Or, you have a parachute, but it is woven from spider silk.
Or jumping out of a plane without a parachute to find that the plane was on the ground already.
I can relate to how disconcerting it feels to have been promised a loving God and OOOOPS justkidding. Not to mention being the misfit and surrounded by all these theistic people.
I prefer to think of it as more like realizing the plane is already crashing and deciding one might as well step out and enjoy the view beyond the cabin while one can.
on a treadmill.
Okay, so we all agree on the plane, we’re agnostic regarding the parachute…
I just do it anyway.
I don’t need to be thanking, or praising, a specific deity in order to feel thankful for what I’ve got, or to praise all the myriad of things sentient and non-sentient that go to make up a beautiful day.
(I once had somebody, who’d been insisting on arguing with me about religion, insist that I give the grace over dinner. I proceeded to thank all the plants and creatures which had become part of the food we were about to eat, and those who raised them, and the sun and the rain and the soil and probably its inhabitants and maybe the people who made the dishes – I don’t remember now how long the list was, though I only took a couple of minutes. There was a longish pause, after which the person who’d insisted I say grace proceeded to thank Jesus. I said after he was done, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you think mine took?’ )
And while it would be nice to think of being able to meet again all the humans, cats, dogs, horses I’ve loved – that’s pretty well cancelled out, in comparison to many people’s religious beliefs at any rate, by not having to worry about hell.
I’m going with those who say the lack of structure for community that is, in this society, automatically provided to a lot of people by the religion they’re part of. There’s no logical reason we couldn’t have an Atheists’ Meeting that did the same things – except that I don’t think there are enough out atheists around here to support it.
Seems to me that religion in human societies does a whole lot more than just provide origin myths, or even explanations in general. It often seems to function as a sort of glue, holding the whole thing together.
Unfortunately that same glue can constrain people so they can’t breathe; or even be deliberately used like a glue trap kills mice.
It would be fascinating. But how?
The genesis of religion has to be so far back that we’re talking anthropology, not history or even what’s generally called pre-history. How do we tell, that far back, what was and what wasn’t religion? Even now the definitions are blurry – look how blurry they are even just in this thread.
Don’t we pretty much only have Christianity’s word that Ba’al said any such thing?
And as others have said, you left out some of those rules; including that graven-image business, which if followed would have wiped out much of the art in the world; and the bits about ‘you must worship me and nobody else’, which have certainly contributed to a massive amount of trouble through the centuries.
I don’t think either part of that is true.
That bit is true. But religion has certainly handed some of them a very useful weapon with which to beat others into going along with them.
It has, admittedly, also handed some others a useful defensive weapon against them.
Huh?
I don’t see how that follows. They can easily be saying that they don’t completely and fully understand how the universe works and the nature of everything in it, and therefore don’t know whether there may be something in the universe or about it as a whole that might reasonably be called a god in some senses of the world.
As no human can fully understand how the universe works and the nature of everything in it, that seems to me to be a statement entirely based upon reason.
There are plenty of earthly religions which include one or more gods that had something to do with the creation of humans but nothing to do with the 10 commandments or Jesus. I’m pretty sure they haven’t all even been claimed to have created the universe.
And there could perfectly well be some sort of god that created the universe but didn’t even particularly notice humans, let alone hand the species some specific set of rules and a specific sort of avatar.
That doesn’t mean that they have any comprehension of what other religions actually are.
They think that what others believe is basically the same as what they believe, except that the others are denying some particular detail they think is crucial (and may think is obvious, so that they may think the denial is purposefully evil.) They often don’t understand that the entire framework of belief, or of mind, may be different.
They assume, for instance (people with other beliefs, consciously expressed or back-of-the-head, may of course be making different sets of assumptions) that of course everybody thinks humans aren’t animals; that there is a heaven and there is a hell; that sex is in some fashion inherently Wrong although some very limited versions of it are OK; that humans aren’t their bodies; that human focus should be on the afterlife, not primarily or solely on the life we’re actually having; that there is such a thing as an afterlife; that the word “messiah” means and always meant a divine avatar of the Tripotent God; that the word God means the Tripotent God; that believing that that god has three persons is monotheism; that a mountain or a river can’t be divine; that the one God (which they think everyone believes in though they think some people willfully deny it) gave everybody exactly the same rules to follow – I could go on.
I don’t. People have used the word “god”, and still do, to mean so many drastically different things since the word was invented, that I think limiting it to mean only
is the category error.
I’d like to thank you, however, for actually providing a definition of what you mean by the word. That’s very helpful, and hardly anybody ever does.
It showed up for me, but along with that statement about its having been removed.
