According to Damian Ruck, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bristol in the 20th century, secularization occurred before economic development and not the other way around. But he adds that the degree of secularism is not the only factor in economic prosperity, human rights also play a role
Author: Damian Ruck, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bristol
Disclosure Damien Ruck received funding from the Research Council in Physics and Engineering Sciences, and from the Welcome Trust (from the Welcome Foundation)
Translation: Avi Blizovsky
We have known for decades that secular countries tend to be richer than religious countries. Finding the reasons for this requires unraveling complex relationships of cognitive and social factors - an impressive task. And so my small research team thought we'd ask a simpler question: Did it come first the secular egg or the economic chicken?
Our latest article in Scientific Advance shows that in the 20th century, secularization occurred before economic development and not the other way around. Although this does not prove that secularism makes the country richer, it rules out the opposite. The arrow of time points in one direction, so economic performance cannot be expected to influence people's opinions in the past.
Gallup's global surveys give us a clear picture of the relationship between secularism and economic development - that the poorest countries are also the most religious. But before the days of modern surveys, early 20th century scholars had already learned that industrialized societies tended to be less religious than agrarian societies; Although they disagreed on the interpretation.
In the early twentieth century, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed that economic development came first. He saw religion as responsible for the practical functions of society, such as education and welfare. But as societies prospered they began to fill these roles themselves and religion was marginalized. On the other hand, a few decades later, the German sociologist Max Weber claimed that the religious change came first. He wrote that the Protestant Reformation released the restraint on productivity and the economic improvement was caused by the "Protestant work ethic".
Only one of them can be right in his prediction. For decades, economists and political scientists, armed with modern computers and advanced statistics, tried to find out who was right - Durkheim or Weber. Some studies found that the secular came first, some found that the development came first, and others found that they were happening at the same time.
A deeper dive into history
My friends and I think that one big shortcoming that prevents us from reaching a solution is the lack of historical depth. To measure a complex concept like "secularism" a comprehensive test is required but it was possible in most of the world only a few decades ago, since 1990. However, for the first time we found a way to dive deeper and cover all 100 years of the 20th century.
This temporal periscope will be revealed to us when we bring together evidence from anthropology, political science and neuroscience: people's beliefs and opinions are formed and formed in the first decades of their lives.
Therefore, despite a lifetime of ups and downs, a person's religious faith will always reflect their formative years. They unwittingly influence a frozen version of the secularism of their childhood society, right into the modern age. Therefore, to know if the world was religious in the XNUMXs, it is useful to check the level of religiosity of people who grew up in that decade.
We did this by collecting answers from the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey, which surveys people from all over the world on their degree of religiosity since 1990. By collecting data for people who came of age in different decades of the 20th century, we created a new timeline of the secularization process.
We compared the level of religiosity with economic data for all hundred years. The following picture shows that in Britain, Nigeria, Chile and the Philippines at least, the red secular line is ahead of the blue economic development line. And our statistical analysis indicates that this is the case in all 109 countries measured.
The message is clear: secularism occurs before economic development and not after it. This means that we can rule out Durkheim's functionalist model, but we cannot yet declare victory for Weber. Every human society is a cacophony of complex causes, effects and dynamic phenomena. Searching for a single cause for every process in this arena is impossible, so we looked to see if anyone else offered a more convincing explanation.
For example, respecting individual rights is the moral victory of the humanitarian revolution and can provide evidence that these societies will achieve economic prosperity. Respect for individual rights requires tolerance of homosexuality, abortion and divorce, and we have shown that secular societies become prosperous only after greater respect for individual rights has developed.
If we focus on different regions of the world, we see some rich religious countries and some poor and secular countries. Countries like the United States and the Catholic countries of Europe have prospered economically, but religion remains important in them. In contrast, the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe are some of the most secular countries on earth, but they record mediocre economic performance. It turns out that respect for individual rights is the factor that distinguishes the rich countries from the poor - even though the laws usually lag behind the opinions of the citizens in some countries.
Despite this, the role of religion should not be ignored. It is easy to see why individual rights flourish wherever religious influence has withered. However, there is no reason why individual rights cannot exist in a religious world. If the religious institutions can become a less conservative force and embrace modern cultural values, they can provide moral guidance for the prosperous societies of the future.
to the article on The Conversation website
More of the topic in Hayadan:
20 תגובות
Yosef
I really appreciate your response. You said something that is rare to hear - "I don't know", especially from a believer.
