(May 23, 2023 at 11:06 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: I think it is perhaps instructive to recall the Roman Empire is thought to have also seen a long decline of established traditional and state sponsored religions from the 1st to the 3rd century, coincident with a rise in large number of esoteric cults of various provenance. It is probably this fractured cultscape that facilitated a boastfully anti-rational, Credo quia absurdum, cult called Christianity to opportunistically and virulently reassert the primacy of a single, much more smothering, religion. So decline in religion does not necessarily betoken a decline in stupidity and gullibility, it may just endow more cunningly opportunistic cults with a more open field.
This could actually be formulated as a law: The strength of the largest traditional religion in a given society varies as the inverse square of the number of fringe religions in that society.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson