Science vs. Religion

[-1-]

The burning has already begun, and we're nowhere near the legislation. If the pleas of aware people are growing loud, it's from fear, not the desire to control others.

Well, yes, yes, it's the burning that started the whole thing. Burning fossils for energy.

Question to ponder: does the burning of Climate-change heretics add to, or subtract from, the overall increase or decrease of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere?

[Serpent]

Question to ponder: does the burning of Climate-change heretics add to, or subtract from, the overall increase or decrease of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere?

Not as much as the forests.

[-1-]

Question to ponder: does the burning of Climate-change heretics add to, or subtract from, the overall increase or decrease of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere?

Not as much as the forests.

We need more heretics.

Or fewer trees.

[hyksos]

The faith in theory is observable by noting, multiple theories that explain the same hypothesis. A recent example, evolution may have begun in/near underwater vents and not in a primordial soup. It’s a numbers crunching game of probability, and one version is mathematically more probable. The fact of the matter is, life started where life started. We choose to believe one version of abiogenisis more or less than the others. Faith.

It is better to say we have multiple hypothesese about abiogenesis, and zero theories. It is dangerous to mix up these words' meanings.

People being human, you will see enormous amount of emotional and personal involvement in a hypothesis. But the emotional intensity of a belief has no bearing on the veracity of a hypothesis. Only when a hypothesis is born out by experiment does it get upgraded to a theory.

Roger Penrose, believes that our universe had previous iterations. He explains our universe will freeze over. Inevitably all mass is soaked up by black holes, and they in turn, fizzle out by Hawking evaporation. They explode. Photons keep pushing the boundaries of the universe, stretching it in relatave size and initiate the next Big Bang. This is due to the photons being so far from the remaining mass at the center. Relative to this new size of the universe, all mass appears to be the size of a fist. Boom, a new Big Bang occurs, until the next one.

Penrose is not engaging in an exercise in faith. He is doing something very different. He is starting from the evidence measured and reasoning from that starting point to make estimations about what is not seen. At no point is Penrose demanding his reader just believe in things not seen "because I said so". There is scientific justification behind each estimation into the unseen.

We choose to believe one version over the other. Conventional Big Bang vs Roger penrose vs multiple other versions. Faith. Usually faith in peer reviewed content(apologies to Roger for butchering his model).

If a single sentence in a publication requires the reader to use faith, it would never make it through peer review. The abstract has to say "We will show that X." Then the paper reproduces the data and measurements that show the conclusion X from the abstract.

There was a recent furor in the news involving a "Reactionless Drive" that was getting lots of press because a former employee of NASA was working on it. The publication that this guy wrote said that the mysterious missing momentum was created by (and I quote) "quantum particles pushing off the quantum vacuum" (end quote). What bothered me about this was not the physics, per se, but the fact that he made a statement like that in a paper and did not even place a citation next to it! Like there wasn't even a little tiny number ² floating nearby. There are rules to this and you cannot just make statements as wild and far-out as that one was without even backing it up with outside citations. (I would have preferred the author just be honest and say "The additional momentum has an unknown origin." Leave it there. That could easily pass peer review.)

I believe that religion is built on an intuition associated with the 4th dimension. Christianity talks about bodiless angels and demons. ie 4th dimensional beings. Spirituality in general talks about tapping into the unobservable. In everything, everywhere.

edy420, I added orange emphasis to your post.

You don't mean "religion" there. At the best you meant to say religious ideas. Since organized religions are so diverse, what you a really doing here is presenting religious ideas to an internet forum. I would even go as far as to say that what you are posting here are merely religious ideas you were personally having in recent weeks.

It is wrong and socially dangerous to equivocate religion with "sitting around contemplating these ideas I was having" -- brainstorming some ideas about 4th-dimensional beings in a safe speculative environment. That really is not religion.

I understand we are not writing books here on this forum, and some of us may have busy lives, so we use shorthand words to substitute for something more elaborate. But in this case with the word "religion" I can't let this slip by. It's too dangerous to suggest that religion is going into Church on Sunday to ruminate about the possibility of 4th-dimensional beings.

For example

A religious mother finds out her daughter of age 19 has had an abortion. She kicks her daughter out of the house for having one. Her mother is throwing her belongings into the snow and screaming that she is a "bloody murderer". She did not take her daughter out to the back porch with some warm spiced tea to ruminate about the possible existence of 4th dimensional beings. "and maybe they might exist and maybe they don't but we can't rule out and blah blah blah." Ruminating is ruminating. No. That's not what she did. She called her a murderer and tossed her clothes onto the front lawn <-- that is religion.

