I've been doing much more lurking than posting lately (guess I'm just not as motivated to post any more; not sure exactly why and that's not the topic of this thread) but I've seen some interesting comments on religion, a subject which (as everyone knows) interests me a great deal. I also have been doing a fair amount of work on the subject lately, and decided to try spelling out my ideas to see what people think of them. The religions that people have invented come in enormous variations, whether we're talking about religions that no longer exist or those that are still around today. The variations have to do with the concept of the divine (one God, multiple gods, spirits, a "force," the universal oneness...), with what religion is supposed to provide (forgiveness in order to escape hell, healing, military victory, fertility, wealth, knowledge of the future, harmony with the universe...) and, especially, in what one has to do in order to obtain whatever it is that is promised (offer sacrifices, recite prayers, do good to others, believe certain things, "blow out the flame of desire," kill infidels...). Nevertheless, it seems to me that, underlying the differences, all of mankind's religions work on the basis of the same three principles: 1) You have to do something (we'll include "believing" as part of "doing," since it is also a human action) and, in return, you have a right to whatever blessing is promised. This is so deeply ingrained in people's thinking that if you don't get what you want, you either decide you didn't do it right, or else that the religion is not worthwhile. Doing something and not getting anything in return just isn't part of how people want their religion. 2) No religion that people have ever come up with is truly concerned about sin. Though many claim to be, a careful analysis shows that they are in fact concerned only with avoiding the consequences of sin. Not offending the gods, or somehow making up for it and/or being forgiven if you do, is very much a part of religion, but only because of the bad things that will happen to you for sinning. If people could be assured of a cosmic "Get out of jail free" card that would guarantee them no unfortunate consequences for sinning, either in this life or beyond death, that would be quite sufficient. It's all people's religions really care about. 3) The whole point of religion is to alleviate the problems that trouble you. The most common "offer" in the history of religion has to do with health, but prosperity (in whatever form means something in the culture where the religion spreads) runs a close second. Some religions do not actually promise good things, but only an end to suffering (Buddhism, for example). Some religions promise this health/prosperity/well-being only in this life, others only in an afterlife, and some in both. But all the religions people come up with seem to have the elimination or at least diminishing of the existential problems we face as their primary goal. I further conclude that if people come up with religions that have these characteristics, it is because that is what people want. It is not part of human nature to want a religion that does not have these three characteristics. What think ye, Wordforge? Do those sum up religion? Are there exceptions?
And if God carried his own Amway suitcases instead of making humans schlep them, I might listen to the spiel.
I'd say "sin" was probably a great tool for maintaining order when it was first invented, but it's long since outlived it's usefulness.
Interesting thread! I feel like I can either write a very short or an awfully long post in return; I'll stick with the first for now, but I wanted to get the the threat in early 1 and 3 seem very vague to me; I wish you'd explain in greater detail what you mean specifically. The way they are stated right now sounds as if it could be boiled down to 1, some assumption of causality; 3, use of that causality to make things better rather than worse. Which would imply to all conscious human actions, I guess, including, but not specifically describing, religion. In the current wording, 1 could be read as much more specific if we use 'right' and 'blessing' in a strict sense, but then most religions I know of don't really conform to this description, including most brands of Christianity, in which what you do or believe might be regarded as a reason for a blessing, but do not create a right that can be enforced or appealed to in any moral or procedural sense. I don't know how to read 3 as more specific. 2 seems to imply that you could be interested in sin in some way not directly related to its bad consequences. It might be worth spelling that out, and also explaining how those other interests about sin occurred to you, if you did not take them from religion.
Yes, that's pretty much it for 1. The key, however, is in what we do: You get what you pay for. If two people perform equal services for their god, and one of them gets more in return than the other, then the one who got less got cheated somehow. Not sure just what you mean here. The point is that you should get what you pay for and if you don't, then either the god in question is not a good guy (he cheated you or else he doesn't even exist), or you didn't do it right. And I think that most forms of Christianity do conform to this. If you believe the right things (believe that Jesus died in order to forgive your sins, among other things) you have a right to the promised blessing: eternity in paradise as opposed to eternity in a place of horrible suffering for those who didn't do (believe, in this case) what they should have. The point is that religion is supposed to make my life easier, either now or after death or both (depending on the religion) and that that is its primary goal. I would go so far as to say that most people (religious or otherwise) cannot really imagine any other goal for religion. Or to put it another way, if we didn't have any problems of any sort, and no perspective of any problems coming up (now or after death), there would be no need for religion. Yes, it does imply that, though I chose not to spell all that out in the opening post. One could want to deal with sin simply because one wants to be a better person, not because of the bad things that will happen because you are a bad person. But I have a hard time finding any religion, Christian or otherwise, that really concerns itself with that. I was raised as a Christian and the teaching I heard was that one needed salvation because of hell, period. There was no hint of being a better person simply because it is the right thing to do.
