RE: A thing about religious (and other) people and the illusion of free will
October 17, 2023 at 10:53 am
(This post was last modified: October 17, 2023 at 10:54 am by The Grand Nudger.)
For better and for worse, yeah - if things had been different, things would be different. Cattle would find themselves in a much different situation in india, for example, outside of religious ideation. OFC, from the standpoint of evolutionary development, we might not have been capable of being any other way. We're primed to accept eyes in the sky and project human motivations out into the world because we're a hyper social species and those two things are meaningfully true even if theyre not factually accurate. There really are states and outcomes that disadvantage us and we instinctively or intuitively believe that things should be NOT THAT.
Supreme beings are deontological tools. Ways to quickly and cheaply organize normative labor. The alternative would be educating every single member on the finer points of an academic argument to normativity - and even though we can assume that some good argument for a religious belief could be made (an...remember, we've set a distinction between superstition and religion) and that a person could hear it and genuinely agree of their own accord - well...we just don't have to. Part and parcel of hyper social behavior is that it's easier and quicker to just say the cheiftan says so. Or the government says so. Or my dad says so. Or god says so. These are all the same entity, functionally, lol.
Supreme beings are deontological tools. Ways to quickly and cheaply organize normative labor. The alternative would be educating every single member on the finer points of an academic argument to normativity - and even though we can assume that some good argument for a religious belief could be made (an...remember, we've set a distinction between superstition and religion) and that a person could hear it and genuinely agree of their own accord - well...we just don't have to. Part and parcel of hyper social behavior is that it's easier and quicker to just say the cheiftan says so. Or the government says so. Or my dad says so. Or god says so. These are all the same entity, functionally, lol.
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