re: #96 Decatur Deb

For religion-tolerant atheists, check in at any decent university anthropology department. Most there are non-religious, and most know what religion is for. Cultures that don’t find a way to organize the World of the Non-existent tend to become non-existent.

One thing I’ve become more and more convinced of when reading primary sources from Long Ago is that people back then were a lot less orthodox than our general idea. There were atheists, there were people who had whacky ideas. During certain eras they had to shut the hell up about it, but there’s plenty of places where if one dude thought there was only one God people’s reaction would have been “Oh Hjardstol, you so crazy”, rather than burning them as a heretic. The intersection of religion and the heresies being taken seriously tend to be when those heresies are of the “Hey, maybe the power structure around here should be different, because of this religious idea i just had.”

Arianism used to be a really big deal, but these days, I’d venture that most Catholics are actually Arianist, but it stopped mattering because it stopped being politically important.