--- Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at enterprize.net.au>
wrote:
> At 5:19 AM -0400 27/6/03, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> >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.
> >---
> >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.
> >---
> >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?
> >
> >---
> >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
> ___________________________________
>
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