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Religion fulfilled two roles in the primitive world: Explaining how the world worked, and how an individual should behave in the world. It took a long time for

Religion fulfilled two roles in the primitive world: Explaining how the world worked, and how an individual should behave in the world. It took a long time for society to mature and learn. The accumulation of knowledge enabled rationally explaining the world from scientific first principles, and rational self-governance from philosophical first principles. Holy books are an artifact from a more primitive time, when experience was spread so thin it had to be accumulated across generations in singular books. If anything, those ideas survived because they lacked flexibility - their persistence reflects built-in error-correction that minimized mutations over time.

dredmorbius 9y ago
If I can amplify on that second function, it also had a few components. One was guiding people in how to live within typical social and community structures -- mostly smaller towns. The other was providing for people to act in a reasonably predictable way, across great distances or times. Realise that a typical large pre-industrial empire might span a few thousand miles, meaning that a journey from one region to another would take days, weeks, sometimes months. Sea and river travel was preferred to land, but ships were restricted to harbour from November to May, in the Northern Hemisphere. Which meant that a provincial regent or magistrate might be on his own for months at a time. As business and commerce expanded, those also required trust. (It's not surprising that the first financial networks developed either among specific subcultures, particularly the Jews, who had dispersed throughout Europe, were restricted from owning land or participating in trades, and had strong ties to other areas, or families, such as the Rothschild banking empire, founded by brothers in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples.) Religion effectively provided that structure, firmness, to both social relations and political and business behaviours. With the addition of considerable other overhead.

dredmorbius 9y ago

If I can amplify on that second function, it also had a few components. One was guiding people in how to live within typical social and community structures -- mostly smaller towns. The other was providing for people to act in a reasonably predictable way, across great distances or times. Realise that a typical large pre-industrial empire might span a few thousand miles, meaning that a journey from one region to another would take days, weeks, sometimes months. Sea and river travel was preferred to land, but ships were restricted to harbour from November to May, in the Northern Hemisphere. Which meant that a provincial regent or magistrate might be on his own for months at a time. As business and commerce expanded, those also required trust. (It's not surprising that the first financial networks developed either among specific subcultures, particularly the Jews, who had dispersed throughout Europe, were restricted from owning land or participating in trades, and had strong ties to other areas, or families, such as the Rothschild banking empire, founded by brothers in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples.) Religion effectively provided that structure, firmness, to both social relations and political and business behaviours. With the addition of considerable other overhead.