No offence taken. Maybe it's the whole nature or nurture argument. All I know is that "I" as in me and my mind right here and now, however it developed, if faced with another belief backed up with no evidence, would not start to believe in it. If I'd grown up in a different society, who knows? Nurture could have changed who "I" became.
Christianity in a nutshell
by serotonin_wraith 105 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Narkissos
Hi sero,
I guess you know that you don't know what you would be if you were not you...
I only picked on your words to illustrate the point I've been trying to make from the beginning, i.e. that you cannot think yourself or your relationship to anything except in fictional terms -- positing, or posturing as, a "'I' character" distinct and not reducible to anything "real" or even "imaginary" (be it your "body," your "brain," your "mind," your "soul"). Whatever says "my body," "my brain," "my mind," "my soul" posits itself as distinct from the above and cannot ultimately be pinned down as "something". Much like "God," don't you think?
Bring back the subject(ive) into the equation and "religion" will not sound nearly as silly to you. (That does not mean that any religion provides the correct "answers" to the subjective questions, or even an adequate paradigm for you to express those questions, of course.)
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serotonin_wraith
I did not name the thread 'God in a nutshell' or 'Religion in a nutshell'.
Maybe it's me but I'm having difficulty understanding what makes Christianity different from other religions if not the beliefs described in the first post. Compare with Islam...
Both believe in a god - are they the same? No, they're still two different religions.
Both believe the creator of the universe inspired a book - are they now the same? No, still two different religions, and two different books.
So what is the difference? Well Christians believe Jesus was crucified and... ahh! Now we're into the specific beliefs, in this case the story of God coming to earth in the form of a Jewish man and being crucified. Muslims don't think Jesus was crucified. That's one of the things that makes the religions different. They believe different events took place in the past.
Islam coming later than Christianity didn't make it a different religion. Mormons and JWs came even later, yet they are still Christian. They are Christian because they follow the Bible (in whichever way they interpret it). They believe certain stories that are unique to Christianity, not Islam.
So if it isn't these stories that people think happened, what makes religions different from one another?
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Narkissos
The definition of the word "religion" and the exact boundaries between one "religion" and another are not written in heaven... they are simply the product of linguistic usage, which in turn depends on historical power struggle.
From the academic perspective of history of thought, Islam might as well be described as one subsection of Christianity since it acknowledges Jesus and gives him a prominent place (in its eschatology for instance), however history decided otherwise. I agree with you that Mormons and JWs are best described as "Christian sects" but a lot of Evangelical Christians would deny them the "Christian" label. Mormonism added its own book, too. Usage just sanctions a balance of forces in society at large, nothing more.
Stories certainly matter, but they are not all. For instance your summary of "the story of God coming to earth in the form of a Jewish man and being crucified" would not suit Christian unitarians (including JWs). The idea that Jesus was not crucified is not specific to Islam, it can be traced back to early Christian gnosticism and Jewish "Christianity" and probably shows in some canonical Gospel stories (i.e., the young man of Mark and the "Jesus Barabbas" substitution). Within "Christianity" beliefs, stories and practices wildly differ. Not even wars between groups (such as Catholic and Protestant, or Sunnites and Shi'ites) necessarily determine the border from one "religion" to "another".
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serotonin_wraith
You've done a good job of showing the links between the three Abrahamic faiths. I hadn't considered it in quite that way before, so thank you. What about the connection to other religions, or what I would call religions? The stories are quite different. Hinduism, for example.
Can we really go back further than the stories in determining what starts a religion, what the foundation is? I think we can speculate, but that is all. Some could say that the stories came from people who were trying to make sense of what they saw around them, and no god was involved. Others would say the stories were revealed to these people by means of revelations from a god. But nobody knows. The only starting point we can be sure of is the stories that were written down or spoken out loud. How they got into the author's brains is anyone's guess.
It's like the question of what started our universe off. We can go back to less than a second after the Big Bang, but no further. We don't know what caused the Big Bang. It could have been a god, it could have been a natural event. In the same way too we know religions came from stories being passed on, but thinking we know how the stories came to be is going too far. The furthest back we can go honestly is the stories.
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Narkissos
How are religious stories developed? That's a fascinating question. In a sense the answers will be guesswork, yet we're not completely lacking data, because new religious stories are being made, and older ones are being transformed, almost every day.
I think one key factor is (geographical, ethnical, linguistical, social...) isolation. An antagonistic other being, of course, influence.
When a group develops a collective awareness of its existence as distinctfrom other things and people, it will of necessity create stories to make sense of its difference, both out of reminiscences of older stories from another social setting (prior to the isolation) and by its own creative imagination. Such stories (which are usually linked with ritual) are meaningful for the group, they are not designed to reach others and apply to them. They are not "products" to be sold on a big religious supermarket. However, as soon as the circumstances change and the possibility of influence breaks the isolation, they come into a concurrential context and must adapt to become relevant to a wider audience, or be dropped for foreign ones which will be deemed better (from the latter perspective).
We read and assess "religious stories" from the perspective of the supermarket customer. We have stories from all the world and all history on the shelves which we appraise from a consumer's perspective -- which shall we buy, if any? None of them wAS made for us; they were only, at best adapted, at worst only hastily groomed or packed, for us.
The supermarket context is not entirely new btw. In a sense the ancient empires (Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman) led to a similar situation. The whole Bible can be read as a series of adaptations of the native Middle-Eastern stories to a succession of such new contexts.
My emphasis on subjectivity merely points to the customers we are, instead of the "products". Even if we decide to buy nothing at the supermarket because we feel it's all crap, there is a reason why we went there in the first place. We were hungry, thirsty, we had existential questions about meaning, life and death, etc. And we come back with our hunger, thirst, and questions. Should we decide to work out our own answers we will be influenced, willy-nilly, by what we have seen along the trip. To most it will be only an "eclectic" and superficial outlook. Some will take the time to study (or perhaps "try") other answers from other contexts -- to be disappointed probably, but even through the disappointment they may be better equipped to work out their own answers. And through all kinds of attitudes the stories go their way.