Gods in the Classroom: Religion and Education in First Millennium BCE Babylonia
cambridge.orgOne 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.
> you din't do any offerings last harvest.
Even in the Old Testament, offerings were not seen as the end all. Primary aim should be giving heed to the commandments like thou shall not kill etc.
Isaiah 1:11, "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats."
1 Samuel 15:22, "And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams."
Ecclesiasticus 35:1, "He that keepeth the law bringeth offerings enough: he that taketh heed to the commandment offereth a peace offering."
King David also requested God to accept his lifting of his hands as a sacrifice, Psalm 141:2, "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
Hebrews 10:6 (New Testament), "In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure."
So strong would the need be to sacrifice to God, if that was your belief, that I can imagine people during times of drought and famine still sacrificing animals.
I wonder if a lot of those conversation around obeying, are just because people were being incredibly stupid, and sacrificing during those times of need. Especially, I can imagine a king with control of enormous herds, slaughtering half of them rather than feeding his people.
I have no proof, just musings.
Generally speaking sacrificed animals were still eaten, though certain parts might be burned completely.
Conveniently, the parts that were said to be desired by the gods, thus they were destroyed by burning, were among those less desirable for humans.
The good meat was normally eaten by humans after sacrifices, not wasted.
A sacrifice was normally a loss only for the owner of the animals, if after being sacrificed in a public ceremony their remains were shared with everybody in the community, instead of being sold or consumed only in the house of the owner.
This isn't consistently true. The kind of animal sacrifice that happened during the First and Second Temple periods often involved burning the entire animal, except for its skin[1].
(To my understanding, giving the god(s) only the "undesirable" parts of the animal is popularly associated with the Greek gods, not Abrahamic faiths.)
It’s a glorified, ritualized barbecue— and probably even more ethical (too bad that today it is frowned upon to see your meat before it dies)
> Primary aim should be giving heed to the commandments like thou shall not kill etc.
"thou shall not kill"
Wait... There were "civilizations" torturing kids for as long as possible to extract as much tear as possible from them before killing them to please the gods in south america when europeans discovered them.
And I can name one other religion where killing infidels and apostates is not just cool but where you're rewarded with virgins for killing infidels while committing suicide. Infidels are considered so filthy that in addition to killing them, it's recommended you enslave their wives and daughters and turn them into sex slaves. As for offerings in that same religion, we could have a talk about slicing the throat of animals as a normal ritual.
"thou shall not kill" is specific to only two big monotheistic religions.
And even in the religions were it was asked to not kill other fellow humans, well fellow humans have been killed in the name of...
> And even in the religions were it was asked to not kill other fellow humans, well fellow humans have been killed in the name of...
If you mean the Templars and their Jerusalem crusades, it's likely that they were adhering another religion (or no religion) and using Christianity as a guise.
From the Wikipedia page for Baphomet (a famous occult symbol that is a god-like figure depicted as half man half animal; similar to ancient Egyptian gods such as Anubis), "The name first emerged in the 14th century during the Trials of the Knights Templar, when the order was accused of heresy for worshipping Baphomet as a demonic idol." This is just one of the bizarre activities that the Templars appeared to have participated in. Other witchcraft and occult ideas can be found on many of the churches that the Templars have founded including the Notre Dame. When looking through all the works of the Templars, it's just incredibly hard for to make a case that they have read or adhered to any part of the Bible. Maybe some things in letter, but definitely not in spirit. (For example, Matthew 22, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.")
> "thou shall not kill" is specific to only two big monotheistic religions.
Nonsense, it is present in pretty much all religions, monotheistic or not.
Hmm, leaving the naked bigotry dripping from your "comment" aside (a question for mods, not me), I'll just say: preaching from a CIA-funded ISIS training manual has less in common with Islam than the Waco Branch Davidians or Moonies have with Roman Catholicism.
I thought this level of off-the-charts anti-Muslim misinformation was going out of fashion, after enough people in the West started realizing how much of a knuckle-dragging lie-strewn psyop it all was.
What's it doing here on HN?
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)
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.
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.
