jus' take a look
from A. C. Clarke's "3001: The Final Odyssey":
Dr. Khan looked very pleased; he was clearly delighted to find a new audience.
"...My field of interest is the psychopathology known as Religion."
"Psychopathology? That' s a harsh judgment."
"Amply justified by history. Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands--no, by now millions--of tribal groups holding an incredible varietyof beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there' s a ninety-nine percent overlap,the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other,over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders."
How to account for such irrational behavior? Lucretins hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear--a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe... For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil--but why was it so much more evil than necessary--and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?"I said evil--and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species ... One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, writtenby a coupleof sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Churchauthorized-encouraged !--to extract 'confessions' fromthousands of harmless old women, before it burned them alive ... The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword!"But most of the other religions, with a few honorable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity... Even in yourcentury, little boys were kept chained and whipped until they'd memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbedof their childhood and manhood to become monks.
"Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they -and they alone!- had received messages from God. If all the messages agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant- which never prevented self-styled messiahs from gathering hundreds - sometimes millions - of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith."
Пока это один из немногих интересных моментов (там почти целая глава, так что здесь- сокращенная версия) данной книги, интересной скорее в качестве музея футурологии под мягкой обложкой, чем собственно книги)
[upd-to-date] глава целиком в формате .pdf
Dr. Khan looked very pleased; he was clearly delighted to find a new audience.
"...My field of interest is the psychopathology known as Religion."
"Psychopathology? That' s a harsh judgment."
"Amply justified by history. Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands--no, by now millions--of tribal groups holding an incredible varietyof beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there' s a ninety-nine percent overlap,the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other,over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders."
How to account for such irrational behavior? Lucretins hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear--a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe... For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil--but why was it so much more evil than necessary--and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?"I said evil--and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species ... One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, writtenby a coupleof sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Churchauthorized-encouraged !--to extract 'confessions' fromthousands of harmless old women, before it burned them alive ... The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword!"But most of the other religions, with a few honorable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity... Even in yourcentury, little boys were kept chained and whipped until they'd memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbedof their childhood and manhood to become monks.
"Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they -and they alone!- had received messages from God. If all the messages agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant- which never prevented self-styled messiahs from gathering hundreds - sometimes millions - of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith."
Пока это один из немногих интересных моментов (там почти целая глава, так что здесь- сокращенная версия) данной книги, интересной скорее в качестве музея футурологии под мягкой обложкой, чем собственно книги)
[upd-to-date] глава целиком в формате .pdf