K
Kris Krieger
Guest
bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote in
news:1f529cd9-ae3f-4029-bed5-959a0b92f86e@s9g2000prg.googlegroups.com:
I said that the only examples I'd heard of, regarding cultuers whose
social-religuious views were more relaxed re: casual sex than Catholicisn,
were A FEW isolated islands with Polynesian cultures.
A FEW. Good grief!!
duped, but Meade is not the one and only end-all-and-be-all source.
referenced as to topic, so I can't offer any such list and won't bother
even trying.
But that still does not make it valid for your to shove words into my
mouth. "A few" is generally considered (or at elast, used to be) to be
"more than two and less than a dozen".
SO unless you can provide me with spefic references showing that ZERO
island cultures had less-rigorous strictures than has the Catholic church,
your attack remains specious.
"There are only a few cases I know of where X is true" It's patently
obvious that this statement is completely different from saying that "I can
state as an absolute fact that, in all cases X is true".
(2) you still have not made an adequate case that not even "a few" above-
referenced societies had exactly the same strictness of rules against
casual sex as does Catholicism (similarly to some, and IIRC many, other
Eurasian religions), and therefore have not negated my recollection
regarding that.
cannot claim that with any confidence. What's the argument with someone
saying "I haven't researched it so I can't claim to know it to be a fact"?
the proverbial dead horse of religion placing itself outside fo rationsl
analysis, because that wasn't realted to the process I was, to the best of
my understanding, trying to elucidate.
observations can become rules and how those rules can become incorporated
into religion, with the additional detail that observations can't always
discern true cause and effect and therefore can lead to faulty assumptions
that give rise to irrational rules.
describing the original process. It's a new chapter so to speak. A
different point.
basis of what I've read and heard re: the development of Human
spirituality. I was starting from ideas concerning the earliest
development os Human spirituality among isolated small bands of hunter-
gatherers, and how that ie likely to have evolved into various religions.
I don't think that such bands would have sat up one dayus and said "Hey!
If we had religion, we could convince Zopglog's band to join us!" Given
that these things evolve, I also can't think that the desire for conquest
drove the ceration of religion. It's more likely that the absolutism of
every religion's belief in its own supremacy has, at various times in
history, combined with desires for territory and resources, and *that8 led
to aggression. It di deventually happen that people realized religion
could be used as a form of "soft conquest" and, if that didn't work, as a
way to convince the poeple (i.e. pool of potential soldiers) that a war
would be justified by "divine favor" so to speak. Btu I don't see how or
why religion would have spontaneously sprung up as a means or justification
for conquest - other aspects of Human society and psychology had to develop
first.
"weapons". Anyway, you're also stating a hhypothesis which AFAICT is your
own.
wasnt' referring to modern elaborations of those laws, but rather, to
what's commonly taken to be the pre-written-history roots of those laws.
another does not, has no bearing whatsoever upon "time spent in the
'kitchen'". Also, it was women and girls who would be doing food
preparation, with a few large-scale butchering tasks left to men (women
could easily wring the neck of a domestic fowl and pluck it), therefore,
it's not relevant to freeing up men to go to war.
And it's the time women spent preparing food is also not relevant to
whetehr men had free time to go around converting others - *nobody* had
much free time, because maintaining a small far, or even living in a trown
prior to the advnet of machines, was labor-intensive and time-intensive -
that did not magically change just because of cleanliness laws. THe fact
is that thos elaws didn't add all that much to the ingherently-difficult
life led by poeple in the early days of Christianity and prior to the
Rennaissance (and most people had extremely difficult lives for a few
huyndred years after that). There are cultural reasons for the spread fo
Christianity, but merely ditching the cleanliness laws wasn't one of them.
If people wore clothing that was primarily pure wool, they did so because
cotton did not grow in Europe and making linen is far more labor-intensive,
and therefore costly, so it was irrelevant that they didn't wear pure wool
because of Leviticus.
Don't say "you said", when I didn't say.
the hope of salvation, *equally* upon poor people and rich people, and did
not require costly offering at a temple (which the poor could not afford to
make).
I'm not going to apply your pohrase "evolutionary fitness" to this context;
although the word "evolution" can be applied any time one thing develops
from another thing, the phrase "evolutionary fitness" only makes sense to
me when describing biological systems, and is, in this context, inaccurate
and misleading.
and redefine pre-existing rituals and symbols. So...?
your notion.
news:1f529cd9-ae3f-4029-bed5-959a0b92f86e@s9g2000prg.googlegroups.com:
THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID!On Sep 23, 3:46 am, Kris Krieger <m...@dowmuff.in> wrote:
[snip]
And even that opinion probably relies on what Margaret Mead was told
by a bunch of mischievious adolescents.