Let’s change the word, Dan. Instead of “sin,” let’s call it, say, “transgression” – a gradually codified set of parameters for surviving in the tribes we all arose from. “Thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s hunting knife or, for that matter, his wife.” That sort of thing. The more complex the society, the greater and more fine-tuned the number of these transgressions. Then there’s the divide between legal sins – those against the tribal leader/local lord/king that can get you beheaded, those against your peers that can end up with you losing a hand or your testicles or result in a long stay in a stockade or dungeon – and “moral” sins…things that piss off the shaman/priest. So, at base, “sins” are transgressions against one’s fellow man. “Do unto others…if it harm no one…your right to swing your fist,” etc. The problem arises when one invokes God. “God doesn’t want you to do that” isn’t the same as “I, the king/your spouse/your next-door neighbor don’t want you to do that.” To me the most significant part of Asyncritus’s post is “the religions people have invented.” It has a lot more import when he says it than when Dan or Packard or I do. Because if we start with the premise that God is made in man’s image, and not the other way around, things become simultaneously simpler and more complex.
Sins are interesting. I think they are probably the oldest remains of pre-civilization. Stone age men figured out that it's no fun when a family member dies. They knew it's inevitable but they must have figured out that helping it is not so cool. Thus, murder as a sin was born and remains just that until today. I see this as important steps on the way from animals to actual humans. Same goes for the rest of the. Figured out at one point, codified and religiousized later. For me, sins are stone age morals that have not been adapted much over the millennia. Like all morals, they do, however, mostly reflect the writer's. Like, sex. Most religions have major problems when it comes to the bedroom since this aspect of human behavior is extremely hard to control. So, wham, bam, make it a sin but 'allow' it on clearly defined terms aka marriage. Whoosh, religion has a foot in the bedroom door. You swear before your $deity that you'll only have sex on their terms (and procreation so the flock doesn't shrink). Problem solved! Of course it is. Otherwise nobody would have invented it. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. I think that's too narrow. The need for concrete solutions is since humans seem to be unable to handle things that can't be explained. Big existential problems need big 'solutions' and many of us are still happy to have the biggest of all to blame everything they don't understand. And of course... hope.
It comes down to "does it break an arm, or pick a pocket?". What you eat, what you smoke, or who you consensually stick a dick into, ought to be nobodies business, and these sorts of "sin", always give themselves away by having to add extra supernatural dimensions to the universe to justify them being wrong.
Hope can be a poison, and false hope is radioactive, and full of Borg-AIDS. Making shit up keeps you from finding real-world solutions. It's not harmlesss, it's not cute, it's anti-survival, and therefore dangerous. To steal a Hitchens line, it rightly belongs in the infancy of our species.
I think it's pretty simple... Primitive people were quick to notice that certain behaviors would lead to "positive" developments (harmony, prosperity, order, etc.) and some would lead to "negative" ones (conflict, disorder, impoverishment, etc.). As people associated outcomes in the world with the influence of supernatural beings, they deduced that the behaviors associated with "negative" outcomes must displease those beings, and so they built cults around reinforcing "positive" behavior. The priests of the cult would say that God doesn't want you to be lazy, or to murder, or to screw your neighbor's wife and, sure enough, society was plainly better off where those behaviors were made less frequent, and worse off where they were commonplace. People would've been quickly sold on the idea because, on that level, it does work. But, human beings being what they are, placing the power of control of behavior of all in the hands of an elite few inevitably leads to people seeking this power and abusing it.
