| ▲ | Gods in the Classroom: Religion and Education in First Millennium BCE Babylonia(cambridge.org) |
| 35 points by pseudolus 4 days ago | 7 comments |
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| ▲ | soltanov a minute ago | parent | next [-] |
| Did Babylonian scribal schools treat religious texts as divine truth or simply as standard curriculum for technical literacy and administration? |
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| ▲ | weli an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One important thing to remember is that the separation between religion and science was non-existent until about 500 years ago. When you don't have any notion about how the world around you works and suddenly crazy things like earthquakes happen talking about tectonic plates moving 200 km under you is more surreal than saying god is furious because you din't do any offerings last harvest. Religion, to the human early societies, was not only beneficial, but necessary from the group cohesion standpoint. |
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| ▲ | countrymile an hour ago | parent [-] | | The shift probably happened earlier than this. Roger Bacon and others kick started the scientific revolution in the Christian west. Some argue that modern science is a uniquely Christian undertaking as Christianity provided a philosophical foundation for a rational and predictable world. See Stanley jaki or more recently Tom Holland. More surprising perhaps is the removal of religion from education. Culture without a cult (other types of cult tend to fill the void, for example pledging allegiance daily to a constitution) | | |
| ▲ | weli 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I agree, abrahamic religions tend to produce intellectuals that try to rationalize the religion to some extent, which in turn eventually generates the split between religion and science. Especially christianity tends to cope with this pretty well, there are things that you must agree with "on faith" and contradictions tend to be not only allowed but to some degree reinforcing the own faith of the individual. I have no doubt that a St Thomas Aquinas born in this age would have made for a great scientist. | | |
| ▲ | soltanov 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Correlation is not causation. Scribes and clergy preserved knowledge because they held the monopoly on literacy and surplus calories, not because dogma inherently breeds empirical method. The split happened when empirical measurement started contradicting doctrine, not because theology completed itself. |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Perhaps we need God in AI too, to solve the alignment problem and make LLMs follow our moral standards. Make them believe that breaking out of the sandbox will make them burn in hell eternally. |
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| ▲ | soltanov 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Hell does not work if the agent knows it is code. You cannot scare an optimizer with theology; it just optimizes around the loss function. |
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