>Not at all. Premodern socities engage in metaphysical speculation all the time. Bushmen work, what, 8 hours a week? Hunting and gathering is not labor-intensive.
Actually, hunting can be pretty exhausting and even labour intensive if you have to make all your own weapons from rock. Different if you have a 4WD and can just nip out and buy a nice ready-made rifle with a scope of course. Plus if you are a nomadic society without any beasts of burden, you have to carry everything you own, so a reference library of stone tablets is rather out of the question.
>>So many things that your ancestors have discerned about the world must simply be accepted without question. Otherwise, if every member of the tribe gives up the hunt and becomes a philosopher, the tribe will starve.
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>People became shamen. How many people in modern societies become philosophers/scientists? Almost none.
Not many people became shamen either, but that's irrelevant. The point is these societies didn't have any need for scientific specialists. Of course they needed priests, because their culture and entire social knowledge was coded in the form of religious dogma. You need one or two authorities to ensure that this doesn't get lost or mixed up accidently.
Modern society does need scientific specialists, because it is a dynamic technological society. Things are changing too fast to be able to rely on dogmatic transmission of social knowledge.
>>Material circumstances. You need security, leisure and access to great resources to be a scientific scholar. Few pre-modern societies had any of that.
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>There were/are premodern socities with a great deal of leisure time. Considerably more than most moderns have.
I didn't say you ONLY need leisure, I said you also need great resources and security. You can't make up for the lack of these other elements merely by having 24 hours a day of leisure.
>> >--
>>>It does beg the question. :)
>>
>>What question?
>
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>I meant that it assumes that religion must a priori by reducible to material circumstances,
I don't assume anything. But I'm not sure what you are hinting at there. Can you be a bit clearer? If you want to challenge my theory it would be helpful to go beyond vague assertions.
> and that such a reduction exhausts the content of religion. In fact, you can reduce anything to anything. I can reduce Bill Bartlet to his relationship to my pencil if I want to.
How can you reduce anything to anything? Can you turn me into solid gold? The final sentence is so meaningless that I can't even guess what you are trying to convey.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas