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Passionating. I see religions mostly as Conway's game of life - blips of colors fighting for territory using various ways, sometimes removing the competition,
by guylhem 14y ago
Passionating.
I see religions mostly as Conway's game of life - blips of colors fighting for territory using various ways, sometimes removing the competition, sometimes behing destroyed by competition, sometimes dying by themselves, etc.
It's like competition in a soul market :-)
But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope.
Yet I would be worried if a religion achieved dominant status (monopoly) in a way that could be used to eradicate newcomers and innovation.
We already have an oligopoly - see the problems it makes on a worldwide scale.
- upquark 14y ago> But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope. I'd argue that the surviving religions are more like the strongest viruses of the mind, not really the most useful mutations for society. You could look at the progress of societies and religions as the co-evolution of hosts and parasites, rather than of a single species acquiring useful new features :)
- wisty 14y agoA good parasite never kills its host. I'd say the truth is somewhere in between. Religions were a useful adaption. But after being supplanted by more useful mind viruses (like philosophy, which is itself becoming outdated; or formal justice systems), then their utility no longer mattered - just their ability to cling on.
- Volpe 14y agoPhilosophy predates a fair amount of religion, and actually encompasses it. And by definition it can't become outdated (as it's the pursuit of knowledge).
- s_baby 14y agoThe formal justice system is based on the Talmud. It's filled with "case studies" of edge cases that were used to set precedent of interpretation.
- simonh 14y agoBecause what we really need right now is a "formal justice systems are a Jewish conspiracy" meme going around.
- eru 14y ago> A good parasite never kills its host. That depends very much on how easy it is to find new hosts.
- adamfeldman 14y agoThat is the basis of my favorite book, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. From Wikipedia: The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago>>But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope. Do they? How can you tell? Maybe they actually slow humanity's progress.
- s_baby 14y agoLook at societies that haven't transitioned from tribal kinship identities and belief systems. Their lifestyle has changed little in thousands of years.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoThat doesn't imply anything positive about religion, just that some tribes with and without "religion" reached a stable lifestyle early and aren't motivated to progress.
- s_baby 14y agoIt implies religion was a necessary condition for progress.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoNo, it implies that religion was a sufficient condition for progress. http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/jyoung/necessary_and_sufficient_conditions.htm http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/jyoung/necessary_and_sufficient_co...
- s_baby 14y agoThen show a counter example without religion in the equation.
- derleth 14y ago> But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope. They were the best way to do this in the past, but we have better reasons to hope now: The world is comprehensible and our efforts to understand it meaningfully improve our lives, leading to meaningful improvements in our selves. We are, on the whole, less violent now than we were through most of our history, and there is reason to hope this will continue. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-and-the-decline-of-human-violence http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-and...