Strictly speaking, you can make a semantic argument about "following a belief", because I added the interpretation that this is done in an honest conviction of the truthfulness of such belief, which you didn't state. But let's assume that we exclude people who simply follow a tradition without giving it much credit, like in fact many modern "religious" people do when they go to church once a year for christmas and once in life for marriage.
Tricking out non-god religions is a nice parlour trick, but doesn't make a difference to the core argument, because for the rationality question it doesn't matter if your invisible friend is the almighty lord in heaven or the wood-spirit in the magical tree. Likewise, Buddhism is largely misunderstood as a "be nice and meditate" tradition, but the non-western forms of it contain a large set of magical beliefs that are unproven, unfalsifiable and irrational. It does have a fairly large part of worldly rules that are not based on its religious beliefs, but on cultural and social experience, same as Taoism. And you could try to view them seperately - as is commonly done in folk-buddhism of the western kind - but you could do the same for Christianity or Islam or Zoroastrianism or almost any other religion. But in that case you're not actually talking about, say, Christianity anymore. "Pick and choose" is a very common form of avoiding the revolting barbaric parts that almost every religion contains, but in this argument I won't allow it.
Atheism might be a belief (though by word and definition, it is rather a non-belief, but let's not be nitpicky), but that doesn't mean it is a religious belief. "I think it might be snowing in Helsinki right now" is also a belief, as is "too much sugar is bad for health", and none of them have anything to do with religion.
There are at least 3000 defined belief systems in the world, and probably millions which are undefined. Have you checked each one and objectively assessed them against agreed, objective criteria?
I don't have to. A class of statements can be refuted as a class if you can refute any of their shared assumptions.
What exactly constitutes a religion is indeed subject of debate, but this is not a philosophy class so let's keep it simple:
: an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods
: an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group
I will not consider the 3rd definition, because it is included to explain such examples as "Hockey is a religion in Canada." - in other words, a metaphorical use of the word.
The shared assumption is "god or gods". You can argue Buddhism and probably a dozen other religions, but they are rare exceptions, by your number less than 1%. Animism and other "nature spirit" religions fall under a wide definition of "god" (being almighty and all that shit is a fairly recent invention, many old gods are little more than big nature spirits).
By rejecting the principle possibility of gods, I can reject all religions, known, unknown or even completely forgotten to history.
If not, then your statement religion is bullshit is merely a statement of belief, and self contradictory.
Are are, again, trying to mix any kind of belief with religious belief. That's a very cheap trick, please don't insult readers by assuming they are so stupid they don't see the difference.
And in any case, your claim was that:
(me)For that you don't need to be 100% rational, you just need to be rational enough to consider religion bullshit. (you)Which rules out everybody.
I have shown that there is at least one person that considers religion bullshit, so it does not rule out everybody. Everybody minus one is not everybody anymore.
But that doesn't seem logically possible. Are there people on earth who don't follow a religious belief of some sort?
Yes, they are called Agnostics or Atheists or different other not yet so common terms.
Which rules out everybody.
I consider religion bullshit, so at the very least it's not everybody. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one, but it only needs one counter-example to disprove an all-quantor statement.
Then lets use the word "researcher of nature" instead of scientist.
Happy with that. Yes, I consider words important.
In ancient times there was no difference between "that research"... "seeking for knowledge" and religion. That was my point.
Depends on how "ancient". Religion is comparatively new to our species. There was magical belief and animism long before there was anything that we would a consider religion. And a lot of the early wisdom about nature draws from that source more than from religion. In fact, in many places religion simply made a hostile takeover of originally magical knowledge and rituals.
But yes, for a long time there was no clear line and people who wondered about the nature of the world would often do some physics this week and some musing about the nature of god the other week.
But that is part of my point. This inquiry into nature was largely not scientific, even when it involved areas that we consider part of nature sciences these days. The ancient greeks are where I know a little about and they were just as much into postulating something as fact because they thought about it really hard as they were into doing experiments and drawing conclusions from results. Let's not forget they invented dialectics as a tool for divining (pun partially intended) absolute truth.