Religion is : I am going to pull my kid out of public school, because public school will expose my child to demonic influence. And then they literally do it. This is called "home schooling". It is a real thing.

Religion is : I will not take my sick child to a hospital. Instead we will gather around and pray over him. This will excise the demons that are making him ill. This happens even in the 21st century.

So yeah. That is why I had to cut you off on using the word religion sloppily.

[doogles]

Hyksos, I liked your clarifications of 'hypothesis' and 'theory', and of 'religion' and 'religious ideas'. I'd never really thought about them before, and actually tended to use the terms interchangeably. I can see the error of my past ways.

Your use of concrete examples was very useful to my way of thinking. It left no doubt as to what you had in mind. I wish other posters would use concrete, real-life examples as explanatory amplifications of what they are attempting to communicate.

[Serpent]

Just a tiny problem with Hyskos' depiction of religion. Religion, for both good and ill, is rather more than personal intolerance and rancor, just as religious ideas are both brighter and darker, and certainly more complex, than ruminating on the 4th dimension. (Actually, I hadn't known about that one.)

For the purposes of the current topic: religious ideas and scientific ideas are not in conflict; they're simply incompatible and must be compartmentalized to co-exist. The only conflict is between religious and secular organizations.

[doogles]

This is not strictly a post about Science vs Religion. It is working hypothesis about why spiritualism could be so widespread amongst nations even though many of them were isolated from one another. I will use a simple concrete example to explain my hypothesis.

Imagine you are born a member of a humanoid tribe in the course of our evolution. You will reach a stage of awareness of all of the other members of your tribe and of course form closer alliances with some members. Suddenly, somebody you have known quite well drops dead of a heart attack. You look at the body and see nothing wrong with it; it still looks like the humanoid you've known for years. But the 'life spirit', or 'essence of liveliness' has gone out of it. Whatever it is that has animated that body has suddenly disappeared.

It would be quite logical to conclude from your own observations that we consist of a physical body and a 'life essence' (or whatever you like to call it).

Hence spiritualism. Without the knowledge of ATP etc, it would be illogical to think otherwise.

Then the question you ask yourself logically is "Where did that spirit go? The variation in hypotheses at this stage is dependent on your imagination. A heaven or paradise as another dimension is a useful one. A theory of spirits floating about in limbo is another. A possibility of these spirits floating about until they find a new-born body to inhabit is an extension of that one. But your tendency as you grow up will be to adopt the hypothesis that your predecessors in your tribe have adopted.

The possibility of superior beings in this spiritual world and of single or multiple alpha leaders of course is not beyond our imaginations, especially if we ever asked ourselves where our species came from or how we came to exist. The variation in hypotheses of course explains the variation in established religious ideas.

Without modern knowledge, the hypothesis that we consist of a body and a sort of animating spirit essence seems to be quite logical to my mind.

Maybe this post is on track. It suggests that religious ideas used to be the logical hypothesis to virtually all of our ancestors but that a body of scientific knowledge is gradually becoming the new logic.

[Serpent]

Imagine you are born a member of a humanoid tribe in the course of our evolution. You will reach a stage of awareness of all of the other members of your tribe and of course form closer alliances with some members. Suddenly, somebody you have known quite well drops dead of a heart attack. You look at the body and see nothing wrong with it; it still looks like the humanoid you've known for years. But the 'life spirit', or 'essence of liveliness' has gone out of it.

By the age when you could articulate the change, you will have seen all kinds of death: of infant siblings, of grandparents, and very many prey and domestic animals. Early peoples did not 'protect' their young children from the realities of how life is made, begins, falters and ends. You would take death entirely for granted. (Heart attacks hadn't been invented yet: crocodile, childbirth, rockslide...)

It would be quite logical to conclude from your own observations that we consist of a physical body and a 'life essence' (or whatever you like to call it).

The spirit idea doesn't come from death or absence, it comes from the aliveness of nature. These people were immersed, in their environment, which was teeming with life and keening with death every minute of every day. Things - not just animals that they could readily identify as being like themselves, but water and clouds, stars and plants, even fire and air - move and change and produce sound, as if by volition, as if they had minds of their own.

Without the knowledge of ATP etc, it would be illogical to think otherwise.

Logic doesn't come into it. Life and its ending wouldn't be perceived as a problem in need of a solution. I mean, early humans were not dropped from a spaceship into an alien environment: they didn't suddenly need a brand new attitude to what had been ordinary life for millions of years.

