To give Christianity credit for the rise of science is to ignore the long time period between the birth of Christianity and the birth of modern science. What was the holdup?

To blame Christianity for all the evils of the world, well… that’s been debunked to death.

The point of explaining is to be able to control. You want to figure out something works so you can work it. The only truth that matters is pragmatic truth. That’s by definition: pragmatism is about results, and results are what matters. Religion tries to explain and control an entirely different aspect of life from the physical sciences. Direct comparison is ludicrous.

The hard sciences do a reasonably good job of helping us control the world. We can have technology without science, because we had technology before science, but the scientific method speeds up technological development. Religion hasn’t done nearly as well in its own problem space, but – to be fair – that’s a much harder task than science has accepted.

And philosophy is what you get when the quest to explain the world gets lost in the weeds. “What is truth?” quoth jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. If you have to ask what truth is, there’s no point trying to tell you.

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list…

When the magical (I wish this to be so: therefore it is so!) and the religious (We are all one! Brotherhood of man! The universe loves us!) and the social (This is what all good citizens believe! If you believe otherwise you are a BAD PERSON!) and the personal (That bastard didn’t show me the respect I’m entitled to!) all come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can be irresistible ”

SO I occasionally say that, if religion can be generically defined as belief in anything not material [which is about the only all encompassing terms I can think of], then we are all religious. It is inescapable. It’s form may vary, and we may well stop calling it that, but it will always be with us.

I wonder if it is possible to have a society that has one ‘religion’ that is overwhelmingly conceptually dominant, it ceases to be thought of as a separate category of thing called ‘religion’. I don’t know if we have ever had that, quite. We have had cultures whose stories, beliefs, and attendant moral systems have risen so organically and endured that they are accepted as part of the air. We have had salvationist religions that took over so thoroughly that their truth claims were accepted by most without discussion and which served as guides to every aspect of life. But they were always understood to be a category of thing under the equivalent name of religion- all your classical civilizations and the Abrahamic ones made distinctions among sacred and profane, and so forth. Perhaps only at its earliest, naturalistic stages of shamanist practices and/or ancestor veneration would it have been considered anything else. Perhaps not even then.

We may be the first civilization to invent a new religion for ourselves with holy objects, holy people, ritual practices, and demons, without even knowing it. We’re not quite there yet.

The point of religion is to answer questions that science doesn’t, hasn’t, can’t, and in its wisest moments probably won’t try to. The question now, to me, is whether a majority of humans any longer want or need those questions answered, or even any longer think in terms of those questions, or how much.

1. An answer to the finality and terror of death.

2. Purpose in life.

3. Meaning of the universe and humanity’s place in it.

I am always impressed, for example, when an atheist [meaning here, someone who claims to have no belief in an afterlife or any other cosmological framework that either preserves consciousness or merges it with something cooler] indicates they do not fear death, for example. Wow. This is exceptional, oddly unremarked courage and stoicism. Beyond stoicism, really. Even the stoics could give some sort of account of the universe and life’s meaning beyond naked materialism.

I know well humans have tried on every variant on all three questions, some more “secular” than others.

Continuity of one’s family, tribe, nation and culture was a big one in the ancient world, lightly dressed with pantheons of culture-appropriate gods and spirits, and one never seriously threatened until modern times. I concede its broad secularity, apart from the gods. It’s ancient weakness, recognized by salvationist religions, is that peoples and civilizations eventually disappear/die. [David Goldman/Spengler's entire schtick in favour of Judaism/Christianity/Judeo-Christianity could be boiled down to this trope- embrace salvation because all your worldly lineage is doomed eventually.] Still, some beat the odds and live on. Jews, Armenians, arguably Han and various Indian peoples are still doing well. If you allow from some historical morph, so are others. I like this one, of course. But it has it’s weaknesses in an age that cares little for it.

Most options that try on ‘spirituality but not religion’ language are just making a false distinction of substituting low-specific content religion and not calling it religion.

Science-fiction writers and some physicists have tried on the wonder of the universe and the human mission to learn and explore. Pretty good. Probably not enough content for most humans down the future centuries. Also, essentially a new religion. “Wonder” is not a materialist concept.

