Archaeologists found an ancient Egyptian observatory
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world.
Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information.
For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated.
Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.
The only reason we don't use "religious" method is because science has taught us to only believe "data backed evidence". Also at the same time we are moving fast into the era where reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard and unlikely if not impossible.
That "day-to-day" people neither read science papers in depth nor religious scriptures in depth is a common problem as well.
A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted. Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many fields of Biology, and many others are all about social proof, since really what else can you use? There are too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any of it to make sense in a hard ‘verifiable’ way.
And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify, rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also falling prey to ‘acceptability’ vs ‘verifiable correctness’.
Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or people with rich rich sponsors - which also often required or provided social proof/acceptance.
Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is marketable, and secrecy protects the ‘trade secrets’ so any sort of professionalism can be supported for further work or development. And because people need to eat.
Which are closely related to secret societies like the Freemasons [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry], and the common pattern of secrecy among Alchemists [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/amb.1992.39.2.63].
I’m not clear about what you mean with ‘tiered system of information based on achievements’ separate from ‘secrecy’. That pattern was, and still is very common in religious and military institutions that I think anyone would call high on ‘secrecy’.
In broad strokes, how is that different from modern day security classification systems, and/or things like information access based on rank?
One very obvious difference between now and then, IMO, is the massive difference in wealth and population between now and then. That allows specialization and optimization to much greater degrees than possible before.
I think the English language is great but complicated cultures are ill served by translation.
Biblical Hebrew commonly has 3 verbs in a sentence to semantically express a thought. The cultural ideas and concepts are hard to express in English.
Any translator needs to understand that aspect. Without that understanding important subtleties could be lost.
All of that is to say the word secret in English has connotations that may not exist in the original idea.
I’m not saying there weren’t societies that held information closely, I’m saying the motivations and details are likely lost.
What % of population today can actually understand let alone reproduce the papers being published today. And this is not just about practicality of it. Is there a motivation to even reproduce it ?
I am not saying "science is bad". I am saying science has the same fate as religion.
It is not obvious to me.
You have some other ideal I assume.
I see you as unwilling to defend your ideas.
It is unlikely because there is no incentive to it. In contrast, it would be considered career sabotage if you keep reproducing other studies than creating original research. Because funding agencies and hiring committees will look for that. Not because it is impossible (Of course operative word here is "most")
I suspect, when you don't understand things like the big bang and genetics, the line between religion and science (or fact and fantasy) is quite blurry.
Other times, it's better to take comfort in accepting that I can't know everything and realize that the scientific method tells us far more about this subject than imagination. It just requires a big dose of humility.
How would we when we don't know what caused them.
Though interesting that each of the above scientists all explicitly claimed to be Pythagorean… where are the Pythagoreans of today?
Agreed. Even today, for many people there is no fatal tension between science and religion (often in large part because they serve to answer different questions).
My personal rule of thumb is that if I see an apparent contradiction between religion and science, it just means I have an incorrect/incomplete understanding of some area of religion or science (or both).
https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
is a successor of the Pythagoreans.
Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in how the world works?
Some will flat out kill you for disagreeing, in fact.
Every major religion in recorded history, and all the ones I’m aware of from prehistory, have some history of violence. Even Buddhism.
This is one of those ‘false ideal past’ things.
You can draw lines of causation back and forth between those two (or three) big things pretty much arbitrarily depending on the specific circumstances.
Pair that with Modernism, and you've got a recipe for some slippery definitions of "truth".
But we generally agree to only label it as Gnosticism if it doesn't pass the consistency trial (2 Pet 1, 1 Jn 4), and especially if it outright fails it.
EDIT: Especially in the context of christianity, the importance of faith/belief cannot be overstated. Even the very act of looking for proof that you're doing the right thing can arguably undermine the entire point of the "religion". cf John 3:16—"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
NB, as awkward as I am to quoting the bible, I am an atheist. I'm just saying this doesn't need to be a barrier to understanding other people.
As for your scripture quote ... the usual misinterpretation I see in that is ignoring the context (particularly, the condemnation in verses 18-19 for those who believe not), but that seems not to be what you're saying. Remember that "faith, believe" is a much broader word in Greek, covering "loyal, trust, commit, persuaded"; I don't see how that's possible if we ignore the evidence we're handed. "Blind faith" is mostly an outside mockery of Christianity rather than a internal doctrine (I can go on about that if you want).
