Was religion the cause of civilised societies?

Re: Was religion the cause of civilised societies?
I think that agriculture and technology from the invention of weapons and tools in the iron and bronze ages onwards played a bigger role, personally.

RELIGION IS PROPGANDA, they used it to keep the masses under control so they could exploit them to keep their "society" running smoothly.

when people start asking questions its NO GOOD NO GOOD!!!!!!!

That would depend upon what one meant by civilized society. We do know that temple societies--i.e., societies in which the activities of the members were organized by a priesthood--have been successful in many places, and many times. However, the point that Contrex is making is well-taken. The priests of "Ur of the Chaldees" did not invent agriculture, they simply organized to exploit it as efficiently as possible, and the evidence is good that the point of the exploitation was to support the priesthood and the military. The same holds true with copper and bronze, which were "discovered" and exploited before temple societies existed. In the case of iron, it did not enter human civilization until temple societies and organized religions were already in existence, but there is no reason to assume that organized religion were responsible for the exploitation of iron.

To me, the evidence is clear that organized religion can offer some organizational benefits, but only so long as it wields a power of terror over its adherents. Formerly, the terror was a present superstitious belief in the dangers of offending a present god. Now, it is a superstitious terror of the consequences of defiance in a putative afterlife. Taken all in all, to my mind, the historical evidence is that organized religion is a parasitic organism which feeds on existent societies.

its wierd when you look at civilization.

look at the south americans, they had no competition. so they got to buildings and agriculture and they stopped.(as far as i know, i STILL havent read deeper into the pre-american civilizations.

look at the cradle of civilizations, the spread of literacy, CONSTANT wars, cultures mingling, trade routes. china, europe, russia, mongols hittites assyrians, vikings, ottomans, macedonia, , i cant even remember all of the invaders. (i love the assyrians, they took out the old israel if i remember correctly. god didnt help much then..)
I think its safe to say, war made society as we know it today. no?

and wherever there was war, there was a religion being used to make it a "holy" war, am i right?

are war and religion related? without religion IMO, humans wouldnt die for a "country" or a "cause"

anyways , interesting stuff happening back in the good ol days.

All wars start off as holy, whether recognised religion is involved or not.

First off we need to draw a line between spiritualism and religion. So far as we can tell spiritualism goes back a very long ways. It was an verbal passing down of wisdom from one generation to the next. The oldest that we have any good record of is the TAO, but some have guessed that something nearly identical to the TAO also existed in the West at the time. There was no written language, the wisdom was always in flux, and there was no institution called "the church". Spiritualism was interwoven into all of life, and all took part.

At some point special people were chosen to be in charge of the wisdom. much later written language allowed the wisdom to become codified. we moved into having churches and religion and arguing over which version was right. The church became an institution and started to look out for its own best interests.

The point: My theory is that the shift from spiritualism to religion was very important. The church standardized the wisdom, and became in charge of passing it around. The church had an motive to organize events that drew the people into large organized masses. It became clear that with large numbers of people working together amazing things could get done. Because of the church people came to see that large groups of people working together made all better off. I don't think that you ever would have had the ancient cities of maybe the 4th but for sure by the 3rd millennium B.C. were it not for religion.

From there we know what happened, the Churches sponsored rulers and became in charge of education, and were the primary institution with the ability to manage society. We know that during the times of history that religion played a huge role in the advancements in civilization.

Do we still need religion in an age where most are educated outside of the church, and in an age were in most areas of life gatekeepers to knowledge are out of business because of the book and the Internet? I doubt it, I think we are going back to spiritualism passed down from person to person.

Re: Was religion the cause of civilised societies?


I'd credit the ability of humans to "learn" and "teach" ourselves as the basis of any society. Religion comes in well after that.

The apes have a rudimentary learning capacity - they can teach each other through observation. One does something and another can watch and learn from it but that is about as far as it goes. That method of learning is very slow (you can only demonstrate something for a few others at a time otherwise those in the "back of the crowd" aren;t actually seeing what is going on) highly susceptible to error and a very "hit or miss" process since they have no feedback loop. One watches another do something and then others repeat it. If they get it wrong the "teacher" doesn't correct them.

Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to communicate through language which means we can pass information directly without requiring the observation steps. I can tell you how to do something (either verbally or in written form) and explain the do's and don'ts as well as why something should be done. Once you comprehend it (and we have feedback loops so I can question you to be sure you do) you can then pass that information on to others as well. This is hundreds of times faster than passing knowledge through observation only.

Religion is one of many things that is taught/learned and different societies teach/learn different religions.

This is a rather naive comment, but don't take that as a bitter, personal attack.

