Ethical Atheist vs believer in God

[Tao_Equus]

I wasnt actually, agreeing not disagreeing, i was merely pointing out that "things" can be misinterpreted,,,, even with the best of intentions and the most intelligent minds of the time.( but, yay, cool a smart fella agrees with me. cool. )

And that too is all I have been saying, well I added that I think they probably are misinterpreted if all given blanket ritual significance.
But sorry, I'm not smart....just not stupid

 

[juantoo3]

And that too is all I have been saying, well I added that I think they probably are misinterpreted if all given blanket ritual significance.
But sorry, I'm not smart....just not stupid

Your points are well taken, and for the record I have *never* thought you stupid.

I do hope you don't mind if I continue to disagree. I can grant this much; you are correct, not every instance requires a ritualistic connotation, and not every piece would serve to support that position. I do think that there is still sufficient evidence among what exists to draw a valid supposition of ritual even if not every piece can be so assigned.

I think too that if one seriously considers the relation of ritual to superstition and religion, that there is a great deal more than meets the eye.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful Christmas.

 

[juantoo3]

Altamira ceiling

Just a minor point here Tao; I agree the horse (Przewalski's Horse,
Przewalski's Horse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) is a common theme through many of the caves, but I see a few more bovines, particularly bison. Lascaux and Altamira are famous for their bulls.

Altamira bison

Lascaux bison

 

[juantoo3]

Gallery of hands from Chauvet. Might be a bit hard to see, but to the lower right and left are small collections (4 or 5) hand prints. In between is a depiction of a Rhinoceros.

 

[juantoo3]

Preserved footprints from Niaux.

 

[juantoo3]

Here is a list of some of the better known sites and links to their "official" websites.

The cave of Lascaux

Lascaux

The Cosquer Cave

Cosquer, a personal favorite

Museo de Altamira | Santillana del Mar (Cantabria) 39330 España

Altamira

The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

Chauvet

http://www.niaux.net/

Niaux

http://www.grottes-arcy.net/

Arcy-sur-Cure

http://www.showcaves.com/english/fr/

An extensive listing of French cave sites with basic info and links

http://www.showcaves.com/english/es/

An extensive listing of Spanish cave sites with basic info and links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_caves_in_South_Africa

List of South African caves with many links

http://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/blombos/

Blombos cave

http://www.cap.nsw.edu.au/bb_site_intro/specialPlaces/special_places_st3/aboriginal_sites.htm

Australian sites

http://www.cap.nsw.edu.au/bb_site_intro/specialPlaces/special_places_st3/LakeMungo/lake_mungo.htm

Lake Mungo

http://www.hf.uio.no/iakh/forskning/sarc/iakh/lithic/AmudNet/Asites2.html

Qafzeh, Israel; Neandertal

http://www.neanderthal.de/

Neandertal museum

Scientists say the oldest decipherable DNA from a Neanderthal confirms the view that there was little if any hanky-panky between that long-vanished species and modern humans - but they also say their findings show that the Neanderthals were more genetically diverse than previously thought. If anything, the results deepen the mysteries surrounding our ancient, heavy-browed cousins.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/06/06/182.aspx

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=12320930

Scladinia Cave

http://www.atapuerca.tv/atapuerca/historia.php?idioma=EN

Atapuerca, Spain; Neandertal

http://www.mladec.cz/

Mladec, Czec.; Neandertal

http://www.iabrno.cz/agalerie/magdal.htm

Magdelanian rendition, Czec. museum (interesting Venus figures, *not for the prudish among us*)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_table_of_the_principal_old_world_prehistoric_cultures

Good timeline for prehistoric sites

http://www.donsmaps.com/tripleburial.html

Dolni Vestonice, triple burial

http://www.donsmaps.com/index.html#sites

Donsmaps, good resource for ancient archeological sites

http://anthropology.si.edu/humanorigins/ha/shanidar.html

Shanidar, Iraq; Neandertal

http://www.dmanisi.org.ge/

Dmanisi

This should make for a good little resource for anybody wishing to follow along with this discussion...

