floppit wrote:Your post made me think, more than that it almost persuaded me except that our time now is only a brief snapshot in history. If it was religion itself that stifled development and progress one would expect to see the first civilisations that arose having less religion - or religious memes, but that's not the case. Mayan culture was highly religious - I almost don't need to type the words because alongside the ancient civilisation ruins temples spring to mind as quickly as their geographical context. The Babylonians were highly religious polytheists but that didn't prevent them being (probably) the first to use the concept of zero, if not the number itself.Charlou wrote:Ideological dogmatism, often religious, is a major contributing factor, actively preventing economic and intellectual development and progress for many backward, oppressed, "hopeless" cultures.floppit wrote:again looking at the examples above they have another common denominator - the economic background in which they developed, poverty and for many hopelessness.
This can be exploited by those with greater economic resources and their own agendas, of course, further entrenching the "hopelessness" and creating the circumstances which breed radical extremism.
My contention is not that religion is helpful, or even that it isn't harmful, rather that it is more a product than cause. Religions change over time as does their adherence to a dogmatic versus a flexible approach, recent years have shown that just within the CofE. The existence of religion remains and yet the levels of dogmatism change which would surely indicate other, more potent, factors.
If religion is the cause what explains the changes in religion? Beyond that, if it is religion holding nations back how can we explain highly religious and advanced countries like the US? Causal relationships just look different - what can be observed in our brief snapshot of time seems closer to a correlation.
Religion, as you note, is not an absolute thing, it's evolved as we humans have evolved, and due to its memetic nature and human diversity religion has evolved and continues to evolve along a diversity of branches. It's probably unnecessary to go into the various theories about how and why religious thinking initially evolved as I'll assume most here are aware of those. Religious thinking exists. Religious thinking is faith rather than evidence based, ie assertively absolutist, not scientific. So, even though religion as an evolving phenomenon is not an absolute thing and changes and diversifies along with the various paradigms of the religious, religious thinking is rooted in absolutism, and in turn absolutist thinking is prone to manipulation and abuse, as well as to manipulate and abuse.floppit wrote:If religion is the cause what explains the changes in religion?
As an aside, floppit, have you read The God Delusion? In Chapter 8, WHAT'S WRONG WITH RELIGION? WHY BE SO HOSTILE?, Richard does a very good job of explaining his perspective on this subject. He covers:
Fundamentalism and the subversion of science (pg 282)
The dark side of absolutism (pg 286)
Faith and homosexuality (pg 289)
Faith and the sanctity of human life (pg 291)
The Great Beethoven Fallacy (pg 298)
How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism (pag 301)