Regarding Einstein - the quote I brought is from a later letter of Einstein's, a letter to a religious friend. His opinion is very clear there - belief in God is nothing more than a human weakness.
The difference between me and you is that I want to be shown that I'm wrong, because that's how I'll learn. And this is exactly the scientific method. I read many proofs (so-called) for the existence of God, and I even chose such a proof as the subject of my master's thesis.
I think that for many people, religious belief is a social/family necessity. I am convinced that if I meet a smart person who is not "committed" to his family or the society around him, I can easily convince him that he is wrong.
On the other hand - I'm afraid to discuss such things with people I know, for this reason, that I don't think it's my place to harm from a family/social point of view.
I was hoping I'd have that option, but for now you're the only one I can talk to. And here you are also telling me that this is actually not a topic that you are open to. Of course I respect that, and as I said at the beginning - I really appreciate you.
I fix miracles. An agnostic does not "believe that Jesus is flesh and blood" it is a gnostic Christian.
Einstein believed that there is a God in creation, but not in a God separate from nature and not in the abiding of the soul.
I respect everyone's right to be an atheist, and my right to believe in a creator whose existence I am not trying to prove.
And what we have in common: we both believe, I appreciate the correctness of the scientific method, in the big bang, in the theory of evolution, in archaeological evidence, in the age of the universe. In the formation of the mind from neurons (as opposed to the soul). There are also things I allow myself not to know. I don't know if the soul remains, I don't know completely, I just believe that the Creator is greater than nature, maybe the universe is the Creator. That's what people like you are for, in case I'm wrong. Let someone fix it. Of course separation of religion from state.
It has more in common than with others. Many oppose everything I have mentioned, so it is wise that we both be united.
We are not supposed to be the same, only similar.
Regarding the entries in Wikipedia, the nose that should not be quoted in articles, I find them reliable. I found it appropriate to bring value
Where are hundreds of scientists who believe in a creator. I am unable to do such work.
There is value regarding Einstein's opinion about a creator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein
Einstein believed that the Creator is nature, not a private God of anyone, and there is no soul remaining.
The refinement of truth lies between our two formulations.
Agnostic - believes that Jesus is flesh and blood and not a god.
Yosef
It is disrespectful to bring half quotes. In the continuation of the quote you gave, Darwin explains that he is an agnostic. Elsewhere he was bolder, arguing that there could not be a good god who created the parasitic wasp.
Einstein said explicitly that he did not believe in God. he wrote:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish
Why is the opinion of scientists, who are not experts in the field of religion, important to you? Let me tell you something that will surprise you, from a field that is related to the topic: philosophy.
In the studies that have been done, the situation is this:
In the general population - 2%-5% do not believe in a higher power
Scientists - about 50%
Philosophers - 70%-75% do not believe in a higher power.
And let's delve into the opinions of the philosophers and discover something very interesting. In the population of philosophers of religion, the percentage of non-believers is low, as expected, about 20%.
But - in this population, the percentage of believers who become unbelievers is greater than the percentage of non-believers who become religious.
I think this is a very important point - much more than that, for example - Newton was a believing Christian.
And if we talk about it - why doesn't your way of thinking lead to you converting to Christianity? Are there many more believing Christian scientists than believing Jewish scientists?
Here is the most important quote (in my opinion) in human history (this is today's paraphrase of the words of Epicurus:
Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
I heard this quote as a small child, and for over 50 years I have not heard any argument that comes close to refuting what Epicurus said.
If you are a person of faith and you are looking for a creator, then surely you will find him. Everything you don't know "is God made!" And if it contradicts logic then say "God's ways are hidden".
But - if you exercise integrity, you will see a completely different world. Copernicus showed us that the Earth is not at the center of the universe. Darwin showed us that we are a species like any other living species. Crick, Watson, Franklin and Gosling showed us that life is not something mystical, but a chemical process. And today, neuroscience has shown us that even consciousness is not something mystical, but again, the result of chemical processes.
So where is God in all this? Where do you see a place for the Creator?
Among the greats of physics and mathematics and philosophers, many believe in the existence of a Creator:
Newton who even wrote a book on the Talmud, Einstein, Spinoza (God is nature), De Carte, Immanuel Kant.
Ramanujan, even Darwin who is remembered as an atheist said in 1879
"1879 "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God."
