@Hanky, I've seen the notion bandied around that god stories (or god persistence) may be related to the administration of proto cities.......but never that they would have been impossible or even significantly more difficult.  Even this, however, ignores a wide gap between behavioral modernity and city building, we already had gods for quite some time..and yet they didn't help us build cities.  Even hunter gatherers built cities, so a confluence of god and grain doesn't strike me as any more convincing.  

It's always seemed simpler, to me, to assume that cities had gods because cities had people, and people had gods.  Their presence was coincidental and unavoidable.  What suggests to us that city building or admin would have been easier with religion and gods thrown in the mix...we can certainly see innumerable examples of precisely the opposite within recorded history?

Toss me some lit man, so I can read up on this agreement of anthropologists.

(December 14, 2015 at 2:07 am)excitedpenguin Wrote: People are not as dumb as a lot of my fellow atheists give them credit for. A lot of them are just understadably confused and didn't even think these things through(the believers, I mean).

But to stubbornly insist that giving up religion is a simple matter of smartness is pretty dumb IMO.

(December 14, 2015 at 2:31 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote:

(December 14, 2015 at 2:07 am)excitedpenguin Wrote: People are not as dumb as a lot of my fellow atheists give them credit for. A lot of them are just understadably confused and didn't even think these things through(the believers, I mean).

But to stubbornly insist that giving up religion is a simple matter of smartness is pretty dumb IMO.

You're right, it's not just about that. Nevertheless, I sense a fair amount of defeatism coming from a lot of people who are concerned about this, and that's definitely a bad thing.

I guess, to me, this desire to sweep god belief under the rug just seems a little bourgeois, a kind of fussy concern for orderliness. Whether it embarrasses you or not, god belief played an enormous role in our becoming what we have. I'm far more concerned to understand how that worked than I am to hide it.

(December 14, 2015 at 2:41 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote: I guess, to me, this desire to sweep god belief under the rug just seems a little bourgeois, a kind of fussy concern for orderliness.  Whether it embarrasses you or not, god belief played an enormous role in our becoming what we have.  I'm far more concerned to understand how that worked than I am to hide it.

Great point WTW and absolutely right.  The God belief has spurned a great deal of who we are.  I've even heard the argument that the advancement of sciences by Newton, Kepler and Galileo was because of their belief in a creator.  I can't remember where the quote is from (I think CS Lewis) but it goes something like, "Men became scientific because they expected Law in nature and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver."

(December 14, 2015 at 2:27 pm)Rhythm Wrote: @Hanky, I've seen the notion bandied around that god stories (or god persistence) may be related to the administration of proto cities.......but never that they would have been impossible or even significantly more difficult.  Even this, however, ignores a wide gap between behavioral modernity and city building, we already had gods for quite some time..and yet they didn't help us build cities.  Even hunter gatherers built cities, so a confluence of god and grain doesn't strike me as any more convincing.  

It's always seemed simpler, to me, to assume that cities had gods because cities had people, and people had gods.  Their presence was coincidental and unavoidable.  What suggests to us that city building or admin would have been easier with religion and gods thrown in the mix...we can certainly see innumerable examples of precisely the opposite within recorded history?

Toss me some lit man, so I can read up on this agreement of anthropologists.

The idea of agriculture as the mother of urban settlements is what I learned in college (that's a school for higher education, just in case you wonder), albeit this was 30 years ago. I know theories change, but it makes the best sense because cities were not observed up until the time that the practice of agriculture was practiced intensively. So, have new discoveries since led away from this old idea, or is somebody just throwing cause and effect out the window and calling whatever they are arguing on whatever they may wish?

Hunter-gatherers built cities? You did say "cities", which I believe must consist of at very least permanent settlements by more than a handful of allied families, and an established political system. Hunter-gatherers doing this is unlikely, in that they need to keep moving in search of fresher, less-picked-over foraging grounds.

Anyway, where did who point to and call it a "city" established by hunter-gatherers?

H/G's -did not- have to keep constantly on the move, it become so as time progressed, or could be so in particular environments at particular times, but at the big changeover event all they needed was a fertile area teeming with life, same kind of place you'd need to farm, later.

It's undeniably true that agriculture has been (and was) responsible for the largest and most permanent cities and civilizations.  However, the "ag first" model hides it's assumptions in plain site when it refers to the "hunter gatherer sites" later evolving into cities with the advent of ag.  There were already people congregating there, and in many cases building permanent structures in those sites.  Essentially, deciding that ag came first is just an issue of defining a city as a settlement well-post agriculture.