Of course religions consist on some level of beliefs people want to have. There is no reason to hold a belief absent or in the face of evidence other than the desire that that belief be true; faith is the triumph of desire over reason. Even then, as noted in 2), such beliefs are often, if not usually, not truly believed. People act upon the desire to believe something true far differently than they act upon a belief that it's actually true. People generally don't truly believe in sin, and they most certainly don't truly believe in the afterlives they claim to believe in or their reactions to death would be far different than they are. Religious faith is ephemeral, hence the need to constantly reinforce it through acts of prostration and ritual assertions of belief or it withers and dies. Why do gods so desperately need the secular law to enforce their wills? Because that is the sort of law that people wishing to demonstrate their beliefs in gods, rather than people actually believing in gods, create. Public piety is an act of a nonbeliever desperate to convince himself and others that what he wants to be true and believes to be false is, in fact, true.
Well in regards to Christianity, IIRC in the New Testament there is ONE and ONLY ONE blessing that is promised to people in this life. IIRC that is to honor thy father and mother....and your days would be long upon the earth.
What if your parents are abusive swine? I actually think emancipation ought to happen more often, and not just be a thing for child celebrities. Most of the kids I went to school with should have been emancipated.
So? There is no right to retaliate against people just because they are bad. You can honor your parents no matter how they treat you the best way you can. And I have a lot of trouble believing that many parents you knew of were that bad.
In a quick Mel Brooks-like overview of human development, it seems to me that religion was man’s first science, i.e., a way of trying to explain natural phenomena. Lightning/brushfires, comets, eclipses were obviously messages from something powerful Out There. Wildebeest weren’t running this season, drought made the waterhole dry up? Obviously the gods are angry. Must do something to placate them. Whether that “something” was to sacrifice an animal or a virgin or the captives from the last raid on the neighbors depended on the nature of the humans inventing the god. God is made in man’s image, not the other way around. Violent societies beget violent gods. Benevolent gods more often arise in resistance to the violence of the surrounding society. As to why some societies are more violent than others, that’s a more complicated subject. Codified religions – from the tribal shaman to the Egyptian priesthood to the Vatican – were the result of power struggles with the civil authority – the tribal chief, the Pharaoh (look what happened to Akhenaton when he tried to abolish the priesthood – they killed him in this life and in the afterlife), the Tudors. How the priesthood rose to authority was in large part based on prognostication – reading and interpreting the stars, the entrails, the Magical Book scrabbled together centuries later out of the legends of desert tribes. Then there was the power of threat. Follow the rules or face eternal damnation. (Someone should do a study of whether a belief in Hell is stronger in societies growing up around active volcanoes.) But the ability to invoke an authority that controlled the afterlife was the priestly class’s way of limiting the power of kings (excommunication or q.v. Akhenaton), managing the rabble, and raising the priestly class above such common things as manual labor. They sowed not, but they certainly reaped. The burnt offerings/collection plate kept them in groceries and paid for the Sistine Chapel. Primitive science and power struggles are the underpinnings. The human impulse toward understanding infinite things within the limits of a finite intelligence is the motivation. But like all human institutions, what starts out with the best intentions inevitably succumbs to entropy.
Climate. The American south, violent crime, death penalty. Middle east, violent crime, death penalty. Keep people out of the hot places.
There is a lot of debate on that. In my opinion, treat them with respect, politeness and deference whether they deserve it or not in your opinion. Treat them well regardless of how they treated you. Respect their values. Have your own values but do not try to openly challenge theirs. When they are older and begin to get feeble, try to provide and assist them however you reasonably can That sort of thing
Perhaps so. Whenever someone says "you give me power, I give you a better society" you have to wonder whether the former or the latter is their true objective. Perhaps the two are inextricably linked and everything should be viewed through the lens of rational self-interest...
Not untrue thought there are exceptions. during the horrendous 1980 heat wave it was interesting that it was so hot that in some cities like Kansas City the murder rate actually went DOWN. Apparently it being so awful outside that people were reluctant to violently confront one another.
But it doesn't say you would live forever. Says "days would be long upon the earth". I also thought that this mean that every other thing being equal, that instead of dying at 70 you could live until 85. Or if you might die at 45 you could live to 55 instead. And so on.
"I'm sorry Mr. and Mrs. Jones. We did everything we could, but your baby daughter is dead. Look at the bright side: she had 108 long days upon the Earth!" It's a bullshit argument. For anyone who lives to be X, you can always say they would've lived to X+1 if they'd just been better Christians. Hogwash. Your god seems content to let Nazi concentration camp guards live well into their 90s.
And I know parents that made my friends drink bleach and get beaten regularly. I would Honor no one who conducts themselves in that way in regards to their children.
