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Faith
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09-10-2011 12:40am#1
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Sam V Smith wrote: »Religion is man made, and like most things "man made" it was created to serve some purpose. That purpose was lack of understanding.
Is that true, though?
We tend to conflate gods and religions. In fairness, we do that with good reason because of their mutual interdependency. But it doesn't always make sense to group them together for the purposes of discussion.
I'd readily accept that gods were invented as a way of dealing with humans' lack of understanding of how their world came to be. But religions are another matter altogether. Although religions are hugely important in recycling the stories of gods from one generation to the next, history suggests that their far more important role was as a means of social control.
As humans began to settle, develop agriculture and establish towns, societies became much more complex than they had ever been, and rules and laws to regulate how people behaved towards each other became more numerous and more complicated. As anyone who has ever been involved in making or enforcing laws will tell you, laws and societies operate far more smoothly when people are willing to comply voluntarily with the rules. So the more complex societies became, the more important it was that there were social constructs in place to encourage people to voluntarily go along with numerous and complicated rules. Religions were exactly the kind of social constructs needed, partly because of their connection to the stories of how the world was created, and partly because of their emphasis on rules and "right behaviour".
At first, religions were centred on personalities - kings, tribal chiefs, and the like. But religions based on living people were destined to fail, because living people were all too likely to publicly prove their infallibility and lack of whatever it takes to be an all-powerful god. On the other hand, religions centred on creatures people couldn't see had a better chance of succeeding, because invisible gods are less likely to be seen to have feet of clay (so to speak). It is no accident that most early religions that we know about sprung up in what was called the Fertile Crescent, because that's the part of our world that was first to develop agriculture and to urbanise.
Anyway, I'm rambling. If you haven't read it already, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs And Steel has a few interesting things to say about this.
As for faith, now that's a whole different kettle of fish.
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AhSureTisGrand wrote: »On a similar vein, if he's going to call fools fools then he should really be more careful with the apostrophe.
I thought you used (') when you were paraphrasing something for a headline?
If it was direct quote you'd go " ..." but if you're paraphrasing you'd go ' ...'
Please, correct me on this if I'm wrong because I often use this in more technical stuff.:o (i.e criticising newspapers
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There's no difference I'm aware of between the two. A quotation mark is a quotation mark, whether it's made up of one or two apostrophe's.I thought you used (') when you were paraphrasing something for a headline? If it was direct quote you'd go " ..." but if you're paraphrasing you'd go ' ...'
Here's Fowler on quotation marks:
http://www.bartleby.com/116/406.html0 -
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Deleted User wrote: »Is that true, though?
We tend to conflate gods and religions. In fairness, we do that with good reason because of their mutual interdependency. But it doesn't always make sense to group them together for the purposes of discussion.
I'd readily accept that gods were invented as a way of dealing with humans' lack of understanding of how their world came to be. But religions are another matter altogether. Although religions are hugely important in recycling the stories of gods from one generation to the next, history suggests that their far more important role was as a means of social control.
As humans began to settle, develop agriculture and establish towns, societies became much more complex than they had ever been, and rules and laws to regulate how people behaved towards each other became more numerous and more complicated. As anyone who has ever been involved in making or enforcing laws will tell you, laws and societies operate far more smoothly when people are willing to comply voluntarily with the rules. So the more complex societies became, the more important it was that there were social constructs in place to encourage people to voluntarily go along with numerous and complicated rules. Religions were exactly the kind of social constructs needed, partly because of their connection to the stories of how the world was created, and partly because of their emphasis on rules and "right behaviour".
At first, religions were centred on personalities - kings, tribal chiefs, and the like. But religions based on living people were destined to fail, because living people were all too likely to publicly prove their infallibility and lack of whatever it takes to be an all-powerful god. On the other hand, religions centred on creatures people couldn't see had a better chance of succeeding, because invisible gods are less likely to be seen to have feet of clay (so to speak). It is no accident that most early religions that we know about sprung up in what was called the Fertile Crescent, because that's the part of our world that was first to develop agriculture and to urbanise.
Anyway, I'm rambling. If you haven't read it already, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs And Steel has a few interesting things to say about this.
As for faith, now that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Well said, and i completely agree. Although I would say that just reenforces my point that religions are man made.0 -
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