What was the Purpose

What was the purpose of religious tests? Were they just a effort to educated the next generation? There is two ways to learn, one is by experience, the second and faster, more economical in both time and money is to read, and learn from written works. This has been known for a long time, since Alexander the Great, and his great library in Alexandria to educate the world. Oh well, it is nearly underwater now. Perhaps the oceans rose and the delta sank.

Johannes Stobaeus complied great works to "educate his sons" in the 5 century CE. Much of the old Greeks and Roman stuff came to us through Stobaeus, he has kept education alive, not just for his sons, but for many generations of humans. Was the bible also an attempt at recording and hence preserving history and stories for the purpose of teaching? and if so, we know that each generation learns more, so perhaps it is time to update and revise what is important enough and correct enough to teach the next generation. In that case, it is our duty to update all these books, or to produce new books for the same purpose. It becomes "what should be taught?" type of question.

The required information, aka knowledge, changes with each generation, and for each person. This is one of the missing bits, and what information we should have is also a problem. This might be useful is an easy way out; but it overloads each following generation with too much information, more than they can properly handle. Now we are left with too much, and yet too little. Consider critical thinking, and can you name all eight components? Without knowing all eight components, what you call critical thinking is not what I call critical thinking; so we have miss communications. That is the basics of the problem, no one has the time and effort to do in depth examinations of others ideas, because we have different foundations. If we are evidence based, without supernatural or magical  thinking, we are not willing to spend the time to learn what others think about the supernatural.

So what is this ranting all about? I do not have the patience to argue reality with the religious. They can do as they please, but forcing there religion on me is not acceptable. At the same time, having no or poor ethics is not right either, yet there is no need for ethics, morals, and our cultural values to tied to our religions of lack there of, yet these seam to be handles together. It is easier to adopt values that to reason what these values should be. To learn what are good values and why they should be followed is important for society to survive, but understanding what good values are has become a problem for all of us. It is not just what is possible, but there is the economy of life as well to consider, and the economy of the system. We cannot overspend to save something that cannot return value to the system. It has become that simple.