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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The elite see this as weird, but it’s actually the default state of humanity. Most people throughout history have made moral decisions based on their religion, and most humans do today.

I would disagree quite strenuously with this, the default state of humanity is a hunter-gatherer with no concept of what we would understand as "religion". I would even go further and say that conflating religion with morality is a relatively "modern" development. In most pagan religions the relationship individuals and groups have with the gods is a very practical and transactional affair, you give offerings to gods in an attempt to gain their support and help, morality does not really enter into it. To a pagan gods are basically just very powerful people and a fact of life that you have to deal with. In fact, I would say that you can also see traces of this thinking in christianity, particularly in the old testament before god had a kid and mellowed out a bit. You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.

You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.

That's very explicit in the Old Testament especially the early parts. They make explicit covenants with that are about earthly rewards like having lots of descendants or being given possession of the promised land. There isn't anything about an afterlife better than that of a shade in Sheol.

God's punishments for breaking the covenant are earthly ones that usually involve bringing a foreign army against them. These stories of God's punishment mostly seem like post-hoc justifications for why Judah was defeated in battle and conquered despite having the support of the Lord of Hosts. They rationalize it as them having broken the covenant first.

This idea of God and the universe having a moral bent is something inserted later into Judaism through Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy.

They make explicit covenants with that are about earthly rewards...

Sure, but what kind of things do they agree to do in those covenants?

The entirety of the Mosaic law found in the Torah? Are you trying to make some kind of point with this question or do you somehow not know that?

And you see no connection whatsoever between the Mosaic law and any sense of morality?

No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.

I get what you mean now and I reject the implications.

Moses, like all great thinkers, was both original and true. In that, what he said that was true wasn't original and what he said that was original wasn't true.

I prefer Zoroaster. I think laws against kicking pregnant dogs make much more sense morally, than laws against eating shrimp.

That you disagree with the moral vision presented does not imply that the whole thing, at its time, in the perspective of the people involved, had nothing to do with morality.

Did you read anything I said or the Torah itself? I have no doubt they thought it meant morality. Morality meant following the covenant they made with a god. Moses wrote it down for them. That was their morality. I just reject it's truth, not that they thought it was morality.

Did you read anything you said? You said:

You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.

That's very explicit in the Old Testament especially the early parts.

No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.

It is easy to explain.

Leave current world where food comes from well stocked supermarket refrigerators open 24/7/365.

Leave even world of your peasant ancestors living, I presume, in lands with temperate wet climates where pigs roamed in the forests and fed themselves for most of the year and had to be fed only during winter.

Enter dry and treeless world of Near East. In this world, pigs had to be fed for all year, with food that could otherwise feed people. In this world, pigs were not necessity, but luxury for the rich. People who try to explain pig ban in desert religions as health measure are wrong, it is explicit populist, pro-social measure.

You are certainly aware that the Bible is one of the most extremist and revolutionary books ever written, book that rejects all structures of oppression in its time and place, book whose vision of better world is world of anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes without (or with strictly limited) monarchy, without feudalism, without landlordism, without usury and loan sharking, without standing army and permanent slavery(OFC excepting Gentiles). See biblical commandments that do not make sense to you in this light, and they will fit.

Do you have a single source to back that up?

Do you have a single source to back that up?

Biblical Jubilee year

In ancient Near East, periodical debt forgiveness was common(people were then not so advanced as to pull themselves by their bootstraps from hereditary debt slavery), but biblical system pushed it further, into land redistribution every 50 years.

Remember, equal land division was always in agricultural societies the most extremely extremist demand of the most hardcore rebels.

As late as 1793, sooo radical French revolutionaires decreed death penalty for anyone who would dare to propose "agrarian law".

Here it was the law and the norm, explicitly designed to stop accumulation of land by few families, stop emergence of large hereditary landowners and resulting feudal system.

Add ban on lending on interest (what, in peasant village conditions, meant extortionary loan sharking, not investment in productive enterprises) and limiting slavery (for Hebrews only OFC) to seven years.

Yes, there is no evidence that the biblical economic system was ever actually implemented, but was well thought off. Bible writers were well aware about conditions in their world (all powerful kings, crushing taxation, omnipresent serfdom and slavery, few oligarchs and plantation owners owning most land), didn't like it and tried hard to find way to avoid it.

It is significant, and it is even more significant than not even the most Old Testament loving Christians who brought back biblical punishments and biblical genocides, never ever thought about putting this system into practice.

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See also acoup on oaths:

Remember that an oath is essentially a contract, cosigned by a god – when you are dealing with that kind of power, you absolutely want to be sure you have dotted all of the ‘i’s and crossed all of the ‘t’s. Most pre-modern religions are very concerned with what we sometimes call ‘orthopraxy’ (‘right practice’ – compare orthodoxy, ‘right doctrine’). Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting the exact form or the ritual precisely correct (for comparison, ancient paganisms tend to care almost exclusively about orthopraxy, whereas medieval Christianity balances concern between orthodoxy and orthopraxy (but with orthodoxy being the more important)).

Even without formal religion, I just can't believe that early humans didn't have moral frameworks, just from the simple fact that moral systems facilitate group cohesion and survival. There's just no way hunter-gatherers were a bunch of homo economicuses, and only modern humans have morality. Morality isn't a byproduct of civilization; it's one of its foundational building blocks.

I think the objection was to saying most moral decisions were “based on their religion”, not that moral decision making didn’t happen at all.

The OP’s conclusion relies on religion as moral fabric rather than religion as a transaction. I believe the latter was much more common, historically, until the Middle Ages or maybe even the Enlightenment. Even though people were always making decisions (and judging others) based on morality.

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