 

[Tao_Equus]

Your points are well taken, and for the record I have *never* thought you stupid.

I do hope you don't mind if I continue to disagree. I can grant this much; you are correct, not every instance requires a ritualistic connotation, and not every piece would serve to support that position. I do think that there is still sufficient evidence among what exists to draw a valid supposition of ritual even if not every piece can be so assigned.

Hi Juan,

First I have "never" felt like you thought I was stupid, not for a moment.

Second, it seems we can still find some middle ground and I find that more important than the unkowables we debate

I think too that if one seriously considers the relation of ritual to superstition and religion, that there is a great deal more than meets the eye.

It may well have been ritual itself that led to superstitions and not the other way round. And that ritual arose due to the inevitable yet slightly unpredictable nature of the annual cycle. That the repetitiveness of prey migrations, the appearance of different berries etc. led us to looking for 'signs' of their imminent arrival. Of course crocodiles gather in the Nile at specific points and times to coincide with the arrival of the huge herds of wildebeest, and birds migrate 1000s of miles in tune with their specific food sources. Our expanding conciousness simply extended this knowledge from being unconscious behaviour to something we thought about. We then ritualised the patterns and this led to the creation of superstitious metaphors as aids to remember, for discussion and as naive explanations for causation. Of course I cannot prove that ritual came first, but it does make sense to me as a credible hypothesis. And as a result one could say that religion is the inevitable consequence of having brains that require answers and that faced with the lack of them we invented them. And continue to do so.

I too hope you and your family had a wonderful Christmas and wish you all the very best for the year ahead

David

 

[juantoo3]

it seems we can still find some middle ground and I find that more important than the unkowables we debate

It is a big comfort to know we are back on a more even keel.

It may well have been ritual itself that led to superstitions and not the other way round. And that ritual arose due to the inevitable yet slightly unpredictable nature of the annual cycle. That the repetitiveness of prey migrations, the appearance of different berries etc. led us to looking for 'signs' of their imminent arrival. Of course crocodiles gather in the Nile at specific points and times to coincide with the arrival of the huge herds of wildebeest, and birds migrate 1000s of miles in tune with their specific food sources. Our expanding conciousness simply extended this knowledge from being unconscious behaviour to something we thought about. We then ritualised the patterns and this led to the creation of superstitious metaphors as aids to remember, for discussion and as naive explanations for causation. Of course I cannot prove that ritual came first, but it does make sense to me as a credible hypothesis. And as a result one could say that religion is the inevitable consequence of having brains that require answers and that faced with the lack of them we invented them. And continue to do so.

Yours are some interesting observations, and would seem to have a corollary with the "standard" Pagan natural cycle (birth-death-rebirth, etc.).

If I may offer up some more info to help round out the picture:

There is some evidence of ritual among the Neanderthals in which a Shaman dresses as an animal by wearing the skin of the species involved. James Shreeve relates:

"But the Neandertals' true humanity revealed itself in the actions of their souls. At the 50,000-year-old site of Hortus in southern France, two French archaeologists in 1972 reported the discovery of the articulated bones of the left paw and tail of a leopard. Their arrangement suggested that the fragments were once the remnants of a complete leopard hide worn as a costume."~James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 52

The arrangement was as if the individual was wearing a leopard skin cape. This is attested by several facts. The position of the paw indicate that the bones of the paw were left in the skin. The fact that a human skeleton was found without large parts of a leopard skeleton indicates that there was not a lot of leopard skeleton when the man was buried. There is no reason for leopard skeletal remains to decay faster than human remains. The teeth of a leopard are quite hard and resistant to decay and should have survived had they been there. They weren't. This implies that the only leopard bones in the burial were the paw and the small bones of the tail. Thus this appears to be a cape.

An animal cape is a symbol often used by shamans in their magic rituals.

Shaman Cape

This is from Glen Morton, a researcher I have come to respect considerably, and to whom I have referred to in the past.

Some other of his related works can be found here:

Anthropology Articles: Relation of Biblical Man to Fossil Man.

