Relistening to The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience series of lectures. It's fascinating but I question one assumption.
They still bury/cremate them in best clothes with beloved & significant objects with them. I think its a ritual of valuing who they were.
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My grandad had his pipe & tobacco, his glasses & a coin he always carried & his well-worn deck of cards.
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It made us feel better to show our love, closeness & respect. If my husband dies before me, I'll probably bury him with his playstation. ;-)
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Good points to question. Apart from the trinkets themselves I wonder about other evidence showing the Neanderthals visual artistic culture.
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There can be much other evidence, yes. And it seems very likely they did coz we do this so consistently.
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We have evidence of a variety of cultures without formalized religion like ours that treated their dead as if they lived on after death.
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But what does this look like? Where's the separation between 'you'll need this in the afterlife' & 'This is symbolic of who you were.'
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Go to H.sapiens sapiens historical treatment of death. Almost every culture through time has had some concept of the soul.
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I agree with that. I said so. I don't doubt that we have believed this for a very long time.
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If you discover someone buried in a boat in a culture that believed you cross a river to reach Heaven, clear evidence.
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If someone discovers my dog's remains buried with his favourite toy & blanket & assumes I thought he was going somewhere, they'd be wrong.
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The fact that ppl who do believe in an afterlife & ppl who don't both dress their dead smartly & bury them with tokens suggests more to this
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We have to question why they do it when they don't believe in an afterlife. I don't think we would do it without the influence of society.
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I don't think we would do that if we didn't have a history of being dualists. What we do now is an extension of what we've done before.
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We're still dualists tho tending to bodies, making them 'comfortable' is prob most to do with struggling to accept they're not in there.
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Perhaps that's our inner drive, but that doesn't remove the idea we have significant historical evidence that humans believe in afterlife
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I'm not questioning that idea at all, just that burying people with stuff is necessarily evidence of it.
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I think they're taking the evidence from our history to create context & then drawing conclusions.
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And I don't think that's sound given the evidence that ppl who don't believe in an afterlife do the same thing.
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It is if they do it because they exist in a society where it has been done for millennia.
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I don't know if I'd be happy to just chuck the bodies of my loved ones away without care & tokens of who they are in another culture.
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