But they did make up stories.
When someone important to us dies, we don't just miss them, we often feel their presence for a long time - we speak to them and dream about them. I should think those early people, who lived so much more intimately together than we moderns, would feel that even more intensely. So they put their lost parents and babies and brothers and wives into the stories.

Then the question you ask yourself logically is "Where did that spirit go?

If you're a primitive, it hasn't gone far. It's in the cairn you built over their grave, where you bring an offering when you need advice, or in the cave where you draw pictures, or it's taken up residence in the sacred grove. The spirits of the ancestors do not desert their tribe.

All those paradise ideas come with civilization.
There is a conspicuous break between the primitive and the pastoral conception of death and hierarchy, and another one between the pastoral and the city-state.

[doogles]

Your imagination and hypotheses are totally different from mine Serpent but you appear to speak with much authority and conviction on the matter.

Do you have a reference for "The spirit idea doesn't come from death or absence, it comes from the aliveness of nature." I must confess to being totally ignorant of that 'fact'.

[Serpent]

Your imagination and hypotheses are totally different from mine Serpent but you appear to speak with much authority and conviction on the matter.

Do you have a reference for "The spirit idea doesn't come from death or absence, it comes from the aliveness of nature." I must confess to being totally ignorant of that 'fact'.

Conviction,yes; the subject has interested me for a long time. Authority, no, not in the academic sense. I just don't see any point in waffling.
I don't have a reliable internet reference to hand. I have some books on mythology from various cultures and ages. That particular reference is to animism, very well illustrated in the folk-tales of native North Americans. African legends have a remarkably similar flavour. They are both in sharp contrast to the mythology of ancient Egypt and Persia. For a transition from primitive to pastoral, Norse and Celtic myths are a good reference, and from pastoral to city-state, you need go no farther than the contrast between Greek mythology and its dramatization by Homer and Sophocles. The Judeo-Christian tradition is interesting (You can readily follow the evolution of a belief-system through Genesis) but hard for us to read objectively.

[-1-]

Where the spirit idea comes from is beautifully and quite comprehensibly written down in a book the title and author(s) of which I never noted.

The book talks about the formation of early religions or spirituality. It turns out that people in primitive environments don't have a separation of spirit from body at death. If a person in the household dies, they still have him at the communal meals, he or she has his or her place still at the family "dinner table" if you wish. People talk to him as if they expect an immediate and live answer. These people disintegrate, of course, right in front of their eyes, so they usually bury the body and keep only the head and then the skull around the house. And that's why some South Pacific primitive cultures perfected the art of head-shrinking (not psychiatry) to a high degree.

This is the beginning of the formation of human spirituality of those people who have to start spirituality from scratch. That's why the South Pacific islands are excellent study grounds for this, because people somehow are in the circumstances of starting brand new civilizations -- they leave (on occasion, and I don't know the details "how") their original islands and start with a clean slate of spirituality.

So these what I wrote earlier, are facts, or apporximations of facts, not speculation, according to my feeble memory of the beginning pages of a book I read in a library 15 years ago.

[Serpent]

My mother's ashes are in the window of what was her favourite room. And, yes, we still speak to her once in a while - not in any expectation of an answer, but from fond remembrance.
We haven't changed all that much; we've just been on a terrible, possibly fatal side-track. The Big Omni, pie in the sky when you die concept was a product of the imperial mind-set. Oddly, it's science that is at last rediscovering the interconnectedness and commonality of life. That's why militarized religion is lashing back so very hard right now.

[-1-]

I remember from that library book I mentioned, and adding my own two-cents' worth, an idea that authority and permanence, as well as domain of influence, increase between stages of going form primitive to pastoral, and from pastoral to city-state.

In the primitive, each household has a member to look out for them. That member may become eventually lost to memory in detail, like by great-grand-children, but his or her identity as a protector remains.

Many protectors exist in primitive cultures, and they are not in contention with each other. The protectors look after their own protegees, usually descendants, and that's that.

In pastoral societies, the protectors had other protectors under them, as the family grew and written documents testified to it, so eventually some protectors gained dominance over a large area of land or over a large amount of people, probably what we'd call nations. "Nation" by the way, more apparently in European languages than how it is apparent in English, come from the root "natality" or "birth". A nation in European languages designate people of a common birth. So it is not surprizing that in pastoral societies, where a nation became conscious of different nations around them, would attribute their unique existence as per customs, language, culture and spiritual protectors, to a common origin.

Protectors therefore became gods, with sous-gods under them who obeyed their commands, albeit not always willingly, and sometimes disobedience occurred by the sous-gods. Rebellions among gods had been known to be believed. (Zeus vs. Chronos, for instance.)

