10 Feb '16 08:13>
Originally posted by DeepThoughtIndeed, they are anything but simple. Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it, is that one fails to understand religion (a foreign one or one's own even) if one thinks its purpose is to explain anything (such as the origin of the world). If one makes the assumption that religion is supposed to explain something, then the obvious objection arises that the explanations don't work, and then you're left wondering how people could have been so stupid as to have thought, for example, that doing a rain dance would make it rain. Somebody must have noticed that it rains sooner or later anyway, even if you don't do the dance. One has to keep reminding oneself that ancient peoples were no less intelligent than we are.
Yes, I read his Wikipedia page which gave a summary of Wittgenstein's comments. Frazer's a bit painful to read, as he hammers the square pegs of facts into the round holes of his theory. It's the abridged version I'm reading which is quite long enough, I doubt I could get through 12 volumes of that. My purpose in bringing it up was just to illustrate that the origins of religious ideas are not simple.