= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
James_Miller comments on Moloch: optimisation, "and" vs "or", information, and sacrificial ems - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (58)
One interpretation of Greek Mythology is that the Greeks didn't really believe in their gods, but the gods represented different aspects of human nature. We are sort of doing the same here and so following in the classical tradition.
I agree that this is a possible interpretation, but (just to be clear) it isn't a very sensible one, is it? Being one of those "People we would naturally expect to be very different from us in some respect are actually very similar, only they behave exactly as if they differed, for a complicated reason" things
I don't know about Greek Mythology, but this is totally a real thing regarding Hinduism (though not necessarily the predominant view). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism
(I suspect certain Greeks believed in them literally and other Greeks believed in them as metaphors but they never realized they disagreed for reasons akin to these.)
They did in fact have open disagreements. Most famously, Socrates was executed over one.
That depends probably a lot of what you mean with "really believe". They probably didn't believe in the same sense of "believe" that 21st century Christians in their Gods.
Not all 21st-century Christians "believe" in the same sense, either. If a future anthropologist or classicist were to reconstruct the "beliefs" of modern Christianity from the kind of patchwork sources that we have for ancient Greek myth, they might have a pretty hard time.
I wonder what people living 10,000 years from now (assuming that "people" would even exist then, however defined) would think of christianity. In that time, one of the world's dominant religions might have started 8,000 from now/2,000 years "before" their time, and only a few antiquarians would even know of the existence of the christian religion. They would have to reconstruct it from fragmentary evidence comparable to efforts to reconstruct, say, the ancient Sumerian religion.