In many societies, the hand of religion rested lightly on the polity. Rome had a civic religion, and a well-organized society. Each officer of the state had a civic, a military and a religious function. There were a handful of officers of the state who had a purely religious functions--the priests who were responsible for divination and the censors. But the function of the censors only applied in the city, and it was not what we think of when we think of the the word censor--the censors were responsible for certifying the membership of each tribe (the word tribe derives from Roman political organization, and was the basic political unit of the state), from which the concept of and the word census derive. Public voting was conducted by tribe, and levies for the legions came from the tribe, so the function of the censors was crucial to the state. Eventually, the censors became indirectly responsible for public morality, in that they were also responsible for assuring that all citizens practiced the civic religion, and so for certifying that the public were not impious--which is how the concept of censorship meaning to forbid something arose.

But that was the only office which had a unique function and practice--military officers on campaign could conduct divinations, whether or not a civic priest was available. All civic officers outside the priesthood (and the censors were priests) also had a juridical function in the Roman courts, and a military office when on campaign with the legions. Therefore, for example, the quaestor when in the city was responsible for financial administration, and in the courts was responsible for sureties (as in bail posted for a suspect) and the collection of fines. In ceremonies of the civic religion, the quaestor was responsible for the provision of birds for divination and the physical effects with which religious functions were conducted, such as wine and food for sacrificial or celebratory rites. On campaign with the legions, the quaestor was responsible for the "war chest," with which purchases were made in the field, and for the payroll of the members of the legion, when the order of Plebs finally forced the Senate to agree to pay them while on campaign.

In none of this, however, was any Roman civic or military officer required to proselytize, or to enforce any sanction against any other religious practice or belief. The Romans never went to war with anyone for religious reasons. All Roman citizens and free residents of the empire were require at least to pay lip service to the civic religion (no one gave a rat's ass what the slaves did or believed, so long as they did not publicly offend the tenets of the civic religion). However, having done so, all citizens and free residents were thereafter free to practice, believe in and observe the rites of any religion they pleased. If a particular region or city or town failed to observe the civic religion, then penalties could be levied against them, and if they remained adamantly opposed to observing the civic religion, then the legions might be sent against them. But even among the legions, any religion which appealed to the legionnaires could be practiced, so long as they duly deferred to and sacrificed to the legions "Eagles," the symbol of the Roman state in the legion. The cult of Mithras was extremely popular in the Roman state and especially in the legions in the period of roughly the first through the fourth centuries, which accounts for why the christians borrowed so heavily from mithraism when they cobbled together their religion. Jews and christians (and the christians were originally and for a long time seen by the Romans as simply a cult of the Jews) were often persecuted, not by the state (see for example, the letters between Pliny and the Emperor Trajan, in which the emperor basically ordered a "don't ask, don't tell" policy), but by their neighbors. Jews and then christians often refused to go through the motions of the civic religious rituals, claiming that it would offend against their god, which could well bring down the wrath of the state on a region or city or town, so that Jews and christians were as often as not attacked by their neighbors who did not wish to suffer as a result of their stubbornness. Persecution of christians as a state policy did not appear until the reign of Septimius Severus at the end of the second century--and in his case, he was paying back christians who had backed his rival and lost. Later, as christians became embroiled in the politics of the Empire, they could suffer state-sanctioned persecution when they backed any claimant to imperial authority, and then lost, or fell into the hands of the opponents of the boy they were backing.

Basically, although the Roman state expected at least lip service and going through the motions with regard to their state religion, the Empire was religiously tolerant, and never went to war on a religious pretext. The Roman state existed from 754 BCE when the city was founded (at least according to the Roman account) until Constantinople fell to the Osmanli Turks in 1453--so for 2000 years the most coherent political organization in European history largely ignored religion on a political basis, except with regard to those who stupidly and stubbornly put their own heads into a noose.

