RE: More Shit For Creatards To Swallow
April 20, 2015 at 10:54 pm
(This post was last modified: April 20, 2015 at 11:10 pm by Hatshepsut.)
As for priests often being hypocrites, yes. Few were more venal than Pope Leo X. Religion hasn't cast a benign influence over the mindset of civic leaders either. But I still contest the scenario where religion alone holds the human race in darkness for millennia, unable to progress beyond bending over a shaduf in the emmer wheat fields until a white knight in atheist armor liberates us during the Enlightenment era. Religious influences in history are a mixed bag, some good, some bad. It's likely that religious thinking was an early motivator of compassion toward strangers. Aristotle's Ethics didn't completely neglect the gods. Machiavelli, who made some attempt to do so, isn't widely admired today.
I feel the basic reason progress was so slow is that it is inherently difficult regardless. People aren't wired up to be rational technocrats. We had to develop a culture for impersonal governance which could overcome the cultures of aggrandizement that naturally emerge when you put some people over others in societies larger than a band for the first time.
I feel the basic reason progress was so slow is that it is inherently difficult regardless. People aren't wired up to be rational technocrats. We had to develop a culture for impersonal governance which could overcome the cultures of aggrandizement that naturally emerge when you put some people over others in societies larger than a band for the first time.
