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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

It is almost impossible to imagine that the writings of any long-lived society would not have ample quantities of "timeless wisdom". In fact it would be striking and unusual if it were otherwise.

Much wisdom can be difficult to stumble upon but is self-evident once known. Long-lived societies are sure to import all such wisdom from around them, then discover more for themselves over time.

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You're right; the main way that the bible (and by extension religion) is important in this regard is that it's survived, in various forms, for as long as it has. I kinda believe you need a religion to preserve knowledge and wisdom like this for so long.

I mean tangentially related, a while ago there was an article about how to safeguard nuclear waste storage for the next 100.000 years; one suggestion was to create a religion around it and its preservation. Something that can survive an intellectual step backwards. (Not unheard of; see the Greek and Roman societies of old. Their knowledge was lost for a long time, but Christianity survived. Of course their knowledge getting lost may be related to the rise of Christian religions as well)

> I kinda believe you need a religion to preserve knowledge and wisdom like this for so long.

Depends on how high you set the bar for 'survive'.

We have a few of the writing of Euclid, Archimedes and other Greeks, and mostly they weren't preserved for religious reasons.

Religion was certainly an effective carrier for stories prior to the age of the printing press. Unfortunately most religions lose the ability to adapt and error correct, which means that they end up stalling progress as surely as they preserve it.

Exactly. I'm pretty sure one can find "lots of timeless wisdom" in the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Norse Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, the Necronomicon, etc., etc.

especially in the age of limited literacy and scribal skills, I'm not sure people would have invested much time in copying and archiving ideas and texts they thought were garbage. this is sort of a literary survivorship bias at play, it would seem.

Yes. But the Necronomicon is one of two things (depending on what you're talking about): A fictional grimoire, or a piece of fiction (a hoax, even).

I know, throwing that in was my lame attempt at humor. :-)

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