RE: On the origin of religion
February 8, 2017 at 12:01 pm
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2017 at 12:11 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Doesn't seem to have been difficult...the oldest atheist on record is older than the big three religions and expresses a viewpoint that doesn't exactly sound like it was dreamt up by that one guy, that one night.
Even if we dial it all the way back to red ochre burial time, not everyone got such a burial...and such burials appear to have been looted with regularity. It seems as if there might have been a few skeptics in Uncle Og's crew...who didn't think Og needed that axe after he died, after all...and would rather have handed it to their kids when they finally bit the bullet from stepping on a tetanus laced acorn or whatevs.
This isn't to say that there isn't a pronounced trend of religiosity, or practiced ritual (or seeming superstition) that begs for an explanation...but none of these things are actually interchangeable with uncritical belief in their objects of veneration or systemic approaches - of a cognitive difficulty in lacking belief. How many people with a rabbits foot keychains actually believe that a rabbits foot is lucky, or seek to explain their unexplained good fortune by the presence of a synthetic tuft of fur on their chains? If we found all of the rabbits foot keychains, 10k years in the future, would we be justified in assuming that vast swaths of people actually bought the rabbits foot magic hook line and sinker?
Conversely, is there any reason to suppose that for some ancestors in the near or distant past these sacred objects weren;t dual or multi-purpose..or that they weren;t themselves the paleolithic versions of todays nominal christian..who go through the motions while lacking any identifiable belief or faith? Food for thought.
To put it in truncated form, it doesn't take a knowledgeable, 21st century scientific mind to realize that spells and cantrips don't work. Were no more or less capable of noticing that now than we were at the dawn of magical beliefs and trinkets, coinciding nicely with full modernity. To imagine that it would have been more difficult for people entirely like ourselves to do something that we are trivially capable of doing is to imagine something...strange.
Even if we dial it all the way back to red ochre burial time, not everyone got such a burial...and such burials appear to have been looted with regularity. It seems as if there might have been a few skeptics in Uncle Og's crew...who didn't think Og needed that axe after he died, after all...and would rather have handed it to their kids when they finally bit the bullet from stepping on a tetanus laced acorn or whatevs.
This isn't to say that there isn't a pronounced trend of religiosity, or practiced ritual (or seeming superstition) that begs for an explanation...but none of these things are actually interchangeable with uncritical belief in their objects of veneration or systemic approaches - of a cognitive difficulty in lacking belief. How many people with a rabbits foot keychains actually believe that a rabbits foot is lucky, or seek to explain their unexplained good fortune by the presence of a synthetic tuft of fur on their chains? If we found all of the rabbits foot keychains, 10k years in the future, would we be justified in assuming that vast swaths of people actually bought the rabbits foot magic hook line and sinker?
Conversely, is there any reason to suppose that for some ancestors in the near or distant past these sacred objects weren;t dual or multi-purpose..or that they weren;t themselves the paleolithic versions of todays nominal christian..who go through the motions while lacking any identifiable belief or faith? Food for thought.
To put it in truncated form, it doesn't take a knowledgeable, 21st century scientific mind to realize that spells and cantrips don't work. Were no more or less capable of noticing that now than we were at the dawn of magical beliefs and trinkets, coinciding nicely with full modernity. To imagine that it would have been more difficult for people entirely like ourselves to do something that we are trivially capable of doing is to imagine something...strange.
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