Pastoral societies' gods even head gods allowed the belief of head gods of other pastoral societies. This had been the original policy on spiritualism in the Roman Empire.

From the pastoral to the city state, the head honcho became ultimate, with ultimate, undeniable power the edicts of which were followed without exception, unless the Devil (an evil entity) had a hand in it.

Sous-gods became angels; later, humans became sous-gods, too, by becoming Saints.

-----------

So we see a clear progression of alleged spirits' alleged power from protecting / advising households, to protecting / commanding nations, to presiding over and dominating all creation, which was done of course by the creator of the creation.

[-1-]

Serpent, I must point out to all, although I am just as much an atheist as you are, that showing religions "here's looking at you kid", and showing their fallacies or weak points even in their historical development, does not constitute, unfortunately for me, a definitive argument against religions. Or even a somewhat effective one.

If I show this to my religious friends, they can shrug and say, "So what? my God is great, and I follow His words, instead of believing He does not exist." This by them is not an argument, but a declaration that nullifies all logical and / or illogical arguments against faithism.

[Serpent]

So what?
I'm talking about them, as I do about whatever interests me, not at them or to them, and certainly not in anticipation of a response from them.

[Fuqin]

There was an Australian existential movie called (bad boy bubby)
In it a boy grew up in a room protected from the world. his mum told him there was no air outside the house ,his prison mearly a sub cultural construct. eventually a small cat had come from the outside ???????? questions arise!!! One day he finds the cat dead , he says, " cat be still!" He then wraps it in glade wrap and makes his journey of the loss of innocents to the outside world .

[Fuqin]

When religion can repudiate '''belife''' it will have only knowledge left to deal with , (scientia)

[BadgerJelly]

Hyksos -

For example

A religious mother finds out her daughter of age 19 has had an abortion. She kicks her daughter out of the house for having one. Her mother is throwing her belongings into the snow and screaming that she is a "bloody murderer". She did not take her daughter out to the back porch with some warm spiced tea to ruminate about the possible existence of 4th dimensional beings. "and maybe they might exist and maybe they don't but we can't rule out and blah blah blah." Ruminating is ruminating. No. That's not what she did. She called her a murderer and tossed her clothes onto the front lawn <-- that is religion.

Religion is : I am going to pull my kid out of public school, because public school will expose my child to demonic influence. And then they literally do it. This is called "home schooling". It is a real thing.

Religion is : I will not take my sick child to a hospital. Instead we will gather around and pray over him. This will excise the demons that are making him ill. This happens even in the 21st century.

So yeah. That is why I had to cut you off on using the word religion sloppily.

You think that is a fair and balanced assessment of “religion”? Sounds my like the actions of deluded individuals - granted there is something of an glut of religious outliers in the US.

I’d also add that many of the clergy have ruminated about many things in precisely the same way as scientists do. They just happen to believe they are doing something like “reading some higher narrative” whereas the scientist isn’t massively concerned with some “higher order” in anything other than an abstract manner.

[Serpent]

There appears to be quite a glut of 'outliers' in the Middle East, as well. In fact, such attitudes are not at all marginal, even the US. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/01/18/pence-says-criticism-wifes-job-anti-lgbt-christian-school-is-deeply-offensive-us/?utm_term=.464d8c25745b
I don't think Hyksos intended those examples to be an assessment of religion in general, but rather a contrast to the scientific view in action.

[Serpent]

questions arise!!! One day he finds the cat dead , he says, " cat be still!" He then wraps it in glade wrap and makes his journey of the loss of innocents to the outside world .

What do you suppose is the origin of the concept of innocence?
In case it's not obvious, I'm referring, not to a criminal justice term, but the idea of a child's innocence, or the innocence of Adam and Eve, or the proverbial "newborn lamb"?

[-1-]

Hyksos:
"She called her a murderer and tossed her clothes onto the front lawn <-- that is religion. "

BadgerJelly:
"You think that is a fair and balanced assessment of “religion”? "

Serpent:
"I don't think Hyksos intended those examples to be an assessment of religion in general, but rather a contrast to the scientific view in action."

-1-:

Ayvey. I can't condone doing "revisionist critical analysis" of speeches made less than a day ago, much like Christina scripture bochers are doing it to the Bible. (Bocher: Yiddish word, meaning a poor student, a person of no consequence in the community, low in rank, whose job is to study the Torah, and he lives on hand-outs from the community, he does no substantial work outside of studying the Torah.)

