I’m arguing that this particular piece of literature is what was used in reality world, not in fantasy Der Trihs counterfactual world.
Most things were not taught to the general public, then as now, intellectual pursuits were the province of the leisure class. It’s just that we have a VERY LARGE leisure class, and yet most of them wouldn’t be able to begin to understand the conversation we’re having. They live in Philadelphia where it’s always Sunny.
Either it was static or it advanced. When you get like this there is just no point, your anti-intellectualism is like NORAD.
Ok
And yet they didn’t. Why do you think people are superstitious? Because they couldn’t tell the difference between the imaginary world inside their head and the real world outside it. As I said you cannot comprehend a state in which the critical thinking skills you take for granted simply didn’t exist.
The Foundation for intellect as you understand it had to be laid. Science didn’t suddenly spring up as if from a vacuum, there was a tradition of learning dating back thousands of years that it built upon. Arguing that it happened ‘in spite of’ religion, is not even wrong.
You know, in a rather tongue-in-cheek kind of way, I can kind of get behind mswas’ Theory of Religious Progress.
Early humans saw gods and spirits pretty much literally behind every rock. Then you got somewhat more abstract polytheistic pantheons of gods and goddesses, up on a distant mountaintop if not actually in the sky rather than hiding behind every tree. Beginning perhaps with Akhenaten of ancient Egypt, people started to simplify things down to a single God–but everyone* still believed in at least the single monotheistic deity. The Enlightenment saw the Deity’s day-to-day responsibilities greatly reduced, and also in some quarters the beginnings of true atheism*. Finally, here at the Pinnacle of Civilization and Progress, there are those of us who have done away with gods and the supernatural altogether!
So, see, there has been Progress in Religion.
*There were actually atheistic schools of thought in ancient India thousands of years ago. Also, the “spirits behind every rock” belief probably persisted alongside the “pantheon of gods and goddesses on the mountaintop/in Heaven” or “single God in Heaven” ideas for a long, long time.
Aren’t those pretty much incidental to organized religion, rather then springing from it? I don’t know that Christianity (which I’ll assume you intend to credit with most of these advances, at least in Europe) is particularly encouraging of a more education population.
Anyway, it’s the religion providing a place where contemplation of the natural world can occur that science gets made, not through revelations through the prayers and rituals of the religion itself. I’m willing to give the Catholic church some credit for hosting the early European scientists (when it wasn’t hassling them), but that was quite some time ago and that role has been better filled by secular universities.
The meteoric rise of the last ~200 years is certainly not due to religion. I suppose if modern religion is to be considered more advanced than ancient religions, it’s because they stopped endorsing slavery, among other practices.
I can’t quite agree with your overly grim assessment. Nonfamous individuals were indeed capable of cleverness, but we don’t have the written records that celebrate them. The modern Joe Schmoe will indeed be remembered because there are permanent records of his life written in scattered computer databases, not because he’s smarter than Achmed the camel-driver of AD 980.
I’d guess that smart people are pretty as smart as the smart people of centuries past, and religious people are about as religious as the religious people of the past. The difference now is with improved literacy and access to education, we lose fewer potentially smart people to lives of stunted opportunity, and it is not religion per se that does this, but something akin to the G.I. Bill.
But from a religious perspective the Sumerians, Greeks and Romans were all pan-theists with some small movement towards a transcendent prime mover. So way any progress there? Then there’s the problem of Judaism’s monotheistic approach (much like the Persians) which failed to achieve much of anything on your list, while Confucian /Taoists of China had technological wonders before monotheistic Europe.
So your Religion/Science mach of progress is really more of a random walk.
Unless you’re going for the spiral minaret for the money to fund a decent spaceship win.
Oh, please; there’s nothing all that profound about this conversation. And the priestly early written languages weren’t kept from the public because the priests were a “leisure class”; they were restricted because they were a tool of control. They weren’t useful for much beyond allocating resources anyway, and it’s not like a bunch of priests would or did work to advance them much.
Someone defending religion is in no position to accuse anyone of anti-intellectualism. And you present a false choice; there is also what actually happened, change without progress. Random drift.
No; they didn’t want to. Clearly they could tell the difference between fantasy and reality if they chose to, or they would all have been dead and we wouldn’t exist.
Which among other things meant throwing away or learning to ignore religion. Religion is, among other things the denial of rationality and of knowledge; it undercuts and cripples the intellect.
