re: Religion and whether people actually believed in them historically, that's one of the pet peeves of one of my favourite writers, Bret Devereaux. For anyone not familiar with him, he's a professional historian, and he's written a fair bit on the topic. Representative quote: "As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion."
I forget who said this about Wurtzel, but they described her as being the ideal 90’s girlfriend.
Enjoy your well-earned vacation!
Love the book and substack recommendations. Also like the formatting and summaries - thank you for this!
re: Religion and whether people actually believed in them historically, that's one of the pet peeves of one of my favourite writers, Bret Devereaux. For anyone not familiar with him, he's a professional historian, and he's written a fair bit on the topic. Representative quote: "As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion."
That comes from https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/ and is part of a longer series of him rather grumpily tearing apart the historical accuracy of GoT. He also wrote an enjoyable series on how polytheism actually worked (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/) and a follow up on how people, historically, thought about oaths (https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/).
The upshot is: Yes, people in the past really did believe in this stuff. And, I think just as obviously, plenty of people today still do.
David Chapman has some good posts on both how weird historical (and much of modern non-western) Buddhism is to western liberal sensibilities, as well as on the topic of how Buddhism was modernized for explicitly nationalist purposes (and with a western intellectual audience in mind). One of my favorites in that vein: https://vividness.live/the-king-of-siam-invents-western-buddhism The series outline is here: https://vividness.live/the-crumbling-buddhist-consensus-summary