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From a religious point of view, there's the obvious problem of interpretation. Very few religions offer divine revelations directly to the believers, and those that do often have strong cultural ceremonies that can influence people's interpretation of the events. Most religions go through prophets, priests, shamans, medicine men, or other such representatives who receive the divine word and then interpret it for others; this is often done partially by interpreting signs and symbols rather than just plain words, there is no way to verify that they are accurately interpreting or presenting the revelations, and there's no solid way to even tell the difference between a real prophet/revelation and a fake one cooked up by some fraudster. Secondly, religions and even religious branches compete and often try to stamp each other out. The contents of the New Testament weren't decided by direct divine decree, but rather by (put simply) a bunch of bishops who got together, gathered up all the Jesus stories, and deciding which ones fit the mythos they wanted to emphasize and which ones didn't. Many of the biggest splits in Christianity and Islam basically come down to arguments about who the real representative of God is; Protestantism basically originated from widespread desire to deny the divinity and/or supremacy of the Catholic Church as an organization, since it was terribly corrupt and wielded much political power, and Islam's Sunni/Shia split originated from a leadership dispute. Differing interpretations were only to be expected, since only your religion was the true one and the other religious heads were fakes, liars, or had fallen from the right path. There's been plenty of decrees by popes and bishops since that have shaped and changed Catholicism - and caused it to differentiate from other Christian branches that didn't follow the pope's pronouncements. Most other religions also have hundreds or thousands of years of decrees by human leaders, with each branch accepting rules made by different leaders. There's also the question of the divine will which might possibly be giving incomplete or flawed interpretations to people on purpose, or changing its mind over time. The very nature of the Abrahamic religions, in fact, kind of necessitates this interpretation, since the divine changes its mind a whole lot in the Old Testament, and then the New Testament comes in as an add-on to the Old with some changes and updates, and then the Koran does the same thing to the New (I'm simplifying considerably here). That also goes back to the leadership thing - two thousand years ago, the only real difference between Judaism and Christianity was that one believed in the divinity of Jesus and his teachings, and the other didn't. Christianity started as nothing more than a Jewish cult. Now, from a non-religious point of view, most people like to think of their brains as clear-thinking beep-boop logic machines which make rational judgments, maybe with some emotion thrown in for flavor. That's not really true, though. In reality, just as our visual cortex takes a lot of shortcuts to ease the workload of seeing, subconscious takes a lot of cognitive shortcuts designed to make thinking easier and faster. For all our smarts, we're still animals; our smarts exist to help us survive, not to solve difficult philosophical problems, and part of that is orienting toward quick and confident decision-making on things that matter (even if there's a risk of the decision being wrong) rather than standing around confused or pondering things indecisively. Until the invention of agriculture, people didn't really have time to think. And although that is no longer true, those mental work-savers - like gut feelings and stubbornly sticking to what we already believe - remain, which is why we had to come up with methods for ensuring reliable critical thinking in science and other fields. Just as the shortcuts our visual cortex takes leave us open to optical illusions that exploit the flaws in those shortcuts, our conscious minds can easily be led to strong and unshakeable belief in totally wrong things if we run into a situation or person that can attack the weak points in those mental shortcuts.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:18
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 08:49 |
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