The origin of religion is in socalled ancestor "worship" and kinship systems, and is highly rational, as it is the origin of human culture, which gives humans a big adaptive advantage compared with other species.
Kinship and myth systems organize the relationships in a living generation based on tracing relationships to dead ancestors. In this, the experiences of those ancestors are preserved and used by that living generation. By this humans , unlike others species, found a way to accumulate and preserve for succeeding generations, the experiences of past generations - science/theory derived from the practice of their ancestors actually , and passed on to them in rituals, myths and kin systems. Ancient religion is actually rudimentary science in this sense. The stone tools left over are evidence of ancient materialism.
Kinship systems are the central organizing principle of all aspects - economics, myths, rituals etc - of pre-class society. (See _Culture and Practical Reason_ by Marshall Sahlins ;On the "rationaity" and socalled prescientific thinking, see _The Savage MInd_ by Levi-Strauss)
God and all the problems arising with the major "theisitic" religions arise with the beginnings of class divided society.
Idealism is a modern problem originating in class divided society . Materialism continues the original human tradition of mythical/kinship thinking, It unites ancient and modern communism.
Charles
>>> Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> 06/03/08 12:35 PM >>>
Yes, "rationality" is not the right word.
I think part of what I've been trying to get at is the following. The difference between a "scientific," if you want to call it that, or mythological or theological worldview is really a difference between the way the different thought-structures organize objects of experience. Despite what the empiricists may have fooled themselves into believing, experience contains a lot more than just sense perception -- feelings, hunches, everything that can enter your consciousness. You or I have learned and know, or think we know, that when we see something in a dream, it wasn't real, and that when we feel something is looking at us and can't find anything, or feel the presence of a dead loved one, that this it is all an illusion, probably explainable by unconscious thought processes or some neural quirk or whatever. Ugh the Caveman has no such belief system -- nobody ever told him that sense perception trumps other forms of mental content. He may not even have any notion of "sense perception." He feels that something is watching him, can't find it, and comes to the logical conclusion that what was watching him is invisible.
So, when people think mythologically or superstitiously or theologically, or whatever you want to call it, what they are doing is the natural thought process of organizing objects of consciousness. This probably precedes the human species by some time.
--- cgrimes at rawbw.COM wrote:
>
> The mistake of the theory that mythological thinking
> is the precusor
> to scientific thinking is that mythological systems
> of thought are
> rational within their own assumptions about the
> world. And, there is a
> deep difference between a rational explanation
> derived from its axioms
> so to speak and a scientific explanation.
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