The term “belief” originally referred exclusively to one’s loyalty and affinity, such as when people say that they believe in a sports team, which clearly carries an emotional and competitive connotation. William Cantwell Smith points out in his Belief and History (1977) that it has only been since the Enlightenment, when knowledge became more theoretical, …
You can quibble around the edges about his analysis (and painfully trite take on religion), but I think he is generally right just as I have been claiming in this blog: over the long haul, human history has been in the direction of greater justice accompanied by prosperity—resulting from the progressive coordination of our increasingly divided labor.
in the 21st Century, the secularist view that religion is a Darwinian side-effect, or an emotional “complex” of childlike Freudian defenses that should/will go away, has become an alarmingly dangerous abdication—nay, an abject surrendering—of the received power of the collective being that is the very heart of who we are.
Primatologists’ disdain at the notion of an evolved human Spirit rivals that of the clergy in Darwin’s day.
Jared Diamond claims that justice is a cultural construct in his book, “Before Yesterday.”
