I don’t think it would eliminate religion, but it would greatly weaken it. Especially in the more intellectual areas of society; simply introducing evolution would make atheism intellectually respectable, by introducing a non-theistic explanation for life.
“This . . . is my Boom Stick !”
In other words, go armed and bring along a few armed and armored guys. If Anyone tries to burn you as a heretic, “think of it as evolution in action”.
And really, as this is pre-Christian you probably won’t have half the problem.
Well, one thing we don’t know is how much we’ve bred ourselves to be religious since then. Whether you take my view that it’s due to the religious systematically killing and raping unbelievers, or the apologist view that there’s some sort of survival benefit to religion, or the view that there was one and isn’t now; we are probably more inclined at the genetic level towards religion than we were then. If you travelled back and educated people back then, the resulting overwhelming technological edge would cause that culture to sweep the world. Religion would never get the foothold it did.
I appear to have misunderstood the OP. Don’t fight the hypothetical’s goal appears to be, not to use time travel to discredit any religion, but use it to change the course of history so religion plays a less important role.
One might, say, go back to ancient Greece, in particular the age of the Ionian scientists such as Thales, early philosophers who were tending in a scientific direction, quite different from the later idealism of Socrates and Plato. Go then/there, and introduce the printing press, vegetable-pulp paper (potentially much cheaper and more abundant than papyrus), and the sewn-sheet codex book (much easier to read than a scroll). The new technology for propagation of information would give a boost to that particular intellectual melieu. Society would become more broadly literate. The age of science might start 2,000 years earlier than it did in our timeline.
Would that be enough to marginalize prophetic religions such as Judaism, or forestall the rise of new ones such as Christianity and Islam? That is a much harder question.
Think about what would happen if someone from *our *future came here to educate us primitives on the true nature of the universe. He’d undoubtedly fascinate a segment of our society, but most people would have their own reasons not to believe him.
Regarding the OP, how do you explain the fact that, today in 2007, with all our knowledge about the nature of the universe, most people still believe in a religion . . . often one that contradicts our 21st-century “knowledge”?
I think you’d need to get in well before 2000 years, because religion is a biz, and it was a biz long before monotheism showed up. Maybe if you went back to the genetic bottleneck when the human race had been reduced to a few hundred people, max, probably less than that, and really laid the kaboom on them about there being no supernatural entities and so forth, you might have a chance. But in the intervening times, the conditions that made the biz lucrative in the first place would replicate themselves unless you somehow managed to prevent that. How you would prevent that, I dunno. There’s always gonna be a buck in telling dying people that there’s an afterlife.
Not necessarily. The ancient Greeks were scandalized at the idea that the sacred goddess Diana was merely a rock in the sky. And try going back to ancient Mesopotamia and claiming that the current god-king (think Saddam Hussein with his own personality cult) really isn’t the grandson of a god. A few armed men? You’d need more like the Surge.
You could write volumes, and I’m sure people have, about how religion as we know it was part of the adaptation of tribal peoples to living in civilized states. The odd thing about what became Judaism is that it was markedly the reaction of a tribal people againstthe religious practices of surrounding civilized nations: things like sacred prostitution, the deification of kings, the “moral relativism” of incorporating foreign gods into a pantheistic view, etc. It’s striking that the ancient Hebrews became more and more tempted to adopt such things as they became more civilized, and it was seen as divine retribution when the Judeans nearly ceased to exist as a distinct people after the Babylonian conquest. In fact, modern Judaism can be said to be the result of the survivors of the Babylonian exile deliberately adopting a set of religious and social mores designed to keep them distinct from their conquerers; and the one’s who didn’t became assimilated and ceased to exist as a distinct people.
Unless you stayed there forever, Id be pretty sure the presence of a person who could travel in time and could kill people at a distance would simply create another religion?
So you turn up out of the blue, speaking strange languages, with impressive “magic” devices that can do all sorts of things, deliver knowledge, and then disappear off again? And this is supposed to make people less religious? You’d get incorporated into whatever the local religion is, more likely (assuming of course those religions aren’t true or can’t be corrupted like that, etc).
Rather overly optimistic. Block printing was not unknown in large areas of the world in any case, and was capable of fairly high quantities with good quality. Likewise, book formats did not hold back scientific advancement. The lack of people wealthy and interested enough to read them and do something with it was. Aside from which, with the implicit goal of foregoing that “idealism,” you’d set back any kind of political science or philosophy by an unknown quantity.
Who would you teach this stuff too 2000 years ago? What proofs would you bring to show them that it was right? What exactly would you teach them that they could grasp AND prove with their current mindsets and level of technology? Would you be going by yourself or taking along other scholars (and translators…unless you speak the various languages in the regions you will be going too)? Soldiers? Pack animals? What equipment would you bring with you?
I think that simply going back in time with a text book or two explaining physics or whatever isn’t going to get you much. You’d REALLY need to go back with a large group of scholars in multiple disiplines AND either the equipment needed to demonstrate whatever it is you want to show or the ability to make that equipment using local materials. You’d probably also want to take along a bunch of engineers and crafts people…because the locals are going to be MUCH more interested in how to make better steel or steam powered engines and such than obscure physics and cosmology. So, you will need to impress them first with something they can grasp and THEN start the long process of teaching them the scientific method and enough basics to even start with Newtonian physics and cosmology. Also, take a bunch of physicians and medical types who have extensive training in the use of herbs and working in more primitive conditions. Stop a few really nasty plagues, or at least mitigate the damage, and you will seriously impress the locals. Might want to take a few historians along as well…at least for a while, knowledge of whats SUPPOSED to happen might be helpful.
