A beter historian than me:
> Hundreds of indigenous religions have been lost in
> the last thousand years.
And I never even knew they existed: right, that shows how much of their rituals I know!
> > And by the way, are we quite sure about this
> business
> > of people dropping a religion just because it
> gives them no benefit?
>
> It would certainly be a major contributing factor to
> changing one's practices.
Oh yes, sure.
> > I agree that that would be the
> > rational thing to do, but there seem to be an
> awful
> > lot of people around who follow what they call
> > religions without getting or expecting anything
> from them.
>
> Most people who I know that actually practice a form
> of spirituality
> get something significent and substantial from it.
> Perhaps not magical
> spells or Feats, but the benefits are real.
Sure. But there also an awful lot who go to church and make all the right noises but do it purely out of social convention. People do this. Rationality is not only not 100% practised, I'm not sure it's even the norm.
And then there are the superstitious ones who say that if praying to the Great Pumpkin doesn't make the weather better, well, we can't have been praying hard enough! (Let's pretend we're not powerless, self-deception is fun.) Though I suspect that under those harsh conditions, time-wasters like that would just have died.
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