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Jonathan Palfrey's avatar

As I don't have a yearning for religion, why would I have a yearning for a religion substitute? I don't think there's an empty religion-shaped space in me that wants filling. I suppose only people who've been religious in the past have that empty space.

I have my own morality that suits me well enough. Yes, LOTR has some moral content, but so do many other works of fiction. I think that no two moralities are ever exactly the same, and the morality of Tolkien or any author is unlikely to match mine, although there's usually a fair amount of common ground.

I can think of one thing I've lacked in my life: a job that I could throw myself into with real enthusiasm. I don't hate my work, but I'd have retired from working at any age if I'd inherited a fortune. There are things I like to do, but they don't tend to earn me money. I don't think I'm unusual in this.

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DavesNotHere's avatar

Interesting hypothesis.

One could easily tell an evolutionary psychology story supporting the idea that such myth making helped or was part of something that enhanced group cohesion among hunter gatherers.

It is challenged by a position I associate with Nietzsche, the idea that sin and evil were innovations of Judaism and Christianity, that the ancient Romans and Greeks looked at things with a fundamental difference. The ancients had religion, but supposedly took a different perspective on its relation to violations of social mores. A perhaps oversimplified interpretation of that would mean that if you got away with braking some rule, that meant you were favored by some god, or actually accomplishing something on their behalf, and if you annoyed the gods, they would see to it that you regretted it.

I don’t know enough about the ancients to speculate about where they derived meaning, or whether they count as a counterexample to your thesis.

Hayek speculated that we are stuck with intuitions that are still appropriate to small tribes, which make us uncomfortable with the sort of arms length interactions required by large populations and a dispersed and decentralized web of production. This dualism gives us trouble.

“If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once. To apply the name ‘society’ to both, or even to either, is hardly of any use, and can be most misleading”

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