Now that Occam is quoting scientists

[slartibartfast]

Religion Has Been The Root Cause Of Conflict For Over 2,000 Years, Says Science

It’s been a long held belief that religion is one of the reasons that humans have been able to thrive over the last few thousand years. People have hypothesised that it has brought us together and allowed the human race to flourish. But that theory has been cast into doubt by Anthropologists who say religious ties did not bind early societies together at all, instead they say faith has always been a destructive force.

A new anthropological study says that that religion has been dividing civilisation for over 2,000 years.

Scientists have been studying archaeological sites in Mexico that date back to 700BC. The Rio Verde valley on Mexico’s Pacific coast was home to an ancient community and Professor Arthur A Joyce is adamant that local religious rituals delayed the development of large state institutions. He believes that the primitive rituals did help to forge a strong small scale community, but held the colony back from developing any further.

His team found that elite members of this fledgling society started to dominate religious life and controlled the connection between community members and their gods – this inevitably led to conflicts with traditional community leaders which stunted the community’s progression and caused conflict.

The religious dispute in the lower Rio Verde valley lead to the demise of regional power centres. Grand temples that were built to celebrate their Gods were abandoned after only one century’s use.

Professor Joyce from the University of Colorado said: “In both the Valley of Oaxaca and the Lower Río Verde Valley, religion was important in the formation and history of early cities and states, but in vastly different ways.

“Given the role of religion in social life and politics today, that shouldn’t be too surprising.”

It seems nothing has changed. Religion is the root cause of almost every conflict across the globe and it’s a travesty. Wars rage in the name of a ‘mythical being’ in the sky, who almost certainly doesn’t exist. Faith causes suffering throughout the world, huge swathes of people are killed in the name of it and it’s the one thing that is stopping the human race from progressing and reaching it’s full potential.

www.viralthread.com/religion-has-been-causing-conflict-for-over-2000-years-says-science/?utm_source=socialamp&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=2015&utm_content=inf_11_43_2&tse_id=INF_bc45e121761d4d8897481dc086734202

[pim]

Not so sure that scientists make good historians, slarti. It's probably as dubious a concept as that historians make good scientists. It's when people of particular specialities become historians and they bring their particular expertise to their examination of history that they become interesting. Gordon Rattray Taylor was one of those polymaths who had expertise in lots of areas: evolutionary biology and Freudian psychology to name just two. He turned to journalism and became interested in historical questions as they related to his fields of expertise. He wasn't a "modern" writer, more post WW2 than the present day. I remember as an undergraduate reading his Sex in History in which he examined human attitudes and approaches to sex down through the ages. What made it fascinating was the lucid way he brought his deep insights into Freudian psychology to bear and dovetailed it with his understanding of history. Religion of course gets a big mention (how could it not!) and Christianity in particular comes off very badly. You'd love the book but I'm not sure that it would "prove" (sigh, that hoary old chestnut) your point. Whatever your "point" is.

Or you could read Colleen McCullough's historical novels set in ancient Rome. I've read them all. McCullough (of The Thorn Birds fame) was a neurologist and she brought her medical expertise to her characters and plot construction. So there's a place for scientists in historical research and if they take their history seriously enough so that they're more than mere dilettantes then they will have a valuable contribution to make. But it doesn't follow that scientists ipso facto make good historians ... or for that matter good theologians!

