NNT thinks that if religion has survived for millennia we shouldn’t uproot it unless we can be damned well sure we can replace it with something less damaging. But we cannot be sure, right?

Like the late Robert Bellah and Robert Anton Wilson, NNT thought religion was not about “belief” but about action, and it starts with ritual. We have ideas about “God” all mixed up. Most religions started off with rituals, then developed deities post hoc. Religion makes people do things, and then the King arrives and uses the local religion for social control.

Further, NNT sees very strong historical lessons in Christianity and Islam that support his idea that history does not crawl but “jumps” and is best not thought of as something that develops slowly and relatively predictably: in noting the paucity of extant writings by contemporary thinkers in or near Jesus’s time, “Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think he would leave traces for posterity.” And: “How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam the third edition, so to speak that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change.” NNT follows up these observations by making a general note about our study of history: “These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian’s profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.” p.11, op.cit

Illusions of understanding: this is at the heart of NNT’s work.

via Overweening Generalist: Promiscuous Neurotheologist: The Atheologies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Robert Anton Wilson.
HatTip to Dave Lull