What "opinion"?
That Polynesian-based island cultures are fairly casual re: sex.'
I said that the only examples I'd heard of, regarding cultuers whose
social-religuious views were more relaxed re: casual sex than Catholicisn,
were A FEW isolated islands with Polynesian cultures.
A FEW. Good grief!!
Again, I said A FEW, I did *NOT* say "all"! Maybe Meade was unfortunatelyPretty much every report except Margaret Mead's said they weren't.
duped, but Meade is not the one and only end-all-and-be-all source.
Again, I don't keep lists of every single thing I read that's cross-Do you think I'm just making everything up out of the
blue?
No. I think you get your information the same way that I do - by
reading books intended for the general audience - and you missed the
tolerably recent revelation that Margaret Mead had been duped by her
informants.
referenced as to topic, so I can't offer any such list and won't bother
even trying.
But that still does not make it valid for your to shove words into my
mouth. "A few" is generally considered (or at elast, used to be) to be
"more than two and less than a dozen".
SO unless you can provide me with spefic references showing that ZERO
island cultures had less-rigorous strictures than has the Catholic church,
your attack remains specious.
(1) I never claimed to be omniscient, nor have I implied to be so. I said,Are you so upset merly becasue I said that, on the surface of it,
a couple of JL's obervations are probably correct, that you're now
accusing me of merely inventing things?
I don't think that the formulation I used implied that you were
inventing anything - at worst I was claiming that you weren't
omniscient, and nobody in their right mind thinks that they are
omnisicient.
"There are only a few cases I know of where X is true" It's patently
obvious that this statement is completely different from saying that "I can
state as an absolute fact that, in all cases X is true".
(2) you still have not made an adequate case that not even "a few" above-
referenced societies had exactly the same strictness of rules against
casual sex as does Catholicism (similarly to some, and IIRC many, other
Eurasian religions), and therefore have not negated my recollection
regarding that.
Maybe that's not what you intentended, but that is not what I perceived.I use hedge words when I don't know all the facts, I specify gaps in my
knoweldge, and I say "IMO" when something is largely just my opinion.
SO
I hope you are not implying that I'm merley making stuff up, merely
because I said that I think one little statement seems to be accurate.
Like I said above. I don't think that what I wrote implied that you
had invented anything.
Perhaps so; I merely said that I haven't looked into it and thereforesnip
So, rather than only stating "the Pope", John should have said "most
leaders of religions which have their roots in Eurasia".
Except that the Pope is pretty much unique in proscibing access to
mechanical precautions for those who can't manage abstinence and
fidelity.
I am not absolutely certain that he is unique in that, therefore, I did
not state such uniqueness. I still am not absolutely certain that he i
s
thusly unique, so I still am not goign to state it. And it wasn't the
point I was trying to make.
No other religious leader has been reported as having gone out of his
way to claim that condoms are a bad thing.
cannot claim that with any confidence. What's the argument with someone
saying "I haven't researched it so I can't claim to know it to be a fact"?
Uh, that's basically what I said, tho' I didn't think it necessary to beatThe error most peopel make today is in assuming that, simply becasue
ancient people had no cell phones or cars, they were stupid. They
weren't, and probably had to be much smarter to survive than do
today'
s
coddled masses. So no, they did not know what 'vibrio cholerae' was,
but they could certainly observe that someone ate oysters ro clams,
an
d
developed a lethal case of the shits - *and* they could observe that
there was no way to tell *which* shellfish were deadly (becuase
tehre is no way to visually discern which are or are nto infected).
So, being smart, they said, "Hell, *I'* not gonna eat that stuff,
and neither is my family!"
Things such as the laws about what can be planted, and when, and
wher, were rooted in observation; laws about not eating meat with
dairy were to pervent waste in an unforgiving environment; laws re:
what to use for weaving cloth could have ben related to observing
what made forstronger cloth versus weaker cloth.
Same goes for sex. Even aside from issues of human jealousy and
questions of who will suport kids (i.e. paternity questions), the
same principles of observation applied to the spread of STDs.
THe problem is that cause-and-effect are not always observable,
leadin
g
to errors in discerning what causes something. So, if someone spat
over
his left shoulder during a hunt, and then narrowly missed getting
gore
d
by a wild boar, he might decide that he escaped harm becaus ehe spit
over his left shoulder. That is part of the cause behind religious
errors.
