(July 13, 2017 at 9:18 pm)Whateverist Wrote: I suspect, as I think Khem may have just hinted at, the capacity/tendency to attribute comprehensible intentionality by personifying 'spirits' of animals and weather (etc.) would have been evolutionarily advantageous. It would be a natural first step which could have given our growing brains a way to strategically engage the perils and potential benefits of the environment, even before the development of symbolic language.
(July 13, 2017 at 3:13 pm)Lek Wrote: I don't think it's instinctual.
Maybe not, but the sex drive itself obviously is instinctual and rape would be the upshot given the opportunity and no countervailing inputs.
But to your point about seeing the intentions of gods in all manner of events, I completely agree with you. Of course I don't endorse relying on this primitive way of thinking any more than I endorse rape.
Well back when we were wearing bloody animal skins and bonking women on the head with clubs to drag them back to our caves, we weren't exactly moral agents. Evolving to the point of cognition we're at where language can develop, direct ideas and feelings could be shared, etc., are what enable us to actually understand concepts like consent, empathy and morality. So even if a thing was instinctive and advantageous (preventing our extinction by reproducing as much as possible during our early ancestors' day), we can contemplate it and determine if in fact it's a good thing, or advantageous, or at least outweighs the consequences in our modern age. In the case of rape, it does not, even if it once did and is the reason any of us are here rather than one more dead branch on the tree of life. Same with religious belief, although I don't believe that in and of itself is instinctive, merely a by-product of other behaviors that would be better off contemplated and concluded that they should be rightly dismissed for their lack of continued utility. But because the rules of the religious game are what they are, its staying power is such that we actually have to question whether it's instinctive. Because them fuckin' heathens are the last people we should be associatin' with 'cause they ain't got gawd in their hearts.
Religions were invented to impress and dupe illiterate, superstitious stone-age peasants. So in this modern, enlightened age of information, what's your excuse? Or are you saying with all your advantages, you were still tricked as easily as those early humans?
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
