While neither of us can say for sure, the remarks I've seen across the Web seem to agree with this view. As I wrote earlier in this thread, a furry religion appears to fall under the condition of wish fulfillment: people who want to be part animal--as they envision these specific hybrid parts of their choice to be, of course, rather than any other mixture of parts, of which there would be many--and somehow feel that by wishing, or worshipping something they've made up, they'll achieve this form in another lifetime. If this is accurate, and it certainly appears to be, then it bears no resemblance to any religion I've ever encountered, lacking all the requisites.C Elegans wrote:If this is the background to the claims that a Furry religion exists, it would be my question1: an overinclusive use of the term religion, in this case based on ignorance what a religion is. Ancient and African religion would be targets for this misconception simply because people in the Western world generally has far less knowledge about those religions than the monotheistic religions that are popular in our own culture.
I agree: this lack of knowledge makes it all too easy to refer back to African religion for confirmation--since it's The Great Unknown to most folks, it's easy to rely upon misconceptions. For example, when Hill-Shatar remarked earlier in this thread, "As said, some people even worship in a sense the animal body hybrid ideal," he was referring to the traditional worshipping system of places such as the Indian subcontinent and Egypt. But although the Egyptian goddess Sekhet, the Lady of the Flame, was depicted as possessing a lion's head, nobody worshipped lions, or thought of her as a lion, or believed that her power was to make them into hybrid lion-humans. Instead, the lion was a symbol of Sekhet, just as was her own name, derived from sekhem, meaning "to be strong, mighty, violent" (EA Wallis Budge, Gods of the Egyptians). Similarly, Bast, the cat-headed goddess, was worshipped in this fashion because the Egyptians knew the power of visual imagery, and Bast was a goddess of protection, stealth, and violence. This was very appropriate for the first land to ever domesticate the house cat, where it served as the first successful rat catcher and saved countless agricultural crops.Regarding African religion, I think this is a relatively difficult subject since Western people in general do not understand that the African continent harbours more different ethnic tribes, cultures, languages and religions than any other part of the world. This is not surprising really since evolutionary speaking, we all came out of Africa. As Westerners, we rarely come into contact with authentic African culture and religion and most of us don't visit Africa very often due to the difficulties and expenses going there and the political unstability. In school, we are taught about the "world religions" which usually are the monotheistic religions and hinduism, buddism and konfucianism. African religions are treated simply as "animism" and "tribal" is often equal to a more "primitive" level in an imagined, culture-centric hierarchy where monotheistic religions are the most "developed".
I'm afraid that animism is a catchall word used by pop culture, today, to refer to a host of religions and religious views and experiences that can't be tidily summarized for modern secular Christians. I've only done a small amount of research in this, so I'll be really curious what you've found. My own areas of concern were into Eastern European and Asian shamanism, and pre-monotheistic European religion; though I've got a few texts on Native American materials, as I may have mentioned before. I've been glancing through these, and would be glad to put up a few samples of the shamanistic experience after returning from a brief trip to NYC this weekend.
I know the feeling. If I were to start all over now, and had my adult years before me, I would want to become a cultural anthropologist. As a scientific discipline it was still in development when I was growing up (despite some famous studies going back as far as the early part of the 20th century), and really only began taking off in the 1970s and 80s.Among people who are interested in religion as part of anthropology/ethnography, West Africa in particular is famous for it's many various rich religions with highly abstract symbolism. I guess though that if you see a guy from Burkina Faso dancing around in an antelope costume on Western TV, it's not always that there is an extensive explanation for his behaviour. I saw a very good documentary at the Swedish Musuem of Dance recently, where various African mask dances were shown together with a narrative that explained the various aspects of the dance and the underlying religious meaning. It's a pity this movie can't be bought, it would serve as a nice source of basic information for people who don't have the time and energy to look for good textbooks about the subject. I've been reading books and articles about African religion since I was 5 years old, and I still know I have barely managed to reach under the surface. *sigh* I wish I had time for another research career
Please, do put up some of the things you've found: some quotes, some conclusions, maybe some recommedations on reading, if you can.