I don’t for a second believe that religion was required for people to have good morals. It was required for control.
Comment on White House Faith Office
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days agoNah, it was originally about making sure your population had good morals, then about controlling your population more generally, then about making money, then about banning fun for some reason, then about making money again
It’s been quite the wild ride
Cypher@lemmy.world 3 days ago
GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Parents do tge same thing with santa.
SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Agree 100%
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
By good morals I mean it came up about the time that people were moving from tribes where they knew everyone personally to settlements where it was impossible to… it sounds weird now but “don’t steal from strangers”, “don’t kill strangers”, “share your harvest with strangers in need” etc. were actually pretty novel ideas which needed to be taught and helped a bunch with ensuring people could co-exist with more people than they had relationships with
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 3 days ago
A lot of old testament stuff had to do with hygiene. Look at all the kosher rules regarding food. Deut. 22:9 also forbids growing mixed crops, which likely had to do with the chance of crossbreeds being infertile and the inability for Bronze/Iron Age tribes being able to replace seed stock quickly enough.
SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Or some priest or political leader took revenge against a pig farmer who slept with his daughter.
And the mixed crops this was more likely to make sure farmers are not self sufficient.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 3 days ago
No. The seed thing is explicitly so the farmers could grow the same crop from year to year. If you grow a cucumber in the same plot as squash, the seeds from both will be a hybrid and not give you anything useful. Cucurbits are meritoriously easy to hybridize and create useless offspring. The genetic mechanics wouldn’t have been know, but you would still see the results. People needed to live in groups then and now. No farmer would ever be able to be completely self sufficient regardless, especially then.
I was thinking more along the lines of shellfish for a primarily desert people or the Rabbi being the defacto food inspector.
SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I would think that farmers were experienced and smart enough to know which crops would hybridize and which don’t. They would not need the clergy to tell them that.
We don’t see farmers today getting farming advice from the church. They get it from other farmers. I don’t see any reason for it to be different back then.
I do see however that the church wanted to sound important and wise. So they wrote things down, but without having a full understanding, so a lot of the advice they wrote down is too simplistic.