Regardless, you also see this issue with earlier latin translations, too—"credere" has similar semantics, and for all intents and purposes "trust" and "loyalty" have similar semantics, too. (I am not able to profess the same understanding of biblical Greek you do, and presumably neither of us know Aramaic or Ge'ez... which is fine, because neither do most christians.) This is fundamentally an expression of faith in the same sense that was expressed with the story of the binding of Isaac; the same sense of existential faith that Kierkegaard expressed in "Fear and Trembling". You're reverting to quibbling over precise interpretations of the text when it's not clear why this is more meaningful or any more correct than how people actually interpret it, nor more meaningful or correct than the culture that is widely accepted as universal in christanity—e.g. canon itself, the church, marriage sacraments, the Lord's Prayer, etc. Even original sin, although rejected by some protestants, has little textual basis and still permeates denominations post-schism. (Hell, christian values and worldviews still dominate western secular society to an extent most people probably don't process.) These things are just as much "christianity" as anything in the canon texts.
I mean, why is "canon" meaningful to you at all?
Anyway, I'm not trying to attack you for taking this approach (I, too, like trying to understand texts as closely as I can to understand the author), I'm just saying I don't see why gnosticism is any more "problematic" than any other interpretation. the Bible, like most texts written by humans, is fundamentally contradictory and incoherent. People are gonna interpret things how they interpret things—the beauty of texts like the Bible is the value you receive doesn't come from correctness at all but belief or some other subjective, internal reverberation (in my case—mere appreciation of connecting with an ancient author). The neuroticism you see with e.g. Aquinus over interpreting it originates in the problem that they had no better tools at the time for reasoning about the universe and morality aside from appealing to the worldviews and diction people already had in common and trying to wrangle consistency from it by applying Aristotle. If there were people who had other approaches that firmly reject the coherency of the Bible (at the time), we didn't bother to record them.
Personally, I like the theory that gnosticism is basically Egyptian revenge for being, as they saw it, slandered in the Old Testament. If you identify the demiurge as the god "Set" this is rather poetic. However, there are many varieties, so this is unlikely the only source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethianism
My aunt has always been a cat person. One of her cats in particular was infamous for coughing up hairballs all over the house. In fact, over a lifetime, the total size of the hairballs exceeded the size of the cat itself!
Some people collected as much hair as they could, showing it off. Some people acted like they had never seen the cat, but if you looked at their clothes, you could easily find cat hair. As for me, I had no interest in cat hair. Whenever I wanted, I could just open the photo album and look at the pictures of the cat (I was in many of the photos). Sometimes the photo was blurry or overexposed, but you could still easily tell what it was a picture of (especially when personal memories were added). But of course I was looking forward more to actually visiting her so I could pet the cat again.
This ad-hoc parable covers: 1. superficial Christians, 2. secular society, 3. Christians and the Bible, and 4. what Christians are looking forward to.
One thing that is commonly misunderstood is that the Bible is somehow supposed to persuade people to become a Christian. It isn't. It's for those who already believe, and are determined to order their lives around their belief, their creed (I was aware of that Latin word already). The short, memorizable "creeds" are suitable for an illiterate audience to memorize and proclaim, but in this era of widespread literacy, why would any one of us settle for less?
Intellectually I can acknowledge it, but it just doesn't "make sense" to me that people wouldn't choose to look at pictures of Cat. (If you do want to try, I recommend spending a month or three browsing Matthew 5-7 - some of the most accessible and practical chapters, whether someone has no Christian background or a lifetime of it. Remember, this is meant to be applied; think about what that would look like.)
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As for other things you said ...
> James bible for a reason—not because it's a good translation
The KJV isn't actually that bad, even though it has its weaknesses (especially in the OT where scholarship has advanced since) and biases (but since the biases weren't aimed at a modern audience, they tend to miss) and outdated language (but this is almost always obvious). But as someone who regularly does read the Greek, it's actually better than many modern translations (the NIV in particular is infamous for making stuff up out of thin air, like one of those photo filters that covers your face with a dog. And no, it's usually not a manuscript difference. One passage that almost everyone gets wrong is Luke 22:31-32.) If you read the translators' preface they were explicitly aware of the effect they would have.
> As I'm sure you're very aware, first century christianity would be nearly unrecognizable to basically any denomination today and is likely very different even from the fourth century when the canons were gathered and the roman state adopted the religion forming the roman church,
I don't dispute the first half of this at all. As for the latter ... whenever people blame the Catholics for curating the Bible, I must ask - why did they leave so many verses in that explicitly criticized what they're doing? (there are about 4 that any child who is exposed to the Bible can point out immediately)
> understanding of biblical Greek you do, and presumably neither of us know Aramaic or Ge'ez... which is fine, because neither do most christians.)
