(July 10, 2019 at 3:18 am)Belaqua Wrote: When you say "before we invented gods," it sounds as if we were going along with no notion of gods and then came up with the idea out of whole cloth.
No. I'm talking about a considerable amount of time before these ideas evolved, which as you say would have been fuzzy ideas at best.
Quote:
People tried to figure out how the world worked. They attributed various events to various kinds of forces and agents. Some of these are what we would now call natural, and some weren't. Some were anthropomorphized, and some weren't.
Gawdzilla and other lazy thinkers act as though people used to be honest empiricists until some guy had a fantasy. That suits the general anti-religion ideology around here, but it's a comic book view of history.
I don't think I've said "some guy had a fantasy." I'm of the opinion that the God idea evolved slowly in the minds of early humans. Keeping in mind the position they were in it's understandable why Gods would be an appealing proposition.
Quote:Before any such explanations occurred to early primates, it makes sense to call them atheist in the sense that dirt is atheist, or the empty space in a box is atheist: it lacks belief because it has no belief. It has no belief because it has no abstract thought or the capacity to try to explain.
The before and after would have been a vast amount of time.. I mean it's not as if on a Friday no explanations had occurred to them and then on Saturday morning it all became clear.
