Certainly Christianity has had a big influence in Western Civ. If
you read one of those books that give you a capsule of western philosophers,
there is maybe a thousand years, from the collapse of Rome to the early
Renaissance when all the philosophers were men of the cloth. I used to just
skip them with a sneer of contempt. What did they know? They didn’t even know
that there wasn’t a god for Chrissake.
But the church had a firm grip on literacy, and anybody who wanted
to know how to read and write or have any access to books had to be a member of
the church. And even though they talked a lot about god, they were still
tackling issues of the nature of good and evil, truth and untruth, that are big
issues in philosophy.
I wonder about the atheists of the day. Surely there were some,
but I guess it would be dangerous to say so out loud, and certainly nobody was
going to print anything like that.
But what to make of the bible? Some think it is the unerring word
of god, written by men, but under the influence of the holy spirit, but still,
hard for us mortals to figure out what it means. Again if he wanted us to do
something or behave in some way, why didn’t he just tell us in plain
language? Others think the bible is just a miscellany of old books collected
over the centuries, some left out, some left in, almost randomly selected. Of
course I am one of these people, and so I think what difference does it make
what it says? I would no more let it influence my life than I would an Ouija
board of a fortune cookie.
But I agree it is good to know, it is a big part of our history.
People who believed it had a big influence on our history. And it does have a
certainly literary lilt, and there are all those little stories that everybody
knows just because they are in the popular culture, and you can use them as
examples of some kind of point you are trying to make. What is with that thing
where he wanted Abraham to kill his son? Should Abraham have said no? Was god
just playing some practical joke?
I’m not sure that religion is an attempt to try to understand the
universe. Maybe in its early stages when there are a lot of ideas floating
around, but once it gets a firm hold on things, it is just the guys at the top
telling you what to believe and what not to believe. That’s why any kind of
search for knowledge was stifled in Europe for those thousand years I mentioned
earlier, and the muslims had a pretty good run as far as science and philosophy
until their religion became calcified. The hardest guy to teach anything is the
guy who knows everything.
See, it’s like I keep asking why do humans have this urge for
fairness, and you say it’s part of god’s grand design, so what the hell, that’s
the end of the discussion right there. Instead of doing something like studying
other animals who exhibit altruism, and seeing how this increases their chances
of growing to maturity and passing on their genes, and maybe learning something,
you just turn to god and say thanks for that, because we all know he likes to be
thanked, but our knowledge doesn’t get any bigger. I suppose you could ponder
why god gave us fairness, but we already know that we can’t understand him, so
it’ like talking about angels dancing on the head of a pin.
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