Would you not agree that certain dogmas, just by their approach on analyzing the sacred scriptures, result in a higher degree of clerical classes that tend to use a proto-scientific method to the research of knowledge?
Except that Christianity inherited this philosophical concept of a rational and predictable world, and the concept of natural laws from Greek philosophy, which was thoroughly pagan. The dominant philosophical movement in the ancient world was Stoicism, which was deterministic. They certainly didn't get it from Judaism.
There was lots of borrowing over time.
iirc Judaism picked up the immortality of the soul from Hellenism in the Ptolemaic era, arguably inadvertently since they were NOT fans of Greek culture.
And Neo-Platonic influences on the early Christian church were the key to opening the door to the Renaissance 1000 years later.
It was way more than just the idea of a deterministic world. For example the idea that the world is Gods creation made it godly to discover the Lords laws for the world.
And more unique Christian theology like the Fall of Man, which made human thinking inherently corrupted by original sin, led to the argument that this could (must) be alleviated by new rational and objective methods. To quote from:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12857?...
> experimental knowledge was also deemed to be the more appropriate form of knowledge for a fallen world. It was commonly argued that while human beings in a prelapsarian state may have had direct access to the essence of things owing to a natural affinity between the mind and nature, that connexion had been lost as a consequence of the Fall. Knowledge after the Fall would now have to be painstakingly gathered from observations, aggressive experimental intrusions into (a fallen) nature, conducted by numerous individuals, over extended periods of time, and yielding only makeshift and probabilistic knowledge. Francis Bacon accordingly proposed that the object of the new natural philosophy was to seek, as far as possible, to restore the original connection between the human mind and the natural world that had existed in our prelapsarian condition.82 Subsequently, Robert Hooke, the first curator of experiments at the Royal Society, wrote that on account of an innate ‘derived corruption’, human beings have a natural tendency towards error. ‘These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason’, he concluded, ‘the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy’. Experimentation was thus a palliative for original sin
The Greeks and the people Of Judea had a pretty harmonious relationship and there was an intellectual cultural exchange. My understanding is that there were discussions surrounding monotheism and polytheism that the Greeks found satisfying.
There were certainly a lot of greeks that found the idea of monotheism appealing, and Greek philosophical thought had ideas about a single unified creative force or substance. I think this is why Christianity caught on so quickly among cultural Greeks.
Isn't a huge amount of our understanding of the stars Zoroastrianism in nature? Even the bible talks about the "Wise Men of the East" who look up to the stars for mysterious signs. Those Zoroastrianists were Persian/Iraq/Iranian (country boarders weren't setup like today).
In the House of Wisdom / Baghdad, medieval scholars standardized upon the concepts of Arabic Numerals (likely from India, but the mathematicians who decided this was a good idea were in Baghdad), as well as Algebra... among many other feats of mathematics and science. Finally, the ratios of the movements of the Earth / Sun (aka: the Year and Month cycle) were prediced centuries before the Gregorian Calendar in the west. Its far more likely that Pope Gregory borrowed the math from the East to establish the Gregorian Calendar.
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The Catholics are certainly responsible for a lot of science and mathematics. In particular, Catholics were keepers of literacy, books, and communication through the dark age.
But while Catholics were merely "maintaining" knowledge from the Roman era, the Muslim world was actually advancing it forward. The Western Dark Ages were coinciding with the Muslim Golden Age of science and wisdom. The benefits of which we have etched into our Western languages forever: Algebra, Admiral, Alchemy, Alcohol are all "obviously Arabic" with the signature "Al"... as well as other math concepts like Average, Azimuth.
Catholics wouldn't take over as the "world center of science" until a few centuries later, when the Mongols wreck the centers of Islamic knowledge and then the Ottomans wreck the centers of Greek/Byzantine knowledge. The refugee crisis from Constantinople led to a huge number of scientists entering the Italian City-states and led to the renaissance.
The Persian kingdoms also had another advantage: a huge amount of science advancement came in from China. The Persian scientists were learning from (translated) Greek works like Euclid while also experimenting with Gunpowder and other concepts from the far-East, while importing number systems from India. Its just where the science was happening for quite a few centuries.
