Yakoob on 21/2/2015 at 22:25
Quote Posted by faetal
The thing is, the vast majority of what I see with religion isn't lots of scholarly philosophy of life, it's more "these are my beliefs, because they are and I'm not really willing to discuss that". Which is fine - if people don't want to discuss, that's their business. I do get a problem though when there is a large enough amount of people saying "these are my beliefs, because they are and therefore other people can't have abortions / learn about evolution in school / listen to music I find objectionable" etc. Religion as a personal, internal experience is completely benign. Religion as a static idea of the rules of the universe which everyone must follow or we're all damned, not so much. Even if the latter didn't exist, I'd still find the former interesting, but the latter does exist and in numbers which anyone not in on the joke rightly finds troubling.
But, in this case, isn't the problem not the religion but the attitude? It's not too far off from the turbo-vegans going on long rants how I shouldn't eat meat, people calling spanking your kid child abuse and getting militant about it, or heck even big corporate heads lobbying the government for what is most profitable rather than what is most good. All try to impose restrictions on others for other than religious reasons.
Tho I would agree with you that religion seems to attract the nuttier of these cases, and it's often much harder if impossible to rationally argue with them because, as I pointed, faith is irrational by definition.
demagogue on 22/2/2015 at 03:25
Yeah, this thread is focusing on non essential aspects of only some religions IMO.
As for the beliefs, in most religions as I understand it, they are vehicles for getting your experience to a certain state, not a statement about the world outside experience. Like the creation story is decidedly more about how nature enters consciousness conceptually from nothingness than any physical story. It's the obvious interpretation. Everything is created by a word, actually a conceptual distinction, light/dark (and isn't it obvious why that has to be first), day/night, land/sea, earth/sky. Reality can't even exist until there's language to recognize it. The order of creation is the conceptual order of recognizing reality, not building it. And why else is it so critical that every animal be named by Adam for them to exist? It's like reality as it emerges in the mind of a newborn, or someone slowly coming awake. Not just metaphorically either.
Once you get that, you see how the creation story directs you inward to how you experience nature, not outward to a scientific explanation. Then the text really opens up. In pre-modern times, there wasn't this line between the universe in your mind and the one out of it. Now in our era we've made that line possibly too hard. Actually we don't experience reality as it is. It's saturated with our spirits. And it's not just your personal spirit, since all humans share that saturation. So it's something deeper in the construction of reality in consciousness generally.
But we don't usually see it that way. And religion is one way to pull us back into seeing how much the inner life bleeds into the outer.
Yakoob on 22/2/2015 at 06:40
Interesting interpretation. I forgot who it was but there is a quote somewhere how things don't exist until we give them a name. At least not as a social construct we can interact with.
As a side note, it's been a while since I've been to my bible studies, but does the holy book (any of them) ever explain WHY the almighty diety (or dieties) created the world? Like, to what end?
Because I can't seem to think of any reason but for the deity's own amusement. Unless we weren't created by them (which I think is the case in ancient greek/roman mythos and maybe Hinduism?)
faetal on 22/2/2015 at 11:18
I'd say you might be gilding the lily a bit Dema. Unless I'm taking you too literally, in which case, I'm sorry. How you describe the origin creation myths is a nice description, but I'd imagine more just that humans invented creation myths as folk stories back when we knew nothing of the universe, simply because our brains don't like unsolved mystery. Over time, eventually, that settles into a memetic story which is specious. As a technological species, we see everything as being creatable, so it's a straight extrapolation to apply that mechanistically to the universe. Without science to inform me otherwise, I'd think a creator or creators would be the obvious answer to the question of origin. In fact, I think the idea is so natural to our brains, that some people hold on to it even with science telling us that the answer is far more complex.
