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Comment by junofan | Hacker News Reader

That’s a bit cynical. Religion is more like a technology. It was continuously invented to solve problems and increase capacity. Newer religions superseded older and survived based on productive and coercive supremacy.

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If religion is a technology, it's inarguably one that prevented the development of a lot of other technologies for long periods of time. Whether that was a good thing is open to interpretation.

On the other hand it produced a lot of related technology. Calendars, mathematics, writing, agricultural practices, government and economic systems. Most of this stuff emerged as an effort to document and proliferate spiritual ideas.

I see your point, but I'd say religion's main technological purpose is as a storage system for the encoding of other technologies (and social patterns) into rituals, the reasons for which don't need to be understood; to the point that it actively discourages examination of their reasons, as what we could call an error-checking protocol. So a religion tends to freeze those technologies in the time at the point of inception, and to treat any reexamining of them as heresy. Calendars are useful for iron age farming, but you can't get past a certain point as a civilization if you're unwilling to reconsider your position that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, for example.

This is ahistorical, whiggish nonsense. The actual world is not a game of Civilization II.

Eh? I was talking about Galileo's trial for heresy.

Then you also understand nothing about Galileo.

I think it is hard to fully remove religious practice from species. I think it exist along a spectrum and that there are base ritualistic behaviors most animals engage with (e.g. a pets ritual around eating or play), organized social order sort of rituals (e.g. birds expecting a particular mating dance performed well and this sensibility shared among the local group of birds), and finally what we observe in our own development as a species, higher religion, but that is merely iteratively developed from layering these simple behaviors onto simple behaviors until the whole is quite elaborate in fact.

In that sense I think getting caught up in “religion bad for tech” zeitgeist misses the point of what religion actually is. Collectively shared ritual. Belief in God, and specific shades of that, is just the step of the dance the bird does in this case. Taking a step back, plenty of atheists engage in collectively shared ritual too. Belief in the 9-5, the bludgeon that is the four years to specialize vs lifelong apprentanceships towards true mastery, economics constraining choice rather than pure skill. Do these rituals not also hold our species and technological development back? If we talk about religion, it is worth also considering the mountain of other blockers towards progress we have built for ourselves in this collectively agreed upon daily society ritual we all partake upon.

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