It's not like I have any formal training - you learn what you practice. I just picked it up after a couple hundred times looking up words in a Strong's Concordance. Hebrew is admittedly harder (I refuse to call it "Aramaic" for the same reason I refuse to listen to people who say "nobody spoke English after ~1066, we're actually speaking a Norman variety of French"), but the oldest OT we have is actually the LXX (Septuagint, in Greek), and that's fairly accessible if you look for it (the main problem being random words that don't have Strong's numbers, and thus are much harder to search for).
> I'm just saying I don't see why gnosticism is any more "problematic" than any other interpretation.
Because I don't want a cat, I want this cat. And if the cat hair is a completely different color there's no point in even looking at it. I utterly reject the idea that any cat will do.
Otherwise, pretty much every religion says they aren’t a part of it anymore. Sometimes that has serious consequences for them. Several of the large religions have ‘you can’t leave’ clauses, either de facto or de jure.
And if the core tenets get ‘influenced’ to violence, then that is what also happens.
Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism—particularly zen buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam.
Of course, this comes back to what you consider a "religion". If you're looking for something like the catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural to be dismissive of anything other than what you already believe in as you presume that other people even care what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your opinion is entirely beside the point.
Though in both cases, would the unacceptable idea not be ‘there is one objective view of reality’, and anyone holding such a view highly unlikely to be considered an adherent?
Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future.
> there is one objective view of reality
Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair.
For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.
Would someone be able to call themselves Jewish, without considering themselves one of ‘god’s chosen people’ who had a covenant with that one god?
Would someone be able to call themselves Hindu without believing in the dharma?
Would someone be able to call themselves Muslim without believing in the one god, with Mohammed as his prophet?
Would someone be able to call themselves Buddhist without believing in Siddhartha Gautama, the dharma, and that enlightenment could exist.
At least, by anyone serious about the meaning of those groups or being at all honest about it. (Plenty of ‘Christmas Mass’ Catholics and non-observant Jews from a community identity perspective, but most would freely admit they aren’t ‘religious’ depending on who is asking).
At literally any point since those religions existed?
That is my point - these groups are fundamentally defined by beliefs, and while they are often pretty flexible on the margins, every one of them has core beliefs that define it and are non-negotiable.
Or do you think a Polytheistic Jew, and/or one with no genetic or conversion history is going to be accepted at Temple, or a Hindu who follows the Bible?
That was the whole debate over Arianism.
You can see this same sort of tension in the Torah too, specifically in the Deuteronomistic account. There's all sorts of remarks about those dang southern Jews and their heretical paganism. We also know of the apparently polytheistic Elephantine Jews from archaeological/literary evidence.
Let's not forget that monotheism and the impossibility of other gods is also a particularly Abrahamic belief that's not widely shared in other ancient traditions.
I mean, if you're that guy, you can't just say you don't know!
I absolutely agree! Although in the context of authorship during exile I'd hazard a guess that there was some motive of community cohesion and development.
> When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people that are curious and critical.
I hear a far more ambiguous term, and the term will have different connotations if you ask a catholic vs a protestant vs jewish person vs a sunni vs a sufi vs an atheist, &c. I have no clue how others perceive the term, but I sense that it's a rough match at best and completely nonsensical at worse.
But broader than that, our (i.e. those of us in the western tradition) entire conceptions about interpreting metaphysical/ontological language have been shaped by western religious conflict and an impossible to enumerate number of people being very, obviously, proudly incoherent, preserved in writing at massive, massive cost. The terms we use—faith, belief, god(s), spirit, afterlife, heaven/hell, sin, evil, guilt, salvation, &c—are difficult to detach from the above conflict and often have zero parallel in the metaphysics of people outside this culture.
This also results in people not realizing how much they've internalized the connotations of what might be basic descriptive words for common internal phenomena outside of the framing of religous rhetoric—for instance, you often see atheists proudly rejecting the concepts of faith and belief entirely, unaware that their own worldviews are formed around confidence about metaphysical concepts formed on less-than-certain grounds. as Hume would point out, and as should not be a surprise to anyone who identifies as an empiricist—we all have faith or belief that the sun will rise tomorrow without any line of reasoning to allow us to find deductive, 100%, absolute certainty in this. After all you never know when a pulsar might just completely obliterate our solar system, or that the laws of physics won't arbitrarily change. This might seem facetious until you realize that language only binds to reality in terms of personal confidence that these words are actually descriptive, regardless to what extent this is actually relevant to reality wrt established inductive reasoning.
