Religion and sciences

It's because virtually all religions have noble intentions and preach peace so there's no place for weapons design in their holy books.

The problem is that several of the most widespread religions suppress the multifaceted human spirit by compressing it into the one-dimensional model of monotheism where everything is measured on a linear scale of good vs. evil.

As predicted by the Jungian model, the parts of the spirit that are suppressed fester in "the shadow" (or "the dark side" as Lucas called it). Eventually they can't be held down any more and they explode into orgies of hatred and violence. When this happens to an individual his family or community can usually keep him from getting into too much trouble. But the Abrahamic religions have the frightening ability to coordinate the spiritual suppression of entire populations of believers, so they all erupt into orgies of hatred and violence at once and there's nobody left to tell them to stop it and act like adults.

So we get Caliph Omar's armies obliterating the entire civilization of Ancient Egypt, Pope Urban's armies obliterating the entire Inca and Aztec civilizations. As well as slightly smaller holocausts like the Christian people of Germany and their Jewish minority or the Christian people of the USA lynching their African-American neighbors. Jung said, "No wars in history have been as bloody as those among the Christian nations."

So that's when they delve into their science books since the people who wrote their holy books did not want to teach them how to build weapons. For the most part the people who wrote their science books didn't either, but since science is logical and organized it's not too difficult to divert to military purposes.

Although there is a basic conflict between the scientific method and the acceptance of the supernatural that lies at the core of every religion, most religious people either tacitly accept the religious tales as metaphor, or simply invoke cognitive dissonance and let their brains handle both systems of cognition. It's really a minority of religious people who consciously and rigorously reject science, such as the ironically named Christian Scientists. The major denominations of Christianity and Judaism teach perfectly fine science to their children and produce their share of leading scientists.

You need to learn more about cognitive dissonance. Just about all of us are afflicted with it to one degree or another.

You're raising the question of free will and this does not belong in the Science section. Please take it to the Philosophy or Religion board before this thread goes off on a tangent.

 

Unfortunately it's not so straightforward. If it were, we outsiders would see it coming, and even the wiser folks in the religious community in question would have a chance to act as moderators.

They're also not so cleanly defined. There are always a lot of issues mixed in that have no religious basis. Among the key reasons Jews were persecuted in Europe were their financial wealth in a nearly dead economy and their low mortality from the Plague. Ironically these were ultimately religious factors but no one recognized them at the time. The Christians misinterpreted a word in the bible to mean "any lending of money for interest" whereas the Jews read it as "usury," so they were the only people who were willing to provide capital to Europe's projects and earn interest on it; the Christians thought immersion in water was sinful whereas the Jews considered bathing part of the general covenant to be a clean and respectable people.

Jung identified rites of passage as archetypes, instinctive motifs that occur in almost all societies and almost all eras. Some of them have clearly practical origins such as testing a youth's readiness for the adult world; others recognize biological processes that transform a youth into an adult; still others have only ceremonial value that we can't quite explain. Many are not formally administered, such as first intercourse; others are such as first driver's license; still others are traditionally clandestine such as first beer.

The problem is that rites of passage are artifacts of their era. The "Walkabout" of the Native Australians doesn't transfer very well to children with cell phones and obligations for institutionalized schooling. Marriage is becoming increasingly dicey as people routinely live to unheard-of ages during which they grow and change in different directions as their obligations to their children diminish.

Because of Paradigm Shifts. Every time civilization undergoes a fundamental transformation, many of the cultural patterns of the old era become invalid or downright counterproductive. We're living on the cusp of the transition from the Industrial Era to the Information Age and we can see the new patterns forming. We're sitting here forming a community with people we've never seen in person--a strong one that plays a major role in our lives, not just the community of Boston Red Sox supporters or Shakira fans.

The old rites of passage such as army "boot camp," fraternity hazing, Boy Scout merit badges and religious baptism are becoming irrelevant in an increasingly virtual world community. We have to see what new ones will develop, or better yet, be the wise elders who guide their development.