Looking back at ancient cultures has made me wonder if religion plays a necessary role in forming a civilization. I'm especially wondering if Western Civilization would be what it is today without religion.
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Post by Jabberwocky on Mar 6, 2020 21:16:24 GMT -5
Religion, mythology, storytelling all fill a role: to explain that which defies the rational mind.
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Religion, mythology, storytelling all fill a role: to explain that which defies the rational mind.
Richard Dawkins touches on this a little in "The God Delusion." The human brain is wired for survival. Often, this means we use mental shortcuts to try to understand things that don't make sense to us. Because most of the interesting developments we see are created by human effort, we assume that the cool parts of the Earth and the world around us must've been created. Then, people leverage this shortcut for their own power and influence and finances.
Post by Anisopterra on Apr 3, 2020 11:26:05 GMT -5
Well, to counter Inven's point, the entire conflict thesis between religion and science is really a product of relatively modern thought, and many of the scientific achievements of humanity have been brought about and preserved through religious organizations and societies.
Personally, I think the prevalence of religion in the forming of civilization is that religion almost always creates a sense of community, and people need to have something connecting them together in some way before a society can form. As well, religion is a source of shared culture and traditions, which can hep preserve that unified community.
I think about this a lot. Religion in NationStates seems to be something that can potentially be many different possible things. The game's commentary on reality is biased in many ways, but there seems to me to be potential insight in this picture drawn of the variability of religion. All the words for religion are these really unclear words for what might be intrinsically unclear complexes of social control. Religion clearly influences the world, yet religiousity makes no consistent claims. Religion could mean everything or nothing, and it almost certainly does mean something different for any two people contemplating it. How then can religious communities come together and determine that they are all in relevant senses "the same"? The psuedohomology of religious communities seems to function as a strength despite the intrinsic unclarity of what brings them all together; dealing with thoughts that must all be different, still they find harmonic potentials. At the same time, religion may be intrinsically a tool of exclusion, since it is a skirt of mystery around social groups which to a soul of no insight must surely appear to be made entirely of lies and turns of phrase.
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Practicing, actually practicing a religion - instead of just paying lip service every Sunday - can be hugely beneficial to ones life. It can provide direction, it provides a moral compass, it provides community and it may even contribute to mental wellbeing. All this assuming you're not part of some aggressive religious group that seeks to control every facet of your life.
Of course all these things can be obtained without religion as well, if one so chooses. But religion is one way to obtain them. There's nothing wrong with that.
And of course, thus far, religion has played an important role in developing societies all over the world :-)
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No, we have even seen it on modern civilizations like the soviet union where despite religion being banned, it lasted for a while and the reason it fell wasnt because of religion
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Looking back at ancient cultures has made me wonder if religion plays a necessary role in forming a civilization. I'm especially wondering if Western Civilization would be what it is today without religion.
I'm not sure there's been a civilization that didn't have a concept of religion of some sort. We might call many of them 'spiritual' more than 'religious' today, but even societies that are avowedly not-religious do indeed have a sense of religiosity in them (often one they deny).
No, we have even seen it on modern civilizations like the soviet union where despite religion being banned, it lasted for a while and the reason it fell wasnt because of religion
'[C]ivilizations like the soviet union...' talk about setting a low bar.
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Agreed, Religion was more necessary in the past than now. Not to mention it has caused many world altering events for the better or worse. Confucius (Even though he is considered a ethnic religion) teachings affected people around the globe and undoubtedly helped china grow. (At least philosophically if nothing else)
I think it's likely to form as a means of explaining things before more scientific and mathematical explanations can be found, since the brain really does love its "Why?" questions, but I'm not entirely sure it's required? I suppose an answer would depend on the nature and background of the new civilization. Are they starting from complete and total scratch as a species? Is this a civilization made up of people across the world who were scooped up in 2020 and placed on an island somewhere? Do they retain contact with other people, and if not, how long are they separated from others? Are they starting in a safe environment or a dangerous one? Like. I can imagine a lot of different "let's begin a civilization" scenarios and how that would change the type of/importance of religion as a presence.
Well religion used to have a practical role as well as spiritual one. It used to be an explanation to phenomenons that people couldn't explain, like thunder -Zeus or Perun throws thunderbolts, earthquakes - Neptune struck the ground with his trident or Namazu did it. But the spiritualists aspect is the one that's most dominant today. Belief that there is something out there that directs our life, like God, karma, Chi, the Universe or whatever, provides a good moral backbone to people. It helps people cope with losses knowing that their loved ones are in a better place and so on. I believe that we created religion out of necessity to understand the unexplainable and in return religion shaped us and our culture more than we understand. Maybe if we started all over again, as a civilization, we would also create religions probably different than the ones we have today, but the effect that they would have on us would be the same.