Anthropology of religion

[smurfitup]

Fascinating article:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=9708

serves as a great counterpoint to some of the superficial arguments made by dawkins, hitchens, harris etc.

[luckyme]

[ QUOTE ]
Fascinating article:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=9708

serves as a great counterpoint to some of the superficial arguments made by dawkins, hitchens, harris etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. It seemed to support their claims.

luckyme

[Arp220]

Come on, that article is bilge.

To pick but a few examples:

1 - Enlightenment thinkers did not conclude that religion 'must have some other origin' because of some fundamental insight that modern writers have missed. Rather, it was most likely because religion was vastly more ingrained as a meme in society than it is today, and declarations such as the ones Dawkins and Hitchens have made recently would likely lead to. at best, their long imprisonments. For example, only a few decades before, Galileo suffered relentless persecution for daring to contradict a small part of church dogma, much less the fundamental basis of religious thought.

2 - Early on, the article summarily discounts the notion that religion is a 'babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge', but from about the fourth paragraph onwards, states and restates that religion is exactly this, dressed up in a contorted melange of sentences. The article can quote Hegel and Creuzer all it likes, but what else is an emotional need that expresses itself in ritual but a childish excuse not to try and understand causal origins, but to avoid the seeking of such an understanding by lumping the whole field into a 'deep' and 'mysterious' thing call spirituality, or myth, or some other such buzzword that fundamentally is nothing more than the tacit acceptance of ignorance?

3 - From about the fifth paragraph onwards, there seems to be a bizarre conflation of a objective study of religion, of the 'need for the sacred', with the idea that that need represents a need for something that is somehow different from that outlined by Dawkins and others. Theres the standard rehash of Girards writings, and the claim that the 'sacred' is a human universal. In some twisted sense this may be true, but it carefully avoids what underlies this idea of a 'sacred' - a thing that requires, consciously or otherwise, that we accept dogma, irrationality, faith, that we do not question or try to understand, that we accept that there are things we can never know.

It's hardly a counterpoint to Dawkins. If anything, it reinforces his arguments.

[All-In Flynn]

[ QUOTE ]
For post-Enlightenment thinkers, the monotheistic belief systems were not related to ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. Rather

[/ QUOTE ]

If anyone needs to know what 'sleight of hand' is in the context of discourse, this is a textbook example. Logic doesn't really have a 'predecessor', and even if definitions of predecession are contorted to produce one, magic ain't it. And 'superstition' (still going strong to this day as a quick survey of the average poker table will confirm) as the 'predecessor' of science is ultimately no less of a stretch. And this BS 'point' is established to divorce modern monotheism from its (historically documented) polytheistic roots - all observable data to the contrary.

[ QUOTE ]
The Genesis story... reveals itself as a study of the human condition..."

[/ QUOTE ]

So what 'truths about man and woman' are conveyed by the account of Eve's creation from Adam's rib? That this was clearly designed to 'explain' why women (appeared to) have an extra rib (they don't) flies in the face of 'allegorical apologists' to coin a phrase. That kind of thinking is easy, and may perhaps make the thinker feel as though they are closer to 'understanding' religion, but it's not of any inherent value. Suppose we take the neocortex, my personal candidate for 'what really separates us from the animals'. Its presence might account for the larger head-to-body size ratio in humans as opposed to apes, and so may ultimately be responsible for the discomfort women experience in childbirth... and look at Genesis! They ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (they grew a neocortex), they covered their nakedness (they became 'civilised') they were cast out of Eden (they left the no doubt blissful ignorance animals enjoy) and God even says 'Henceforth shall you feel pain in labour' (not an exact quote). So in fact, Genesis might be a kind of encoded account of human evolution!!!!!! Or, you know, not.

Where this kind of thinking (the Bible is allegory, pure allegory and nothing BUT allegory, written as such to be read as such) falls down is that there's not really any point in encoding that type of information. If the authors of the Bible wanted to say something they said it, and sometimes they used allegory to get their ideas across. But they were attempoting to make real truth-claims about the real world (as they saw it)... trying to give religious feeling some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card as 'allegory' brings more problems for religious apologists than it solves... how 'allegorical' are the lengthy chains of ancestry recounted in the Bible? Trying to exempt the core texts of any given religion from their their truth as seen by their authors is a Sisyphean endeavour.

/rant... I apologise if I've drifted OT...