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from the I'm-handing-out-infinite-punishment-for-finite-crime,-spread-the-word-and-take-donations dept.
Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around: study
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
When ancient societies hit a million people, vengeful gods appeared
The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.
[...] But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?
The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.
"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."
All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:52AM (1 child)
None of that is true, I'm sorry to tell you.
No, they didn't. They killed and imprisoned the people who had enslaved them for generations. In the case of Russia, serfs had only been freed from bondage a generation before and plenty of serfs starved under the old order.
China had been ruled by warlords for nearly a hundred years, and plenty of people were starved or worked to death under those regimes as well.
That's just bullshit. I have not advocated for communism. What I have done is attempted to understand why people all over the world have attempted to set up communist governments regularly during the 20th century and why the West has repeatedly used violence to stop them.
No body pretends the The Gulag Archipilago is history, in fact this is from the Wikipedia article about it:
Oh, and I have read it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:44PM
Bullshit. Kulaks were a common target, for example in Russia (frequently to the point of false accusations in order to make quota [wikipedia.org]), but those guys couldn't have enslaved anyone.
Second, "enslaved them for generations" indicates that one is blaming people for the sins of their ancestors - which isn't a premise of any sane legal system. And there are ways to fix such inequalities fairly without becoming genocidal maniacs in the process.
It's funny how many apologists there are for the worst governments of the world.