Hm. A fair point.
Though, if I'm misconstruing, I don't think it's a lack of logic and more... my bias against thinking that people really actually believe religion literally.
I generally tend to believe that... there is nothing fundamentally "smarter" about human beings today more than five thousand years ago and... that no rational person then now or in another five thousand years would "actually" believe that there was a demon in a pig that made you sick or something.
I have to believe that if a couple of well-educated people (rabbi, after all, were teachers and the most learned men of their time) put their heads together, they'd probably figure out that it was like a cold or a flu or some other non-fatal disease which was understood to be passed on an air-to-air vector or a sexual vector or whatnot. Educated people knew that insects spread disease and that insects could be too small to see with the naked eye, at times.
People knew about sickness and that... it was something in the air or... something you spread with your weiner. People who had the time to think about things and not just toil fourteen hours a day, anyway.
The educated class in that society explained it to people in a way that people without the time to think could understand. These days, the middle classes mediate that interplay, having enough time to think some or most things through and... calling the ruling class on their bullshit so that the most oppressed underclasses can access the truth underneath the simplifications and manipulations.
The more people have to work, the less time they have to reason and learn. Religion exists, in my mindscape, not because it exists on reflex in the human mind, but to fill in the gaps, to force people without the time to know things to... do reasonable things.
The problem is that such great power corrupts any power structure in two generations at the most but probably even quicker.
This is why religion asks us to be fruitful and multiply... the more kids we have, the harder we have to work, the less we can learn and reason and the more power religion has. This is why government allied with religion functions to economically destroy the middle class, as the middle class functions to mediate truth and force reality on all others and, indeed, themselves.
The harder we have to work, the easier we are to rule because we become embroiled in just... feeding our kids, working our jobs, scrimping for health care. As individuals, we can only function in our own immediate self interest... dynastic families and bureaucracies of tradition can affect agendas that transcend generations and even centuries.
Yikes, I've rambled off-point.
Essentially what I'm saying is... my bias is not logical fallacy, my bias is the belief that... I don't know that adult humans with the time to learn could've been that fundamentally ignorant with all the knowledge that was already on the books, so to speak.
By the time the idea of "kosher" was codified, the knowledge base was there, if crudely, to know that these effects were not demons or spooky ghosts with only one or two jumps of common sense.
Distrust of organized religion is probably my defining ideological tenet, if I have to choose one. I tend to believe that all of the other problems of the world could not be so very out of control if so many of the rules of society weren't based on blind faiths that are either just silly or constructed specifically to control a given society's underclass.
While I believe that there's parts of our society where partial socialisms are necessary (education, infrastructure, military, health care, etc) I'm not a communist because... small scale capitalism is healthy and can work if essential religious assumptions about who "deserves" money and success and so on don't conspire to create larger structures of inequity.
There's an old Russian saying, "the second you think you're hanging the last capitalist, someone comes along to sell you the noose" and... as disgusting and weird as the whole killing part of that thing is, the other part of it... that people are always going to look for gain where they can... is useful and true.
Unfair as it can be, economy is why we have stuff. Functioning under the watchful eye of a government making sure that business doesn't get so big or so hidden that it can cheat, it can be a force of change and... if not capital G good... at least a necessary-evil mechanism to keep things moving.
Capitalism will sell what it can sell when it's allowed to sell it. It's religion that messes the whole thing up, looking to keep people ignorant through its direct interactions with people, through indirect interactions with commerce with the government/military... because the less ignorant people are, the less religion means anything to them.
Capitalism will sell what it sells, government will protect its own petty bureaucracies, the military will generally be very happy being unused if everyone is getting paid... religion is the wedge in the works, functioning to leverage everyone against everyone else for its own gain.
...fuck, have I rambled.
I would erase the whole thing but for the fact that I took so long to type it.
But this whole thing explains my bias, anyway. Before government, culture and economic forces developed enough... with spare time to think and learn for more people... religion had to fill in all of those roles and had to do it simply.
The Big Questions are The Big Questions, there's nothing wrong with having a slant to it for your own personal edification. But... organizations to deliever those answers to us on a platter, man, we have less harmful paths to the smaller answers now.
Kosher law is one of the most benign surviving versions of this manipulation and, even there, they have to dance an intellectual dervish to explain it in today's context without either coming off racist against everyone else or admitting that it comes from common sense and that the whole "God" thing was sort of made-up.
I dunno.
That's my bias. For whatever it's worth, "comparative religion" was the field I took more classes on that anything in college but... the underclass prerequisites were different for the Communications and Liberal Arts departments and so my diploma says "TV/Radio/Film".
Author
Topic: 10 November 2006 - Pick you up by your junk. One handed. (Read 11151 times)