Sam Harris

Maybe this is within the book itself. OK, I tried to find it and couldn't. Does anyone know the answer? If there was a reason they gave up their irrationality, why haven't these other religioins given up their own?

hmmm…good question..I’ll look into that…maybe the key lies in the past….

I’ll bet Sam must’ve come across this information in his research, or could direct us toward an answer. Is there a way to email him directly, do you know?

I’m not sure how often he watches us, like some sort of omniscient persnonality who has created his own chaos/cosmos, but I’d bet if you clicked on his name out on the main page, you could email him.

ha hahahahaha.

thanks, i did find his username and did email him.

I have heard India described as a land where belief in the old gods hasn’t died out, but rather coexists with newer ones. Hence you find Hindu temples next to mosques, churches, Zoroastrian temples and other outlets of other religions.

In a European equivalent, assuming, say, that Emperor Julian had gotten his way, today we’d see churches next to temples dedicated to Zeus, Mithras, Thor, Lug and so forth.

Did not the Romans fold the Greek gods into their own religion. Do not the Roman Catholics have a pantheon of saints. As Catholicism spread across the Earth they used a very effective means of converting indigenous tribes to their belief system - canonized existing gods as saints.

Really? So the Catholics merged and acquired the Greek gods? How did they convert the Greek god believers into renouncing their old faith for this new one, Catholicism? Maybe we can learn from these Catholic missionaries how to convert the current believers into believing in Reason.

The Romans conquered the Greeks. The Christians took control of Rome and the Roman Catholic church was born.

Try sending your question to Michael Kolopoulos, Greek Historian, author and very very rational man,

http://www.greatlie.com/en/author.cfm

I’ll invite him here to contribute, if he has the time

the poor Greeks….

I am no scholar and look forward to your expert but…off the top of my head…

Didn’t paganism get rooted out by the Catholic Church with extreme force and legislation?

I don’t think you will find what you are looking for, the converts to Christianity were motivated by the same things they are today, and since we oppose murder (well we do don’t we?) we can’t duplicate the methods Christians used to get rid of paganism.

We may never know why the Greeks stopped believing in their gods because majority of the sophist writings—which probably explain the disenchantment of the Achean worldview—were burned.

Shortly after the events of 314 BC, the Greeks, under the influence of Spartan rule and guided by the philosophical truth-system of Plato, rewrote the past to fit the present and expunged the relativistic literature of those golden age political consultants and educators: the sophists.

It seems the Spartans couldn’t tolerate the the free market of ideas (religious and political) that populated the Greek ethos. It was annoying to continually defend their legal positions against experts at rhetoric, perception, and reason. Thus arose Plato’s idea of Absolute Truth. It was employed as the most effective antidote to sophist-driven relativism. A belief in Absolute Truth, of course, requires certainty and certainty nearly always tends toward violence and so was lost the great legacy of thought produced by early Greek thinkers. Most of the sophists, including Socrates, were killed for being independent thinkers.

I happen to think the greatest attribute to our modern scientific thinking (thanks to Francis Bacon) is not the preponderance of well documented evidence organized into air-tight theories of how the world works, but the discipline of doubt and skilled skepticism. Science, in my view, is chiefly a habit of mind and not simply a body of facts organized by parsimonious theories. Science is the disposition of systematically learning for oneself about the material and social world around you—our best and most ancient use of mind.

Hopefully that is a historical clue that will offer some ideas as to why the Greeks stopped believing in their gods.

Cheers,
AF

[quote author=“afenn”]
I happen to think the greatest attribute to our modern scientific thinking (thanks to Francis Bacon) is not the preponderance of well documented evidence organized into air-tight theories of how the world works, but the discipline of doubt and skilled skepticism. Science, in my view, is chiefly a habit of mind and not simply a body of facts organized by parsimonious theories. Science is the disposition of systematically learning for oneself about the material and social world around you—our best and most ancient use of mind.

I agree absolutely!