People often say this, but I don’t think there is any actual evidence to support the claim that ancient religions were attempts to explain natural phenomena. Certainly ancient people did try to explain natural phenomena by appealing to supernatural spirits or deities,
Right.
but it doesn’t follow from this that that was the original motivation for believing in those things. People might have believed in them for different reasons (as expressions of a sacral relationship to particular places, for example, or to make sense of death) and subsequently appealed to these already-believed-in spirits to explain other stuff.
Yes, a lot of claims of evidence of the divine rest on a pre-existing belief in the divine, rather than 'showing their work', so to speak. And how is "to make sense of death" not an "original motivation for believing in those things"? I would think that's the ultimate motivation for believing in those things (e.g. Pascal's Wager - I remember Christopher Hitchens had a good response for Pascal's Wager, but unfortunately I can't remember what it was right now).
And indeed we find that people who believe in pagan religions today don’t typically do so because they think they provide explanations for natural phenomena, but for much more complex reasons.
Right, even people of faith today take scientific explanations for a lot of natural phenomena for granted. People who may practice pagan religions today or who believe in things we might call superstitions no longer use those things to explain the things that science has already 'unlocked.' Are there people today who
actually believe that sacrificing seven bulls and seven lambs will ensure the year's harvests are good? I doubt it. Would they do that ritual and then have an enormous barbeque? I would think they'd have to, because nobody would waste so many animals. Does anyone today actually believe that sacrificing a person on an altar will please the gods and bring the rain? I doubt it. We would think anyone who tried or wanted to was mentally ill and commit them to a hospital against their will, even if the sacrifice was themselves a willing participant (
that person would clearly be mentally ill too, like all of the people at Jonestown, but perhaps they would deserve something more like 'deprogramming' rather than being institutionalized). I expect anyone today who practices any religion - pagan or otherwise - is incorporating modern science into their belief system, like my former colleague who prayed while his daughter was being seen to by doctors and nurses. I expect his prayer in that instance was a way to calm his own mind and heart*, like a form of meditation, and perhaps as a way to bond with his family (I think he said his brother was there with him).
* To clarify, when I say "calm his heart" I'm not being poetic, I mean it literally. Lower your blood pressure and heart rate. Control your breathing so you don't hyperventilate. Slow the release of adrenalin and cortisol. A person whose child is in emergency surgery could themselves suffer a cardiac event. If prayer helps them calm those stress reactions, then they should do it. If it were me, I'd probably listen to music and focus on controlling my breathing.
I really don’t think this is generally true of Abrahamic religions.
As I understand it, a wavering in one's faith is called a "crisis of faith", and that successfully navigating such a crisis means returning to a position of faith that somehow folds in, or just outright dismisses, whatever challenged the faith. It also seems self-evident that religions around the world prefer their flock be ignorant, to varying degrees**. The Taliban and Boko Haram, off the top of my head, are the worst, but we can see American right-wingers invoking their religion while attacking education, journalism and science. They appear to think those things are antithetical to their belief system, and I suppose I have to believe them. Boko Haram put it right in their name. American Evangelicals won't riddle my body with bullets, as Boko Haram would; they're pulling books out of American school libraries.
** To clarify, I'm not claiming that
only religions do this. Certainly any authoritarian power structure benefits from keeping the people under its control in the dark, and most religions are authoritarian power structures.
Certainly it may be true of some forms of those religions, such as much of contemporary Protestantism, and some forms of Islam, but it’s not the historically dominant position at least in Christianity. Until round about the nineteenth century, Christians universally believed that God’s existence could be rationally proved, without reference to revelation, through reason alone, with as much certainty as a mathematical proof. This was simply uncontroversial throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The existence of God was therefore precisely not an article of faith at all.
I'm not a mathematician, but I feel like there's something fundamentally incorrect about comparing religious claims, however much they've been thought through, to mathematical proofs.
This remains the teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemns as heretical the view that God’s existence can be known only through revelation and not through unaided reason.
Of course this is an unfashionable view among most religious people today. And this is why it’s easy to suppose that the Abrahamic religions are inherently based on the idea that belief in God is not supportable by reason. But it would be a mistake to think that. The currently prevailing view (outside Catholicism) is, historically speaking, very anomalous.
It seems to me that a train of thought could be perfectly good, if we accept or overlook its starting point, which in this case is a belief in God. I guess I'm assuming that the people you're talking about believed in God first, and then worked from there to create a line of thought that, if the premise is taken as true, makes sense. Was there ever any evidence?
Ever?
It's my understanding that the "snakes" are a metaphor for the Druids, or at least whatever faiths existed there before Christianity took over.
Yes, exactly.
