice of one's intellect and integrity to publicly avow belief in
impossible events and ridiculous propositions.
Brent
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