Yes, I Believe so. Having no upper class means no need for luxuries, having no oppressed class means no ability to rise up off the backs of others, having no god means no divine help.
So…same as reality, then.
If no religion, then no religious wars. But we humans are an antsy bunch that would have found something to fight about other than food and resources.
You aren’t asking the right question. This depends heavily upon how you define religion. If you mean that someone acknowledges the existence of a god yet takes no ritualized or any other type action to contact, propitiate, or otherwise interact with said deity, then yes. Most pantheistic religions had no problem acknowledging other gods, yet took no action to worship them. This presupposes that they engage in their own rituals however. It is very certain that there were plenty of people out there who might have believed in the existence of a god, yet engaged in little or no religious custom.
Could someone please posit a path by which we get from having a brain-stem barely capable of finding food and partners to reproduce with to understanding how the universe began and what matter and energy consist of without passing through a long religious stage? Because I’m really not seeing what you’re talking about here.
That’s glaringly obvious, considering that nothing you just posted has anything whatsoever to do with anything he posted.
I don’t see why, any more than a claim that there’s only one Earth or one Sky would demand intolerance.
I don’t see anything about belief in God, or religion, that necessarily has to lead to religious wars, conflicts, intolerance, or any of the other ills that are blamed, fairly or unfairly, on religion. It could, potentially, act as a civilizing, unifying, harmonizing, pacifying force, preventing humanity from degenerating into Lord-of-the-Flies style anarchy. This strikes me as quite clear; what’s far less clear is what effect(s) religion or belief in God actually have had.
Since you asked politely, Nope. I believe I’ve only read the Genesis Saga, and haven’t really read the OT. I DID watch the 10 Commandments though, so that’s gotta be worth a bonus point or two. But other than that, not so much.
Feel free to enlighten me, though I can probably guess what is about to be said based on context.
Then I’d love to hear about a culture, many of which developed independently of each other because of geological barriers, that did not (or does not) practice religion.
The Mayans, the Incas, the Egyptians, the aborigines, native Americans… give me an example of any civilization that did not practice “religion.”
I don’t think any religion can be explained without taking into account when man first made the connection between the sexual act and the birth of a child 9 mths later.
This had to have been the first ‘mystery’ that newly self-conscious man was to ponder, and I reckon it was the reason for all the early ‘Earth Mother’ figurines.
I can’t think of a single one. But so what? That only demonstrates that religion is part and parcel of the human condition. It says absolutely nothing about the necessity of religion vis a vis the development of science.
Then give me an example of a society that developed science BEFORE religion.
This is the second time I’ve read this allegation this week here.
Request for enlightenment, please.
If I understand what you are saying, all ancient cultures in recorded history had some form of “religion”. Therefore, the study of science was a natural offspring of religion?
I don’t see the direct connection. This sounds like one of those “if-A-equals-B-and-B-equals-C-then-A-equals-C” equations to me. COULD there be a connection? Maybe, but to say unequivably that without religion there would be science is ludicrous.
Once more, with feeling:
Fact.
QED’s theory.
You denounced my theory that religion was a necessary pre-cursor to science, calling it “bull and shit.” I’m asking you, a man of science, to offer up some evidence to support your theory, that science could exist independently of religion. Something more than simply repeating yourself with more feeling and pounding your beer on the table.
It doesn’t work that way. YOU made the claim the religion is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of science. It’s YOUR burden to supply supporting evidence for your claim.
I don’t think the hypothesis of no development of religion is really a plausible scenario. I think it was and is an ineveitible result of the human brain and of human communities. If you could wave a magic wand and make religion, and all memory of religion disappear today, people would reinvent it by morning.
Tribalism, certainly, was (and is) one of the primary formative components of religion and that would still exist in spades, so people would still separate into in-groups and out-groups and still kill each other. Death and grief would still exist, and that would lead inexorably to find rationalizations, and that leads to mythology and that leads to religion.
I just don’t see how humans could have done anything BUT invent religion. It’s as inherent to their social development as a species as families or moral codes or wars.
Give me an example of a society that developed science before rape.
You can’t re-write history to suit a theory, but that same history does not prove that it could not happen in another manner. It is on YOU to show that religion is necessary to scientific development, not QED to make something up to suit his case.
#1) Religion and science both deal with the same questions “why” and “how.”
#2) I can think of no civilization on earth that has not practiced religion.
#3) There is no evidence of a civilization that embraced science absent religion.
#4) There is no evidence of a civilization where science pre-dated their religion.
#5) Though their diet, dress, and culture were different, each civilization’s religion were all centered around common mysteries, such as how the Earth began and how children were conceived.
#6) There are common elements in all religions, even civilizations separated by an ocean and existing thousands of years apart – such as the existence of a fertility god, a sun god, etc. As I said, religion began with inquiry.
Religion is science in its infancy. You don’t become an adult until you go through infancy.
There you have it.
You say “bullshit.” and that’s fair. What do you have to support an alternate theory?