Mary Currie, Isaiah Leibovitz, Gregor Mendel, Galileo who said "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use"
A list that includes hundreds of celebrities and believers in the Creator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology
Although the name is misleading "Christians in Science" it refers to Christian believers. So the argument is not true.
We all observe the world. Some of us find a creator in him, and some of us believe that there is no creator. I think we can talk if we believe in the principles of science and morality. Because there is no contradiction in my opinion, and even if a person is an atheist but moral, he is no less moral than an outwardly religious person.
Of the 6 Israeli Nobel Prize winners in exact sciences, only one, Israel Oman, is a person with a religious lifestyle, apparently because creative innovation and religious conservatism "don't quite get along". On the reasonable assumption that creative innovation contributes to the economy, one can assume that religious conservatism will be harmed by it. The point is, that an economy is affected by many factors such as minerals, physical location (transit of goods), security situation, commitments from allies, freedom of information.... and therefore it is difficult to reach a clear conclusion.
This article predictably caused some little anti-Semites to come out of their holes and express their infantile whining
Menachem: Indeed, Nazism and totalitarian methods are religious figures. It can be concluded from this that when there is no religion in human society
Adopting another religion. Religion is seen as negative by virtue of what it does to the masses - leaving them in their ignorance, or
In their dependence on the rabbinical establishment, without opening their horizons to the wisdom of the Gentiles (I am not disparaging the Gentiles - the purpose of the expression here is different)
and tools for conduct - or freedom of choice at all. and by forcing archaic concepts on a non-religious public. As Smotrich said: the religion is us.
In my opinion, religion should not be confused with belief in an abstract creator. Although for most religious people it was us. Note that Isaiah Leibovitz, who was a professor in 2 worlds of content: biology and philosophy, and editor-in-chief of a Hebrew encyclopedia, was an observant ultra-Orthodox, out of his belief in the existence of a Creator. On the other hand, I believe again: a. Separation of religion from state, b. It is the right of each individual to choose whether he believes in God or an atheist or something in the gray shades of what the Creator is: nature, above nature.
It is true that throughout history religion has held back science, but science has found a way to break through, and it has also preserved morality.
Crimes have been committed in the name of religion endlessly, and along with that moral theory.
The author's "research" is guilty of two fundamental mistakes.
One - that surveys on people's perspectives today are truly capable of being a measure of their actual "level of religiosity" in certain years in the past. The truth is that people's memory reorganizes their past in a rather biased way, especially in sensitive questions of faith and religiosity. People will prefer to place themselves in the past roughly as they are today, in order to be portrayed as consistent and coherent, or alternatively very far from their position today, if they prefer to be portrayed as revolutionaries. A decent study would have used completely different variables - empirical, objective and direct to measure the level of religiosity in a given society at a given time. In this context, it is not difficult to think of real-time declarations by people about their religiosity, the extent of those studying in different types of schools, the frequency of performance of measurable religious practices (the frequency of visits to the synagogue/church/mosque, for example), etc. But the study prefers to rely on subjective testimonies whose truth value is rather dubious, instead of convincing empirical facts, because it wants to serve a certain agenda, according to which secularism lies in the economic good.
The other mistake in the research is the obviously incorrect assumption that "a person's religious belief will always reflect their formative years. They unwittingly influence a frozen version of the secularism of their childhood society, right into the modern age. Therefore, to know if the world was religious in the XNUMXs, it is useful to check the level of religiosity of people who grew up in that decade." Well, a person's faith does not necessarily reflect a person's formative years - often the change comes after the person leaves his formative settings (school, parents' home, transition from a civilian setting to the army and back to university, etc.). And in general - the question is what are the formative years of a person in a given society - the difference between Western societies and Asian or African societies may be very large here. In any case, the result of this wrong assumption is that the timetable for determining religiosity is moved back, and thus a religious change that actually took place later (say - in the mid-sixties) is attributed to an earlier time (say, the beginning of the fifties). And so, an economic change that took place in practice - let's say in the early sixties - is interpreted as a change that followed the religious change. The erroneous conclusion is not reached by chance - it is ordered in advance, again - to serve the religious agenda of the researcher, according to which the economic good lies in secularism.
Another methodological error is the fact that it is not evident that an attempt was made in the "research" to isolate and neutralize the effects of other factors that condition economic errors (world wars, global politics, regime changes, democratization, etc.).