The same can be said of the Chinese Empire (one ought actually to say Empires, since it was a rather fluid polity). There never was a state religion, beyond the fiction that the emperor was the "Son of Heaven." Even then, Heaven did not imply the existence of any god--the Chinese were, however very much convinced of the existence of spirits and of a spirit world. The most common religious observance of the Chinese peasant was the worship of the spirits of one's ancestors, for which there was customary practice, but no dogmatic ritual requirement. Throughout the history of the various dynasties, no religious practice was ever required, and in fact, the Chinese were even less strenuous than the Romans, having nothing equivalent to the Roman civic religion. If you read Marco Polo's accounts of the journey to China, and his travels for the Yuan emperor Kublai, you'll see that he constantly refers to the number of christians, Jews, Saracens (by which he means Muslims) and "Pagans" (in which he displays his religious bigotry) in each region through which he passes. The highly successful Semitic merchants known as the Aramaeans (from whence, Aramaic, the language of Palestine in the time when Jesus is alleged to have lived) became confessional Jews, meaning that they converted to the practice of the Jewish religion. They spread the practice wherever they travelled, which is why most Arabs who were not "pagan" when Mohammed arose were confessional Jews, and they made it all the way to China. In later years, the Nestorian christians followed the same paths as the Aramaean merchants had done, which is why Polo found both Jews and christians all along the route of his journeys. The Chinese only ever began to take religion into account in the 20th century, when they began to see christian missionaries as tools of the hated Western powers, and slaughtered them and their Chinese followers--but for the good and sufficient political reason that they represented a hated foreign influence.

Even when christianity with its full panoply of bigotry took control of Europe, religious adherence could not be relied upon to indicate who would ally with, or fight against whom. You couldn't tell the players without a score card. Until the hardcore religious bigotry and persecution of Ferdinand and Isabella was imposed at the end of the 15th century in Spain, it was common to see christians hiring Muslims for political and military dirty work, and Muslims hiring christians. El Cid, the famous Spanish hero, was available as a soldier of fortune and a military contractor to the highest bidder, without regard to their confessional peculiarities.

In a fit of incredible stupidity, the German electors in 1519 chose King Carlos of Spain (then still a teenager) to be the Holy Roman Emperor (heavily influenced by liberal bribery based on the gold and silver of the "New World"). In 1517, Martin Luther had published his 95 Theses against the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the practice of simony (look it up). Carlos, as the Emperor Charles V called an Imperial Diet (like an occasional and erratic congress of Imperial dignitaries in Germany) in 1521, and his purpose was to force Luther to recant, or to have him seized (and probably executed). He failed of his purpose, and the Wars of the Reformation eventually resulted. However, the religious excuse really counts for little or nothing in the face of political considerations. The French King, François I, absolutely hated Charles, and went to war with him in Italy. Even though he was defeated by the Spanish in 1525, and was made a prisoner, as soon as he was free, he renewed hostilities against Charles. He didn't give a rat's ass that he and Charles were both Catholics, and that Charles was attempting to suppress Protestants--he hated Charles and considered Spain a threat to France (a very obvious and intelligent view to hold), and he even went so far as to ally himself with the Osmanli Turks (think, "Ottoman" Empire), and in 1543, they launched an attack on Nice, which was then controlled by the Emperor. Politics always trumps religion in war.

The great religious war of Europe was the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Initially, the excuse for war and the genuine cause was tension between the Protestants and the Catholics. The Catholic League, lead by the Holy Roman Emperor (the HRE was almost always a member of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty, and the Austrians remained Catholic during the Reformation), successfully defeated the Protestants, originally incited by the King of Denmark. In 1625 the Bohemian (read: Czech) military genius Albrecht Wallenstein raised an army for the Emperor, and cooperating with the forces of the Catholic League, knocked Denmark out of the war. By 1628, he and the Imperial general Tilly were basically the last men standing, and he marched an army of 40,000, which was swelled to about 100,000 with camp followers and opportunistic brigands, into northern Germany, and attempted to set up his own little kingdom based on Stralsund on the Baltic coast (he was basically a jumped-up thug of great military skill and endless ambitions)--but was foiled when Swedish troops (who were Lutherans) came to the defense of the city. He made a lot of enemies, so in 1630, those German princes convinced the incredibly stupid Emperor, Ferdinand II, to fire him. At the end of that same year, the even greater military genius, King Gustav Adolf (known to European history as Gustavus Adolphus) of Sweden landed at Stralsund, and began the campaign which was to make him ever after famous as a "Great Captain." Although Gustav Adolf was killed on the battle field of Lützen less than two years later, his minister, Oxenstiern, continued the war and acted as unofficial regent for Gustav's toddler daughter, Christina, who was now the Queen of Sweden.

What has this to do with religious war? Well, Catholic France was still fighting Spain (and would not definitively defeat them until 1643), and now the great minister of Louis XIII, Richelieu, saw an Austrian victory as an unacceptable threat to France (completely plausible), so he negotiated with Oxensteirn and French gold began to pay for Swedish-German armies, and eventually, French troops marched into the Rhineland, and even into Swabia to cooperate with Swedish and German Protestant troops.

Once again, in war, politics always trumps religion.

great post man, damn. haha.

Thanks, Boss. I drive people nuts at parties.

i didnt expect it to be so thorough.