[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Teilhard de Chardin - Truth or Dare

[CurtAdams at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/1/03 23:20:10, sentience at pobox.com writes:

>Nonreligious people tended to get burned at the stake until very recently.

Yes, but so did heretics.  Actually heretics tended to get it worse.
Christians had it way worse in pagan Rome than areligious philosophers.

>  Figure that sometime way back in human history religion started as an
>epiphenomenon, and shortly thereafter it became extremely nonadaptive to
>start asking nosy questions.

Except they *did* ask nosy questions - only the questions involved (mostly)
proposing alternate religions rather than questioning religion itself.  
There's 
a funny quote from, I think, the Durants' History of Western Civilization from
a traveler to Byzantine Constantinople complaining that you couldn't buy bread
or get a haircut without having to suffer through long discourses on one side
or the other of various subtle theological disputes which, at the time, were
inciting pogroms and civil war.