By the way, if the researcher really wanted to find out the causal relationship between religiosity and economic prosperity (to the extent that it exists), he would probably follow the high road of scientific research and also examine examples from the not-so-distant past. For example: Great Britain advanced, gradually and steadily throughout the Victorian period and then reached the peak of its global economic power in 1911. Since then, a gradual decline in its global economic power began. The question now is: did this happen after a religious change? Or maybe the religious change happened later (say - in the twenties or thirties of the 20th century)? Is the level of religiosity a significant variable in this process or is the priority given to other variables? For those who know history and economics, the answer is quite readily available, but our researcher is not interested in the facts...
The author's "research" is guilty of two fundamental mistakes.
One - that surveys on people's perspectives today are truly capable of being a measure of their actual "level of religiosity" in certain years in the past. The truth is that people's memory reorganizes their past in a rather biased way, especially in sensitive questions of faith and religiosity. People will prefer to place themselves in the past roughly as they are today, in order to be portrayed as consistent and coherent, or alternatively very far from their position today, if they prefer to be portrayed as revolutionaries. A decent study would have used completely different variables - empirical, objective and direct to measure the level of religiosity in a given society at a given time. In this context, it is not difficult to think of real-time declarations by people about their religiosity, the extent of those studying in different types of schools, the frequency of performance of measurable religious practices (the frequency of visits to the synagogue/church/mosque, for example), etc. But the study prefers to rely on subjective testimonies whose truth value is rather dubious, instead of convincing empirical facts, because it wants to serve a certain agenda, according to which secularism lies in the economic good.
The other mistake in the research is the obviously incorrect assumption that "a person's religious belief will always reflect their formative years. They unwittingly influence a frozen version of the secularism of their childhood society, right into the modern age. Therefore, to know if the world was religious in the XNUMXs, it is useful to check the level of religiosity of people who grew up in that decade." Well, a person's faith does not necessarily reflect a person's formative years - often the change comes after the person leaves his formative settings (school, parents' home, transition from a civilian setting to the army and back to university, etc.). And in general - the question is what are the formative years of a person in a given society - the difference between Western societies and Asian or African societies may be very large here. In any case, the result of this wrong assumption is that the timetable for determining religiosity is moved back, and thus a religious change that actually took place later (say - in the mid-sixties) is attributed to an earlier time (say, the beginning of the fifties). And so, an economic change that took place in practice - let's say in the early sixties - is interpreted as a change that followed the religious change. The erroneous conclusion is not reached by chance - it is ordered in advance, again - to serve the religious agenda of the researcher, according to which the economic good lies in secularism.
Another methodological error is the fact that it is not evident that an attempt was made in the "research" to isolate and neutralize the effects of other factors that condition economic errors (world wars, global politics, regime changes, democratization, etc.).
By the way, if the researcher really wanted to find out the causal relationship between religiosity and economic prosperity (to the extent that it exists), he would probably follow the high road of scientific research and also examine examples from the not-so-distant past. For example: Great Britain advanced, gradually and steadily throughout the Victorian period and then reached the peak of its global economic power in 1911. Since then, a gradual decline in its global economic power began. The question now is: did this happen after a religious change? Or maybe the religious change happened later (say - in the twenties or thirties of the 20th century)? Is the level of religiosity a significant variable in this process or is the priority given to other variables? For those who know history and economics, the answer is quite readily available, but our researcher is not interested in the facts...
The article refers to religion in a very comprehensive way and as a uniform thing.
Religions are very different from each other and even within the same religion there can be differences between currents. For example Catholic Christianity encourages more mutual help and a socialist society, this can lead to a less rich country than a fully capitalist country (but with less disparities) Catholic countries in Europe are more socialist than America and Protestant countries in Europe. But it is not certain that this is a negative thing.
The suppression of religion also never resulted in economic prosperity. What more indicates that the weakening of religious forces is more a symptom of approaching economic prosperity than a cause.
In my opinion, the measure that is really important is not the number of religious people, but the degree of power of the religious institutions. There is not always a complete overlap between the things.
Not all religions also lead to least human rights. Hedli Lema, one of the most important religious leaders, when asked about homosexual relations, said that it is forbidden only for monks.
