Did everyone used to believe in god because people in the olden days were dumber than we are today?

So this is how it happened… an appealing story, though… one has to admit.

It’s really easy for people today to assume that people who lived ‘back then’ were dumber. 

And some modern historians want to belive that a lot of people who lived ‘back then’ were secret athiests, becuase today it’s pretty obvious that much of what organized religion will claim is fairly laughable and unscientific.  (Excepting for the christian ethical code, which in its historical sense, is probably one of the better ethical codes that any religion has come up with – a good mix of humanism and egalitarianism lies at the core of the gospels).

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Are there downsides to the growth of technology?

 

I like to think about how truly and deeply quiet it was…

From my own experience and from talking with other college professors, I know that the great majority of university students assumes that technology is almost all good.  Historians tell us that that the average person in western society became increasingly enamoured of science, and of increasing technology, since about the mid-nineteenth century; at roughly the same time when advances in chemistry and medicine enabled the creation of effective drugs on a whole new scale.  While many traditional medicines did help many ailments, there were also plenty of basic things which were untreatable by such methods.  For example, the industrial revolution caused many people to live crowded together in cities, so that they could be close to the factories where they often worked for 16 hour days, six days per week. 

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John Donne’s Compasses.

I’d just like to type this somewhere:  everything is connected.  That’s in essence the essence of Platonism.  It’s all about reason, and philosophy, but it looks for the ways in which things influence other things.  Thus, an image of a compass, of the kind used to draw a circle, is a good metaphor for the Platonist approach.  To a two-dimensional person, who lacks the perspective of a third dimension, the two points of the compass on a piece of paper would seem to be separate.  But to someone with the proper perspective (wisdom, knowledge, insight, education, however you’d like to put it), they can see that there is much more going on than simply two points on paper, one of which is fixed and the other which draws circles around it.  On a higher plane, the two points draw closer to one unity, which symbolizes how they are both emanations from one idea.  Now, one doesn’t have to literally believe in ‘unities’ or even ‘ideas,’ or ‘ideals’ as if they truly existed, let alone believe in ’emanations,’ to see that, very often times, there are a lot of things which don’t seem to be connected, but which are, for example, spitting on the sidewalk and dictatorship (see previous post).

And the most brilliant use of this idea that I know of, which dates from the time when it was still possible to believe in a Ptolemaic universe, i.e., before Galileo came and proved once and for all that the Sun was the center of the solar system, and that most of the lovely medieval ideas that go along with the ‘harmony of the spheres’ idea were proven to be scientifically impossible, is John Donne’s poem, A Valediction:  Forbidding Mourning.  Which I’ll reproduce here:

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