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RE: Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?
December 14, 2019 at 1:04 pm
No one makes that case, lol. That's the straw that apologists pitch when they don't want to discuss the case made. There was no singular reason for the decline of the western empire.
The case...by which we mean those historical details we take to be factual - is that christianity was one of many things which contributed to the decline. Christianity directly challenged, and eventually defeated the institution which it sought to replace, the imperial cult. This wasn't just the official religion of rome...it was also the apparatus of the civil government.
The empires problems were already as numerous and difficult as any person would imagine with territory spanning the majority of the then-known world, but it was the collapse of their civil services at home and the dissolution of their governing class into a bunch of bickering puppets that sealed the deal. By the time that the barbarians hit, they were literally just walking into rome unopposed. There was nothing left of the once formidable roman government.
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RE: Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?
December 14, 2019 at 1:17 pm
Is Harry Potter an attempt to understand the world? Marx Brothers? NFL? That fucking cricket game they play elsewhere? Any of that?
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RE: Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?
December 15, 2019 at 9:48 pm
(December 14, 2019 at 1:17 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Is Harry Potter an attempt to understand the world? Marx Brothers? NFL? That fucking cricket game they play elsewhere? Any of that?
Exactly.
Religion is not a SERIOUS attempt to understand the world. It is an attempt at an explanation made out of thin air that sounds comforting to a lot of people.
But in my experience as a former theist, if you actually try to live in accordance with the belief system's explanations and predictions, you're in for a world of hurt, because it's literally un-tethered from the Real World. You'll be embracing things you shouldn't embrace, avoiding things you shouldn't avoid, and just generally fucking yourself over.
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RE: Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?
December 16, 2019 at 10:33 am
To address the OP, I believe religion, and any other institution, is a collective attempt to reinforce a tribalism mentality to restrict our world view into something understandable and manageable for coping with life. That is essentially how we are build. The very act of "growing up" is putting restrictions on the unfettered imagination and chaos of childhood into something functional and manageable for one's self. Much in the same way we form intentional social structures (like religion or politics) to restrict things like freedom, critical thinking and inclusiveness so we can operate at an improved level of safeness or sameness in our day-to-day.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
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RE: Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?
December 20, 2019 at 12:03 pm
(This post was last modified: December 20, 2019 at 12:04 pm by mordant.)
(December 16, 2019 at 10:33 am)tackattack Wrote: To address the OP, I believe religion, and any other institution, is a collective attempt to reinforce a tribalism mentality to restrict our world view into something understandable and manageable for coping with life. That is essentially how we are build. The very act of "growing up" is putting restrictions on the unfettered imagination and chaos of childhood into something functional and manageable for one's self. Much in the same way we form intentional social structures (like religion or politics) to restrict things like freedom, critical thinking and inclusiveness so we can operate at an improved level of safeness or sameness in our day-to-day.
Another way to look at it is that we look for rules of thumb, shared conventions and other philosophical and semantic shortcuts to simplify our mental model of reality that we work from.
There is nothing wrong with this so long as we are aware we are doing it and review for blind spots on a regular basis. I think the problem comes in where people come up with an abstraction, say "job done" and move on and never look at it critically ever again -- to the point where subsequent generations aren't even aware of the implicit assumptions they operate on, or why.
A great story on this score is a guy whose wife would always trim the corners off a beef roast before putting it in the pan. He was curious why this was. His wife simply said, well, my mother taught me to do it that way. So he asked the mother, and got the same answer. He eventually worked his way to the grandmother who said, oh, the pan I had when I married your grandfather was too small for the roast to fit into.
I think we have a lot of mental and procedural tics like this that either no longer serve a purpose or are downright dysfunctional. If we keep doing things The Way They've Always Been Done or The Way Everyone Knows They Should Be Done (or, The Way the Bible Commands It) then we run into escalating problems. That doesn't mean simplifications are bad, just that mindless simplification is potentially bad. In fact I would say, mindless simplification is "always eventually bad, to some degree".
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