That is why I draw the line at the Newton cabal, roughly. They experimented systematically and often without a pre-defined expectation of the outcome. While still rough at the edges, their methods were already essentially identical to the scientifict method of today. There were probably individuals who followed such a system before them, but as a movement, as a widely-used method, these guys started it.
But the delineation of rationality was not the point. The point was if religion would spontaneously appear in a group of people that don't bring it with them already. For that you don't need to be 100% rational, you just need to be rational enough to consider religion bullshit.
There are various definitions of what a religion is. You are probably alleging to the functional definition, basically a religion as a collection of rituals and traditions.
These will probably develop in any culture. But let's be just one inch more strict and require some supernatural element, a god or spirits or something. Because without such an element, we're talking about an ideology, and not about a religion.
I'm not really surprised that study of religion comes up with some kind of natural cause of religion.
But that aside, here's the thing: If it's not genetic, then it must come from outside, i.e. culture, education, indoctrination, something. In which case it is not a natural tendency, but a product of environment. If it develops in humans without outside influence, then it must be genetic, unless you are in line for a Nobel prize for some so far unknown additional mechanism of trait inheritance.
However the "scientists" at Babylonian times considered themselves scientists, researching the universe. That half of it are just believes and not proven facts, does not matter.
There were no "scientists" in Babylonian times. The word is from the 14th century.
There may have been "wise men" or "learned men" or "magicians" or whatever they called themselves. And yes, they explored the universe, trying to figure out how the world works. But that, exactly, is my point: Not every explanation of the world is a science.
Science, in the way we use the word today, is a specific method of inquiry. Some other approach to explain the universe is not science. I really don't know how to explain the most simple concept of semantics more clearly. And airplane is a specific type of flying machine. Not everything that flies is an airplane. It could be a bird or a helicopter. Or a guy who jumped out of a balloon and thinks he is an airplane, but even that doesn't make him one.
We started from this:
We should not forget that in really ancient times religion was the same as science.
And I still refuse it. What you could say is that "in ancient times, religion was a perfectly accepted way of explaining the world". That I would accept. You could even claim the religion and empirical research were much closer together, true still even unto fairly recent times, as some of the proto-scientists of the late middle ages were monks. Some of them may even have been religious officials and scientists at the same time. But even that doesn't make religion and science the same, just like being a marathon runner on the weekend and a particle physicist during the week doesn't make marathon and physics the same.
Not just tried, I succeeded. And I see great people around me, near and far. Sure, they aren't perfect, so if you're trying to make a stupid semantic point about anything that is not 100% x not being x then you should go back to fuzzy logic 101.
But it removes the psychological impact from death. Instead of all the insecurity and the not-knowing and the loss, you have a fake image of your favorite grandmother being happy in heaven. Makes it easier to deal with the whole death thing.
Oh absolutely, I said some of his stuff. He also did some brilliant work, no doubt.
The problem with his formal logic is that it is a "good enough" solution - it works good enough that it takes a long time for the problems to become visible.
If you intentionally interpret my words in such a strange way, we have nothing to discuss. Good job finding a semantical flaw that has nothing to do with the actual point being made and riding on it. Here's your brownie point.
First, they could read Aristotle and come to the logical conclusion of God's existence (and the necessity thereof):
I've read him and some of his stuff is pure idiocity. There's a good reason we needed to invent non-aristotelian logic.
Second, they can examine the belief that science is the only way to knowledge (called "scientism"), and come to the conclusion that it is either self-defeating or trivially true:
I've also done some philosophy of science, and while there is valid criticism, nobody has yet offered something better that produces actual results. There is no shame in using the best that is available at the time, while keeping your eyes open for a better alternative.
What reasons do you have in believe the above to be true?
Because what differentiates a scientific approach from a religious approach is that science doesn't claim to know the answers. I only claims to have found a really good way to ask questions.
