Now apply that principle to all of the phenomena that our ancestors were familiar with, but didn’t understand. Then lightning becomes the wrath of the sky gods. A good harvest becomes the blessing of a beneficent deity. A new-born child’s deformity becomes the curse of an evil spirit. And so on. In each case there are only the blind forces of nature at work, but because our brains are wired to see patterns where none exist and intelligent agents where none exist, all of the above are attributed to gods, deities and spirits.
And thus, taking Keith77’s point, though they didn’t know it, our ancestors were ascribing meaning and intention to forces and phenomena of entirely natural origin. Their superstition being a function of the latent pattenicity and agenticity gifted to them by evolution.
Our brains are just as liable to these cognitive faults as theirs were, but we have the advantage of knowing better when they could not.
Yes, probably. Personally, I prefer limiting the comparison to “bronze age mythology”, although I’ve probably used the other one, too. It is easy to get carried away when you’re having fun On a side note, stating the obvious, “bronze age goat herders” would not be the ones to write the bible, as they would be illiterate. They just followed the mythology transmitted by their parents and society. The authors were literate men, probably jotting down stories that had been transmitted over a game of telephones[1] over an unknown number of centuries.
But in the end, it is all about context. It boils down to the willingness to follow with the times and update your knowledge database as new data come in. In the bronze age, believing bronze age myths and bronze age deities and following contemporary rules and morals would be expected, normal, and advised. However, if — three or four millennias later — people still follow these bronze-age codes and knowledge databases, and (and this is crucial) have not updated them significantly as society has evolved and new knowledge and data poured in, it is to be expected that they will be exposed to a certain amount of ridicule. I think that to compare the beliefs and knowledge level of current bronze age mythology followers with the beliefs of unenlightened (relative to what we know today) and illiterate bronze age people can be appropriate in certain contexts. This accentuates the “non-updatedness” of the contemporary bronze age mythology followers. It might not help driving the point home with the enthusiastic bronze-age mythology fanboys, but it sure feels good making the comparison In any case, this is quite different from characterising bronze age society and bronze age people as primitive.
Disregarding the obvious fact that telephones had not been invented yet ↩︎
Oh, gosh. That was a bad one. I guess they were just shooting into the wind with that episode. I liked the episode with Apollo where Kirk tells him that humanity no longer needs gods.
I don’t know why, but I prefer the original to all of the rest. Next Generation was weird. There was quite a few incest jokes in one episode. It was the episode where Picard’s solution for this clone colony was to breed with these back water idiots and that they should take multiple wives or husbands.
Another decent season 3 episode was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” with Frank Gorshin. A bit of a ham-fisted morality play but it did a great job of depicting the stupidity of racism. “But can’t you see?! I’m black on the right side … and he’s black on the LEFT!”
On a side note, stating the obvious, “bronze age goat herders” would not be the ones to write the bible, as they would be illiterate. They just followed the mythology transmitted by their parents and society. The authors were literate men, probably jotting down stories that had been transmitted over a game of telephones
In any case, this is quite different from characterising bronze age society and bronze age people as primitive.