sullster

I suppose so, monsters, like the idea of hell, are used to scare children and adults into believing illusions or behaving in certain ways. It is amazing to think that religion owes its existence to childhood credulity and fear carried over to adulthood. Priests and ministers taking the places of parents by saying that they know of monsters who will "get us" if we don't think and do what they say. Very few are able to shake those childhood fears, so expertly planted by parents, and continued at church.

How many would still believe religion if there was no ingrained primal fear of monsters and hell?

Pitshade

Of course there are monsters in the Bible! The very first sentence starts out, "In the beginning God..."

Megatron

Oh! You mean that one! ...oops, I forgot. :sheepish grin:

DRFseven

So, no theists answer. Why am I not surprised? Every time a question like this is asked, theists act as if the question is extremely silly and juvenile, yet they can never answer it!

Megatron

Rephrase:

They act as if the question is silly and juvenile because they cannot answer it.

lpetrich

As to monsters under one's bed, I've seen an ingenious theory that accounts for it, based on the principle that one is not necessarily paranoid because one sometimes has real enemies.

For most of the history of our species and certainly its ancestors, little children faced some very real monsters, as shown in <a href="http://anthro.palomar.edu/hominid/australo_1.htm" target="_blank">http://anthro.palomar.edu/hominid/australo_1.htm</a> Notice the picture of the australopithecine skull with bite marks in the right place for a leopard's fangs.

So in the eastern and southern African grasslands, our ancestors of a few million years ago were up against leopards and hyenas and jackals and others whose main thought about some little tyke would be "Yum, yum, yum".

I didn't mention sabertooth cats because their big upper fangs are overkill for such small prey; they are thought to be adapted for killing elephants and similar thick-skinned big prey. This would mean that a sabertooth cat would ignore such small fry unless it was really hungry, the way that lions and tigers generally don't try to catch mice.

So IMO the best strategy would be to stay with the kid; though the little tyke is nowadays not likely to go the way of Alpo or Purina Cat Chow, the fears remain.

lpetrich

Some real monsters for our ancestors' kids to be afraid of:



Notice how the fangs match the tooth marks on the skull.



Looks beautiful, but big cats hunt prey much bigger than mice...

[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

HelenM

Ok, I know this question was first asked to me.

No, it's not silly and juvenile; no I haven't been avoiding it on this thread - I only just saw it.

1) I uphold the validity of the scientific method and I can use it check whether there are monsters under anyone's bed. I cannot use it to check whether hell is real ("Excuse me a moment while I just die temporarily and go see whether hell is real or not")

2) I never had a book asserting there were monsters under the bed that I had any reason to believe.

Anyway I'm not 100% sure about hell. I think that comes across in what I wrote about it last fall although I haven't reread it lately:
<a href="http://home.att.net/~shmildenhall/weighdwn/hell2.html" target="_blank">The Doctrine of Hell</a>

I uphold my right to have irrational beliefs if I want to and not to try to explain myself if I don't want to.

I uphold your right to call my beliefs irrational if you want to.

But please don't call me stupid; they are two different things entirely.

love
Helen

DRFseven

How? I truly want to know.

That's the point; if monsters, why not hell?

I don't know what the books you might have had were, but why didn't you believe them? Plenty of people have believed them. And you do have one book that asserts demons and other magical creatures; do you only believe part of it?

Certainly; anyone has a "right" to irrational beliefs in that they can't help having them; if that's what you think, that's what you think. And, of course, no one is obligated to explain them; but I would question why you would want to answer a query that asks for an explanation by saying you don't have to answer!

Has someone called you stupid? Certainly I never have and I've never thought it. On the contrary, I am intrigued by your ability to believe in the face of obvious intelligence, and I've always wanted to try to understand the reasoning of someone like you. Stupid believers are easy to understand; you're not. If you would try to walk through an explanation, you might gain a greater understanding of yourself and what, exactly, your beliefs are; that is, if you're not afraid. If you are afraid, it's perfectly reasonable and understandable that you wouldn't want to attempt an explanation (and in so doing, explain it to yourself). But to, in essence, say "Can't make me!" is unproductive to all involved.

By the way, I'm sure we all, myself included, have plenty of irrational beliefs. For myself, I like figuring out what they are and examining them to see if I can get them to go away.

HelenM