Once the old weirdo in robes (moses) left, the people rejoiced and a wild orgy ensued.

There is a lesson to be learned here, ditch the religious leaders, and let the party begin!

Religious people are a product the Dark Ages.

I've yet to meet a monotheist who admits to worshipping a metaphorical God. They always seem very sure it exists and exactly what it wants.

@David1955
I’ve yet to meet a monoatheist who admits to non-belief in metaphor.

@barjoe
Religious people existed a long time before the dark ages...

“The phrase “Dark Age” itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. This became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.

As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the “Dark Ages” appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century), and now scholars also reject its usage in this period. The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether owing to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.”

[en.wikipedia.org]

@skado Yes but today's religious people are living in "The Dark Ages". Some kind of religious belief probably existed amongst hominids.

@barjoe
That’s a sweeping generalization that isn’t informed by the facts of history and science.

@skado Once a being evolved with enough thought to contemplate their existence and fear of mortality, they invented simplistic explanations. Only intelligent beings can be that stupid.

@barjoe
“Just-so” stories are simplistic explanations. Becoming familiar with the relevant history and science is time-consuming, and sometimes challenging to our comfortable assumptions, but never simplistic.

“Once a being evolved with enough thought to contemplate their existence and fear of mortality, they invented simplistic explanations” is a “just-so” story. Another simplistic explanation.

The hard-won anthropological data tell a much more complex and nuanced story.

@skado It is that simple. Humans contrived the notion of a deity. The supernatural exists only in people's minds. That just so happens to be the truth.

@barjoe
Those statements are highly correlated to isolated parts of the truth, which is much larger and not at all simple. The notion of a deity did come from humans, but it was probably mostly not “contrived” ( planned ). It was most likely bioculturally evolved as an emergent property of our species, and thereby accomplished with little conscious knowledge of its implications.

Many phenomena that we refer to as supernatural are actually natural phenomena. What exists only in people’s minds is incomplete or inaccurate explanations of natural phenomena they don’t understand. One example being the idea that religions are about the supernatural. Religions are primarily about biology.

@skado Religions are primarily about fear of death. Not wanting to accept that our existence will end in abrupt darkness and finality. Lower species never "think" about it.

@barjoe
There’s lots of stuff “lower” species don’t think about. There’s also lots our own doesn’t think about. Like the role religions play in counter-balancing evolutionary mismatch.

@skado Evolutionary Mismatch is what you want to talk about. The OP wanted to speak about how religion made things worse for humanity. One example is religion promoting large families among less educated people. That would be an example of evolutionary mismatch, so religion has not counter-balanced that.

@barjoe
Evolutionary mismatch is what causes species extinction. If it weren’t for religion we would be extinct now. That’s not religion making things worse, in the net effect. The invention of agriculture was what allowed people to have large families. They didn’t need religion to tell them it was ok to copulate (I promise).

@skado Religion sucks. Religion in this modern era is overpopulating the planet with ignorant religious people. Smart people use birth control.

@barjoe
An abundance of food is what causes population growth in any species.

@skado The species I'm concerned with are humans. Childhood starvation is in overpopulated countries in Africa and South Asia. Religion preys on the poor to get them to pray. An abundance of food causes population growth? I always thought it was from fucking without contraception.

@barjoe
Works the same with any species, humans included.
[foodsystemprimer.org]

Invisible something.

Well at least he’s got balls, right? ( )