"However, the same skeletal pathologies and injuries that show that the Neanderthals lived risky lives and aged early also reveal a strikingly 'human' feature of their social life. The La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Shanidar 1 individuals, for example, must have been severely incapacitated and would have died even earlier without substantial help and care from their comrades. This implicit group concern for the old and sick may have permitted Neanderthals to live longer than any of their predecessors, and it is the most recognizably human, nonmaterial aspect of their behavior that can be directly inferred from the archeological record."

Compassion in Homo erectus

From another of Mr. Morton's essays, to which I had hoped to find more direct source links. In my quest to find some resources I did manage to cover Shanidar, but I deliberately moved past La Chapell-aux-Saints for lack of "official" museum or educational link reference. I am still looking for the site that contained a crippled member who would have required extensive care to live as long as s/he did, another example of compassionate care among our pre-historic ancestors. I'll keep looking...

Should have guessed, it is found further in the same essay:

In 1973, Kamoya Kimeu, a hominid fossil hunter of mythic renown discovered the fragmented bones of an Homo erectus. After sifting the earth from the dig, the homo erectus skeleton fragments were mixed in with the bones of hippos, crocodiles, and turtles among others. The fragments of this individual were easy to pick out from the 40,000 bones of other species because the homo erectus' bones were terribly diseased and deformed. Eventually, the fragments when glued back together, it turned out to be the first nearly complete skeleton ever found of a Homo erectus. Unfortunately, the diseased bones allowed very little to be learned of the normal anatomy of H. erectus. This fossil was given the museum number KNM-ER 1808. The KNM-ER stands for Kenya National Museum-East Rudolf. The geologic dating revealed that the fossil was 1.7 million years old, making this one of the oldest erectus fossils around. The bones had belonged to an adult female erectus.

The diseased bones consisted of two parts. There was a normal core where the osteocytic lacunae are parallel. The osteocytic lacunae are tiny caves in bone where the bone cell once lived. Surrounding this normal core was a half inch of 'woven' bone, thickest on the limb bones and almost nonexistent on the skull. The woven bone has bloated and highly irregular osteocytic lacunae and was deposited near the end of 1808's life. This fabric develops for one of three reasons: 1) when the creature grows very rapidly, 2) when fractures heal and 3) when a disease is operative. Since there is a core of normal bone which represents an adult-sized skeleton, rapid growth as a cause can be ruled out. Since the woven bone was all over the skeleton except for the skull, fractures didn't seem very likely as a cause. This left open disease, but what disease?

...The consensus seemed to settle onto a diagnosis of hypervitaminosis A. ...she got it by eating carnivore livers...

...to suffer from dizziness, stomach cramps, nausea, and balance problems. Their hair fell out and their skin cracked and peeled off in strips. Their joints throbbed with pain.

Walker and Shipman (1996, p. 164) write:

"Any sort of movement produced terrible pain, for what they were experiencing was exactly what happened to 1808. The excess vitamin A they had eaten caused the periosteum, the tough, fibrous tissue that encases each bone, to rip free from the bone with each pull of a muscle. (The muscles are anchored on bones through the periosteum.) Between the periosteum and bone, torn apart blood vessels spilled their contents, forcing further separation of the tissues. In the case of 1808, the blood formed huge clots, which ossified--turned to bone--before she died."

"To have such extensive blood clots, she must have been completely immobilized with pain. Yet, despite her agony, she must have survived her poisoning for weeks or maybe months while those clots ossified. How else could her blood clots have been so ubiquitous; how else could they have turned to the thick coating of pathological bone that started us on this quest?