Catal Hayuk, for example...not built by farmers at all.  Eventually filled with them, driven by it, sure...but not built by it or for it.  The major value of that city, from the POV of anthropology, is that it shows our transition from h/g to ag.  Had they not been congregating in that city beforehand it would not offer such a glimpse (nor would they have had the later manpower to farm).  The glimpse it offers is counter-intuitive, early agriculture was a disaster incapable of supporting populations- it would have taken even more land than h/g took, and much more than any of the earliest agriculturists could work.  For this reason, there's a blurry line between ag and h/g.....and that line stays blurry well beyond the advent of "civilization proper". It's probably better to think of the first cities (and their populations) as quasi-pastoralists who ate native grain (just like the animals they'd followed in)- and those grains didn't resemble our current grains at all. It would take time to develop the tools, but more than that..the cultivars, to successfully farm. By the time that had occurred, those settlements already existed and were already permanent, or semi permanent..which wouldn't change after the advent of ag either, as people left them whenever the grass wasn't tall enough, or later, whenever crops failed....which was often, ag being -at that time-...at its very best, stirring the dirt with sticks and planting meager weeds while the global environment shifted around them - forever locking out hunter gatherer societies.

(December 14, 2015 at 3:45 pm)Rhythm Wrote: H/G's -did not- have to keep constantly on the move, it become so as time progressed, or could be so in particular environments at particular times, but at the big changeover event all they needed was a fertile area teeming with life, same kind of place you'd need to farm, later.  

It's undeniably true that agriculture has been (and was) responsible for the largest and most permanent cities and civilizations.  However, the "ag first" model hides it's assumptions in plain site when it refers to the "hunter gatherer sites" later evolving into cities with the advent of ag.  There were already people congregating there, and in many cases building permanent structures in those sites.  Essentially, deciding that ag came first is just an issue of defining a city as a settlement well-post agriculture.

Catal Hayuk, for example...not built by farmers at all.  Eventually filled with them, driven by it, sure...but not built by it or for it.  The major value of that city, from the POV of anthropology, is that it shows our transition from h/g to ag.  Had they not been congregating in that city beforehand it would not offer such a glimpse (nor would they have had the later manpower to farm).  The glimpse it offers is counter-intuitive, early agriculture was a disaster incapable of supporting populations- it would have taken even more land than h/g took, and much more than any of the earliest agriculturists could work.  For this reason, there's a blurry line between ag and h/g.....and that line stays blurry well beyond the advent of "civilization proper".  It's probably better to think of the first cities (and their populations) as quasi-pastoralists who ate native grain (just like the animals they'd followed in)- and those grains didn't resemble our current grains at all.  It would take time to develop the tools, but more than that..the cultivars, to successfully farm.  By the time that had occurred, those settlements already existed and were already permanent, or semi permanent..which wouldn't change after the advent of ag either, as people left them whenever the grass wasn't tall enough, or later, whenever crops failed....which was often, ag being -at that time-...at its very best, stirring the dirt with sticks and planting meager weeds while the global environment shifted around them - forever locking out hunter gatherer societies.

Please don't be putting words in my mouth, as if I said that agriculture evolved overnight.

Yes, there had to be a period of transition as experimentation played out. Cities could not have existed with inland peoples as they have since agriculture developed prior to this so-called "revolution". Popular trading sites are known to have existed, ok - but I don't think the word "city" properly applies to this. Even if they were big and complex enough by whatever standards apply for said title, my point was that cities aren't everywhere on the map prior to agriculture, and without this development the hunter-gatherer culture may have persisted with widely scattered trading towns to this day.

It seems impossible in the states. I'd really like to know what they did in the UK to make religion a non-issue among the common people, if not the government.

(December 14, 2015 at 2:46 pm)Kingpin Wrote: I've even heard the argument that the advancement of sciences by Newton, Kepler and Galileo was because of their belief in a creator.

Newton, by all accounts, even was a fundamentalist. But that doesn't change the fact, they were, for the most part, persecuted by religious authorities. Keppler wasn't. I even have to leather bound calendaries from 1647 and 1649 with a preliminary by Johannes Keppler. My father found them when he was setting up shop right after the war.

But that aside. I would add what I always say when this is asked. I don't even think, it's desirable for religion to vanish. The void would be filled by some other unknown ideology. Many people always look for direction. What I wish for is fundamentalist religion to vanish, since it mostly does harm. Not belief as such.