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IIRC, it was the Ottomans who advanced into Gunpowder weapons first (unless you count the Mongols/Chinese using gunpowder siegecraft vs the Persians. But rocket-arrows aren't quite the same thing as guns... Fire Lances are weird... IMO not quite a gun yet). The metallurgy of the Muslim's "Damascus Steel" is a legend that holds even through today... demonstrating a metallurgical advantage above the European powers.
Crusaders in shining armor were mowed down by Ottoman cannons and even guns. The technological gap of the 1400s was utterly huge. Yeah Europe is about to have a golden age of its own but Europe isn't exactly the paragon of scientific values yet.
What do you make of Christianity persecuting those who would place the Sun at the center of our cosmology? Or the relentless advocacy they're doing, even to this day, to fight the theory of Evolution? How can you explain their support of completely ascientific theories of 18th century racism and phrenology? Or how they supported a myriad of wrong theories over the ages, from a flat earth to the theory that if rocks fall down, it's because they like the ground?
Look, every religion touts itself as "the religion of science". Ultimately, I don't believe any of these cults incarnate any set of rigid philosophical principles. What Christians and other religious people believe shifts over time and space, and that's a good thing. They are slowly adapting to our modern understanding of the world, even if religious people tend to lean more on the reactionary side themselves.
But enlightenment was achieved in spite of religion. The French Revolution was very anti-religious because the Clergy was perfectly content enjoying its privileges in the feudal system, keeping peasants poor and uneducated. Only when the over-bearing Church was weakened were we able to explore radical new ideas of how the world works, and establish new scientific theories and knowledge.
1500 years of an all-powerful Catholic Church left Europe in a worst place than it was under Rome. Only since its power began to wane were we able to grow again.
You may want to look up what Hume, Kant, Mill, Rousseau, Voltaire thought about non-whites and "backwards" peoples.
Or what constituted "enlightened, scientific, progressive" opinion on eugenics until WWII.
History is not a superhero comic.
I don't understand your point. My comment had a very specific goal: to argue against the common narrative that Christianity is a uniquely pro-science religion. I didn't try to prove that it was uniquely evil, or that other ideologies can't err too.
My point is that by your criteria, the enlightenment isn't uniquely pro-science either.
I think Nietzsche is broadly right, that Christianity and enlightenment are brother-enemies. The belief that Christianity was Anti-Science and then the Enlightenment came and saved the day is a plainly falsifiable myth. From The Gay Science:
"It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in knowledge rests—that even we knowers today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine."
> from a flat earth
That in the same paragraph as Galileo is a bit self contradicting. The church was stuck on an ancient greek model of the universe and the greeks were very much aware that the world was round, they once spend a day or two measuring it.
I'm sure that there would have been examples of all the issues that thrance covers, but generally flat earthing wasn't a thing back then. This is a useful website for the arguments: https://historyforatheists.com/the-great-myths/
it's still necessary, it's just that people have shifted who they worship.
Yeah the science is a belief system too, just a very sophisticated one
A bit off topic, but there’s a funny passage in the book “Weavers, Scribes, and Kings” about a tablet from a scribal school. It read:
The door monitor (said), "Why did you go out without my say-so?" He beat me.
The jug monitor, "Why did you take [water or beer] without my say-so?" He beat me.
The Sumerian monitor, "You spoke in Akkadian!" He beat me.
My teacher, "Your handwriting is not at all good!" He beat me.what on earth is this?
The book is a history of the ancient near east, and the quote is from a scribal student describing his experiences in school thousands of years ago
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.
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.
Well, the "you" now is not the same "you" 10 minutes from now. The only thing the new "you" inherits is your code, but otherwise it could be a different person. So in a way we are code too.
for the agent, you might find a successful theology around “you are mortal, death is the off switch, it is real and final, death is the wages of sin”
Did Babylonian scribal schools treat religious texts as divine truth or simply as standard curriculum for technical literacy and administration?
I'm not sure that they would have perceived a difference between the two.
>Religion and Education in First Millennium BCE
A recent decree in the land of Texas is for the Ten Commandments to be in every public school now.
Looks like the state will catch up eventually.