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Lumifer comments on March 2015 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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The very widespread practice of non-symbolic sacrifices, for example.
What sacrifices count as non-symbolic? Animal sacrifice? Human?
Why is this interpreted as taking (similar) religious beliefs more literally, rather than just having different beliefs?
Is there a quantitative argument to be made that more beliefs were more literal in older times, apart from some examples?
Because if you don't literally believe that the ritual will win you useful-in-real-life god's favor, each sacrifice reduces your chances to survive and prosper.
If you want to get numbers involved, you first need to specify (with numbers) what does "more literal" mean.
The same could be said about most religious rituals. There are various theories of signalling honesty, in-group commitment, and riches though costly sacrifices.
Why ascribe the change in sacrifices, for example, to a less literal modern religious belief, rather than to a less central role for modern religion, or sacrifice becoming less important compared to other religious behaviors?
I don't know - gwern talked about more literal ancient beliefs, I only asked what he meant and how he knew it.
I don't think this is true. Take contemporary mainstream Christianity or Judaism, as the religions most familiar to LW. Do most rituals meaningfully reduce the chances to survive and prosper?
"Less literal" belief and "less central" role are correlated :-)
The rituals require money (tithe and other church collections), time (church attendance) and effort (e.g. kashrut and ritual cleanliness). They also forbid some useful things like contraceptives.
Whether this reduces prosperity depends on how you define that, I guess. As for survival, I'm not well familiar with the form modern Christianity takes in places where survival is a real concern, like some African countries. Anyway, there are some good arguments that especially for the poor and weak, modern social religious organizations improve the chances to survive, because the locally big religions also tend to provide most of the private social and welfare services, and help organize smaller-scale social networks.
Is this very different from ancient practice? Does it matter if a farmer brings an ox to the Jewish Temple for sacrifice, or pays tithe and other taxes and fees to the Catholic Church? In both cases he discharges a mostly-mandatory religious obligation by paying a significant sum of money, or an object that can be bought for money.
Yes, but something being more or less central is very weak evidence for it being taken more or less literally.