Again; they clearly were not as foolish as you claim they were, or none would have survived long enough to have offspring. Or managed to raise any offspring they had.
What you are ignoring is that it doesn’t take advanced critical thinking skills to figure out that just because you want something to true, that doesn’t make it true. That’s the level of rationality that’s needed to avoid drowning by walking on water or falling to your death because you try to fly.
You are also ignoring that if critical thinking skills were the limiting factor, people would all have become agnostics at the least millennia ago. They certainly had the concept of asking “Well, where’s the evidence” back then for things like crimes; they just didn’t apply that same standard to religion.
Oh? Because wolfpacks died out due to the inability to perform Algebra? Basic survival skills are different from the kind of abstract critical thought I am talking about. But even going back that far it’s necessary for the foundations of thinking. The hunt involves some logical abstraction as humans hunt trying to outwit their prey. So you’re right being able to make a knife out of rock requires some sort of abstract thinking, still metaphysical concepts that are far removed from day to living are much different.
People die this way today, what makes you think they didn’t die that way then? Bourgeois false consciousness makes them egomaniacal in a way nomadic tribesmen were not? I am sure people jumped off of cliffs trying to fly, and drowned trying to walk on water in antiquity.
I think you have a lot of underlying assumptions involved here.
More revisionism. The idea that religion is about “metaphysics” is a modern one. Created because religions have been driven back and back by science.
But such people were and are the exception, while being religious was the rule. The utter idiots you are trying to portray our distant ancestors as have never been anything but a tiny fringe.
Not really. Metaphysics is just the word we use to describe it. It doesn’t represent any movement of religion to call it metaphysics.
I think you are projecting your own view of it. My point is that critical thinking is subject to technological advancement and requires a cultural pedagogy to propagate it from one generation to the next. You were taught certain critical thinking applications at a young age so not having those tools is a foreign concept to you, thus you cannot imagine a world where adults lack the critical applications that you take for granted.
Oh, please. :rolleyes: You yourself were going on earlier about how they believed all sorts of literal, physical things due to their religion. Now, it’s all claims about non-material forces and things supposedly outside of the world; that’s a major change whether you like to admit it or not.
They survived, in a world where the laws of physics don’t care what you believe. They built things in the same world that didn’t fall over. They made tools that didn’t break. They therefore had those skills. They simply chose not to apply those same skills to religion; you are trying to pretend that religion is a lot less obviously baseless and stupid than it is.
One problem with this idea (that I didn’t see anyone else mention) is that it conflicts with Exodus 20:11, where God says
“For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (NIV)
Put bluntly, God himself seems to think it only took 7 standard days.
People have always made claims about all kinds of forces. You are looking at thousand of years of human advancement and saying it should have been self-evident. But it wasn’t. Underlying what you won’t say is your believe in secret cabals that rule religion to keep people stupid. It’s silly. There is nothing in America that does anything like what Christianity does. If you find yourself homeless and hungry knock on the door of any church. If the first one won’t feed you knock the dirt from your shoes and try the next one. There’s no other organization that has franchises all around the country that will do that, that is ready and self-evident that it will do something like that. And yet you pontificate about morals. You take your Christianized morals and run them through an age of enlightenment filter and suddenly you think a revision is a completely new type of technology.
It’s silly.
Your opinion is meaningless because you don’t even know what religion is or what it has done for society. This isn’t about you being an atheist either, most other people have some kind of inkling.
Religion provided pedagogy for certain things like literacy and mathematics that helped to bring up the level of education of the populace as a whole, it was a long slow process.