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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 07 Nov 2019

Taken: 05 Nov 2019

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Religion explained

Religion explained
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Religion as we knows it probably appeared with the modern mind. It is convenient to date the appearance of modern-type cultures at the symbolic “explosion” that occurred some time between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, with an abrupt change in the number and quality of artifacts produced by the modern humans, with a great variety of new objects some of which had no practical utility, the use of ochre, the first cave paintings, elaborate burial practices, etc. an important difference between these and earlier cultural manifestations is found in the diversity of objects and representations, which may indicate the emergence of those group-level similarities and between-group differences that we call human cultures

What prompted this outburst of creativity and diversity was certainly a change in mental activity. This is why it is tempting to think of modern hominization as a kind of liberating process by which the mind broke free of evolutionary shackles and became more flexible, more capable of novelty -- in a word, more open. Many scenarios of cultural evolution give pride to place to this kind of cognitive breakthrough, understood as a new capacity for symbolic reference and a newly acquired flexibility in decoupled representation. As psychologist Michael Tomasello argues, perspective-thinking, which produces intuitive inferences on the reasons why other behave the way they do, was crucial to this change. It was for instance indispensable in the domain of technology. Modern human tools and tool usage show incremental, cumulative change; the artifacts created required that cultural learners could figure out other people’s intentions. In many domains of acquired culture it is simply not possible for developing subjects to consider cues provided by cultural elders and to produce relevant inferences about them without representing those elders’ communicative intentions. ~ Page 322/323

Religion Explained
5 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Belief in God -- Religion -- There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travelers, but from men who have lost resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea. The question is of course wholly distinct from the higher one, whether there exists a creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellectuals that have ever existed.

If, however, we include under the term “religion” the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be universal with the less civilized races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have gradually speculated on his own existence. As Mr. M’Lennan has remarked, “Some explanation of the phenomena of life, a man must feign for himself, and to Judge from the universality of it, the simplest hypothesis, and the first to occur to me, seems to have been that natural phenomena are ascribable to the presence in animals, plants, and things, and in the forces of nature, of wuch spirits prompting to action as much as conscious they themselves possess. It is also probably as Mr. Tylor has shown that dreams may have first risen to the notion of spirits, for savages do not readily distinguish between subject and objective impressions. When a savage dreams, the figures which appear before him are believed to have come from a distance, and to stand over him; or “the soul of the dreamer goes out on its travels, and comes home with a remembrance of what it has seen. But until the faculties of imagination, curiosity, reason, etc., had been fairly well developed in the mind of man, his dreams would not have led him to believe in spirits, any moe than in the case of a dog. ~ Page 97/98
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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