What makes you think homo sapiens have the mental capacity to figure things out eventually?
A look at the past 500 years and what we've manage to accomplish in that time.
Religion appeared on earth because our ancestors lived in a frightening world full of stuff they didn't understand but that could kill them. Lightning, floods, diseases, etc. etc. Religion was a way to at least explain it, which dissolves psychological stress. We have since replicated that even in rats, random unexplainable punishment leads to mental breakdown, while predictable, understandable punishment leads to adaptation.
Thought experiment: If you take people today, vet them very carefully for being rational and non-religious, and make them start a colony, for what reason would religion appear? With a scientific approach to the universe, there are still unexplained things, but you know that eventually you will be able to understand them, and you have a big framework of understanding to put them in until then. There is no reason for fear and mental pressure.
You see, the thing about laws is that they're worth nothing if you cannot enforce them. So you are going to do what, exactly, to stop company X when it ignores all of them to get an early monopoloy on, say, water treatment machines on Mars?
This whole "deregulation" bullshit hasn't worked, or rather: Worked in the opposite of what was promised, good job.
We don't need more "hands off" stupidity that fails. We need a good, solid framework, preferrably created by experts and not by politicians.
That's NOT what people in history generally said was the purpose,
Love and war are full of lies. More importantly: Many elements of culture evolve the same way natural evolution does: What has a positive contribution, raising the survival chances of the society, will survive, even if nobody understands the why.
Maybe my choosing of the word "purpose" was not perfect, as it implies more intent than I meant. But here's the thing: A lot of conflict in society can be traced to unmarried young men. Some social scientists go so far as to see them as the major source of revolutions and wars.
Sure, occasionally as with some royal families, it's been purely about economics and politics, but not for the vast majority of people in human history who simply lacked sufficient wealth for economics or politics to matter.
Which is why even among simple people, marriages throughout human history were more often arranged than left to chance, yes? This is so incredibly stupid that it makes me angry whenever I hear it. That everyone thinks poor people can't think about economics. Of course they do. Just on a different level. Where the king thinks about securing another realm for his lineage and brokering peace with an arch-enemy, the miller thinks about keeping the mill in the family and matching his daughter to the smiths son instead of that poor farm hand.
If anything, economics matters more to poor people. For the king its about politics and how big they will write his name in the history books. For the miller it's much closer to sheer survival.
only ONE couple I can recall did not remain happily married until one of them died.
And I'm trying to tell you that there may be several other factors at work here. Firstly, a lot of couples are not as happy inside as they are outside. Most people keep whatever troubles their marriage to themselves or to a very, very small set of highly trusted people. Unless you are in that circle, which if you are a man you almost never are because women don't share such things basically with their mother and their BFF, while men share it rarely at all, you can't say. Secondly, the definition of happiness has been twisted. People used to be what we call content today and considered themselves happy. Especially the Disneyfication of love and romance that women suffer from is so incredibly cruel it should be considered torture (this dream of being a princess who never has to work, is always admired by everyone, etc. etc.) Thirdly, I wasn't talking about the relationship image of movies, but of the women image. 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, all the women you would ever see in your life would be real or realistic (painting), and their number would be limited to your immediate surrounding plus a little bit (paintings). With movies and television, we have all seen 10,000 women by the time we are old enough to marry, and half of them have been photoshopped, got make-up applied for two hours by a professional and put under perfect lighting done by another professional. It's inevitable that comparing those images to the real life pictures of real women doesn't work - but our primitive brains don't understand it.
Traditionally "marriage" presumes that humans are more than just animals,
Traditionally, marriage has many purposes but despite a very long interest in all things culture and society, this is the first time I've read that one of its purposes was to highlight how we are different from animals.
Marriages primary purpose in most cultures is to remove the participants from the dating market, thus reducing competition and increasing the amount of peaceful cooperation within the society. That is why marriage is by necessity a public, i.e. social, and not a private contract. That is why most cultures have some kind of indicator for married vs. unmarried people (in western culture, marriage rings).
