Kind of, but religious law wasn't just about the afterlife. People believed their gods would punish them in this life if they didn't follow religious law, and that their gods would reward them in this life if they were obedient and followed all the right rules. It helped that the punishment of the gods would be literally carried out by soldiers or executioners. Religious law was also government law.
The skycake was a later development. In the early days, the law of the gods was the law of the land.
Yes, and it was the invention of religion in the previous 4000 years that allowed humans really take off as a planetary species. That only reinforces my point - hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers with very little change, then only a few thousand years later and we've basically conquered the world. Religion doesn't have to be real to be a useful tool for organizing civilization.
It's all made up, but it was a useful fiction when we were still in the nascent stages of historical development.
I think he's going to run into a brick wall with the city council and police union and organized business leadership when he tries to do any of the things he promised. They'd happily destroy New York if it meant kneecapping the DSA from making any progress.
I'm not really sure what you want as a source. The only civilizations in human history that developed beyond the gens/clan/tribe had some kind of religious law, so there's numerous field examples of this phenomenon. I supposed it could just be a coincidence that it happened over and over, and that there aren't counterexamples? That actually seems like the more extraordinary claim.
This is all value neutral, by the way. I am not saying religion, or slavery, or feudalism, or capitalism are good. I'm only saying that they were stages of historical development that lead us to this point. If history could develop a different way, there's no way to really test for it. Maybe we'll find aliens some day that never went through a religious phase of historical development?
The technology to create fire is absolutely an invention. Let me guess, you don't think electricity, nuclear fission, or antibiotics are inventions either? They exist in nature, after all, so they're merely discoveries. 🙄
I think fire has religion beat. People stopped burning witches, but they still burn people for entirely secular reasons.
Also, you know, forging blades, firing guns, running combustion engines, etc. Fire enabled war on a scale religion could never match, and as religion wanes fire remains supreme.
Religion was necessary to get us to this point, so I don't know how you can call it a destructive invention unless you're arguing that civilization was a mistake. Its use-by date was in the thousands of years, it was very useful as a technology to organize society for a very long time. It has lost its usefulness, and become backwards compared to newer technologies, but it was a great idea.
On the one hand I'm farther to his left and am critical of some of his campaign decisions, and am not optimistic about his abilities to overcome the capitalists through purely electoral means.
On the other hand I'd be happy to see him prove me wrong.
They are planning to round people up by the millions and are doing it based on skin color and language. They're putting them in concentration camps, with plans to build many many more camps to house all the detainees.
This isn't a matter of technical definition, it's the crime of crimes. There's a reason no legal case for genocide has been made, it's because the standards for it are too high for anything Russia has done to meet.
Kind of, but religious law wasn't just about the afterlife. People believed their gods would punish them in this life if they didn't follow religious law, and that their gods would reward them in this life if they were obedient and followed all the right rules. It helped that the punishment of the gods would be literally carried out by soldiers or executioners. Religious law was also government law.
The skycake was a later development. In the early days, the law of the gods was the law of the land.