The Hyksos clearly said, "This is religion." I resent anyone saying five hours later, "well, what he meant was...[something not religion]."

I have to be fair. We have to be fair. If I/we don't accept this from Bible scholars, then we ought not to practice it ourselves.

This is why I did not "like" (click on the "like" icon that the VAT, Serpent and doogles clicked on) the post by Hyksos. It was an ad hominem argument, not an attack, but an appeal to humanity, not to logic.

Hyksos:
"So yeah. That is why I had to cut you off on using the word religion sloppily."

Well. Hyksos used it exclusively. Hyksos's examples were far from encompassing all that religion is or could be.

So... well... we are getting post-modernism back to modernism, or do we do away with the definitions or we decide each for the self what we mean by a word, and force it down others' throats?

This is something where I am siding with BadgerJelly. The example was ill-conceived, and it had less to do with religion or with religious ideas than anyone can claim it did.

It is nice to have friends on the boards, but friends should not, ought not sacrifice logic and philosophy to ally themselves with their friends.

Methinks.

[doogles]

Where the spirit idea comes from is beautifully and quite comprehensibly written down in a book the title and author(s) of which I never noted.

The book talks about the formation of early religions or spirituality. It turns out that people in primitive environments don't have a separation of spirit from body at death. If a person in the household dies, they still have him at the communal meals, he or she has his or her place still at the family "dinner table" if you wish. People talk to him as if they expect an immediate and live answer. These people disintegrate, of course, right in front of their eyes, so they usually bury the body and keep only the head and then the skull around the house. And that's why some South Pacific primitive cultures perfected the art of head-shrinking (not psychiatry) to a high degree.

This is the beginning of the formation of human spirituality of those people who have to start spirituality from scratch. That's why the South Pacific islands are excellent study grounds for this, because people somehow are in the circumstances of starting brand new civilizations -- they leave (on occasion, and I don't know the details "how") their original islands and start with a clean slate of spirituality.

So these what I wrote earlier, are facts, or apporximations of facts, not speculation, according to my feeble memory of the beginning pages of a book I read in a library 15 years ago.

Your imagination and hypotheses are totally different from mine Serpent but you appear to speak with much authority and conviction on the matter.

Do you have a reference for "The spirit idea doesn't come from death or absence, it comes from the aliveness of nature." I must confess to being totally ignorant of that 'fact'.

Conviction,yes; the subject has interested me for a long time. Authority, no, not in the academic sense. I just don't see any point in waffling.
I don't have a reliable internet reference to hand. I have some books on mythology from various cultures and ages. That particular reference is to animism, very well illustrated in the folk-tales of native North Americans. African legends have a remarkably similar flavour. They are both in sharp contrast to the mythology of ancient Egypt and Persia. For a transition from primitive to pastoral, Norse and Celtic myths are a good reference, and from pastoral to city-state, you need go no farther than the contrast between Greek mythology and its dramatization by Homer and Sophocles. The Judeo-Christian tradition is interesting (You can readily follow the evolution of a belief-system through Genesis) but hard for us to read objectively.

Serpent and -1-, you have both implied that notions of a spirit essence being part of a body have not evolved from observation of death in humans and animals, but from some other observations. Curiously, both of you have not supplied any evidence for that, but have claimed authority on the basis of having read it somewhere. If what you say is correct, then the working hypothesis I have for why many isolated groups of people have notions of spiritualism in their cultures, is wrong.

I set out to search Google under many sets of keywords, but could not find any references to any working hypotheses on the origins of the notion of a body containing a spirit essence (or soul or whatever).

This is why I would like you to support your statements with such references. If my working theory is correct, then it explains the prevalence of spiritualism and the variations in the nature of hypotheses about this spiritualism between religions.

In addition it suggests that religions are a widespread status quo on this planet and that the scientific knowledge of metabolism as the animating energy of living things is really 'The new kid on the block'. In terms of human or humanoid existence, this new-found knowledge is very recent.

It does tend to suggest that spiritualism just may not be the entire basis of animation or life, and along with other scientific discoveries, that religious ideas may not be the best ones to explain our existence. I can understand that such discoveries could be perceived as a threat to some people with strong religious belief systems. It could explain any tension between Scientific and Religious ideas.

[doogles]

-1- -- "This is why I did not "like" (click on the "like" icon that the VAT, Serpent and doogles clicked on) the post by Hyksos. It was an ad hominem argument, not an attack, but an appeal to humanity, not to logic."

I have re-read Hyksos' post and I stand by my 'like' of it. I believe that the citations you used to criticise that post were isolated and taken out of context.

