Great article. I made the same unsettling realization a couple years ago. It hit me when I was pondering why the two other ages of reason: the Italian renaissance and greek antiquity only lasted a short period. It seems reason is not a good reason (heh) for self replication compared to religion. The superior demographic powers of the unreasonables always makes them take over eventually.
Once in a while, the stars align and the atheistic/scientific population gets some prominence but it never lasts.
The debate is futile however as even though the texts may be useful in providing inspiration for a Galileo or two to advance science, it doesn’t seem to be enough to counter demographics.
Greek Antiquity had a very different form of religious practice than the Levantine Monomyths. The religions were centered around personal revelation, like the Abrahamic faiths, but the revelations did not come from an omniscient personal God. They came instead from an inner world that was supposed to be a reflection of the perfect world of the Gods (and this was in strange irony to their mythology that showed these very same Gods to be tremendously imperfect). Their religions also tended to be very absent of dogma, since they had no codified rituals or rites that led to personal revelation. They did have codified rites for things that lay outside of the personal relationship of the people with the god, and had to do with the relationship of the Gods with nature instead.
Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology and The Masks of God, Vol 3: Occidental Mythology talk about these differences in great detail.
It was this absence of dogma & Rites pertaining to a personal relationship with the Gods that allowed the Greeks to be more open minded about the exploration of the world than the Christians who saw the balance of the world hung upon their personal relationship with God as portrayed through the rite and dogma of the Church. Upset that Dogma, and one upsets the balance of the Universe…
At least that is what I got out of reading Campbell when I was younger. I should get those books back from a friend I loaned them to and re-read them.
What kind of evidence do we have on what common folks in Ancient Greece believed, as opposed to a tiny number of philosophers? To me ancient god-for-every-occasion polytheism sounds a lot like Medieval saint-for-every-occasion Catholicism.
Again, according to Campbell, the two are very similar, and many of the Saints were chosen to fill specific pagan holidays.
The Ancient Greeks had a very different type of belief than the more modern Christian beliefs, and even tried to make accommodations for the Jewish and Christian Gods (only to be mocked by the Jews and Christians for their efforts to be inclusive). The Ancient Greek Belief was that your Family Spirits and Ancestors did more of the job that we would think of a personal theistic god doing. These spirits watched out for family members and strove against enemy family spirits for political/temporal dominance. The Greek Gods were remote powers of the natural world and were to be avoided at all costs in daily life. The last thing you really wanted was the natural force of lightning or rain to show up in town. So, ceremonies and rituals were made to propitiate these Gods so that they would do their jobs and “Please, Please, leave us alone!”
One would petition only specific Gods whose myths made it clear that they had a vested interest in specific peoples. Athena was one such God, Zeus was another, for the peoples of Crete and Pergemon. However, outside of those specific remits, it was dangerous to play with the gods by calling for their favor or damnation.
Thus, most people in Ancient Greece, believed that such beings existed, but that “Mostly, they leave me alone as long as I make sure to observe their rites.” They were very powerful, but I don’t think that any of the Greek Gods, nor all of them combined, could be said to be omnipotent, omniscient, and certainly not omnipresent (The Greek Gods were personifications, like people who had very a specific locale).
So, yes, they were very much like the Saint-for-every-occasion. Save that they did not have the larger presence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being lording over them and mankind.
At the time, the catholic church had a reign of terror. Going against religion was considered heresy and sometimes punished by death so it’s not a surprise everyone were claiming to be good Christians and doing everything to look like good Christians. However, the Italian renaissance ideals were definitely moving away from Christian dogma and towards a more mechanistic, scientific, humanistic and secular interpretation of the universe.
I find Michaelangelo’s sistine chapel representation of god being in the shape of a human brain a good example of the whole situation. They were trying to convey subtle messages so that the pope wouldn’t notice. Given that Michaelangelo and Leonardo were pioneers on human dissections, IMO it is unlikely a coincidence.
http://www.byui.edu/onlinelearning/courses/hum/202/CreationOfAdamBrain.htm
This time, the atheists have a way to either escape from the brutality of religious oppression, or to overthrow it in a limited fashion.
