RE: Why is religion especially Christianity so widely practied?
February 13, 2019 at 12:17 pm
(This post was last modified: February 13, 2019 at 12:55 pm by Acrobat.)
(February 12, 2019 at 9:03 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: Religion fashions stories that provide meaning to those who believe in them.
These stories start with the big questions of "what exists", to which the bible answers "A God, who created a Heaven and an Earth, and designed and created Man and every living thing, and want's Man's obedience". From that foundation, we get stories about fictional characters in Jewish tradition, that attempt to explain the interaction of this God with mankind.
The question of "What exists" is a scientific question, for the most part. Science can only explain so far, but nothing we have discovered has anything to do with gods, or with any supernatural causes for anything.
No these stories don't start with the questions of what exists, they start with the question of what is the meaning of what exists. Which is not a scientific question at all. Hence why what proceeds are narratives and stories with morals and meanings, and not some bland mechanistic explanations. Hence why they read like the sort of moral stories we tell children, like the three little pigs, or the ugly ducking.
Atheists like yourself make a very stupid assumption, that these texts share more in common with science books, then things they actually parallel. They also make a silly assumption, that people in the past lacked any real self-awareness, or understanding of their own limitations, such as their lack of ability to explain the mechanical origins of the universe. Most people don't even care about these questions, let alone raise them to level of importance often associated with religious beliefs, they're just trying to find something to live for.
Your own scientific curiosities, desires to understand science, are less driven by some primordial biological urge, and more driven by your own unique historical contexts, living in age where we have the tools to explore such questions, and is more or less a hobbyist pursuit for the most of us. To apply it to the ancient world, is just anachronistic.