Personally I prefer economic history. Have you ever read an economic historian's take on the decline and fall of Rome? I don't blame Christianity or for that matter any pagan pantheon for the fall of Rome, but traditional historians like the great Gibbon with his Decline and Fall attributes Rome's decline and fall to a moral degeneracy. In my view that's garbage. An economic historian would put Rome's decline and fall not down to religion or morality but to Romes's economy which was based on mass slavery. Much more than the Greek civilisation that preceded it. The Greeks had slaves but it was Rome that built its empire on the use of the Roman army as its principal instrument of acquiring slaves and also of marketing them. Slavery was the energy policy of the Roman world and the Roman legions were the ancient equivalent of BP, Shell, Caltex ... Under that system the non-slave portion of the empire achieved living standards and a quality of public amenity (they had flush toilets), housing, public health and literacy/numeracy that the world didn't see again until modern times. The city of Rome itself had over a million inhabitants at the height of the empire. The slavery economic model was spectacularly successful while it lasted and delivered high living standards and a great quality of life to the winners, and misery & drudgery to the losers who of course were the slaves. A bit like us today: we can buy clothes very cheaply only because there are sweatshops in Bangladesh where people slave in shocking conditions. There are lots of parallels between us today and Rome if we look at the comparison through the eyes of economic history. Which is why the constant harping on religion and ascribing to it all the ills of the world, is not just wrong but narrow and sterile as a line of analysis.

[pim]

Slarti a brilliant and courageous scientist whom I admire tremendously, Stephen Hawking, made the following unscientific statement in favour of space exploration: “Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.”


Now you might agree with him, and so might Occam. I know that I strongly disagree with Stephen Hawking on that point, and I'd dispute his "humans have an innate need to explore" on the grounds that history doesnt support it and in fact rejects that view as subjective idealistic twaddle. I'm happy to develop that argument but other things in the vast tapestry of my life clamour for my attention.

[pim]

Dec 26, 2015 21:52:33 GMT 10 Gort said:

Was it an innate desire to explore that led Humans out of "the cradle of Africa" to spread far and wide?

Who knows what led the various human - and humanoid - species to migrate out of Africa? We can only speculate. Climate change would be at the top of my list. I doubt it was curiosity. More like the search for the basic necessities of life: food and shelter. Neanderthals existed for something like 250 000 years. Lots of climate changes, changes in habitat and food availability in that time. People move more because of "push" factors than because of "pull" factors.

In my earlier post I mentioned economic history as a way of looking at the decline and fall of Rome. It's true that central to every economy is the energy source it's based on. For us ever since the Industrial revolution it's been fossil fuels. For Rome it was human muscle power. True there was wind and water as well as beasts of burden but more than any other energy source Rome was powered by human muscle. Ships had slaves manning banks of oars with only one square sail. For Rome to reach the heights it achieved in living standards and sophistication, standards that were closer to ours today than those of the middle ages that followed Rome, it needed millions upon millions of slaves to do the grunt work that fossil fuels do today. And slavery was Rome's Achilles heel just as fossil fuels are our modern culture's Achilles heel. So much for economics. There's also the role of climate change and the jury is out on the role of climate change in the collapse of the Roman Empire. I suspect historians are only just starting to scratch the surface on that one. To ascribe exploration as Hawking does merely to "curiosity" is to simplify it and completely to gloss over the complex causes that make people leave home to look elsewhere.

I like and admire Stephen Hawking for his brilliance as a scientist and I'm in awe at the courage of the man in overcoming his profound disability. But as a historian my advice to him would be "Don't quit your day job Steve!"

As for a need to know if we are alone in the dark ... I wouldn't put it that strongly. I desire to know, yes.

Even if "we" do find evidence of other life "out there" ... it practically remains out of reach.

To be honest when I look at the Republicans in the US and people like Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews right here in Australia I wonder if there's intelligent life here on Earth let alone in outer space.

[Occam's Spork]

Dec 26, 2015 17:05:05 GMT 10 Gort said:

Theists, and particularly Christian theists, like to claim that Einstein believed in a personal god.
That claim is incorrect.

As Einstein wrote in a letter dated 24 March 1954:


"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

You are cherry picking.
This does not confirm a firm stance in atheism, either.
As noted in a letter written in 1949.

www.washingtontimes.com/multimedia/image/3_einsteins-lettersjpeg-001f5jpg/

[pim]

You probably would have done the "terrier" thing worrying and worrying and barking at Einstein about whether he really was an agnostic I love his contrast between the "professional" atheist and his own more ambivalent attitude.