I think it was Cyril Kornbluth who wrote the Story The Marching Morons where normal society was… a bunch of morons. The society had another side though, anyone who showed the slightest real intelligence was whisked off to live as the real power behind society.
While that was a fictionalization of a fear that the ignorant and stupid would out breed the smarter and better educated (a very real fear in my opinion), it did show something that is rapidly becoming the case. There are a great many technologies that require some pretty sophisticated knowledge to continue functioning. eventually society may get to the point where the intelligentsia may be able to hold the ignorant and stupid members of society (no matter how powerful) for ransom via the technologies controlled by the intelligentsia. It may not be obvious, explicit power, yet it is not something that should be overlooked.
eventually society may get to the point where the intelligentsia may be able to hold
the ignorant and stupid members of society (no matter how powerful) for ransom
via the technologies controlled by the intelligentsia
I do not know one way or the other at this point. From a recent NYT article about the Tea Party Movement, it seems the populace of the USA thinks that this is already the case.
eventually society may get to the point where the intelligentsia may be able to hold the ignorant and stupid members of society (no matter how powerful) for ransom via the technologies controlled by the intelligentsia
I believe the Unabomber Manifesto makes a similar claim. It’s worth reading.
The Unabomber manifesto is an incredibly dense piece of prose. I found it hard to get through, but you are correct. Ted lived in mortal fear of the Intelligentsia being in control because he thought that they were all as psychopathic as he. I would fear a bunch of emotionless robots who hated humanity in charge even if they did run everything in as rational a fashion as possible.
It is likely that the educated and intelligent elite will one day in fact control most of the wealth in the world, and by de facto the actual running of the world under nearly impotent governmental cover. I think that this may well be a side-effect of the Singularity, and if a Friendly AI is indeed developed, it may wind up being very much like The Forbin Project (Except that the AI will not need to threaten us, as it will probably be fantastically capable of just manipulating the masses into the behavior it wishes).
As long as basic freedoms are preserved, I could care less if we were governed by a mindless mob, a group of super-geniuses, or ducks pecking at a light board to play tic-tac-toe to cast legislation.
Great article. I made the same unsettling realization a couple years ago. It hit me when I was pondering why the two other ages of reason: the Italian renaissance and greek antiquity only lasted a short period. It seems reason is not a good reason (heh) for self replication compared to religion. The superior demographic powers of the unreasonables always makes them take over eventually.
Once in a while, the stars align and the atheistic/scientific population gets some prominence but it never lasts.
We see the same debates of reason vs religion in the two other periods. See for example Lucretius’ epic poem De Rerum Natura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
The debate is futile however as even though the texts may be useful in providing inspiration for a Galileo or two to advance science, it doesn’t seem to be enough to counter demographics.
The Italian renaissance was highly religious and all major figures were devout Christians. There was nothing remotely atheistic about it.
I don’t know about how religious Greek antiquity was, but even the non-religious ones were not rational by even the lowest standards.
Greek Antiquity had a very different form of religious practice than the Levantine Monomyths. The religions were centered around personal revelation, like the Abrahamic faiths, but the revelations did not come from an omniscient personal God. They came instead from an inner world that was supposed to be a reflection of the perfect world of the Gods (and this was in strange irony to their mythology that showed these very same Gods to be tremendously imperfect). Their religions also tended to be very absent of dogma, since they had no codified rituals or rites that led to personal revelation. They did have codified rites for things that lay outside of the personal relationship of the people with the god, and had to do with the relationship of the Gods with nature instead.
Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology and The Masks of God, Vol 3: Occidental Mythology talk about these differences in great detail.
It was this absence of dogma & Rites pertaining to a personal relationship with the Gods that allowed the Greeks to be more open minded about the exploration of the world than the Christians who saw the balance of the world hung upon their personal relationship with God as portrayed through the rite and dogma of the Church. Upset that Dogma, and one upsets the balance of the Universe…
At least that is what I got out of reading Campbell when I was younger. I should get those books back from a friend I loaned them to and re-read them.
What kind of evidence do we have on what common folks in Ancient Greece believed, as opposed to a tiny number of philosophers? To me ancient god-for-every-occasion polytheism sounds a lot like Medieval saint-for-every-occasion Catholicism.
