[krapp]

It's the "god" part of "god king" that was the delusion, and all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death. And yes, it's a delusion regardless of how many people believe in it.

[ethbr1]

To some degree, the practice of state religion exists to ensure the stability of the state, especially in pre-mass communication times.

To that, so what if the "god" part was a lie?

A stable society built on an unfalsifiable lie is still a stable society.

[krapp]

That's all well and good until a really bad drought or a plague blows through and people start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the inbred jackass on the golden throne doesn't control the weather after all.

[irrational]

Except, the Egyptian society was quite stable for 3,000 years. Can you imagine the USA existing for 3,000 years? Will there ever be another human civilization that lasts as long as the ancient Egyptian civilization?

[jcranmer]

My understanding of Egyptian chronology is that Egypt was far from stable for 3000 years. In fact, Ancient Egypt is broken up into the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom periods, separated by "intermediate periods" of a few centuries. Even then, it's generally reckoned around 2500 years from the beginning of the Old Kingdom to the incorporation by the Persian Empire.

[viewtransform]

This 3 hr long history documentary is well worth it.

Fall of Civilizations Episode 18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKej05RgsY

[irrational]

But, even during the intermediate periods, the invaders became the pharaohs and kept the old time religion going.

Imagine back when Europe was under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church, but then it went on pretty much the same for 3,000 years. There would be some hiccups along the way, but for the normal peasant, it would pretty much be the same old same old from millennium to millennium.

[hattmall]

Isn't the Catholic church becoming the roman Catholic church or vice versa sort of the same thing? Even with the split into Protestant it's still essentially the same core and looking back 5000 years from now it would probably be reasonable to glue it all together as the Ancient Roman-Christian period / civilization.

[ethbr1]

Or maybe they're just not praying hard enough.

I'm a through-and-through atheist, but I recognize the civilizing effect of order.

'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (but epistemologically pure!) isn't a great sort of life.

[truncate]

Like they say "without faith there is no fear".

[abduhl]

>>all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death.

How do you know that it didn’t work? What if it wasn’t a waste?

[krapp]

Gods aren't real, neither is the soul, nor an afterlife.

[roywiggins]

Building a big thing because you think it would be neat is not really a waste. It's a big thing, everyone knows it's not strictly necessary, but whether it's for the glorification of your nation or your people or your God doesn't matter so much. If people don't have gods they build big monuments to other stuff.

[spiderice]

I don’t believe gods are real, but I can still see the irony of making absolute statements regarding unfalsifiable ideas.

[krapp]

If I die and find my soul being weighed on the scales of Anubis you can say you told me so. What a fool I was to doubt!

[krisoft]

But it is a role they believe he fills.

If we all have the delision that you can fly with the power of your mind that is still a delusion. Because one can perform an experiment and see that you in fact can’t fly with the power of your mind.

But if we all believe that you are the eastern bunny, or the coolest dude on the planet, or the twice crowned poet laurate, those are social constructs. We believe you are the eastern bunny and that makes you the eastern bunny, and that’s no longer a delusion.

I think your hang up is that you have a set of expectations you think a “god” should fulfill, and clearly the pharao did not fulfill them. And that is an objective fact. But there is no reason to expect that the ancient Egyptians shared your expectations about what a god is.

> ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death

That does not sound correct. I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died. That is what the world “resurection” would imply. Their belief was that there is some form of afterlife where you need to perform certain rituals. The pyramids and the treasures were there to aid the pharao in peforming those rituals so he can obtain a better position in the afterlife.

[card_zero]

> I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died.

Don't count on it. At times, they believed everybody would.

It's complicated because concepts varied over time, and people had maybe five or eight souls (alright, soul-aspects) and there were two or three thousand years over which this changed (sometimes for ideological reasons).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_conception_of...

> one form of the ba that comes into existence after death is corporeal—eating, drinking and copulating.

> The idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought ...

> the ba of the deceased is depicted in the Book of the Dead returning to the mummy and participating in life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form ...