> Growing up in a secular society ancient religions can seem awful strange: why did people worship stone statues and sacrifice to them? Did they really believe all that effort did anything?
I don't know, do you really believe there is anything that suggests mathematics exists in reality outside of the maintenance of symbols, structure, and meaning in the mind of man?
Some things exist to teach patterns, to maintain a style of thinking. There are tons of things we don't understand about culture socially - in maintaining peace, individuality AND unity with ourselves as individuals and ourselves in society, that might have been intelligently dealt with in a very real way in cultures you consider primitive, intelligible, irrational, unscientific, archaic, and non-secular.
You can't judge a book by it's cover, so to speak. The superficial observation of ritual does not mean it serves no purpose. The meaning of things change over time, as these things are interpreted and understood by different cultures that come from different backgrounds with different ways of representing and interpreting information about the world. Math does not always represent what it says it represents. Neither do dancing statues. There are certainly TONS of things people rely on, things they assume about how existence functions, that we can't even begin to touch the tip of, because we are blinded by the complexity of our own minds.
I don't know, do you really believe there is anything that suggests mathematics exists in reality outside of the maintenance of symbols, structure, and meaning in the mind of man?
Some things exist to teach patterns, to maintain a style of thinking. There are tons of things we don't understand about culture socially - in maintaining peace, individuality AND unity with ourselves as individuals and ourselves in society, that might have been intelligently dealt with in a very real way in cultures you consider primitive, intelligible, irrational, unscientific, archaic, and non-secular.
You can't judge a book by it's cover, so to speak. The superficial observation of ritual does not mean it serves no purpose. The meaning of things change over time, as these things are interpreted and understood by different cultures that come from different backgrounds with different ways of representing and interpreting information about the world. Math does not always represent what it says it represents. Neither do dancing statues. There are certainly TONS of things people rely on, things they assume about how existence functions, that we can't even begin to touch the tip of, because we are blinded by the complexity of our own minds.