RE: Big gods came after the rise of civilizations
April 9, 2020 at 10:18 am
(This post was last modified: April 9, 2020 at 10:26 am by The Grand Nudger.)
We've been fully modern for 55k years, at least. We know that neolithic and bronze age people employed ritual behavior as a part of their practical everyday tasks. Their rituals were very neatly constructed along the lines of necessity. In many cases, ritual behavior has a clear relationship to enhanced productivity.
The practical utility of ritual behavior is a known known.
While there's some crossover between money and ritual, and a granary makes for a good example of a treasury (people payed their taxes in food for a long time).... a ritual behavior in the sense employed would be more like doing something every day with the explicit intent of it getting you more money - regardless of whether that thing has a causal effect. If we add money (or any currency, really) to the mix it becomes easier to see how ritual behaviors formed, in past and today.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
This, conveniently, is and has always been the traditionalism that moralizing gods* were founded upon and continue to make reference to. Proceeding from there we need only add reciprocity, a ubiquitous belief in human beings about pretty much all things - and we get to highly ritualized behaviors that are more like ceremonies. Everyone standing around a specific well as a priest drops a coin into it - on the expectation that this "seed money" will grow. That the divine will return and even multiply our efforts. Ultimately, any society that can compel it's members to such regimented behavior will find equal success in the more practical aspects of ritual behavior, at the level of the group and the individual - and the continued success of their society will seem to be a powerful indication of the efficacy of ritual and ceremony - repeat ad infinitum.
*I use the term for convenience, I don't think that there is such a thing as a non moralizing god, also noted by the author of the paper as a potential issue for the hypothesis
The practical utility of ritual behavior is a known known.
While there's some crossover between money and ritual, and a granary makes for a good example of a treasury (people payed their taxes in food for a long time).... a ritual behavior in the sense employed would be more like doing something every day with the explicit intent of it getting you more money - regardless of whether that thing has a causal effect. If we add money (or any currency, really) to the mix it becomes easier to see how ritual behaviors formed, in past and today.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
This, conveniently, is and has always been the traditionalism that moralizing gods* were founded upon and continue to make reference to. Proceeding from there we need only add reciprocity, a ubiquitous belief in human beings about pretty much all things - and we get to highly ritualized behaviors that are more like ceremonies. Everyone standing around a specific well as a priest drops a coin into it - on the expectation that this "seed money" will grow. That the divine will return and even multiply our efforts. Ultimately, any society that can compel it's members to such regimented behavior will find equal success in the more practical aspects of ritual behavior, at the level of the group and the individual - and the continued success of their society will seem to be a powerful indication of the efficacy of ritual and ceremony - repeat ad infinitum.
*I use the term for convenience, I don't think that there is such a thing as a non moralizing god, also noted by the author of the paper as a potential issue for the hypothesis
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