b3ta.com board
You are not logged in. Login or Signup
Home » Messageboard » XXX » Message 10771134 (Thread)

# Just talking off the top of my head, so feel free to throw that bit away.
I suppose it didn't really make people aware of those dangers but tried to explain them probably for some control reasons. 'The mountain thunders with fire, give me gold to appease the Gods!' that type of thing.

My main point was that religion as been a part of society since early communities, I kind of get there is a round about sort of way.
(, Fri 18 May 2012, 11:56, archived)
# There's a good analogy by Douglas Adams where he talks about throwing out the baby with the bathwater
There were some islands (I forget the name) where they had planted their crops according to the regligious calendar for centuries, then westerners came and laughed at such superstition. They supplied the islanders with new seeds and fertilisers and promised that they would have four or five times the yield if they switched to western methods. And for a couple of years they did have massively high yields, but then they dropped, because the fields were overworked. Eventually they went back to the old "religious" methods because they worked.

Essentially, religions were a good way of codifying things that people needed to know to survive, but they were also a good way of codifying a whole load of bullshit. The trick is to extract the good bits and abandon the rest.
(, Fri 18 May 2012, 12:08, archived)
# I can agree with that. I'm not anti-religion per se just the dogmatism aspect of it.
whether you could actually separate the two is another issue.
(, Fri 18 May 2012, 12:13, archived)
# If an encyclopedia was wrong 90% of the time, no-one would bother using it.
I think it's quicker to just assume it's all bullshit and start again from scratch. All the stuff about being good to each other is pretty much hard-wired in anyway and I'm not going to be planting any crops in the holy land any time soon
(, Fri 18 May 2012, 13:03, archived)