this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
130 points (68.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35728 readers
985 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I didn't used to understand foreign involvement in wars, like the whole America-Vietnam shenanigans. But I can see why after watching this Israeli Palestine Conflict since birth.

But now it's like watching two children fighting over who's sandcastles can be built in the sandbox. And what do we do if children can't learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.

So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the cycle is something like this Assholes want power over others > they invent religion, which conveniently gives them power > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit > said stupid people push religion on their children > new crop of credulous people is raised > assholes want power over said idiots >... Religion... > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit.....

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It's a bit more complicated than that, as typically religion developed initially as an adaptive social evolution.

For example, early attempts at transitioning to agriculture failed because of a lack of sanitary practices, so disease ran rampant. Much later on when the transition happened again, it was around societies that had developed ideas around the importance of burying the dead, or burning the leftover parts of butchered meats "for the gods."

What you see more is evidence of alterations to religions in order to protect authoritarianism.

A good example of this is Deuteronomy 21:1-9.

The foundational ritual is one where when there was an unknown murder, the elders of the closest town needed to sacrifice one of its cows. From a sociological standpoint, this created a communal shared cost on unsolved murders occurring.

But notice what happens in 21:5.

Literally in the middle of the elders standing in the water breaking the neck of the cow, the priests - sons of Levi - show up to remind everyone that they are the ones chosen to perform rituals and pronounce judgement. And then in the very next line we're back to the elders and the cow in the water.

This line was probably a later addition to an earlier elder-driven ritual following a social shift to a priesthood based on ancestry controlling the religion.

There's a ton of things like this.

So religious practices developed from causes ranging from OCD to social evolution, and then those practices eventually get reworked to support the authorities, and then the continued survival of those religions tend to reinforce authoritarianism even after the original authorities are long dead.