RE: The longest con?
March 19, 2012 at 10:41 pm
(This post was last modified: March 19, 2012 at 10:42 pm by Jackalope.)
(March 19, 2012 at 10:24 pm)mediamogul Wrote: That's getting pretty misanthropic.
Admittedly, it is. Most of the time, I prefer to take the view that most who are involved in religion have lower (or different) evidentiary standards than I do. I'm also happy to "live and let live" with respect to others' beliefs to a point. However, I do not have a lot of patience for those that claim absolute knowledge of things that are demonstrably false (to a high degree of probability).
(March 19, 2012 at 10:24 pm)mediamogul Wrote: I believe that people were more easily deluded about themselves and the world back then. I think that most of the con men of religion were in some facet actual believers.
That, or they had an agenda - which was not necessarily self-serving or malevolent.
I can certainly understand why a relatively primitive culture would "fill the gaps" in their knowledge with superstition / supernatural explanations. That seems to be one constant common to all cultures. I don't understand how people of normal or better intelligence can put more value on stories and traditions from those ignorant ancient cultures over the wealth of human knowledge (I'm not using "ignorant" as a pejorative here).
Primitive cultures had a reasonable excuse. We don't.
(March 19, 2012 at 10:29 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The vast majority of people have had religion shoved up their asses as children and threatened with death/damnation if they doubted.
So it's fraud and extortion, according to Min?