The previously high barriers to getting out of a marriage are due to the secondary purposes in western culture, where marriage is also an economic union. The fact that divorce is still heavily tilted against the husband is due to the ancient assumption that the woman gives up something she can't get back that will reduce her future value to future husbands (i.e. her virginity), so the husband should be prevented from divorcing her unless he can compensate for the difference.
As the economic imbalance between men and women is more and more reduced, so it becomes more easy to get out of a bad marriage.
when I look around today I see very few people who are happily married after many decades where that was once the norm.
Was it, or was it an image projected into a society expecting such? And if it is, are you sure the causality you outline is the correct one? There are many more reasons why it might be more difficult to have a happy long-term relationship today than it used to, the primary reason is probably that you have so much more comparisons than you used to, and some of them are artificially created and appear unnaturally good. Against what you see in movies, your wife can only fail. Not because she is bad, but because that image is a fake.
Right on most, wrong on one account: We don't try to hide small data.
I have a music collection that I'd hate to lose in part because some of it I probably couldn't find again. I have GB of personal data, images, 3D models, software, texts. Add personal photographs and videos and we're not talking about data that you can hide on a thermostat any more, unless your thermostat has a hundred or so GB of storage space for some very strange reason.
True, now that everything is fucked up, we can't just go home and say "oops".
But the least we could do is learn from mistakes and not repeat them. When A got you into the mess, "more A" is very unlikely to be the correct solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking, you can make a semantic argument about "following a belief", because I added the interpretation that this is done in an honest conviction of the truthfulness of such belief, which you didn't state.
But let's assume that we exclude people who simply follow a tradition without giving it much credit, like in fact many modern "religious" people do when they go to church once a year for christmas and once in life for marriage.
Tricking out non-god religions is a nice parlour trick, but doesn't make a difference to the core argument, because for the rationality question it doesn't matter if your invisible friend is the almighty lord in heaven or the wood-spirit in the magical tree. Likewise, Buddhism is largely misunderstood as a "be nice and meditate" tradition, but the non-western forms of it contain a large set of magical beliefs that are unproven, unfalsifiable and irrational. It does have a fairly large part of worldly rules that are not based on its religious beliefs, but on cultural and social experience, same as Taoism. And you could try to view them seperately - as is commonly done in folk-buddhism of the western kind - but you could do the same for Christianity or Islam or Zoroastrianism or almost any other religion. But in that case you're not actually talking about, say, Christianity anymore. "Pick and choose" is a very common form of avoiding the revolting barbaric parts that almost every religion contains, but in this argument I won't allow it.
Atheism might be a belief (though by word and definition, it is rather a non-belief, but let's not be nitpicky), but that doesn't mean it is a religious belief. "I think it might be snowing in Helsinki right now" is also a belief, as is "too much sugar is bad for health", and none of them have anything to do with religion.
There are at least 3000 defined belief systems in the world, and probably millions which are undefined. Have you checked each one and objectively assessed them against agreed, objective criteria?
I don't have to. A class of statements can be refuted as a class if you can refute any of their shared assumptions.
What exactly constitutes a religion is indeed subject of debate, but this is not a philosophy class so let's keep it simple:
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
: the belief in a god or in a group of gods
: an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods
: an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group
I will not consider the 3rd definition, because it is included to explain such examples as "Hockey is a religion in Canada." - in other words, a metaphorical use of the word.
The shared assumption is "god or gods". You can argue Buddhism and probably a dozen other religions, but they are rare exceptions, by your number less than 1%. Animism and other "nature spirit" religions fall under a wide definition of "god" (being almighty and all that shit is a fairly recent invention, many old gods are little more than big nature spirits).
By rejecting the principle possibility of gods, I can reject all religions, known, unknown or even completely forgotten to history.
If not, then your statement religion is bullshit is merely a statement of belief, and self contradictory.