I’d take some soldiers along too…and maybe some advanced weapons (say flintlock rifles and small cannon). Not just for protection, but again to impress the locals and get them thinking of you and your group as someone to take seriously.
Doing all that however still wouldn’t ‘save us from religion’ unfortunately. By then it was too firmly established to be thrown off by anything you could say or prove. What you MIGHT get, if you could avoid things like the dark ages and the black death and such, is something like the Renaissance but centuries earlier. Which means that by today religion MIGHT hold even less sway that it does today.
If you REALLY wanted to kill religion you’d need to set your time machine back VERY far in the past when language was first emerging in the human species. You’d need to go back to that time, herd all the humans you could find together and then…
Nope, that wouldn’t work either. You see, they would listen with interest (to be sure) and then when you left they would forget all about it, since none of that stuff would have any impact on their day to day survival. Unless you were willing to CREATE civilization for them and make them learn not just what you would be dictating from on high (would you put Newtonian physics on stone tablets and carry them down from the mountain?) but an entirely new way to live.
Good thing time machines are fantasy, ehe?
It seems obvious to me that the answer to this question is no. Religion 2000 years ago was exactly what religion today is, namely organized groups of people working to lay aside the vain things of the physical realm and focus their minds and souls on higher things of a higher realm. Hence teaching the Ancients various facts about the physical realm wouldn’t have any relevance to their religion.
Or consider this metaphor. Suppose you meet a person who believes that video games are entirely trivial. Anxious to convince them otherwise, you start explaining the true nature of video games: how to find the 10-coin blocks in Super Mario Brothers, what are the cheat codes in the original Final Fantasy, and so forth. Would your presentation convince the audience to lay aside real life and focus on video games? Unlikely, because nothing you say addresses the central issue of priorities.
I don’t know if I’m being whooshed or not but, sure, if God Himself showed up I might have to rethink my stance.
I’m guessing that the ‘explainers’ (scientists) of the day were quite lacking in their ability to make sense of a lot of phenomena of the day - think, “In the beginning…”.
So, hiding your TT machine away and just trying to pass yourself off as a scientist of the day was more what I had in mind.
I realize religion became a business and a way to control the masses but it seems if the masses had a better explanation for how we got here and what makes day and night than bearded-guy-in-the-sky that they wouldn’t have needed or bought into nonsense mysticism.
Quite inadvertent, Malacandra.
I don’t I’ve ever seen an OP so universally misinterpreted. From the title, I also thought it was about saving from religion today, then I read the OP.
I agree that you’d have to go back > 2,000 years. Then it would be much easier, because long enough ago people didn’t believe in a universal god, just tribal gods, and worshiping other gods was no big deal to most non-Jews. Alexander the Great thought he was descended from the Gods, but never tried to spread the Greek religion, and even got married under the Persian religion.
I don’t think lecturing the natives is going to help. It will take a village. You need to bring subject matter experts, very practical people, back with you and set up your own village and start making cool stuff the others will need - including cool swords and stuff to discourage unwanted visitors. Then you start trading with other villages. You tell people that your no-god is more powerful than their god, and do the appropriate tricks. You’d need to set up some sort of alternate non-god-based social structure for them, and convince royalty that your godless technology will keep them in power and rich better than the priests. You’d need a set of simple to do experiments to answer questions like where the wind comes from, and you need to keep it as simple as possible. If a king without a god becomes more powerful than a king with a god, gods are going to seem a lot less important.
But make them understand your power first, and then bring up gods.
If you visit a Palestinian mountain tribe early enough, you might zap western religion in its cradle. You might want to do the same for Hinduism.
Problem with that is, there *WERE * philosopher scholars of ancient times who set forth rationalist/materialist explanations of the world. Not just in the West but also in India and China. And guess what, the mystics/supernaturalists beat the pants off of them in the popularity contest.
Just having superior knowledge is not per se as effective or as impressive as we may wish to think, when trying to sway public opinion – others have pointed out the example that here we sit in 2007 and it still takes a major court battle to make the science curriculum contain only science. As others have said, by the time you have any organized civilization running, it’s probably too late to* prevent* the rise of organized religion, and at most what you **could ** aspire to achieve is to *find a time and place in history where the conditions are right * to trigger the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment X number of centuries ahead of schedule. WE are just now 4 centuries into THAT sequence of events, and though progress has been made, it’s not a sure thing what comes next.
Maybe. On the plus side you could simply withhold medicine and any other kind of technology from the religious, at least for a while. Personally, I think you’d have to be a lot more proactive, as in smiting the hell out of the believers. If they all kept having mysterious plagues and the like, there’d be a lot of converts to your way of thinking.
OTOH, it probably still wouldn’t work. Personally, I don’t believe our ancestors were any more intelligent than the average person is now. When confronted with a difficult problem a person can learn something or they can just take the easy way out and say “God did it.”
You need to bring subject matter experts, very practical people, back with you and set up your own village and start making cool stuff the others will need - including cool swords and stuff to discourage unwanted visitors. Then you start trading with other villages. You tell people that your no-god is more powerful than their god, and do the appropriate tricks. You’d need to set up some sort of alternate non-god-based social structure for them, and convince royalty that your godless technology will keep them in power and rich better than the priests. You’d need a set of simple to do experiments to answer questions like where the wind comes from, and you need to keep it as simple as possible. If a king without a god becomes more powerful than a king with a god, gods are going to seem a lot less important.