The implication stared me in the face: someone else took care of her. Alone, unable to move, delirious, in pain, 1808 wouldn't have lasted two days in the African bush, much less the length of time her skeleton told us she had lived. Someone else brought her water and probably food; unless 1808 lay terrible close to a water source, that meant her helper had some kind of receptacle to carry water in. And someone else protected her from hyenas, lions and jackals on the prowl for a tasty morsel that could not run away Someone else, I couldn't help thinking, sat with her through the long, dark African nights for no good reason except human concern. So, useless as 1808 was for telling us much about normal Homo erectus morphology, she told us something quite unexpected. Her bones are poignant testimony to the beginnings of sociality, of strong ties among individuals that came to exceed the bonding and friendship we see among baboons or chimps or other non human primates"

Compassion evidenced in Homo Erectus, before Neandertal, before Cro-Magnon...and apparently post other social apes.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_/ai_101261144

Related article by a different author

http://anthrosite.com/Fossil Hominid Species.htm

Interesting list of fossil hominids in the Kenya National Museum.

http://www.museums.or.ke/

Kenya National Museum homepage

 

[Postmaster]

And as a result one could say that religion is the inevitable consequence of having brains that require answers and that faced with the lack of them we invented them. And continue to do so.

Exactly! And these answers come with our capacity to answer them. At the moment only through philosophy give us the best answers that can be offered and I continue to accept them until anything can prove otherwise. I promote and not discourage this quest. I think society is more harmonious like this.

 

[Quahom1]

Exactly! And these answers come with our capacity to answer them. At the moment only through philosophy give us the best answers that can be offered and I continue to accept them until anything can prove otherwise. I promote and not discourage this quest. I think society is more harmonious like this.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tao_Equus
And as a result one could say that religion is the inevitable consequence of having brains that require answers and that faced with the lack of them we invented them. And continue to do so. End Quote


Philosophy is born of religion, which is born of discovery, and knowing what we know, yet understanding that we don't know everything, so we create a rhythm, or a route to maintain what we do know, while searching for that which we do not know.

Since gathering knowledge takes many generations, we create a religious route to keep what has been learned intact, so the next generation doesn't have to start from scratch, in furthering that knowledge originally gained.

Along the way, philosophy develops as well.

Religion is for what is, and philosophy is the conclusion of why is...

Can't have one without the other, but religion comes before philosophy, and not vice versa...

v/r

Q

edit: an analogy if you will. I keep casting my fishing line on the water, over and over, until I happen to catch a fish. I catch the fish and know that if I cast the line over and over again, I may catch another one. But I think back to the number of times I casted my line, and how I casted it, before the one hooked me a fish.

So I adjust my casting, which I do over and over again, until I land another fish...and it keeps developing.

Which is the religious part, and where does philosophy begin?

The "philosophy" of fishing, begins with the "religious" fishing...

 

[Postmaster]

Thanks. I replace religion with philosophy then.

 

[Quahom1]

Thanks. I replace religion with philosophy then.

Hmmm, everything must spring from a "root"...how are you going to know (philosophies), how to catch a fish, unless you have tried over and over again, religiously?..

 

[juantoo3]

how to catch a fish, unless you have tried over and over again, religiously?

Not disagreeing Q, but this is the essense of what I was trying to say earlier about ritual. "Over and over again" is ritual, and ritual feeds into either religion or superstition. Which, in the prehistoric time in question, is a bit difficult to differentiate between the two. For intents and purposes, academically speaking, religion and superstition are one and the same at this point in human civil development, IMO.

 

[Quahom1]

Not disagreeing Q, but this is the essense of what I was trying to say earlier about ritual. "Over and over again" is ritual, and ritual feeds into either religion or superstition. Which, in the prehistoric time in question, is a bit difficult to differentiate between the two. For intents and purposes, academically speaking, religion and superstition are one and the same at this point in human civil development, IMO.

You bring up a good point. However I come back with the opinion that "superstition" is the precursor to "philosophy" and both are derived from the route of religion, which is a repetative series of actions, causing us to remember...

 

[juantoo3]

You bring up a good point. However I come back with the opinion that "superstition" is the precursor to "philosophy" and both are derived from the route of religion, which is a repetative series of actions, causing us to remember...

I don't know...

I'm afraid I can't get past seeing philosophy as a discipline, and not a great deal older than 500BC. We're talking between 30 and 5 thousand BC.

Even taking into account Taoist alchemy and calling that philosophy, it still only takes us back to around 2 thousand BC or thereabouts.

