Naw, I’m sure religion started with an honest attempt at understanding the universe. “Let there be light” could easily be a Big Bang thought experiment…
But yea, then somewhere along the lines, someone started talking with flowery language to impress their audience, and they took it literally… because it’s nothing but fairy tales and grossly broken history by now.
Heck, maybe anthropomorphizing it was intentional because idiots understand a creater far better than reality.
Honest need to understand, sure. Best they could do at the time? Maybe so.
But honest attempt to understand? I don’t really see the attempt. I see people inserting arbitrary explanations.
aka making shit up.
Yes, by now it’s all made up BS, but that’s because you’re waaay at present day, not hearing the first stories of creation from early humans.
Sure, they undoubtedly had no solid scientific explanations, but I bet the intuitions would be very interesting none the less. Kinda’ like Egypt and the pyramids. People assume earlier humans were dumber, when in all reality, they had to be much smarter than us (imagine the average human today. Not smart) just to survive. The intuitions of the brightest would surely have something fun in there.
Mind, I wouldn’t be calling those words the word of any god…
That last part is precisely what a hindu text (the bhagwad gita) says. That to meditate on focusing on the unmanifest and abstract element is hard to conceive for the average human. Thus it is recommended to fixate the mind towards the humanised form of “god”
In that way i found the text to be quite self-aware
Self aware, but then it gives advice to brainwash yourself?? That sounds ill advised. A concept formed on a poor foundation cannot grow in to an actual understanding of much of anything.
Yes, reality is difficult, but reality is reality. To choose anything but reality is to literally deny existence itself.
Humans tell stories and don’t like not knowing things. I have no idea how many of these stories were made honestly or dishonestly but it really doesn’t matter.
Naw, I’m sure religion started with an honest attempt at understanding the universe. “Let there be light” could easily be a Big Bang thought experiment…
I don’t see how it could. The Big Bang is not something you can really come up with if you’re not measuring redshift and noticing older light being more shifted, or measuring CMBR - because if you don’t have any indication that the universe is expanding, it is also an arbitrary explanation to assume it once was incredibly dense.
If you have a hypothesis which can’t be derived from anything a priori and the hypothesis is shown to be correct later, it doesn’t mean you made an honest attempt at understanding. You were simply randomly right.
Wrong. You cannot PROVE it in much of any way. Though I didn’t say, “they had it figured out correctly.” I said, “they were attempting to figure it out honestly.” How are you utterly failing to understand that I KNOW they wouldn’t have the scientific method?
An honest attempt at thought should obviously be very different than the modern excuse, “God did it.” THAT is what I’m talking about. Their honest thoughts, not their scientific understanding or social excuses…
My man, please calm down for a moment and try to understand what I’m saying.
Wrong. You cannot PROVE it in much of any way.
This opening alone makes no sense. Where did I talk about proving anything? The Big Bang isn’t something to be proven, it’s a description of what the earliest universe has looked like based on current data.
Though I didn’t say, “they had it figured out correctly.” I said, “they were attempting to figure it out honestly.” How are you utterly failing to understand that I KNOW they wouldn’t have the scientific method?
Why are you so unnecessarily aggressive? Again, you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. Calm down and read what I wrote again.
An honest attempt at thought should obviously be very different than the modern excuse, “God did it.” THAT is what I’m talking about. Their honest thoughts, not their scientific understanding or social excuses…
And your best example for that is “Let there be light could mean something like the Big Bang”? How does this make the smallest bit of sense? That is literally “God did it”, in its purest form. But this is all besides the point, as this is not what I was talking about. Again, calm down, re-read what I said, and respond to my actual comment. Okay?
I’ll give you an example to make it easier. Let’s say that the character of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly is our actual god. One day I randomly say “What if Jeff Goldblums character from The Fly is god?”. Did I make an honest attempt at understanding?
You were literally saying, “they had no evidence” and then ask me where you wanted proof?? You are literally insane.
You are still not understanding me correctly. I will try again.
You were literally saying, “they had no evidence” and then ask me where you wanted proof?? You are literally insane.
You are not just incredibly rude, but also seem simply incapable of correctly reading my comments. I am not talking about “they had no evidence” in the sense that they should have evidence or anything.
I also think you completely misunderstand what the Big Bang is. It’s not “the universe popping into existence”, as “let there be light” suggests. It’s the period of expansion when the universe existed already. That is why I’m saying you can’t have a “thought experiment” from “let there be light” that leads to the Big Bang. There are no connections between the two ideas.
But I guess your knowledge level is similar to theirs :)
The indigenous Australian creation myth is pretty much “See that valley? Giant snake did that. River? Also snake. Mountains over there? Believe ot or not, snake.”
Just have “Faith”
And what do you know, we still don’t have the answers to lots of fundamental questions.
I prefer having questions to having unsatisfying answers though.
At least now we’re continuously trying, and grappling with questions we don’t have the means to answer, instead of ignoring all the evidence around us and militantly enforcing our placeholder narratives.
Absolutely! Inquisitive and rational thought (and the means to exercise it) is a great thing.
I would probably say that we do have the answers to every “fundamental question” from 2000 years ago. How the earth was formed, how humans came to be, what causes illness and weather, what the stars are…
We have moved on to even more fundamental questions that they couldn’t have even conceived of back then, like “what is dark energy” and “is the universe curved”
We certainly have lots of answers now, but I don’t think your giving enough credit to our ancestors.
I think questions such as what is the nature of consciousness, how did life originate, are we alone in the universe, what instigated the creation of the universe, have been asked since prehistory.
These questions weren’t asked with the same words and worldview as us, but the essence of these questions was the same.
It’s debatable for sure. But let’s take “how did life originate” as an example. The two things we don’t know are how the first single celled lifeform came into being, and exactly how we made the jump to multicellular life. So yes, you can say “we still don’t know how life originated” but what we do know outweighs what we don’t by a lot. And our ancestors weren’t asking those two questions we still have left. I think this is actually a great example that illustrates my point. We know that all living things are connected and have a common ancestor. We know that DNA is the language of life. We know that natural selection drove its diversity, not some designer. We know that modern humans have only been on the earth for some 200k years. This really covers the questions of 01 A.D. and we’ve simply moved on to more fundamental questions. No one was asking “Okay so amino acids and lipid chains assemble spontaneously in sunlight but how do you get from that to a cell?” And that’s really all we have left to answer.
I don’t consider “what is the nature of consciousness” to be an actual question.
“bUt ScIeNcE wAs MaDe Up ToO!!!”
“God works in mysterious ways” -Fuckers who have no clue what they’re talking about and are too lazy + dumb to find out anything on their own.
They also had no idea how mysterious the universe actually is. Quantum mechanics is bonkers.
Any creation myth sounds as plausible as any other. A few of them just got enough traction to indoctrinate enough generations of people that they don’t care about the completely implausible nature of their myth.