[BadgerJelly]

Serpent -

I don't think Hyksos intended those examples to be an assessment of religion in general, but rather a contrast to the scientific view in action.

Really? So three separate examples all biased toward the negatives - all extreme examples. If the first had been mentioned and then items involving comfort, community and belonging were given then I’d probably still have something to say about the vague distinction claimed between “religion” and “religious ideas,” and I wonder how such measures up when taken toward the terms “science” and “scientific ideas”.

I guess the equivalent in the opposite woudl mean that scientific ideas are not science. I am not really sure how such a distinction makes sense? Maybe it does.

Either way I still think attempts to measure religion against science are generally unimportant because they’re very different items of human activity. Art has more in common with science ... yet when mentioned on this site many people simply didn’t understand thr connection.

That said there is political conflict surrounding both science and religion. Such is brought about by the instutional organisations not the essence of the practice as far as I can see. I will admit it depends on what is meant by “religion”. The OP seems against the principle of dimissing religion as a scourge on society (at least if they oppose the the piece cited it seemed like so?)

[-1-]

-1- -- "This is why I did not "like" (click on the "like" icon that the VAT, Serpent and doogles clicked on) the post by Hyksos. It was an ad hominem argument, not an attack, but an appeal to humanity, not to logic."

I have re-read Hyksos' post and I stand by my 'like' of it. I believe that the citations you used to criticise that post were isolated and taken out of context.

It's nice that you can stand by your belief.

[-1-]

Where the spirit idea comes from is beautifully and quite comprehensibly written down in a book the title and author(s) of which I never noted.

The book talks about the formation of early religions or spirituality. It turns out that people in primitive environments don't have a separation of spirit from body at death. If a person in the household dies, they still have him at the communal meals, he or she has his or her place still at the family "dinner table" if you wish. People talk to him as if they expect an immediate and live answer. These people disintegrate, of course, right in front of their eyes, so they usually bury the body and keep only the head and then the skull around the house. And that's why some South Pacific primitive cultures perfected the art of head-shrinking (not psychiatry) to a high degree.

This is the beginning of the formation of human spirituality of those people who have to start spirituality from scratch. That's why the South Pacific islands are excellent study grounds for this, because people somehow are in the circumstances of starting brand new civilizations -- they leave (on occasion, and I don't know the details "how") their original islands and start with a clean slate of spirituality.

So these what I wrote earlier, are facts, or apporximations of facts, not speculation, according to my feeble memory of the beginning pages of a book I read in a library 15 years ago.

Your imagination and hypotheses are totally different from mine Serpent but you appear to speak with much authority and conviction on the matter.

Do you have a reference for "The spirit idea doesn't come from death or absence, it comes from the aliveness of nature." I must confess to being totally ignorant of that 'fact'.

Conviction,yes; the subject has interested me for a long time. Authority, no, not in the academic sense. I just don't see any point in waffling.
I don't have a reliable internet reference to hand. I have some books on mythology from various cultures and ages. That particular reference is to animism, very well illustrated in the folk-tales of native North Americans. African legends have a remarkably similar flavour. They are both in sharp contrast to the mythology of ancient Egypt and Persia. For a transition from primitive to pastoral, Norse and Celtic myths are a good reference, and from pastoral to city-state, you need go no farther than the contrast between Greek mythology and its dramatization by Homer and Sophocles. The Judeo-Christian tradition is interesting (You can readily follow the evolution of a belief-system through Genesis) but hard for us to read objectively.

Serpent and -1-, you have both implied that notions of a spirit essence being part of a body have not evolved from observation of death in humans and animals, but from some other observations. Curiously, both of you have not supplied any evidence for that, but have claimed authority on the basis of having read it somewhere. If what you say is correct, then the working hypothesis I have for why many isolated groups of people have notions of spiritualism in their cultures, is wrong.

I set out to search Google under many sets of keywords, but could not find any references to any working hypotheses on the origins of the notion of a body containing a spirit essence (or soul or whatever).

This is why I would like you to support your statements with such references. If my working theory is correct, then it explains the prevalence of spiritualism and the variations in the nature of hypotheses about this spiritualism between religions.

In addition it suggests that religions are a widespread status quo on this planet and that the scientific knowledge of metabolism as the animating energy of living things is really 'The new kid on the block'. In terms of human or humanoid existence, this new-found knowledge is very recent.

It does tend to suggest that spiritualism just may not be the entire basis of animation or life, and along with other scientific discoveries, that religious ideas may not be the best ones to explain our existence. I can understand that such discoveries could be perceived as a threat to some people with strong religious belief systems. It could explain any tension between Scientific and Religious ideas.

