Monday, October 05, 2015

Just so stories …

 The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved.

The explanations offered do not even rise to the level of hypotheses, since they derive from no evidence, only supposition — how one might think and act if one were a human being eons ago in lion country and the grass started rustling.
Now let's suppose something else, that our distant ancestors were more sensitive to the natural world than we are. Bear in mind we're talking about some pretty sharp cookies now, people who figured out how to domesticate animals, make fire, who invented agriculture, carpentry, masonry, and — let's not forget — language and discourse. But the poor dumb fools understood the world and life in terms of personality, not chemicals, and were sure there was something called spirit and an invisible world corresponding to the one we see, one inhabited by its own hierarchy of beings. I would submit that this was a hypothesis based on experience and observation, i.e., evidence, not the idle fancy of people sitting at a desk.

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