Many religious rules were
probably evolved as methods to reduce communicable diseases.
That probably needs to be put the other way around; the religions
that had adopted sexuall restrictive rules prospered because fewer
o
f
their followers suffered from sexually transmitted diseases;
evolution dictated which religions were successful rather than the
rules that they adopted.
Sorry, but that's simply not the generally-accepted thesis.
Observation of effect, followed by a "don't do that, it's dangerous"
rule also just makes a lot more sense.
John is right on this one.
He's not. Religious rules don't evolve separately. Each religion
comes with its own packet of rules - some useful and some nuts - and
you can't pick and choose the ones you are going to follow.
Uh, this stuff goes back a couple thousand years before religion as we
know it developed. I'm talking about the development of rules from
observations, and how those rules become incorporated into religion.
The rules may have observed from rational observation. Once they got
incorporated into a religion they ceased to be susceptible to rational
consideration.
the proverbial dead horse of religion placing itself outside fo rationsl
analysis, because that wasn't realted to the process I was, to the best of
my understanding, trying to elucidate.
I know that. Again, tho' I was talking about the process by whichAll religions depend on the authority of a god, or a bunch of gods who
are only accessible via the religious authority. Disagreeing with the
religious authority - for any reason - is heresy, because it threatens
that religious authority.
observations can become rules and how those rules can become incorporated
into religion, with the additional detail that observations can't always
discern true cause and effect and therefore can lead to faulty assumptions
that give rise to irrational rules.
It's different fromt he matter of the original process/history.What happened after the formation of recognizably-modern religion is a
different matter.
Not really.
Perhaps, although my own view is less cynical - but still different fromModern government is just a highly evolved a protection
racket, and modern religion is just a highly evolved confidence trick.
The modern variants are much more than just protection rackets and
confidence tricks respectively, but looking at them from that point of
view makes it much easier to predict how they are going to react in
any given situation, because it concenrates one's mind on the basis of
the relationship between the leders and the lead.
describing the original process. It's a new chapter so to speak. A
different point.
I guess I've read different books and other sources. I disagree on theThe only way a particular packet of rules is going to come to
dominate a society is by demonstating superior evolutionary fitness;
the group that follows the best set of rules becomes more numerous,
richer and more powerful than the groups that have been stuck with
less satisfactory sets of rules by their founders
"Evolutionary fitness"? observation-based health laws weren't a byprod
uct
of religion, but the other way around.
That constitutes a hypothesis about the basis of religion - that it
was developed to justify the imposition of a set of health laws. My
alternative hypothesis is that religion was developed as a means of
acquiring political influence by non-military means, and the health-
related religious rules were instituted primarily to provide to
provide a forum where the religious leader could exercise that
political influence without upsetting the military -based power
structure.
basis of what I've read and heard re: the development of Human
spirituality. I was starting from ideas concerning the earliest
development os Human spirituality among isolated small bands of hunter-
gatherers, and how that ie likely to have evolved into various religions.
I don't think that such bands would have sat up one dayus and said "Hey!
If we had religion, we could convince Zopglog's band to join us!" Given
that these things evolve, I also can't think that the desire for conquest
drove the ceration of religion. It's more likely that the absolutism of
every religion's belief in its own supremacy has, at various times in
history, combined with desires for territory and resources, and *that8 led
to aggression. It di deventually happen that people realized religion
could be used as a form of "soft conquest" and, if that didn't work, as a
way to convince the poeple (i.e. pool of potential soldiers) that a war
would be justified by "divine favor" so to speak. Btu I don't see how or
why religion would have spontaneously sprung up as a means or justification
for conquest - other aspects of Human society and psychology had to develop
first.
That's not a good analogy. "Tactics" would have been better thanIt's not the case that someone invents a belief system, and then looks
aro
und for events that fit into it - as humans developed mentally, they
developed spiritual ideas that eventually developed into religions
(meaning, rules regarding rituals and behaviors and integrated into a
standardized definition of the non-physical world/universe). It's
similar to how something someone did might become a story, that's
embellished with each retelling until it becomes Mythology.
Thats a hypothesis about the belief systems that were available to
provide the basis to build the poltical structures that we label as
religions. Organised religions don't grow out of their belief
structures, any more than armies grow out of their weapons systems -
"weapons". Anyway, you're also stating a hhypothesis which AFAICT is your
own.
