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| quote: | Originally posted by Nrg2Nfinit
lol yeah but they always came back
you need some sort of belief system (ill call it religion) to progress to civilization.
The Assyrians had it. The ancient egyptians had it, The romans and so forth.
I would agree with mongoose that when it is moreso used as a political tool to herd people it gets messy. The crusades, The Nazi's the taliban etc.
but if it wasnt for religion, the egyptians would have never made the pyramids. Michaelangelo would have never made his sculptures and shakespear was definatley a man of religion, his creativeness wouldn't have spurred in his time. We live in a scociety now where knowledge and progression and and capitalism is our religion. Law defines our moral standards but essentially we are raised and nurtured to be empathetic (or at least attempt to be).
So the concept of religion is still the same one. Some sort of motivation to be rational, humane and motivated. That is the world we live in now. Is there a god? who knows. We only know what we can perceive and visualize. I prefer to go with pascals wager in this case.
As organisms evolve through natural selection, so should our way of thinking guided by science (it is the structural foundation in which our society has been built on). We shouldn't be jaded by promises of 72 virgins, being the chosen race by god or praying constantly to reach the kingdom of heaven trying to convert people. Instead we should help our society progress and us as a species to become more civil. |
Well, I didn’t really intend to get into this debate (especially since your knowledge far far outstrips my own) but it’s a quiet afternoon at work….
I think the central issue I have with your post here is that there is an assumption that religion caused or created these things, when in reality is was merely the fact that religion was the governing ism of the pre-enlightened eras. I think there is an argument to be made that had religion never existed such great works of art or engineering could and would have been created, just with a different focus or motivation. Sure, the great tombs of the Egyptians were built because of their beliefs concerning the afterlife, but imagine what could have been created had they been motivated by other forces? When I see massively huge awesome church structures all I can think of is how much better that time, effort and money could have been spent. Sure, the pyramids are fantastic structures that everyone knows and loves, but take a minute to think of the thousands of peasants that had to build them; what positive role was religion playing for them? Hell, Yahweh thought it was fine for his chosen to slave away in Egypt for 400 years! 
You rightly identify the fact that religious belief was the governing zeitgeist of the time, but do we praise Nazism for building the autobahns? Nazism didn’t build the autobahns, they just happened to be built during the (thankfully brief) era of Nazism.
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