(July 27, 2013 at 1:17 am)oukoida Wrote: Now, after reading this, a question came into my mind: what is the point for religions in negating earthly pleasure?
Someone mentioned control, and that is probably a part of it, but not all of it. I also think that the rules and behavior control developed over time for religion in general. Superstition probably played a big part in it; if you behaved a certain way and saw benefits that you ascribed to the gods, you might be inclined to codify that behavior. Without a real god to provide oversight and to organize the laws, it's no surprise that you wind up with so many and that some of them seem utterly bizarre (wearing clothes of mixed fabric, for example). Since the assumption is that these are laws direct from god himself, there's no impetus to change them in any way.
So you wind up with a lot of restrictive laws designed to control behavior to a ridiculous degree, which just happens to work very nicely alongside fear and guilt to help keep a population in line. I doubt that church and state leaders were about to look that gift horse in the mouth.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