I'd never encountered the term "theist" before I encountered it here on NTB when Occam used it some years ago. No disrespect intended Occam! I had to have encountered it somehow and it fell to you to introduce me to it. I still struggle with it though. Personally I'd describe myself as an "agnostic" because I find the notion of a transcendent Deity as mind-boggling a concept as the notio of a godless and therefore absurd universe. Because I can't deny either of them I guess I deny both of them. Which is impossible of course but what I do accept is that there's only one way for a mere human being to approach the conundrum of what sort of universe - one with purpose? Or one that’s absurd and pointless? - and that's with humility. And that’s what the agnostic position has to be.



Back to "theist". There's a world of difference between a "theist" and someone who believes in a personal God. Those believers are of course theists but it doesn't follow that theists all believe in a personal God.

[pim]

We need to get that letter up on the board so we don't have to go back to the link all the time ...

[pim]

Sorry but I can't find your reference to any "lie"

[pim]

If I read Einstein's letter again I find the dividing line between "agnostic" and your "theist" to be very blurred. As indeed the dividing line between "agnostic" and "atheist" would be equally as blurred. It can't be otherwise and it shouldn't be otherwise.

[pim]

This sentence of Einstein's strikes me: If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.


To which I would add a sentence in the closing passages of Darwin's Origin of Species in which he says It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.


Call them both atheists if you like. Or agnostics if you prefer. Quibble over the one term or the other to your heart's content. But what's undeniable is that part of the brilliance of each of them, their genius, is the sense of the numinous that came with their understanding and insights.


Give me an atheist who accepts the numinous and there's an atheist worthy of being taken seriously.


Numinous means arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring. Other related words are tremendous which is from a Latin word "tremens" and gives us "tremble", and fascinating from the Latin "fascinans". There's a latin phrase "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" which more or less covers it. Christopher Hitchens related to it. I've also hear the ABCs Top Pseud and Professional Atheist Phillip Adams expound approvingly on the topic of the "numinous". Clearly Einstein and Darwin were no strangers to it.

[pim]

Mildly humorous in a droll sort of way

[pim]

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" Humanity taking onto itself the role of the universe's consciousness? A cosmos that is self aware? And a bipedal creature from the third rock from an average star in the outer reaches of an unremarkable galaxy is to be the instrument of this consciousness? The hubristic overreach in that grandiose claim is staggering. Even Promethean.

But apart from that, I'm amazed that you could post that so approvingly and call yourself an atheist

[Occam's Spork]

Dec 26, 2015 15:13:53 GMT 10 slartibartfast said:

Religion Has Been The Root Cause Of Conflict For Over 2,000 Years, Says Science

Wait... Says who?
Is that a direct quote, or a supposition?

[pim]

Neither, just an agenda-laden claim from people who claim the mantle of "scientist" in order to make grandiose claims about history. About as spurious and fatuous as the pro-gun lobby in the US claiming the mantle of "oppressed minority" defending democracy in the name of "we, the people".

[slartibartfast]

Thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious, Sir Exy. Seems some needed a reminder in English comprehension.

[pim]

Alas, poor Yorick, you're becoming more and more intemperate with your personal attacks. I regret this because our interactions over the years have been marked by friendly solidarity in the face of really vicious cyber "nasties" in the form of Premier, Jockstrap and others too numerous to mention.

But over the past few weeks your tone towards me has turned and become hostile laced with quite a lot of personal abuse which I find over-the-top and unacceptable. The latest example is your crass reference to dementia. Now, thankfully, I've thus far been spared that dreadful affliction which appears to be becoming the lot of so many of us as we get older. So while I, as I enter the year of my life in which I complete my three score years and ten, am grateful that I do so in full possession of my faculties, I acknowledge that I have no cause to be complacent and also that I have no cause to be uncharitable or disrespectful to people who at my time of life have been diagnosed with dementia.


Think I'm being a bit "precious"? Reckon I should "man up" and take a bit of robust chiacking on the chin? If so then you're being selective. There's no lack of "high moral ground" protests that you've made to members like Stellar.