Are are, again, trying to mix any kind of belief with religious belief. That's a very cheap trick, please don't insult readers by assuming they are so stupid they don't see the difference.
And in any case, your claim was that:
(me)For that you don't need to be 100% rational, you just need to be rational enough to consider religion bullshit.
(you)Which rules out everybody.
I have shown that there is at least one person that considers religion bullshit, so it does not rule out everybody. Everybody minus one is not everybody anymore.
But that doesn't seem logically possible. Are there people on earth who don't follow a religious belief of some sort?
Yes, they are called Agnostics or Atheists or different other not yet so common terms.
Which rules out everybody.
I consider religion bullshit, so at the very least it's not everybody. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one, but it only needs one counter-example to disprove an all-quantor statement.
Then lets use the word "researcher of nature" instead of scientist.
Happy with that. Yes, I consider words important.
In ancient times there was no difference between "that research" ... "seeking for knowledge" and religion. That was my point.
Depends on how "ancient". Religion is comparatively new to our species. There was magical belief and animism long before there was anything that we would a consider religion. And a lot of the early wisdom about nature draws from that source more than from religion. In fact, in many places religion simply made a hostile takeover of originally magical knowledge and rituals.
But yes, for a long time there was no clear line and people who wondered about the nature of the world would often do some physics this week and some musing about the nature of god the other week.
But that is part of my point. This inquiry into nature was largely not scientific, even when it involved areas that we consider part of nature sciences these days. The ancient greeks are where I know a little about and they were just as much into postulating something as fact because they thought about it really hard as they were into doing experiments and drawing conclusions from results. Let's not forget they invented dialectics as a tool for divining (pun partially intended) absolute truth.
That is why I draw the line at the Newton cabal, roughly. They experimented systematically and often without a pre-defined expectation of the outcome. While still rough at the edges, their methods were already essentially identical to the scientifict method of today.
There were probably individuals who followed such a system before them, but as a movement, as a widely-used method, these guys started it.
Agree absolutely that there are degrees.
But the delineation of rationality was not the point. The point was if religion would spontaneously appear in a group of people that don't bring it with them already. For that you don't need to be 100% rational, you just need to be rational enough to consider religion bullshit.
There are various definitions of what a religion is. You are probably alleging to the functional definition, basically a religion as a collection of rituals and traditions.
These will probably develop in any culture. But let's be just one inch more strict and require some supernatural element, a god or spirits or something. Because without such an element, we're talking about an ideology, and not about a religion.
I'm not really surprised that study of religion comes up with some kind of natural cause of religion.
But that aside, here's the thing: If it's not genetic, then it must come from outside, i.e. culture, education, indoctrination, something. In which case it is not a natural tendency, but a product of environment.
If it develops in humans without outside influence, then it must be genetic, unless you are in line for a Nobel prize for some so far unknown additional mechanism of trait inheritance.
However the "scientists" at Babylonian times considered themselves scientists, researching the universe. That half of it are just believes and not proven facts, does not matter.
There were no "scientists" in Babylonian times. The word is from the 14th century.
There may have been "wise men" or "learned men" or "magicians" or whatever they called themselves. And yes, they explored the universe, trying to figure out how the world works. But that, exactly, is my point: Not every explanation of the world is a science.
Science, in the way we use the word today, is a specific method of inquiry. Some other approach to explain the universe is not science. I really don't know how to explain the most simple concept of semantics more clearly. And airplane is a specific type of flying machine. Not everything that flies is an airplane. It could be a bird or a helicopter. Or a guy who jumped out of a balloon and thinks he is an airplane, but even that doesn't make him one.
We started from this:
We should not forget that in really ancient times religion was the same as science.
And I still refuse it. What you could say is that "in ancient times, religion was a perfectly accepted way of explaining the world". That I would accept. You could even claim the religion and empirical research were much closer together, true still even unto fairly recent times, as some of the proto-scientists of the late middle ages were monks. Some of them may even have been religious officials and scientists at the same time. But even that doesn't make religion and science the same, just like being a marathon runner on the weekend and a particle physicist during the week doesn't make marathon and physics the same.
