RE: fear "the Empire of heaven" ?
September 9, 2012 at 10:03 pm
(This post was last modified: September 9, 2012 at 10:17 pm by Angrboda.)
Well, there are errors and distortions aplenty that I could focus on, but they're not all that important.
As with any phenomena that we wish to explain, there may be competing hypotheses which explain the phenomena. Is it possible that religion is the result of telepathic communications from space aliens? Sure. It's possible. But the important question is how probable is it that this explanation is true, relative to other explanations of the phenomena. As it turns out, the human brain doesn't need telepathic messages from outside itself, it is fully capable of fooling itself into believing itself to have received messages — no aliens required! Do we need aliens to explain human hatred and warfare? Nope! Do we need aliens to explain human gullibility and imagination? Nope! And speaking in general, an explanation that relies upon mechanisms that have been demonstrated to exist is far ahead of any for which mechanisms are either absent or implausible. (And this gets off into statistics and probability theory that we don't need to go into.) I asked you if you had any evidence. You replied with more speculation. Your imagination is not evidence.
Is it possible that space aliens and telepathic messages are the cause of religion? Sure is. Is it likely or even close to being as likely as other naturalistic explanations? No, it is not. Not by a long shot.
And that situation will remain until you actually provide some evidence(*) for either space aliens or telepathy. When you do find some, feel free to let us know.
(*) And a quick note on evidence. Many people will provide a bunch of weak evidence for a hypothesis under the apparent assumption that a mountain of weak evidence amounts to good evidence. Weak evidence remains weak evidence, no matter how much of it you pile up.