The connection between liberal economic success and civil rights does not always hold either. China, for example, has experienced tremendous economic growth in recent years and the establishment of a strong and growing middle class. And yet, contrary to the belief of the West, no buds of democratization or human rights are visible in China. On the contrary, the greatest opposition to this appears in the middle class who celebrate every step of the administration such as the monitoring of the Internet and the network of cities with cameras.
Maybe we just want to believe that society obeys laws like physics and chemistry. Maybe it's too complex and you can't really derive rules from the short history of democracy.
In any case, studies that deal with religion and appear on the site (let's face it, most of the writers here have a strong anti-religious agenda) always make me innovative. In most cases, it is clear that the author of the study comes with a solid personal opinion and does not succeed or does not try at all to conduct research from an objective place. (In the past I have already read an entire article here that discusses in all seriousness whether religious people are more stupid because they are religious or religious because they are stupid. Or a study that came to prove that religious people do not distinguish between imagination and reality through a test of 6-year-old children. While ignoring a thousand research mistakes that were clearly made in the study like the fact that the researcher knew which of the children was religious)
The article refers to religion in a very comprehensive way and as a uniform thing.
Religions are very different from each other and even within the same religion there can be differences between currents. For example Catholic Christianity encourages more mutual help and a socialist society, this can lead to a less rich country than a fully capitalist country (but with less disparities) Catholic countries in Europe are more socialist than America and Protestant countries in Europe. But it is not certain that this is a negative thing.
The suppression of religion also never resulted in economic prosperity. What more indicates that the weakening of religious forces is more a symptom of approaching economic prosperity than a cause.
In my opinion, the measure that is really important is not the number of religious people, but the degree of power of the religious institutions. There is not always a complete overlap between the things.
Not all religions also lead to least human rights. Hedli Lema, one of the most important religious leaders, when asked about homosexual relations, said that it is forbidden only for monks.
The connection between liberal economic success and civil rights does not always hold either. China, for example, has experienced tremendous economic growth in recent years and the establishment of a strong and growing middle class. And yet, contrary to the belief of the West, no buds of democratization or human rights are visible in China. On the contrary, the greatest opposition to this appears in the middle class who celebrate every step of the administration such as the monitoring of the Internet and the network of cities with cameras.
Maybe we just want to believe that society obeys laws like physics and chemistry. Maybe it's too complex and you can't really derive rules from the short history of democracy.
In any case, studies that deal with religion and appear on the site (let's face it, most of the writers here have a strong anti-religious agenda) always make me innovative. In most cases, it is clear that the author of the study comes with a solid personal opinion and does not succeed or does not try at all to conduct research from an objective place. (In the past I have already read an entire article here that discusses in all seriousness whether religious people are more stupid because they are religious or religious because they are stupid. Or a study that came to prove that religious people do not distinguish between imagination and reality through a test of 6-year-old children. While ignoring a thousand research mistakes that were clearly made in the study like the fact that the researcher knew which of the children was religious)
The researcher did not show a causal link between human rights and economic prosperity. He pointed to the communist countries without taking into account an alternative explanation for the economic backwardness (for example, the reduction of economic competition).
Contrary to what is implied in the title, in the end the researcher was not able to prove that the windows in itself (without its effect on human rights, precisely in those companies that were affected by such an effect from the windows) contribute to economic prosperity,
And he was wrong in his claim that he succeeded in disproving Durkheim's hypothesis that window dressing increases under the influence of economic prosperity (since it is possible, despite his findings, that the growth of window dressing before economic prosperity slowed down due to the economic distress at the time, as expected by Durkheim).
For response 2.
Your claim that Communist Nazism is not a religion is not valid.
Nazism and especially the communists are a religion for everything. Like any religion they persecuted their competing religions.
Even today the communists of China and North Korea are chasing after religion just as the Jews smashed the platforms of all the idols before them.
Dash also excels at erasing all competing cultures.
Above all is North Korea, which attributes superhuman qualities to its enemies. You know Kim Gong Il never shitted!?. I'm not saying that; The North Koreans say so.
Today there is an article by another one who is between the factions: scientific on the one hand and a believer in the Creator on the other
https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5364087,00.html#autoplay
About God's war in Ashra.
The Jewish faction probably fought for many hundreds of years to stamp out the origin of Yahweh's wife. Up to the idea of an abstract god. In the prophets according to my view, which follows the opinion of Professor Yehezkel Kuipman (1935: The History of the Israeli Faith) a partner and opponent of the Walheisen school https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%97%D7%96%D7%A7%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%9E%D7%9F,
Who embodies today is perhaps (!) the archaeologist Professor Israel Finkelstein.