Not just tried, I succeeded. And I see great people around me, near and far. Sure, they aren't perfect, so if you're trying to make a stupid semantic point about anything that is not 100% x not being x then you should go back to fuzzy logic 101.
Religion doesn't solve anything.
But it removes the psychological impact from death. Instead of all the insecurity and the not-knowing and the loss, you have a fake image of your favorite grandmother being happy in heaven. Makes it easier to deal with the whole death thing.
Have you tried opening your eyes?
Oh absolutely, I said some of his stuff. He also did some brilliant work, no doubt.
The problem with his formal logic is that it is a "good enough" solution - it works good enough that it takes a long time for the problems to become visible.
Really?
If you intentionally interpret my words in such a strange way, we have nothing to discuss. Good job finding a semantical flaw that has nothing to do with the actual point being made and riding on it. Here's your brownie point.
Religion appeared on Earth because it fit our brains. (Alternately, our brains evolved to fit religion in.)
The so-called "god gene" theory is based on a single, unpublished, unreplicated study. So I'll call it bullshit until better evidence emerges.
I'm not claiming rational people are perfect.
I'm asking why religious belief should emerge in a world that doesn't need it.
Best answer so far, no idea why it's not being modded up. You are right, I missed that angle.
First, they could read Aristotle and come to the logical conclusion of God's existence (and the necessity thereof):
I've read him and some of his stuff is pure idiocity. There's a good reason we needed to invent non-aristotelian logic.
Second, they can examine the belief that science is the only way to knowledge (called "scientism"), and come to the conclusion that it is either self-defeating or trivially true:
I've also done some philosophy of science, and while there is valid criticism, nobody has yet offered something better that produces actual results. There is no shame in using the best that is available at the time, while keeping your eyes open for a better alternative.
What reasons do you have in believe the above to be true?
Because what differentiates a scientific approach from a religious approach is that science doesn't claim to know the answers. I only claims to have found a really good way to ask questions.
What makes you think homo sapiens have the mental capacity to figure things out eventually?
A look at the past 500 years and what we've manage to accomplish in that time.
We should not forget that in really ancient times religion was the same as science.
Absolutely categorically not.
Science is not just a word to throw around. It is a specific method of inquiry. Not every "we made a rule because it works" is scientific.
That depends.
Religion appeared on earth because our ancestors lived in a frightening world full of stuff they didn't understand but that could kill them. Lightning, floods, diseases, etc. etc.
Religion was a way to at least explain it, which dissolves psychological stress. We have since replicated that even in rats, random unexplainable punishment leads to mental breakdown, while predictable, understandable punishment leads to adaptation.
Thought experiment:
If you take people today, vet them very carefully for being rational and non-religious, and make them start a colony, for what reason would religion appear? With a scientific approach to the universe, there are still unexplained things, but you know that eventually you will be able to understand them, and you have a big framework of understanding to put them in until then. There is no reason for fear and mental pressure.
You see, the thing about laws is that they're worth nothing if you cannot enforce them. So you are going to do what, exactly, to stop company X when it ignores all of them to get an early monopoloy on, say, water treatment machines on Mars?
This whole "deregulation" bullshit hasn't worked, or rather: Worked in the opposite of what was promised, good job.
We don't need more "hands off" stupidity that fails. We need a good, solid framework, preferrably created by experts and not by politicians.
That's NOT what people in history generally said was the purpose,
Love and war are full of lies. More importantly: Many elements of culture evolve the same way natural evolution does: What has a positive contribution, raising the survival chances of the society, will survive, even if nobody understands the why.
Maybe my choosing of the word "purpose" was not perfect, as it implies more intent than I meant. But here's the thing: A lot of conflict in society can be traced to unmarried young men. Some social scientists go so far as to see them as the major source of revolutions and wars.
