Has anyone watched this series? I haven't seen much of it, but someone on the TV was going on about the pyramids and people not knowing how to make them back then. I went on a rant about it, and needed to vent a bit here, so... thoughts on anything involving that show?

Seen it a few times, the one guy needs to stay out of the tanning beds.

When I've seen the show it's usually focused on theories that ancient religious stories are the result of alien visitations. It's basically just a bunch of speculations applying that old saw about any sufficiently advanced civilization looking like magic.

as far as theories go, it isnt as ludacris as it seems

it explains why so many religions get so close to being right about some things, but their meanings get completely lost over time, leading to fanatical worship and twisting of words to "supernatural/sacred" bullshit.

which is exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of sheep farmers being told about physics and quantum mechanics from "godlike" alien beings, who would be unwilling/unable to share technology with such a primitive species (which would unquestionably end up using that technology to conquer and destroy. basically its the whole "paxians/urqa" argument)

it really only reveals a motivation for humans building the pyramids, the humans still wouldve had to build them with slaves, aliens would have no reason to build such things

the alternatives are:

1) that meditative thought can lead to knowledge of relativity and quantum mechanics, along with knowledge of the nature of time, and that people who have reached these understandings have explained these things in such a way as to "embellish" the truth about themselves and how they realised these things. (I.E. people claiming to be god, claiming to have talked to god, things which arent neccesarily incorrect but do involve a slight "warping" of the truth, especially in the concepts of "god")

astronomy/pyramids would most likely be attempts to further "solidify" that knowledge in structures as proof that the pharaoh/king is "god", which can be further "twisted" into insane beleifs such as "without human sacrifice, the sun will not rise"

tl;dr - every religion is a result of some asshole miscommunicating buddhist ideas to his people and abusing the "credibility" he attained by spreading those ideas (and that hinges on buddhist ideas being correct)

2) understanding the universe assists intelligent beings in survival (there is no evidence whatsoever for this, and the success of christianity indicates the opposite is true) causing natural selection to favour them and their societies (yet again, the success of christianity indicates the opposite. societies where the people are subservient, unquestioning, and dumb tend to be the most successful)

humans are the bane of all

You make some pretty inaccurate assumptions. "Subservient, unquestioning, and dumb" can easily describe a fairly large percentage of the world's population without requiring any religion at all. In other words, subservience, etc. can not be used to explain the success of religious societies since those qualities are just as prevalent among non-religious societies. "Sheeplike" is the natural state of a large percentage of all humans. Second, "subservient, unquestioning, and dumb" also fails to describe all Christians or religious people. Remember that until the last couple of hundred years essentially all scientific advancement in the Western and near Eastern worlds was made by deeply religious people, whether they were Jews, Christians, Muslims, or even polytheists.

As for your quandary about why religious societies seem to thrive, there really is no mystery about it. Throughout history religions have given people a common identity and a framework around which they could coalesce to form an actual society. Religions have also provided the structure needed to pass on certain wisdom, usually in the form of laws, which was essential to human survival and advancement. In the ancient world a religious "law" requiring people to wash their hands before they ate was good for the society as a whole, whether you actually believe that it was divine or not. At the time, religion was the only method by which such ideas could be taught to a large, illiterate population.

Another example: Jewish law required that when soldiers on campaign made a camp they should place their latrines outside the camp rather than right in the middle of it, because God would be walking among His soldiers, looking over them at night, and it would be a Very Bad Thing if He were to trip in a pit full of poo. As ridiculous as it may seem to us that an all-powerful, all-knowing god could accidentally step in a latrine, that law undoubtedly helped keep Jewish soldiers more combat ready than soldiers from armies that didn't have any rules about field sanitation. This is just one example out of thousands that help explain why a religious society would thrive, assuming that the laws of that religion were actually good for the society.

When we look at the rules from various religions of the past, many of them look ridiculous to us, but those rules were usually very advanced for the time period in which they were written. No, ancient Muslim and Jewish laws usually aren't very palatable to us. However, given the technology level and the needs of the time, they were the best possible way for those societies to survive and advance. The proof lies in the fact that they did advance by outperforming neighbors with similar technology bases and resources. Of course, it would also be possible for a religion to make laws that were actually bad for the society at a particular time and place. In that case, though, the society and its religion would have gone extinct pretty quickly, and we probably never would have heard about it to argue its merits.

Yummy! Walls of text xxx

it baffles me how you always seem miss the point, and then proceed to back it up with supporting arguments, thinking that you're proving me wrong when all you're doing is attacking a viewpoint that i never proposed in the first place.

it was the mistrust of the "god says so, so do it!" argument which drove the enlightenment, and that mistrust never appeared in other societies. that is how the west came to dominate. the failure of catholic christian imperialism lead to the people questioning things and thinking for themselves.

it was the failure of their religious leaders which lead them to greatness. all the religion did was create the circumstances (after it had fallen) where the people could communicate ideas in a favourable enviroment

the religion only made them "conform" to the point where they could communicate ideas. and the fall of the religion was what primed them for new ideas.

the religion did not bring them science and the enlightenment, the failure of the religion is what brought them science and the enlightenment.

holy shit, if anyone reads these walls of text they need more to try harder at not sucking.

why would you write that much? and especially on a topic as trivial as this one?

-ERMAN

It's landswimmer... he'll argue about the possibility of potatoes becoming sentient if you let him.

This is where you missed my point. Yes, pretty much everyone was stuck to feudal life of working in some field. That was simply the result of the economy and technology level of the time, though. Educating all those people was simply beyond the resources that were available. Too many of them were needed for basic food production. The church was able to provide for institutions of higher learning for at least a few, usually with money extorted from kings and barons who would otherwise have spent the money on yet another war against his neighbors. Without the higher education facilities of the church the dark ages could have continued indefinitely. Again, the actions of the church were exactly what that society needed at that time.

As for the enlightenment being brought on by the collapse of the Catholic Church, I'm not so sure that you couldn't reverse that and say that the collapse of the Catholic Church's power was brought on by the enlightenment. Either way, it's a moot point since even after the protestant reformation, all of the universities were still run by one church or another. The only difference was that some of them were run by new sects of Christianity.

Heresy normally didn't have much to do with scientists by the way. After all, the scientists were mostly priests anyway. When a scientific discovery was in opposition to the current interpretation of the Bible OR other accepted scientific doctrine, the scientist could submit his work to a board of other scientist / priests, and they would determine whether his work was valid - much the same as the peer review process of today. If hard scientific evidence contradicted their interpretation of the Bible, they went back and re-examined their interpretation of the Bible. If they decided the evidence wasn't good enough, they prohibited the scientist / priest from publishing his work. If he published anyway, then he was in the position of a Catholic priest preaching a brand of Catholicism that was not the same as the church, and THEN he was guilty of heresy (which didn't normally end with torture or execution). Questioning the church's doctrine was NOT heresy.

this would be so much more productive we could agree on which subject we're discussing.

for the same reason you put hours into building bases every uni despite how un-fun i consider basebuilding.



possibility?... but if potatoes arent sentient, how did you post in this thread?

fuck I'm found out..