Yorick I think most people would agree that certain so-called "jokes" are such poor form that they reflect badly on the person who makes them. In fact I'm pretty sure you would agree that jokes about abortion are decidedly "off" to the point that Jody would not only delete them without hesitation, she'd probably suspend the offending poster. Same with jokes about racial and religious minorities. We get them on this board and both you and I object to them when they occur. For her part Jody objects to the term "retard" and I note that both you and I have supported her in that. To his disgrace the board boofhead KTJ regularly pushes the envelope on that one in order deliberately to provoke Jody so he cops a serve from me. Is it OK to make jokes about people with disabilities? Of course it isn't. Which brings us to dementia. Is it OK to joke about that or to use the condition as a personal insult? You figure it out. I do know that as I get older I'm aware that people I've known over decades are becoming diagnosed as they advance in years. It's not a pleasant experience at Christmas when you do the rounds of family and friends to encounter someone you've known for years doesn't have the faintest idea who you are. And that’s just looking at it from a selfish personal viewpoint. What's even more dreadful is the progressive effect on the dementia sufferer. If you've known and loved that person over decades you'd wish that individual a quick and merciful end rather than this inexorable disintegration. It's not funny, Yorick, and I take great exception to your crass attempts to channel it into a smartarse personal attack.


At this point I expect you to attempt to divert it into some straw man "defence" of Slarti which would only be disrespectful of Slarti who has never, and I repeat never, whether by PM or publicly on the board, raised with me any of the concerns you claim he has. And he and I go back far enough that I know that if he did have a concern he'd raise it with me. So don't bother going there. Just pull your head in.

[pim]

So you're setting yourself up as board diagnostician with the right to pronounce on whether or not I have dementia? The offensive hubris is staggering. Yorick I suggest you heed the standard advice given to people who are digging themselves into an ever deeper hole.

[KTJ]

[Occam's Spork]

Back to the topic:

I presumed, being the subject in the title of this thread, that I was being called upon to defend an earlier posting.

Ergo, it's my right to question Slarti 's presupposition. I redirect you to my aforementioned query:

Where did he draw the presumption that religion was the sole cause of the world's problems? Is there a basis for this claim or is he just playing 'science says'? Sadly, I'd hate to be the first to inform him that a few letters at the end of one's name doesn't make them an expert on all things, neither does it make them infallible

Pim is right in saying scientists make poor historians.

I'm intrigued to hear whether slarti put any actual thought into this conclusion or did he defer to: "if the internet says it, it must be true! "

Let's start with that.

[Occam's Spork]

The point that pim was making
was certain experts are Ill equipped to make claims outside of their field.

Not that a scientist couldn't also be a historian.

[pim]

I just took the statement that Religion Has Been The Root Cause Of Conflict For Over 2,000 Years, Says Science as a stand alone statement. Personally as someone who has studied a lot of history, who has taught history and who reads history recreationally I find it a fatuous statement to make, and whoever "Science" is should stay in his lab and not quit his day job.

Was the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 all about religion? To say that the Thirty Years War was Europe's last great religious conflict that involved the whole continent is correct up to a point in that the slaughter did involve Catholics and Protestants from an area encompassing the modern day Czech Republic to France to the Low Countries right up to Sweden and Poland slaughtering each other with Germany as the battlefield, but given the fundamental changes that were the outcome of the Thirty Years War such as the emergence of the nation state instead of kingdoms and principalities and duchies, the notion of internationally agreed borders and the evolution of Christendom into Europe as a collection of nation states which lasted for the next 300 years until the Iron Curtain changed everything in 1945, would it be correct to say that without religion the Thirty Years War wouldn't have happened? It'd make a great history essay question! And on that point I do recall that the most challenging history essay question I encountered at uni was "Prince Henry the Navigator was a medieval man, not a modern" Discuss. Lots of conflict in what Prince Henry unleashed but where's religion in that question? How would "Science" go with a 2000 word essay on a topic like that? I'm very happy to leave science to "Science", but I'd advise him to stick with his day job.

[pim]

Did I read the OP? To be honest I can't remember. It's kinda got lost in the usual sledging.