On 10 Dec 2014, at 01:17, LizR wrote:
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.
I agree. Well, it is a bit more than mere shadow, for the fundamental
science, and the health science, etc.
In fact "religion" is the fundamental science. And institutionalized
religion is science + interdiction to question it.
Genuine science is when we substitute authoritarian faith into
questionable hypothesis/theories.
Bruno
--
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