Existentialist philosophy is a magnificent attempt at a substitute. I suppose I consider Nietzsche the progenitor and Rand a tangent of this tradition. All very good until one gets down to realizing that the essential philosophical act is to recognize the meaninglessness of it all and then invent meaning for oneself. Probably our best option, but it both opens us up to new forms of sectarianism and to the horrible awakening one has when one remembers it is all a construct one invented for oneself.

Anyway, ultimately I lose the will to go on with this aspect of it. I guess people just don’t care anymore. I don’t know whether or not that is a new moral/spiritual stage for humanity.

There’s a fair case to be made that on the global scale, and particularly when set against the loosely-categorizable “dharmic” religious universe of East and South Asia, that Europe and MENA constitute one world, the greater Euro-Mediterranean-Mesopotamian world, and the Abrahamic religions one religious tradition. Most big world history textbooks of the early 20c seemed to explicitly take this line. The west begins with Egypt and Ur.

It’s fuzzy- Zoroastrianism contributed a lot and is the only recorded instance of a quasi-monotheism emerging from Indo-European polytheistic religion, just as the Abrahamic ones emerged out of the Semitic pantheons. But Zoroastrianism the religion and Persianate civilization form a transition zone to the Indian civilizational world.

I am often well-persuaded of this view, personal sympathies to South and East Asia notwithstanding.

But then it’s all a matter of the scale and the comparison one wishes to make. If you want to focus on those top level distinctions, fine. But within them there’s been plenty to differentiate “Christendom” from Islam, or Europe from MENA, just as in other contexts there have been reasons to distinguish with Christendom or Europe [not identical frameworks or issues] between North and South or East and West. They’re all correct perspectives.

Put in now older, more secular terms, we just went through a long and profound, morally cutting World War II and Cold War among variants of moral and political philosophy all invented in 19c Western Europe and shoving together bits of flotsam combined and recombined from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Germans and Russians murdered one another’s nations over which 19c German utopian ideology would win out. [I realize Marx considered himself not a utopian, but still.] All in all, a very narrow framework of conflict within one relatively narrow tradition of one civilization, scarcely intelligible in the idioms of other civilizations. But they were real distinctions, just the same.

A fair point about China but then the Chinese have found other principles around which to organize large-scale warfare among Han [or people currently identified as Han and/or Chinese who may not have been at the time], including large-percentage population loss.

My only points to that are really,

a) the fact that peoples want from time to time to have big wars and will find causes around which to organize them [admittedly I'm playing with the causal sequence here]

b) the distinction between “religious” and “secular” motivations is both blurrier and more conceptually ambiguous than usually credited, and for my part at least I’m not always sure how meaningful.

Or to put it another way, if I invade you to make you conform to International Standards of Human Rights, I am imposing a metaphysical framework on you and thus engaging in a holy war in all but name.

On the one hand, an artifact of the Cold War anticommunist front mentality and the desire to make support for Israel an article of conservative and Christian faith. On the other, an accurate description of many of the values being advocated. Hard to separate the two.

In general in the history of China religious conflict seems much less important. From time to time a particular cult such as some strain of
Buddhism might gain considerable influence at the Imperial Court only to be purged by a successor Emperor. But the genocidal intensity of religious conflict in the West and Middle East is rare in Chinese history.

- it strikes me as a minority cause of wars, overall, compared with resources, ethnic hatred, rational statecraft [for some eras], and perhaps others. Except perhaps insofar as religion is inseparable from these. But most wars of the ancient world had armies inspired to believe their gods would help them but not at all fighting just to force their gods or points of doctrine on others. Most wars of the Christian/Muslim era in the western part of Eurasia amped up the divinity aspect but had plenty of other motives as well, as noted.

-More recent wars have what we consider to be secular ideological/values components. We are accustomed to think of these as somehow different from religious wars, but I am not always sure how. If we think they are different, then we have demonstrated that secular motives can cause far worse wars than religious ones. If we think they are the same kind of thing, then we rather demonstrate that some kind of belief and conflict over belief is inseparable from our condition, so the value of condemning past versions of it is questionable.

-Although I admit to a bit of cheek, I often thought the best secular approach to the question of religion and war is that religion is false and we just invented it, so by definition the problem is not religion but that humans seek conflict and ways to organize themselves into conflicting sides. We’ll probably find new ones.