#herbalist

Well, not a lot of immediate personal impact, as I don't believe in the things.

---

But I think religion was largely responsible for opening my mind in certain ways, specifically BECAUSE it was something I don't believe in that most people in the world do.

---

I'll try to frame this around an example we can all identify with regardless of our belief systems. Consider Ptolemy's view of the solar system. He erroneously believed that the Sun (and everything else) revolved around the Earth. Yet, not only did he produce valuable knowledge despite this erroneous belief; it could be argued that he produced valuable knowledge (such as usable almanacs) BECAUSE of this erroneous belief.

---

When I say I value belief systems other than my own, that isn't just lip service to social harmony, or advocacy of looking the other way and pretending that we don't think people are wrong about things to avoid conflict. It means that even when we are completely convinced that someone believes something that isn't true, it doesn't make that belief not valuable.

---

Over the course of millennia, religions, including dead ones (religions that no modern people think accurately describe the world), contributed to human knowledge in irreplaceable ways regardless of the truth or falsehood of their supernatural claims. In a tribal society or agricultural society or military society where there is little value placed on any profession that doesn't involve producing food or killing people, belief systems created a reason to value a person who spent their time trying to know things. A priest or shaman or seer was also often an herbalist or scribe or chemist or astronomer. However fruitless their attempts to make sacrifices for the harvest god might have been, the fact that people believed in the harvest god meant that they could also figure out how chemical reactions worked, or compile a library about the medical effects of local plants, instead of giving up the intellectual pursuits to push a plow or carry a spear. In many societies in many eras in history, religious scholars were the reason scholarship existed at all.

---

So, TL;DR; while I don't believe in any religions, I think the world would be a dark and primitive place without the influence of religion.

View more