In the days of David they even worshiped a whole God.
Return from exile in Babylon 586 BC: Yahweh is the only God. Even after that, the creation continued: first priests and sacrifices. Then Pharisees - rabbis and prayers. Talmud, Mishna, teacher of Nabukim and Kabbalah.
Kabbalah also grew: the issue of reduction - of the Ari in Safed is somewhat similar to theories in physics (Mafetz). The moral conclusions: tikkun olam - it does not exist in physics, nor does it replace physics. Physics is essential. If there is no scientific freedom, if it depends on the religious, there will be wakefulness and darkness.
Even today there is a hidden transformation.
Believe in a spiritual God - referring to believers. Again I point out that with most of the devout religious people it is not possible to have a debate about what contradicts their faith and that is why I have a dialogue and reach with secular people.
The article may be correct - I agree. The 20th century also brought the most terrible suffering and the most terrible destruction - in the name of secularism. You should remember that.
Religions are created by people who believe that human existence (and existence in general) has other dimensions and dimensions beyond the material.
Science is getting to it gradually. Professor Hamed from Princeton theoretically proved that the dimensions of space (perhaps also time) are the embodiment of separate types of energy.
Religions on the one hand brought suffering and the persecution of science. On the other hand, people without religion, we had examples in history: Hitler, communism, totalitarianism and now we are talking about genetic improvement, preventing the random creation of genes that we think are bad.
The good moral philosophers of the whole world believe in the existence of a creator. There is no real connection between this and creationism. Many people have the connection. Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Spinoza (in a certain sense), and much more, Einstein, Newton, believe in the existence of a creator.
On the other hand, atheists also grew big: Hawking, Dawkins.
The world needs both that and that. I am in favor of the separation of religion and state, this is not what is happening in Israel. Demographically Israel is moving towards a religious state. Balances, brakes and engines. Religion when it takes over activates the suppression of thought as an establishment. The principle of spirituality is respectable in my opinion.
I must point out that I have more dialogue and reach with secular people because I believe in the correctness of science and scientific research. On the other hand, I believe that there are layers of existence that are not material and are not directed by neurons that create what is called a soul.
I do believe that if the brain is damaged, the person disconnects, but I believe and have the right to change the soul. and the absolute right of the secular
To be completely secular, as long as he lives within the framework of moral theory. That is to say that the benefit of the general is important to him in addition to his own benefit.
The debate of hitting a heel on the thigh that takes place from the secular and religious side - in my opinion, does not lead either side to victory.
Regarding the need for religion. It is true that for example Yahweh began as a humanoid god, like the other gods: Shalom, Ashtoreth, Baal, Asherah the wife of Yahweh. In ancient archaeological engravings he is depicted with a genital. In the hard core there was a minority
which has archeological evidence from David only, and before that the traditionalists and I am with them believe that there was a historical basis: Moshe, the ancestors, and the seculars according to Assaf's explanation - believed in a completely spiritual God, according to the 13 principles of Rambam's faith: He does not have the image of a body and is not a body, one and Unique as his uniqueness, faithful and also endless to his unity, ancestor of everything that was created: outside of space, outside of time. The Jewish faction after the destruction of the house adopted the ideas of the prophets and won over the people of Israel. The people of Israel returning from Babylonian exile, lived according to faith in one God. Belief takes shape gradually, as an idea of humans, like a theory in physics. Also from there at the end of the batils the sacrifices and the rabbis inherit the priests. Even if the destruction of the house is apparently the main cause.
For the first time, religions/beliefs were created because of the human need to explain natural phenomena,
In the next stage there were leaders who used beliefs to dominate social order
to enact laws and amend regulations that were "as if" given by a "higher power",
The development of science and the scientific approach that explained those natural phenomena
At the same time, education also developed among the "commoners" who could acquire knowledge,
Which created the possibility and the need to create a legal/social/moral framework
Due to the need for the basis of relationships between a person and his friend,
(Not because of fear of punishment or a desire for compensation from that "God")
In the next stage, leaders arise who take advantage of the ignorance of the masses
in order to return and rule as "in the absence of the power of that "higher power/god",
This situation is expanding with us and in general...
What's new. Where religion rules darkness rules.