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Originally Posted by Fljotsdale  Primarily monotheistic. But that doesn't let out the others by any means! After all, what's the point of a priest or shaman if he/she isn't a direct link to the god? |
You're thinking about this anachronistically. In most religious traditions, priests aren't direct links to gods, but leaders trained in the rites necessary to purify themselves and contact the gods: a very different thing. (Shamans are usually holy crazy men, who trade community services in exchange for offering magic and insights.) And again, in most traditions, priests don't lead their communities. In fact, in some communities (for example, most Doric Greek worship) the priests and priestesses were community elected positions for a period of time, usually with no re-election of the same candidate immediately possible. Religious was seen as inseparable from the polis, and from the hearth, and the three were managed in at least some respects much the same way--because the temple, the city, and the home were all literally holy.
In fact, even among Muslims, the various schools of religious law differ greatly in their readings of some important teachings, and among Shi'ite Muslims the various Ayatollahs issue religious edifts that regularly contradict one another. They are not viewed as holy links to their god, but rather, as learned men attempting to interpret the word of their god properly.
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Why? The existence/non-existence of a god or gods is totally unverifiable...
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Yes, yes, yes: I made a mistake in my sentence, there!
When I wrote, "No, you have to take it on face value that the gods are real," I meant to write, "No, you have to take it on face value that
to them the gods are real." That's all.
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Fable: For most believers, they simply are. More to the point, most believers aren't interested in proving any claims about their god/s.
Fljotsdale: True. They sit back and take the word of some human. It's easier than thinking...
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I was trying to point out that most believers simply don't think they need to convince you of what is a matter of faith to them, because it is 1) ultimately unverifiable physically, and 2) a matter of respecting you to arrive at your own conclusions of what works for yourself. You seem to have twisted this around, somehow.
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True. But how about the peoples the Aztecs slaughtered (for example) when they took over the land from the previous inhabitants? They were not affiliated with any Abrahamic religion, but they appear to have been just as murderous a lot as those the Hebrews took over from. Pagans are not always 'nice' either!
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Um, yeah, and...? We also have plenty of wars over everything under the sun, from differences in currency to terrain resources to skin color to physical height to language. I guess all of those should be banished! -Or maybe the problem is simply humanity. Yeah, that sounds good.
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Fable: No, they definitely wouldn't! Religions have absolutely nothing to do with relieving poverty, or hunger, or slavery. They are about the state of an individual and their relationship to a particular deity or deities. That's all.
Fljotsdale: Wrong. May be true of some religions, but the Sermon on the Mount teaches love for god and one's fellow men as primary, ahead of all other things. If you love people you do not let them starve...
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But your thread is about
religion, not about the cultural values of individual religious avatars. The religion, Christianity, is not about the Sermon on the Mount. It is about accepting a set of precepts that include Jesus Christ as one's personal savior, and as god. That's it. I'm not suggesting the values you mention are unimportant, but they don't actually define what sets apart the religion known as Christianity from, say, Judaism. After all, quite a lot of Jews also like and follow the instructions of the Sermon on the Mount, and quite a few atheists I know, too.
I wish we had one of the Ta Hiera folks or a Kermeticist to discuss their knowledge of Doric Greek and Late Kingdom Egyptian religions, respectively. They're modern worshipers, but many of them do have a very deep understanding of those respective polytheistic faiths. They might help provide an outside framework for challenging the modern Judeo-Christian ideas that are being discussed here as though they were representative somehow of all religions in all places and times.