When they weer being developed, there were no such things as kitchens. Iorganised religions exploit the belief structures available to justify
their poltical influence.
The power of a religion lies in how many followers it can gain. Some of
that numberical increase is due to birth rates, but even a brief glance
a t
Christianity shows birth rate was insignificant compared with
conversions and, later on, conquest. Given that Christians dispensed
with most Jewish
cleanliness laws, if a religion's spread was related to "evolutionary
fitness", Judaism ought to be far more dominant than Christianity.
The Jewish cleanliness laws represent a serious over-kill - keeping a
completely kosher kitchen takes a lot of work,
wasnt' referring to modern elaborations of those laws, but rather, to
what's commonly taken to be the pre-written-history roots of those laws.
That doesn't even make sense - just because one family eats shellfish andand the effort doesn't
pay off with a proportionate increase in health.
Christian groups
spent less time in the kitchen so they had had more time available to
spend on converting their neighbours within their society (when they
were still a minority) and more time available to support the armies
that went out and conquered other societies once they had taken over
their own societies.
another does not, has no bearing whatsoever upon "time spent in the
'kitchen'". Also, it was women and girls who would be doing food
preparation, with a few large-scale butchering tasks left to men (women
could easily wring the neck of a domestic fowl and pluck it), therefore,
it's not relevant to freeing up men to go to war.
And it's the time women spent preparing food is also not relevant to
whetehr men had free time to go around converting others - *nobody* had
much free time, because maintaining a small far, or even living in a trown
prior to the advnet of machines, was labor-intensive and time-intensive -
that did not magically change just because of cleanliness laws. THe fact
is that thos elaws didn't add all that much to the ingherently-difficult
life led by poeple in the early days of Christianity and prior to the
Rennaissance (and most people had extremely difficult lives for a few
huyndred years after that). There are cultural reasons for the spread fo
Christianity, but merely ditching the cleanliness laws wasn't one of them.
If people wore clothing that was primarily pure wool, they did so because
cotton did not grow in Europe and making linen is far more labor-intensive,
and therefore costly, so it was irrelevant that they didn't wear pure wool
because of Leviticus.
No, CHristianity is an offshoot of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew, remember?It isn't, and history, plus a comparison of the relative degree of
evangelistic tenets in Christianity versus Judaism, explain the reasons
for that. And related to evangalism is the fact that Christianity, far
more than any previous religion, specifically addressed the "average
joes
"
and, more importantly, the poor and the enslaved, and in addition even
to that, also incorporated various rituals and symbols from the poeples
bein
g
converted - that's how we got Christmas trees, the Easter Bunny, and
various other symbologies - the early Evangelists were very clever when
t
i
came to putting a Christian interpretation on a people's perexisting
paga
n
symbols and rituals, which lent even more authority to Christianity but
"showing" that it had presaged even those symbols/rituals. Prior to th
at,
spreading a religion was merely a matter of conquest, which inevitably
failed as conquest breeds resentment. Christianity's incorporation of
many existing festivals/symbols sidestepped that resentment, thereby
gaining converts at a tremendous rate.
Christianity was scarcely unique in this respect - the Greek
"mysteries" from the same period were similarly eclectic.
But what you are saying is that Christianity was a mutant form
Don't say "you said", when I didn't say.
No, it appealed to a greater number of poeple becasue it placed value, andof
Judaism which demonstrated superior fitness within Roman society,
the hope of salvation, *equally* upon poor people and rich people, and did
not require costly offering at a temple (which the poor could not afford to
make).
I'm not going to apply your pohrase "evolutionary fitness" to this context;
although the word "evolution" can be applied any time one thing develops
from another thing, the phrase "evolutionary fitness" only makes sense to
me when describing biological systems, and is, in this context, inaccurate
and misleading.
I wrote a whole paragraph as to early Christianity's ability to integratenot
only vis-a-vis Judaism but also versus the Roman state religion, and a
number of other options like Mithraism, though it has been claimed
that Paul incorporated a lot of Mithraic ideas into his version of
Christianity,
and redefine pre-existing rituals and symbols. So...?
I didn't say anything about Constantine, the Romans, or Mithraism.and that Constantine effectively fused Mithraism into
Christianity when he declared "Christianity" to be the state religion
of the Roman Empire.
Huh? I never said it was a factor in Christianity's spread. That one wasWhatever else was going on then, the choice ritualised health rules
wasn't a particularly important factor.
snip
your notion.