Sure, occasionally as with some royal families, it's been purely about economics and politics, but not for the vast majority of people in human history who simply lacked sufficient wealth for economics or politics to matter.
Which is why even among simple people, marriages throughout human history were more often arranged than left to chance, yes? This is so incredibly stupid that it makes me angry whenever I hear it. That everyone thinks poor people can't think about economics. Of course they do. Just on a different level. Where the king thinks about securing another realm for his lineage and brokering peace with an arch-enemy, the miller thinks about keeping the mill in the family and matching his daughter to the smiths son instead of that poor farm hand.
If anything, economics matters more to poor people. For the king its about politics and how big they will write his name in the history books. For the miller it's much closer to sheer survival.
only ONE couple I can recall did not remain happily married until one of them died.
And I'm trying to tell you that there may be several other factors at work here.
Firstly, a lot of couples are not as happy inside as they are outside. Most people keep whatever troubles their marriage to themselves or to a very, very small set of highly trusted people. Unless you are in that circle, which if you are a man you almost never are because women don't share such things basically with their mother and their BFF, while men share it rarely at all, you can't say.
Secondly, the definition of happiness has been twisted. People used to be what we call content today and considered themselves happy. Especially the Disneyfication of love and romance that women suffer from is so incredibly cruel it should be considered torture (this dream of being a princess who never has to work, is always admired by everyone, etc. etc.)
Thirdly, I wasn't talking about the relationship image of movies, but of the women image. 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, all the women you would ever see in your life would be real or realistic (painting), and their number would be limited to your immediate surrounding plus a little bit (paintings). With movies and television, we have all seen 10,000 women by the time we are old enough to marry, and half of them have been photoshopped, got make-up applied for two hours by a professional and put under perfect lighting done by another professional. It's inevitable that comparing those images to the real life pictures of real women doesn't work - but our primitive brains don't understand it.
Traditionally "marriage" presumes that humans are more than just animals,
Traditionally, marriage has many purposes but despite a very long interest in all things culture and society, this is the first time I've read that one of its purposes was to highlight how we are different from animals.
Marriages primary purpose in most cultures is to remove the participants from the dating market, thus reducing competition and increasing the amount of peaceful cooperation within the society. That is why marriage is by necessity a public, i.e. social, and not a private contract. That is why most cultures have some kind of indicator for married vs. unmarried people (in western culture, marriage rings).
The previously high barriers to getting out of a marriage are due to the secondary purposes in western culture, where marriage is also an economic union. The fact that divorce is still heavily tilted against the husband is due to the ancient assumption that the woman gives up something she can't get back that will reduce her future value to future husbands (i.e. her virginity), so the husband should be prevented from divorcing her unless he can compensate for the difference.
As the economic imbalance between men and women is more and more reduced, so it becomes more easy to get out of a bad marriage.
when I look around today I see very few people who are happily married after many decades where that was once the norm.
Was it, or was it an image projected into a society expecting such? And if it is, are you sure the causality you outline is the correct one? There are many more reasons why it might be more difficult to have a happy long-term relationship today than it used to, the primary reason is probably that you have so much more comparisons than you used to, and some of them are artificially created and appear unnaturally good. Against what you see in movies, your wife can only fail. Not because she is bad, but because that image is a fake.
Right on most, wrong on one account: We don't try to hide small data.
I have a music collection that I'd hate to lose in part because some of it I probably couldn't find again. I have GB of personal data, images, 3D models, software, texts. Add personal photographs and videos and we're not talking about data that you can hide on a thermostat any more, unless your thermostat has a hundred or so GB of storage space for some very strange reason.
We'll just be going back to using strong crypto from outside the USA, like we did for most of Internets history.
True, now that everything is fucked up, we can't just go home and say "oops".
But the least we could do is learn from mistakes and not repeat them. When A got you into the mess, "more A" is very unlikely to be the correct solution.
So the real problem is that the system has a fault and should be fixed.