Again, according to Campbell, the two are very similar, and many of the Saints were chosen to fill specific pagan holidays.
The Ancient Greeks had a very different type of belief than the more modern Christian beliefs, and even tried to make accommodations for the Jewish and Christian Gods (only to be mocked by the Jews and Christians for their efforts to be inclusive). The Ancient Greek Belief was that your Family Spirits and Ancestors did more of the job that we would think of a personal theistic god doing. These spirits watched out for family members and strove against enemy family spirits for political/temporal dominance. The Greek Gods were remote powers of the natural world and were to be avoided at all costs in daily life. The last thing you really wanted was the natural force of lightning or rain to show up in town. So, ceremonies and rituals were made to propitiate these Gods so that they would do their jobs and “Please, Please, leave us alone!”
One would petition only specific Gods whose myths made it clear that they had a vested interest in specific peoples. Athena was one such God, Zeus was another, for the peoples of Crete and Pergemon. However, outside of those specific remits, it was dangerous to play with the gods by calling for their favor or damnation.
Thus, most people in Ancient Greece, believed that such beings existed, but that “Mostly, they leave me alone as long as I make sure to observe their rites.” They were very powerful, but I don’t think that any of the Greek Gods, nor all of them combined, could be said to be omnipotent, omniscient, and certainly not omnipresent (The Greek Gods were personifications, like people who had very a specific locale).
So, yes, they were very much like the Saint-for-every-occasion. Save that they did not have the larger presence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being lording over them and mankind.
At the time, the catholic church had a reign of terror. Going against religion was considered heresy and sometimes punished by death so it’s not a surprise everyone were claiming to be good Christians and doing everything to look like good Christians. However, the Italian renaissance ideals were definitely moving away from Christian dogma and towards a more mechanistic, scientific, humanistic and secular interpretation of the universe.
I find Michaelangelo’s sistine chapel representation of god being in the shape of a human brain a good example of the whole situation. They were trying to convey subtle messages so that the pope wouldn’t notice. Given that Michaelangelo and Leonardo were pioneers on human dissections, IMO it is unlikely a coincidence. http://www.byui.edu/onlinelearning/courses/hum/202/CreationOfAdamBrain.htm
This time, the atheists have a way to either escape from the brutality of religious oppression, or to overthrow it in a limited fashion.
I think it was Cyril Kornbluth who wrote the Story The Marching Morons where normal society was… a bunch of morons. The society had another side though, anyone who showed the slightest real intelligence was whisked off to live as the real power behind society.
While that was a fictionalization of a fear that the ignorant and stupid would out breed the smarter and better educated (a very real fear in my opinion), it did show something that is rapidly becoming the case. There are a great many technologies that require some pretty sophisticated knowledge to continue functioning. eventually society may get to the point where the intelligentsia may be able to hold the ignorant and stupid members of society (no matter how powerful) for ransom via the technologies controlled by the intelligentsia. It may not be obvious, explicit power, yet it is not something that should be overlooked.
Are you in favor of this development or opposed?
I do not know one way or the other at this point. From a recent NYT article about the Tea Party Movement, it seems the populace of the USA thinks that this is already the case.
I believe the Unabomber Manifesto makes a similar claim. It’s worth reading.
The Unabomber manifesto is an incredibly dense piece of prose. I found it hard to get through, but you are correct. Ted lived in mortal fear of the Intelligentsia being in control because he thought that they were all as psychopathic as he. I would fear a bunch of emotionless robots who hated humanity in charge even if they did run everything in as rational a fashion as possible.
It is likely that the educated and intelligent elite will one day in fact control most of the wealth in the world, and by de facto the actual running of the world under nearly impotent governmental cover. I think that this may well be a side-effect of the Singularity, and if a Friendly AI is indeed developed, it may wind up being very much like The Forbin Project (Except that the AI will not need to threaten us, as it will probably be fantastically capable of just manipulating the masses into the behavior it wishes).
As long as basic freedoms are preserved, I could care less if we were governed by a mindless mob, a group of super-geniuses, or ducks pecking at a light board to play tic-tac-toe to cast legislation.