Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
From my reading it has become apparent to me that the ancient Israelites, the group that invented monotheism and an omnipotent creator/king of the universe, were brilliant. The development of their religion, Judaism, was much more about politics than spirituality. They were a semi-nomadic tribe in lands surrounded by powerful empires constantly at war vying for more land and resources. Their religion is what they used to bind their people to the cause of nationhood, they had nothing else. In the Torah/Bible, every other group of people in Canaan are painted as their wicked and evil enemies.
Atheists don't seem to understand or can't admit to themselves that their freedom of thought was made possible by centuries of progress and stability that Christianity brought throughout Europe and then the New World. They aren't the intellectuals they think they are today without the influence of religion and they can mock religion all they want but much of who they are and what they think comes from religion, it's in the air from the moment we're born.
We may be at a point in our development that religion is no longer necessary but we'd not have reached this stage without it.
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There is a pretty strong argument in my mind (made by evolutionary biologists/social psychology) that it was primarily monotheistic religion that allowed people to successfully live together in larger and larger societies. We made a very quick and massive leap from hunter gatherers, and living in groups of 100-150 max to living in huge cities. It is just a great catalyst for not only binding people together, but for the first time, to bind people of varying languages and ethnicity's together.
This is a large part of what enabled something in humans that no other animal has ever mastered to the extent that humans have. In fact, no species on the planet is even close to the degree of cooperative behaviors that humans are capable of. This is only made possible when the individual, looks beyond "me" and look also to the welfare of "us"... and when times demand it, even sacrifices himself for the greater good of the group. As a result, those stronger belief systems that were most effective survived.
And I agree.. if you look at the history of the time, people were largely subjugated by kings proclaiming themselves to be living gods. Monotheism countered this as well, and quite successfully - establishing a higher law than that king and a set of rules that dealt almost exclusively with fairness and morality that a king would have to then be subjugated to. It was a clever mechanism for undermining the power and authority of rulers, particularly those who were unjust.