You raise an interesting point, I think Tao was alluding to earlier, what I would consider education and / or learning. But I still can find little differentiation when I consider how more modern animist tribes hold "learning" to be a sacred religious enterprise.

Making fire isn't about striking two rocks together. Making fire is about being blessed with the knowledge from (insert source of choice here), about being blessed with finding the correct stones, about sharing and being shown the "correct" way (which may or may not hold some unrelated but superstitious elements to it), and being blessed with the fire to cook and warm oneself and family.

And it wasn't just about making fire. This frame of mind, this attitude about communion with spirit, or communion with nature if that seems more appropriate (though less accurate), extended throughout every facet of prehistoric life.

Life was tough. Nothing could be taken for granted.

Yes, there is an element of rote to ritual. Fundamentally rote and ritual are the same. *If* learning / philosophy could realistically be distinguished by distinguishing what was rote from what was ritual, there might be a case to make, IMO.

From what I have gleaned from looking at various animist societies, that distinction cannot be made because rote and ritual are one and the same in animist societies. Speaking generically, because the animist sees "G-d" or spirit in everything, then everything is religious by definition. If it takes hammering two stones together, then two gifts of the "stone spirit" are ritualistically hammered together to bring the blessing of the "fire spirit."

Whether one wishes today to infer superstition onto such belief, that is essentially what it seems to me these people were doing. Now, there is a portion of non-superstitious rote learning here, how to strike the two stones together just so to make fire, and over time no doubt the spiritual connotations were filtered out, probably around the same time people gravitated to walled cities and religious institutions came into existence. But in the raw, pure state prior to the move to the city this didn't really exist because so much of nature was imbued in the people's minds with spirit.

And it has long been my contention that there must be something there or the people would not have imbued this spiritual element onto as much as they did. Superstition exists because it works. It doesn't make sense, and over time we rationalize away those things that do not make sense as our knowledge base grows. But superstition persists even today because for some inexplicable (to modern scientific and atheistic minds) reason it does work. Medicine calls it the "placebo effect." Even behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner did some research trying to understand superstition and the gambling drive, neither of which logically make any sense:

Superstition in the pigeon

One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.[37]

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.[38][39]

Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one's luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing—or, more strictly speaking, did something else.[38]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.F._Skinner

So while regular reinforcement (Skinner) is an excellent way to teach and has been employed successfully in modern educational systems, it is still somewhat of a mystery as to why people get so *hooked* on gambling if the reinforcement is sporadic and intermittant...same can be said to a degree about superstition, yet it persists as well in human psychology.

 

[juantoo3]

Natufian shaman, Northern Israel

Shaman graves in archaeology

According to Dr. Grosman, the burial of the woman is unlike any burial found in the Natufian or the preceding Paleolithic periods. "Clearly a great amount of time and energy was invested in the preparation, arrangement, and sealing of the grave." This was coupled with the special treatment of the buried body.

Shamans are universally recorded cross-culturally in hunter-gatherer groups and small-scale agricultural societies. Nevertheless, they have rarely been documented in the archaeological record and none have been reported from the Paleolithic of Southwest Asia.

The Natufians existed in the Mediterranean region of the Levant 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. Dr. Grosman suggests this grave could point to ideological shifts that took place due to the transition to agriculture in the region at that time.

Skeleton of 12,000-year-old shaman discovered buried with leopard, 50 tortoises and human foot

Thank you Phyllis!

 

[juantoo3]

One more metaphor and I was gonna pass out

What's a meta phor, anyway? Sim a lee and the world is your oyster! Can't take a pair a bulls in a china shop, can you?

 

[Postmaster]

Hmmm, everything must spring from a "root"...how are you going to know (philosophies), how to catch a fish, unless you have tried over and over again, religiously?..

Sorry Quahom ment to say I replace philosophy with religion got it mixed up.

 

[Paladin]

What's a meta phor, anyway? Sim a lee and the world is your oyster! Can't take a pair a bulls in a china shop, can you?

I try to avoid cliches like the plague

 

[juantoo3]

Lascaux "dead man"

Fumane shaman, also called the Fumane sorceror