(November 21, 2021 at 11:13 pm)Oldandeasilyconfused Wrote:(November 21, 2021 at 11:09 pm)emjay Wrote: Sorry, I don't follow what you're saying here... how it relates to what me and Belacqua were talking about, could you rephrase?
Also, I'm not sure how the rest of your post relates to what me and Belacqua were talking about?, but it's interesting nonetheless. I would add though that I personally think of religion as the inevitable byproduct of the way our minds work; noticing patterns/regularities in the world, always questioning, and with a tendency to ascribe agency where there is none/anthropomorphize things... so in pre-scientific times/places it's not at all surprising there are so many gods and spirits ascribed to the various regularities of nature, such as the Sun, or that the agency of gods are used to explain unpredictable calamities like storms and famines etc. And where knowledge increases, if it increases, those concepts evolve (I'm especially thinking of the classical philosophy I've been reading of late, thanks to the Aquinas thread, where it's very interesting to see those philosophers straggling the line between polytheism and monotheism, and seeing how their thought evolves on those questions...and it raises interesting questions of how those two ideas relate/depend on/follow each other, if they do). So that's my own take on what it stems from, but granted where I see a bug, the religious most probably see a feature.
Oh, sorry about that, I obviously misunderstood.
No worries. I think I could have probably been a bit clearer with how I phrased that bit... ie reasons for believing are seldom the same thing as reasons for not believing (ie I was talking about an issue preventing me from believing, and Belacqua was talking about a type of Christian that doesn't share those similar concerns) ... so it might have been better just leaving it as 'different priorities', as that looks like it encompasses both.