I did not claim authority. I simply said what I believe.

I can't even hypothecize what it is that could have started the spirit/body dualism to evolve as a construct considered by present-day humans. I strongly believe, because a gut feeling tells me this, not hard evidence, that the idea originated even before the appearance of homo sapiens sapiens on the scene. How, when, and why, I can't tell or even guess.

I know it would be nice if themes of philosophy could be argued by citing evidence. But then again, if that were the case, then philosophy would be science, not philosophy.

[-1-]

I did some thinking on what could have started the notion of spirituality. I believe that our present day notion of "supernatural" is an evolutionary product of the process of "wishful thinking". We wish for the best for ourselves; we believe there are causes and reasons why we can or cannot reach our goals or get our rewards; the gaps in reasoning are filled in by reasons and causes that are not visible, are other-worldly, or supernatural.

This may be a description of a personal journey of thoughts of a person who believes he or she is not being rewarded justly, or else he or she is punished unjustly. But I believe (BELIEVE, doogles, I believe, I can't provide hard evidence for this belief) that this has also been the path of evolution of the development of faith.

If we trace it backward, then from supernatural we go back one step, the feeling that we deserve things. We deserve things because there is an ethical causation. We base our belief in ethical causation because we want the best for ourselves. We want the best for ourselves, because we can imagine it. We can imagine the best for ourselves, because we have memories of good things that please us and we have memories of the bad things that hurt / displeased us. We have memory of good things that please us / bad things that hurt us, because we have been pleased before and hurt before, and we have a faculty of memory.

As animals, we have always had a sense of what pleases us (nervous system provides us with the ability to tell) and we have always had a memory (because pattern recognition tells us which way to take to the "good" and which way to avoid to take to the "bad"(*)).

So, if you like, these above stations I described, are stations in the evolution of spirituality.

It is hard to tell from where I am sitting, which station entered the mind-set of the humanoid on the evolutionary process. But since all animals have pattern-recognition and memory, all animal life on the evolutionary tree can be assessed (if we only had a way to do it!) for self-awareness, and a conclusion could be drawn where that particular animal stands on the path toward spirituality.

(*) I read about an experiment, god only knows what publication, that earth worms can be taught which hole not to climb into. Two holes were presented to an earth worm over and over again, and one hole gave the worm an electric shock (mild, but to the worm painful and not fatal).

The worm learned in 139, and not 138, or 140 trials, which hole gave it the shock.

Each new worm that the experiment was conducted on, learned it also in precisely 139 trials.

---------

Disclaimer: I am not sure if the "magic number" was 139. It was a given thee-digit number of trials, if I remember it correctly, and each time the same number.

[Serpent]

Serpent and -1-, you have both implied that notions of a spirit essence being part of a body have not evolved from observation of death in humans and animals, but from some other observations. Curiously, both of you have not supplied any evidence for that, but have claimed authority on the basis of having read it somewhere.

I didn't imply this; I stated it out loud. And, yes, I read it somewhere. I notice you added the spirit of animals, which certainly does not appear in mainstream modern religions.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism
currently on my bookshelf:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2265055.African_Myths_and_Legends
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Ojibway_Heritage.html?id=sfxSdP3di_YC
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/844522.American_Indian_Myths_and_Legends
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67863.Animal_Speak
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525578.Gods_Heroes_Classical_Antiquity
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1716119.Who_s_Who_in_Greek_and_Roman_Mythology
and, of course, Bulfinch and the bible, standard modern, because I've given away the big red gilt King James edition.
Other books have come and gone, and while I remember some well enough to link, I don't have them on hand to look up a reference.

If what you say is correct, then the working hypothesis I have for why many isolated groups of people have notions of spiritualism in their cultures, is wrong.

I believe so, yes. And it doesn't stand to reason, given the lifestyle of early peoples. They were not shielded from anything: nothing took place behind closed doors - there were no doors. Death was a presence in their lives before they could speak its name, or their own - it could never have surprised them; it could never have presented as a mystery.
Nor did their spirit need a distant heaven to depart to: they didn't need to escape a life of drudgery and thralldom, like medieval Europeans or other civilized people.
Also, of course, they were not all that isolated; for the most part, hunter-gatherers were either nomadic or migratory: they came in contact with other peoples, traded, intermarried, fought, feasted and told stories. Always, everywhere, people tell stories: they sing and dance stories, wear them in masks and costumes, paint them in caves, scratch them on rocks, hammer them into jewellery, embroider them on clothing, weave them into rugs and baskets, etch them on pottery, carve them in wood. Stories get passed around, modified to fit new geography, changed over time and translated into different tongues.

