[QUOTE=Mojo Pin]
There is something seriously wrong with your logic here. Modern society was formed in increments for various reasons, but religion is not among them. Modern religions came along only after “modern” agricultural society was formed. Religions (of the type that puts people in power) is always a luxury for society, by which I mean you can’t have priests, popes, chieftains, and shamans who do nothing to contribute tangibly to the survival of the group, without an economic surplus to support their existence. This is self evident–ivory towers cannot exist without a sufficient economic infrastructure.
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:dubious: If early religion was a ‘luxury’ that had ‘nothing to contribute’ why was it so pervasive? HOW did those economic surpluses come about? Did they spring magically out of the ground? Or did they come about because people banded together into larger groupings and were able to pass along key knowledge from generation to generation? Religion was the glue that bound those early societies together. If it wasn’t key to survival then we would have seen societies and civilizations that were completely religion free as they would have had a distinct survival advantage. But we don’t see that…in fact, I know of no society that was free from any kind of religion, be it nature or ancestor worship or the worship of a tribal god/gods. Why do you suppose that is?
[QUOTE=Mojo Pin]
Just because you observe Phenomenon A and Phenomenon B together does not mean the two have a causal relationship. Here is some reasoning that makes sense, and every historian agrees upon: “The rise of agricultural technology and knowledge allowed groups of people to have a huge surplus of food for the first time in history. While previous groups had to set their entire population to hunt and gather, now only a fraction of the population could produce enough food for the whole group by working the fields. This led to specialization in other areas, first in essential fields like woodworking or smithing, and gradually in less essential niches such as religion or art. Thus civilization arose.” Here is some reasoning that does not make sense: “Every society in the world has some form of religion…aha! Religion must have created society! I won’t explain exactly how, but religion is great and everything, it’s the glue that binds people together.”
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Ah…so, something that is pretty much universal (and worldwide, crossing every culture) is simply a ‘causal relationship’ ehe? Your powers of reasoning are truly a marvel! Agriculture arose magically from the ground it seems. It had nothing to do with larger groups of people binding together around a common goal…like, say, a common religious belief system. I’m sure all those people in those early settlements came together to produce your surplus simply because they loved their fellow man and wanted to for the greater good…and maybe because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time.
As for me saying religion is wonderful…you didn’t actually read what I wrote, did you?
[QUOTE=Mojo Pin]
You go on to apply this flawed logic to all the historical knowledge and innovation of Taoists and Confucianists and Islamists and whoever else. Yes, they had a religion. Yes they made great innovations. Now how did one cause the other? Wait, it didn’t. What brought those innovations about was clever thinking on the part of the individuals, nothing to do with their religion. The Chinese didn’t invent gunpowder by divine intervention, they did it through science.
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Oh wait…it did! Because it’s the REASON those folks banded together in the first place and then stayed together to build all those wonderful thingies. You seem to be laboring under the misconception that those folks all came together to do all those great things and then developed these worthless religions out of the surplus. The religions are what brought them together to HAVE those surpluses! There would have been none of those innovations without those civilizations…and those civilizations wouldn’t have existed without the common thread that was their shared religious belief. No, it wasn’t ‘divine intervention’…it was simply the fact that they had a common belief system that brought them together and held them together.
However, I’m willing to listen to your words of wisdom if you think there is another explanation for why peoples came together to form clans and tribes, settlements, to build cities and monuments, to start agriculture and all that other fun stuff. I’m well aware that those things happened (but thanks for the history 101 bit…while it was unnecessary for me perhaps someone else didn’t know what was in the first chapter)…but WHY did they happen? You don’t say. Just that they magically happened and then out of the surplus those parasitic religious types some how leached on…or something. If religion had no bearing on survival (which you claim), why was it pretty much universal in human societies from wandering hunter gatherers to early settlements, to kingdoms and empires?
-XT
The point is that the evidence does not support the idea that the church held back scientific advancement. That’s all. The rest of what you say is just muted invective against churchiness and is irrelevant. What you describe about the church is the same of any ruling class in all of history. Yes, the people who had the wealth to afford free time were the one’s doing the thinking. Yeah, like every other time in history including today.