I suspect that whoever posted it in the original context (which we don’t have) was trying to make the claim, not that I understand Velocity to be making which is that evil people are sometimes intelligent (which is true), but that because the specific Nazis did well on IQ tests they must therefore have been right about being Nazis (which is obviously nonsense.) That would explain its having been removed – or their having attempted to remove it, since apparently it’s still there?
What I meant by that was not to go back into history to find out how and where it all got started but to study the human animal to figure out what in our makeup causes religion to develop and what about us facilitates its spread. Obviously we can examine L. Ron Hubbard, and to a lesser extent, Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith, and perhaps even Mohammed the rug merchant. Look at the growth dynamics of various situations and try to figure out what is going on in the heads of the humans that make these things happen and make them endure.
you were quoting me, not Sam
Whoops, apologies to both of you! I must have gotten my quotes mixed up.
And I think I see what you mean. Neurology might well be useful, as well as history; I don’t know to what extent the knowledge base of neurologists is up to it yet, but the understanding of that field (not by me, by neurologists) seems to be increasing fairly fast.
I was referring to the kind of thing you did here:
Don’t we pretty much only have Christianity’s word that Ba’al said any such thing?
Christianity didn’t say anything about the 10 commandments. That was Judaism, and it was written at least hundreds of years before Jesus.
Nah. Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments personally, in English. /s
No one ever said science was supposed to be easy. There are people out there trying to figure this stuff out.
Bear in mind, too, that not all religions arose in prehistory or antiquity - Sikhism isn’t a very old religion as these things go, for instance. Mormonism is such a recent vintage of Christianity that we have a fairly accurate idea of what Joseph Smith looked like. We have PHOTOGRAPHS of Brigham Young.
A lot of Christian sects believe that Jesus was there In The Beginning.
Ah. Yes, I mis-spoke on that one – and can’t even blame it on a Christian upbringing; I was raised as a secular Jew. I was just posting carelessly in the context of the specific post I was answering, and certainly should have phrased that better.
Various forms of Christianity have certainly had plenty to say about the Ten Commandments over the last couple of thousand years, though it’s true they didn’t write them; but I was talking at that particular point about the claim made about Baal, which is indeed also in the pre-Christian bible, and was made again in this thread though not by me. I meant that I don’t think we do know whether the religion of Baal required child sacrifice; I don’t think we have any information about their religious requirements from anyone other than their enemies. I might be wrong about that.
True; and we certainly might learn a great deal about how new religions get started by studying those and other recent origins.
I don’t know how much light that throws on the origins of religion in general, though. All recent religions were started by people who already had been taught a great deal about religion by the societies they were living in; they weren’t coming up with the whole concept from scratch.
I think trying to figure that out by looking at recent sect origins would be rather like trying to figure out who first came up with the idea that all people should cover some specific part(s) of their bodies with some sort of material, and even more importantly why they came up with it, by studying changes in clothing fashion and materials over the last couple thousand years. That’s an interesting question – but it’s not the same question.
Mormons use part of Christian imagery but are not Christian.
Perhaps one of the more troubling aspects to being an atheist is that I am expected to be something. Screw you, I am a person, leave it at that.
I was more thinking about the development of religion as a social tool.
A God has a lot of advantages for a leader. It keeps people in line even when the cops aren’t around, it offeres rewards and punishments the ruler of the people doesn’t have to make, and it codifies social rules. Religious teachings pre-Gutenberg were the only way to get acess to books for most people. Creating or co-opting a religion was a very powerful tool for leaders. Still is, for that matter.
I’m guessing that about five minutes after people decided some super-being must have created them, someone announced that he had a special line to that being and was given rules that must be followed. The existence of a God was universalized across cultures, and they all started building their own interpretations and sets of rules that suited their people. Some were bad, and went away. The ones most compatible with success survived.
I mentioned Ba’al demanding child sacrifices as an example of a religion with bad rules that was out-competed by ones with better rules. If you don’t believe there were Ba’al worshippers who did that, just substitute the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Phoenicia, or Carthage. They share the common trait that they are all now extinct. Consider it evolution in action.
My favorite bit from “Best Little Whorehouse from Texas” from memory:
Reporter, interviewing a cheerleader: “Who was the greatest American?”
Cheerleader, flustered: “Oh, Jesus.”
Reporter: “Thank you!”
One of the dumber things I’ve heard apologists say (and more than one of them) is that it was okay to commit genocide on these tribes because they did child sacrifice. In other words, to protect some of the children from being killed, you kill all of them.
And I’ve seen Muslims say that Abraham was really a Muslim since he really worshiped Allah in their formulation of him.
Odd no one got around to writing any of this down before those particular religions began.
Lamarckism perhaps.