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Post by lilith on Sept 9, 2011 7:07:50 GMT -6
This morning in my Issues in Education class while presenting a small speech on the linguistics of the days of the week, i found it necessary to discuss the ancient religions and ideologies behind them. while doing this, i got carried away talking and when comparing ancient beliefs to the typical christian/catholic american belief, i accidentally called christianity and belief in god RUBISH... my teacher chastized me and i looked like a regular douchebag in front of my entire, more than likely christian and churchy wholesome believing class.... Point being, i used the word rubish by accident. back up? Isn't what i said almost completely justifiable considering the hollow belief system behind their so called "God"? not to mention the very many stories and chapters completely left out of the bible in order to more easily pull in "god's" followers???
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Post by sin on Sept 9, 2011 7:41:33 GMT -6
back up? Isn't what i said almost completely justifiable considering the hollow belief system behind their so called "God"? not to mention the very many stories and chapters completely left out of the bible in order to more easily pull in "god's" followers??? No. I would say, some interpretations are rubbish. If the religion is used properly, it is far from rubbish. Would you care to provide me an excerpt from any particular scripture to support your 'rubbish' posit? Any will do. |
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Post by lilith on Sept 9, 2011 10:39:25 GMT -6
now, like i said, the word rubbish came out by accident. but after so long of attending church (yes, i used to attend church), i realized that much of the belief system behind the religion was just everyone's fear of burning in hell, which i find completely wrong. if the fear of satan is what keeps many of us in church, then where would we be without that fear??? now, i'm not saying that this is the reason all people believe in that faith, but it's no secret that many do for that reason.
but yes, you're right, i suppose it has more to do with interpretation of the religion than the religion in itself...
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Post by sin on Sept 9, 2011 12:07:11 GMT -6
Those are my thoughts. What constitutes one's religion, is a conglomerate of things.
Interpretations which are imposed onto others, is an influence people must revel against. The thing is, if one is widely unaware of the force of influence, he may justify his slave morality.
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Post by dudetyson on Sept 9, 2011 15:45:03 GMT -6
I think you had a point if you were comparing the randomness and bizarre nature of the pantheons of random pagan religions with the specifics of Christianity. The whole thing DID really just start as out as an ancient tribe with superstitions that just happened to be more dedicated to writing their stuff down than the other cultures/religions.
I basically agree with you and the trick is just to be diplomatic about it. You could say something like, "if Christianity was not the dominant religion in the USA, then we might view its beginnings to be as primitive and strange as other ancient tribal religions." (Of course, there's much to be salvaged from each religion.)
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Post by sin on Sept 9, 2011 16:32:14 GMT -6
The whole thing DID really just start as out as an ancient tribe with superstitions that just happened to be more dedicated to writing their stuff down than the other cultures/religions. Can you elaborate a bit more on this dude? |
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Post by dudetyson on Sept 9, 2011 17:52:30 GMT -6
Sure. There were a lot of dietary laws which the ancient Jews followed, most likely simply out of cleanliness in times before modern first world sanitation such as bathroom sinks kicked in. However, the tradition stuck and it became understood as religious law rather than as commonsense practice.
The process by which a religion develops its list of gods and goddesses, or its One True, strikes me the same way. It seems extremely arbitrary to me. In the polytheistic faiths there is generally a deity for every major natural force the society was dealing with, a deity for many of the human emotions, and some deities of social practices like farming or beauty (I consider beauty socially defined, whatever). How do they get their names? How do different cultures associate different traits to one god, whereas another culture might split those traits between a few gods? Someone came up with it, it stuck, it got passed down, and the result often appears to me the evident result of such a haphazard process.
The pantheons probably began because the people early in the religions had personal moments of contact with that divinity, or had no other way to explain anything at all, plus the mere projection of their mundane lives onto the divine. However, as it was passed down and potentially became mechanical, the religion could become a stifling enforcement rather than the substantive thing it once was. For example, what if someone saw war and agriculture as unified, but in the religion into which they were born, those gods were enemies?
That is why the whole idea of using a fictional pantheon, like we do here, makes sense. But if you can have a fictional one, it really signifies how arbitrary it is, to the point where you might as well make up your own that works for you. Might as well just smash them and rewrite them continually if that's what works for you.
So yeah, I'll plumb the ancient faiths for general wisdom, but to be totally honest, their actual specifics often seem to me to be just a bunch of gobbledygook. When I read the Gospels, I didn't make the fundamentalist mistake of getting caught up in worshipping the personified God. I ran with my own take, which is an exhortation to stay loyal to the Essence. In fact if I read it any other way, I would probably find it so hopelessly contradictory and meaningless as to feel compelled to throw it down out of impatience.
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Post by sin on Sept 12, 2011 10:15:16 GMT -6
Do you believe they originated all of it?
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Post by dudetyson on Sept 12, 2011 15:44:27 GMT -6
I can't know, but I am now open to the idea that there may actually be a sort of supernatural realm and that human beings may have received communications from beings in that realm(s). Or, it could all be projected psychodrama. Or a mix. No idea.
The difficulty of knowing the truth of milennia-old matters, with insufficient historical sources, leads me to my current approach: sift through everything for the wisdom I can get out of it. Don't worry about following their rules or specifics as anything but guidelines for me to experiment with and embrace or reject as I choose.
Seek the divine Essence, knowing that the names may be interchangeable, and the laws may be context-sensitive.
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Post by sin on Sept 13, 2011 9:59:38 GMT -6
Becoming a hobby-anthropologist would do you a great service Dude. The cross-culturalism, and cross-seeding is undeniable. I would agree, any mythos cycle is useful - whether its drawn from Comic Books or Ancient Cultures. The age old argument is futile: My mythos is better than your mythos! The 'divine' inspiration, the source - is something that man may spend the rest of his days trying to pin-point. As a single race of beings, we do not agree on what it is, where it comes from, or if we should be listening to it  |
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