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Red Wine Rants I - Thoughts on belief
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Belief (and by extension superstition) exists only for people who have their world views dictated to them by a central institution.
In the beginning, when humankind first started to ask why-type questions about the world around them, belief did not exist. There was only the world and a tangle of notions about cause and effect, based on how each individual person experienced the world and tried to make sense of it all.
reality was a whole. There was no difference in kind between what westerners today call the physical and the metaphysical, the material and the spiritual. For example: The "dead" ancestors of past generations were still part of the social group, and they were still active participants in the society, with all the glee, temper tantrums and hissy fits one could expect of a person. One would have to interact with the ancestors and spirits as much as with the neighbours and relatives, even if the ancestors required slightly different means of communication. It would be like living in a world where the average lifespan is a thousand years, where prestige and power increases with age, where you live with your family, and where you must do what you parents, grandparent, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, great-great-great-grandparents etc, etc... tell you to do.
Sounds fun, right?
All these different perceptions of how the world works could freely be exchanged, adhered to or abandoned by individual persons or social groups.
No-one had the time, power or reach to make sure others thought as they did about the world.
but such time, power and reach would become much more available as larger societies, sporting more complex social structures started to emerge. Belief gets introduced into the world with the emergence of statehood. For Northern Europe this is about AD 700 or so, but the timing varies immensely around the world. There is indeed still areas of the world that do not acknowledge the nation-state structure they are pigeon-holed into.
The state structure is associated with a need for extensive energy surplus to enable the non-food producing members of society to be fed and to make sure that enough energy is available to sustain the social organisation that the system is built upon. The most important tool for fulfilling such a need is being able to justify it, and that can only happen if everyone is on the same page, i.e. has the same view of how the world works.
Ahh, religion. It is such a streamlined neat little package, complete with a very energetically hyped and often militantly defended FAQ. How can I...? READ THE FAQ, n00b!!! *WHACK!*.
Most times the FAQ doesn't cover everything, and in this little analogy the admins (priests) don't have a clue about programming(causal relationships), so they just refer to the FAQ a lot, complain about "stupid n00b questions", and ask people to shut the hell up or face the consequences.
Such behavior invariably leaves people to go elsewhere with some of the questions they have, and this is precisely where the notion of belief is born.
Belief is the view of the world that is dessiminated and perpetuated by the religious institution and backed by the system in power. One Nation obeying one god, through the mediation of one king. A coincidence? yeah right!
Superstition (or heresy) then, is the part of how people experience and make sense of the world that is not covered (or indeed covered poorly) in the FAQ. It is outside centralized control and manipulation by the religious institution, more often than not because it runs counter what is represented in the FAQ. It is driven by experience, is dynamic and not set in stone.
Go on... have a day beyond belief.
Cheers
-m
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