I set out to search Google under many sets of keywords, but could not find any references to any working hypotheses on the origins of the notion of a body containing a spirit essence (or soul or whatever).

That's because most of the online articles are about - and in the service of - a particular current belief-system, each one having its definition and explanation of the way they interpret spirit or soul. They're not interested in where the notion came from, since they are in possession of a version of that notion that works for them.

This is why I would like you to support your statements with such references. If my working theory is correct, then it explains the prevalence of spiritualism and the variations in the nature of hypotheses about this spiritualism between religions.

So does mine, and I can show you how the early belief systems morphed into and were subsumed by the civilized, organized, authoritarian systems in force today.
Those belief-systems did a whole lot more than describe the departure of the animating essence from a body: they were cultural matrices - still are, for a few isolated tribes: a way of relating to the environment and one another; medicine, law/moral guidance, group identity, history, art and entertainment.

In addition it suggests that religions are a widespread status quo on this planet and that the scientific knowledge of metabolism as the animating energy of living things is really 'The new kid on the block'. In terms of human or humanoid existence, this new-found knowledge is very recent.

I see it, rather, as re-found knowledge. Primitive peoples were a lot more canny and better informed than the Euro-centered world-view credits. Christianity suppressed all knowledge for so long, they had to re-invent curiosity, which they immediately regimented into a Method and took out an exclusive patent on it.
Biochemistry is merely a branch of this until-so-recently-forbidden tree of knowledge. Understanding metabolism (which, btw, a yogi of three thousand years ago could control more effectively than an army of modern doctors) is but one of its many fruits.

It does tend to suggest that spiritualism just may not be the entire basis of animation or life, and along with other scientific discoveries, that religious ideas may not be the best ones to explain our existence.

There, you see, is another question. Why do so many people today think that existence needs an explanation? To a primitive, events need explanations (because he wants to avoid them or repeat them or control them); life and being don't (because he already has them): he's far more practical than the philosophers of a later era.
Religious ideas had and have many uses far more compelling than an explanation of why is there something, but they zero in on that one as a distraction.

I can understand that such discoveries could be perceived as a threat to some people with strong religious belief systems. It could explain any tension between Scientific and Religious ideas.

All knowledge is a threat to organized religion. Obviously! It's laid out plain and flat, in the third chapter of Genesis.https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/ Pay especial heed to the switcheroo from Ch1 to Ch 2 and 3. Sloppy editing, that.
Nature-based religions have no such tension, because they're not authoritarian; they don't need to contradict and force you deny the evidence of your eyes.

[Serpent]

The Hyksos clearly said, "This is religion." I resent anyone saying five hours later, "well, what he meant was...[something not religion]."

Directly above which, Hyksos clearly said:

For example

hence my small objection immediately after and defense a bit later.
We have to be fair, methinks.

[doogles]

-1-, thank you for your response. Like you, my guess is that the notion of spirituality commenced long before Homo sapiens. I used the word humanoid in my posts.

Also, good on you for having a go at a hypothesis - "I did some thinking on what could have started the notion of spirituality. I believe that our present day notion of "supernatural" is an evolutionary product of the process of "wishful thinking". We wish for the best for ourselves; we believe there are causes and reasons why we can or cannot reach our goals or get our rewards; the gaps in reasoning are filled in by reasons and causes that are not visible, are other-worldly, or supernatural."

That hypothesis is as good as any at this stage. I've commenced reading Serpent's list of refs and the current notions are varied. My early reading suggests that your hypothesis and mine are as good as any at this stage.


Serpent, thank you for that last post. The sheer number of refs, and yoour post will take some time, but I will go through them and get back to this thread. My early reading of your first link suggests that Eskimos did attribute spirituality to animals, but you could argue pedanticaly that that is not strictly religion -"Judging that an animal will not mind being killed if it is not offended ritually, Eskimos take various precautions before, during, and after the hunt. The rationale lies in the belief that animal spirits exist independent of bodies and are reborn: an offended animal will later lead its companions away so that the hunter may starve. If, in spite of their precautions, game becomes scarce, a shaman may be called to discover the transgression that has offended an animal spirit—and, perhaps, to do battle with a malevolent being controlled by a rival shaman willing the community harm."


It seems logical to me that if any of our remote ancestors attributes a life essence to humanoids, that they would logically extrapolate that to other living animals - just an hypothesis and not a theory. I'll get back when I've looked at most of the refs.