Meanwhile, if you go back far enough, or even just speak in another language that hasn't marinated in christianized latin for millennia, "gods" and "spirits" might as well just be code for "unknown force that drives the mechanisms of the world and human relations". Anthropomorphization of these forces is a social process that allows people to reason about these concepts in abstract ways. Atheism in this context wouldn't necessarily mean you're rejecting a "sky wizard who wants you to deny evolution" (for a particularly facetious example); such beliefs might be perceived closer to a person abandoning the sole basis people had for reasoning about the world without providing an alternative other than "skepticism" (particularly in the case of Socrates, whose actual worldview we have very scant knowledge of). It takes a lot of time, resources, and pain for people to create concepts we take for granted today—even things like "truth" and "encoding words and numbers to strings of symbols we can algorithmically reason about" had to be invented. Of course this would have been bootstrapped on whatever reasonable substrate was available, if only for the sole purpose of communicating your reasoning to others.
Naturally this is just my 2¢.
I have always assumed that it was the King James Bible that established the “modern” of religion and has distorted its emphasis.
The distortion is so intense that it doesn’t usually make sense to even point out the misunderstanding.
This domain of human inquiry is definitely large enough for all ideas and I find the downvotes on this comment anti-social not because they have other ideas but their inability to articulate them.
It's not really clear that "formal" mathematics is actually that useful to an ancient society, even ones like Egypt or Greece that embarked on large engineering projects (you don't really need a proof of most basic geometry, just empirically noting relationships between shapes will get you far enough). So the idea that it started as basically a religious activity amongst mystery cults in Egypt and Greece is appealing
Of course, the fact that the "mystery" part of "mystery religions" means they didn't write anything down, so rather frustratingly we only get vague third hand accounts of this stuff from classical greek philosophers and Roman-era neo-platonists.
Consider the medieval European priesthood... for example. It's basically where all scholarship and literacy resided. Also esoterica, healing magic, astrology, alchemy...
This persists until the scientific age. Mendel was a monk. Newton was highly devout, and mostly devoted to jewish christian protoscience... some of it tracing all the way back to those Egyptians. If you'd asked him, he would have probably described himself as an alchemist.
Recall that the church tried Galileo... because his published results negated Church dogma. That's because the study of celestial motion was a religious function. Always had been.
Ancient Greek philosophers are often seen as "proto-secular." They were mostly seperste from formal priesthood and often treated homeric gods and myth with scepticism.
But... they tended to be highly devoted to "mysteries" and their cults. There's also evidence that Socrates and co taught "secret" esoterica too... about the secret nature of the world... and triangles.
Math, religion, deciphering of celestial patterns.. those have been together for a long time.
Having religion separate from math, physics and natural science is a modern invention.
Science today, like religion of old, had a centralized authority with strict qualifications to enter. Academia, like priesthoods, were often a blend of talent and nepotism. Meanwhile, technology today is like magic of old, in that in can be wielded by anyone who has the desire to learn. There is also the common refrain in today's tech world that things like the recently unveiled Meta's Project Orion are "like magic." Meanwhile, the Ivory Tower is not far removed from the college (a coincidental term I'm sure) of pontiffs at Rome.
Anyway, this is not to say the modern form has replaced the old, but it helps me conceive of how ancients may have understood the distinction between religion and magic, since both involved the gods, just as scient and technology are based on the same foundational principles and yet are applied in the real world in much different ways.
Seriously, though. There are a lot of open questions on dating old and middle kingdom events. The issue is not that there is no good chronology, it's rather that there are multiple reasonable and established chronologies that conflict. Entire careers have been made on basically arguing about dates.
We can date important events after the 8th century BCE pretty well for the entire Levant, thanks to the hard work of Babylonian royal astronomers who around that time started systematically recording all celestial events on clay tablets, on which they also recorded the date and occasionally various major events. We can "run the sky backwards" and compare with their records to get a perfect correspondence between their calendar and ours. This is why we know the exact date of the death of Alexander the Great, among other things.
An old or middle kingdom observatory with dated slabs that describe enough events to get us a few unambiguously fixed dates is one of those finds that archeologists dream of.
>an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found
Hmmm. No suggestion of a period/era, despite that last claim of 'first'...
Meantime, much farther up the Nile at Nabta Playa in the Nubian desert is a stone circle dated to circa 7,500 BP.
https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy...