No religious tradition is more than 10,000 years old (probably closer to 5,000 but I’m being generous). Why do you believe that was the peak of human knowledge and these dudes figured everything out, when human civilization could easily last another 100,000 years? Isn’t it a profoundly epistemically arrogant belief going by how much human knowledge has advanced just in the last 125 years?
No religious tradition is more than 10,000 years old (probably closer to 5,000 but I’m being generous). Why do you believe that was the peak of human knowledge and these dudes figured everything out, when human civilization could easily last another 100,000 years? Isn’t it a profoundly epistemically arrogant belief going by how much human knowledge has advanced just in the last 125 years?
The whole essay is imbued with that sentiment but most clearly here:
“There are universal moral mandates, and they’re found in philosophical and religious traditions across the globe”
You have a spiritual crisis and you turn to religion for answers. You’re hardly alone in that and the underlying, if unspoken, belief is that ancient religion HAS the answers. What is that belief based on if not the assumption that the ancients were super smart beings (my “peak of human knowledge”) who figured everything out (your “universal moral mandates”) and wrote it down for us in a bunch of books?
No religious tradition is more than 10,000 years old (probably closer to 5,000 but I’m being generous). Why do you believe that was the peak of human knowledge and these dudes figured everything out, when human civilization could easily last another 100,000 years? Isn’t it a profoundly epistemically arrogant belief going by how much human knowledge has advanced just in the last 125 years?
I'm sorry, when did I say that was the peak of human knowledge? You sure are putting a lot of words in my mouth and sounding arrogant while doing it.
The whole essay is imbued with that sentiment but most clearly here:
“There are universal moral mandates, and they’re found in philosophical and religious traditions across the globe”
You have a spiritual crisis and you turn to religion for answers. You’re hardly alone in that and the underlying, if unspoken, belief is that ancient religion HAS the answers. What is that belief based on if not the assumption that the ancients were super smart beings (my “peak of human knowledge”) who figured everything out (your “universal moral mandates”) and wrote it down for us in a bunch of books?