Ch. 11: "The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin"
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 6:03 pm
God is Not Great
Ch. 11: "The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin": Religion's Corrupt Beginnings
Ch. 11: "The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin": Religion's Corrupt Beginnings
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wide selection of openly manufactured sausage religions ... cargo cult ... Marjoe .... Mormons ... Hobbes command ... is quite breathtaking ... planted the subversive thought ... forbidding Adam ... absurd and contradictory ....Erewhon ... bound around this myth ...cargo cult ... simulated landing strips ... Tanna ... John Frum ... Marjoe ... told to say that he had been divinely commanded ... mother would hold him under the water tap ... revenge ... explain how all the tricks are pulled ... racket of American evangelism was just that: a heartless con ...film Marjoe won an Academy Award in 1972 ... Mormons ... founded by a gifted opportunist ... convicted ... imposter ... Joseph Smith ... embarrassing to read ... Moroni ... gold plates ... eighteen months after his conviction for fraud ... mainly found in ... popular work byu a pious loony ... pitiful fake ...Dennett ... people can be better off believing in something than in nothing ... was he a huckster all the time ... religion ... cannot possibly get along without great fraud and also minor fraud ... wanderings of the Mormons ... great historical story ... stains ... crudity of its 'revelations' .. racism ... industriously baptising .... murdered Jews of Europe
Hello Lois, welcome to Booktalk. Your question about an evolutionary advantage for believers is a great one. Jehovah served as a unifying conceptual framework for ancient Judaism, a framework supplied for Christianity by the doctrine of the trinity. These memes have been highly adaptive, but where the framework has apparent factual errors it opens the gate for fraud, of the type described by Hitchens in his critique of Marjoe and the cargo cult. Christianity contains strong cargo cult elements, extending from the idea of universal miraculous abundance through the loaves and fishes to the doctrine of salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Christ. As I see it, if faith is to retain any evolutionary advantage it needs to learn from the critique Hitchens is making and make a genuine enquiry into the truth of its claims.Lois wrote:My first reaction to this chapter was that it was sort of too much all over the board for me. I’m still a little lost with the Tinkerbell analogy, but I’ve changed my mind about the chapter as a whole. I’ve learned a lot in reading this book, I didn’t know anything about “Marjoe” and found it very interesting that he later exposed all of the methods of deception that he had been trained to use. These revelations along with the fact that it hasn’t made an iota of difference are astounding. Do you remember when the “faith healer” Peter Popoff was exposed on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show? (http://www.apologeticsindex.org/487-peter-popoff) For all the satisfaction of seeing that happen, it also didn’t make any difference in the long run. Faith healers are still bringing in huge crowds and loads of money. So, the explanation of “belief in belief” makes sense. Sometimes exposing a lie has the opposite effect instead of discrediting the belief, it rallies the troops behind it!
Forgive me if I haven’t gotten to this part of the book yet, but is there an argument in here suggesting that religious belief/fervor may have a sort of evolutionary advantage for the believers? I’ve heard (but haven’t read anything about it myself) that Richard Dawkins has this view of why religion is so ingrained in us.
I don't see an evolutionary advantage for the species here, Robert. If you are referring to the peoples that the Israelites ethnically cleansed, then what evolutionary advantage did religion have for them? Later on, you could say that this supposed advantage of the Isrealites vanished, so this shows that we're not talking about an evolutionary concept at all. This is all an internecine matter of societies conquering one another, having nothing to do with the evolution of our species. Whether, generically, religion gave some edge to our survival in the early times of our species is unknown and disputed.Robert Tulip wrote: Your question about an evolutionary advantage for believers is a great one. Jehovah served as a unifying conceptual framework for ancient Judaism, a framework supplied for Christianity by the doctrine of the trinity..... As I see it, if faith is to retain any evolutionary advantage it needs to learn from the critique Hitchens is making and make a genuine enquiry into the truth of its claims.
The comment was about an advantage for believers, not for the species overall. It could be that a short term evolutionary advantage of religion, manifest in cultural domination by believers, conceals a longer term flaw which is maladaptive. A furry coat is adaptive while the climate is getting colder but a burden when the world is warming, so evolution, whether of fur or beliefs, is constant and dynamic. Monotheism obviously had some strong adaptive traits to enable it to dominate the world, and the question stands as to whether it remains an adaptive meme.DWill wrote:I don't see an evolutionary advantage for the species here, Robert. If you are referring to the peoples that the Israelites ethnically cleansed, then what evolutionary advantage did religion have for them? Later on, you could say that this supposed advantage of the Israelites vanished, so this shows that we're not talking about an evolutionary concept at all. This is all an internecine matter of societies conquering one another, having nothing to do with the evolution of our species. Whether, generically, religion gave some edge to our survival in the early times of our species is unknown and disputed.
Robert, regarding your second paragraph, you do have some good company, such as Stuart Kauffman whom I'm constantly mentioning. But I continue to think in a literal, perhaps unimaginative way, that since ideas and cultural norms don't reproduce sexually, the most that we have here is parallel with a broad base--still potentially very important, but having clear dissimilarities in terms of mechanism and "laws"--between Neo-Darwinism and the processes of change in human societies.Robert Tulip wrote:The comment was about an advantage for believers, not for the species overall. It could be that a short term evolutionary advantage of religion, manifest in cultural domination by believers, conceals a longer term flaw which is maladaptive. A furry coat is adaptive while the climate is getting colder but a burden when the world is warming, so evolution, whether of fur or beliefs, is constant and dynamic. Monotheism obviously had some strong adaptive traits to enable it to dominate the world, and the question stands as to whether it remains an adaptive meme.DWill wrote:I don't see an evolutionary advantage for the species here, Robert. If you are referring to the peoples that the Israelites ethnically cleansed, then what evolutionary advantage did religion have for them? Later on, you could say that this supposed advantage of the Israelites vanished, so this shows that we're not talking about an evolutionary concept at all. This is all an internecine matter of societies conquering one another, having nothing to do with the evolution of our species. Whether, generically, religion gave some edge to our survival in the early times of our species is unknown and disputed.
I know you like to restrict evolution to genetic biology, but I suspect exactly the same evolutionary laws of competitive selection and cumulative adaptation apply in cultural and technological evolution as in genetic evolution. This would be a good question for de Waal too.