Now, as I see it that’s not progress at all. That’s retreat. The more human knowledge advances, the more the gods and spirits retreat because they don’t actually exist. So, these days we don’t have gods on top of mountains anymore because we can reach them. The more we learn about the world, the farther away the gods get and the less they actually do. I’m sure if we were to learn how to probe beyond the universe the people who claim God is outside of it would claim that he’s in a different, farther away “beyond”.
Nor do I think that going from polytheism to monotheism was intellectual progress. The monotheists were just more prone to conversion by the sword, and of slaughtering those they didn’t convert. It was progress from the viewpoint of an infectious disease; monotheism certainly spread better. But not from an intellectual standpoint. If anything it was a step back; the Problem of Evil and the incoherence of the world in general are more of a problem with just one god.
Are you sincerely arguing that Jews and Persians contributed little to the intellectual development of the human race?
Sure, I can accept it as a random walk, and I can also say that there were moments of regress here and there. But I am saying essentially that mythologies contained within them archetypal lessons that were essential to basic cognitive skills. The development of the imagination is an essential step in intellectual development, the development of the imagination requires intellectual development because it starts with similitudes and moves on to figuring out how things are dissimilar. Imagination is an additive process where as intellect is substractive. Induction vs Deduction.
Heh, when I build my space-ship it’s going to look like a fantasy castle inside of a snow globe. There will be lots of flying buttresses, just because they’re fucking cool.
MEBuckner Sure, I can get behind that view. I disagree that atheism is anything special in cognitive terms, but we can argue about state’s of understanding in the present without creating our own personal mythology of contempt for those who lived in the past. I guess it’s really a personal thing though, optimistic or pessimistic. Do you view the ancestors as all a bunch of idiot rubes who have inconvenienced your life with their ignorance? Or do you view the ancestors as plucky pioneers travelling the pathways of consciousness who ate bugs, poisonous plants, and stared at the sky in awe and wonder leaving behind a legacy upon which we built our own modern achievement?
It’s sort of like those people who say that astrology has nothing to do with astronomy. This is possibly one of the dumbest things otherwise educated people say. Astrologists made maps of the stars, helped develop navigation, developed geometry to plot points in the sky, etc… Whatever you believe about the ends they were trying to achieve, why does that mean that you have to show vulgar contempt for the actual accomplishments they made that contributed to our understanding today? If there weren’t astrologists staring at the sky, there would be no navigation, and no astronomy, no telescopic optics, no calendars, none of it.
No, I’m saying that for the time period and in comparison to the co-existing pan theistic civilizations around them they didn’t do anything terribly special despite being more monotheistic.
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I working off the premise that you’re linking cultural advancement to a progressive advancement in religion to a monotheistic model. Which seems to be the path you earlier laid out with respect to ever improving architecture etc… In other words the closer a culture is to monotheism, the move likely it is to be 'advancing". If that isn’t your contention then feel free to disregard my post.
To the OP: check out what the official Catholic dogma is* and work from there. They have no official problem with either the Big Bang or (mostly) natural evolution.
That’s not my contention. I was just using that as my example because Genesis was the example being used. My point about Cathedrals wasn’t a point about Cathedrals but about architecture or more specifically the mathematical/technical advancement that they are the result of.
Then we are in accord. I really don’t give a shit what your view on astrology is. I give it credit in the way most people do. “What’s your sign baby?”, or my wife and I, “People are all jumping down each other’s throats and not saying what they mean to each other, Mercury must be in retrograde.”, but beyond those sorts of quips I really couldn’t give a shit one way or the other.
OK, which is it? Ancient people were “really really really really stupid”; or ancient people were “plucky pioneers travelling the pathways of consciousness” and to think otherwise is a “personal mythology of contempt for those who lived in the past”?
No. But yes to both of the questions that you posed as a false dichotomy. People at the time were not educated in even basic critical thought as we think of it today. They likely didn’t think anything like how we think today, so the act of trying to impute modern motives upon them, or hold them up to modern standards is a mistake. This is not so much disrespectful of them, it just recognizes that critical thought is a technology that advanced over time. It reached a tipping point with the advent of science, but it was developing the whole time since, in the minds of everyone, thinking at all.
There will be lots of flying buttresses, just because they’re fucking cool.