Literature that serves to annotate moral guidance and is held with conviction of it’s contents and subjects existence in reality, though the components of the literature accepted as reality by the individual would surpass common acceptance of possible reality.
The next logical question is what determines that Hamlet, believed by one to be reality and by no one else as reality, is any different than a text such as the Bible, believed to be reality by a multitude and believed to be false by a multitude.
The answer is simple: the difference between the follower of Hamleton and the follower of Christianity is but a single fact; cultural impact as a believed reality.
Hamlet simply hasn’t had enough people believe it as real and supernatural, and with conviction enough to follow it’s moral teachings with an expectation of some form or providential hope or growth enough to make a respected impact on ideology in present culture.
In a nut-shell, that’s the difference.
As an example, it is my opinion that Plato was attempting to start a new religion in writing about Atlantis; a “perfect” society.
Starting with the legend of their existence in a “report”, and then hoping for people to conjecture all of the belief’s that would one day surround the “religion” on their own.
I believe that Plato understood how religions were formed and was testing the idea out.
It almost worked if you think about it; people are convinced that Atlantis; the perfect society, exists as remains.
If you read his report on Atlantis, you will see that it has all of the markings of a religious story before it becomes religious.
Strip down everything religious about Jesus; go back to culture at the time, imagine his perspective as a man, follow the thought process of conviction and desperation, and then start thinking about how people would carry this message on after he died in the 1st century?
They are pretty similar in the evolution; if Plato’s had been fully accepted as fact and bought into.
(He did also make another “religion”, but that’s different)
My problem is that your method of identifying religious texts seems to suffer from, well, arbitrariness. I mean this only in the sense that you establish no clear line that, when crossed, literature becomes religious… (i.e., what is “a respected impact on ideology in present culture”?)
It seems to me that measuring cultural impact is no easy feat, and I doubt whether it can be done objectively at all, so that “religious” becomes an arbitrary and subjective label with this method.
We could easily measure “how many believe it to be reality”, but again we’d have to establish arbitrary lines… In which case I’d wonder what real difference, if any, exists between the text just above the line and the text just below…
I’m not sure I grasp your example though, or at least I’m not at all familiar with Plato’s Atlantis report.
How about Plato’s other texts? His Socratic dialogues for example? Surely these have had respectable impact on ideology in present culture, perhaps enough to be considered religious, no? Surely these serve to “annotate moral guidance and are held with conviction of their contents and subjects existence in reality”?
Couldn’t we bind Plato’s Socratic dialogues together and call them the major competitor to the Bible in the West? i.e., a robust religious text in its own right?
Perhaps you could clarify your thinking by showing me how the Socratic dialogues, which seem to me to meet your conditions for religion, FAIL to be religious?
Anthropologists looking back at dead cultures have to suffer this strained task that you just described.
They have to decide whether something was just fictional writing or religious dogma.
What they look for is an impact of that dogma in the culture that caused a practice in the peoples lives.
Did it provoke a following and command moral life, and did it attempt to explain the unknown “cosmo’s” by applying labels?
This is what every religion does.
And it is difficult for Anthropologists to tell that line apart many times.
This is why there is such a debate about other early Christian literature’s authenticity versus being just literature.
By subject, I intended concepts of entity or force.
Plato discusses much about his theological philosophies, but blatantly states that he is not a religious authority, nor are his writings to be taken as such when he discusses his theological ideals.
However, his ideas did influence religious followings around; for instance, as I mentioned previously, the Gnostics.
No, but you can (and people do) say that the Christian religion was greatly influenced by Plato’s writings on the cosmo’s and gods.
Do you see the difference so far?
Think of it this way…Plato’s writings, along with Shakespeare, never compelled a culture to erect congregational areas for religious practices.
I have no doubt he has, I actually am intrigued by his position, I wouldn’t suggest it’s right or wrong!
Alyoshka
So you would state that anyone who follows a ‘literary’/fictitious character’s way of life/values can bring that person into our reality through them? So for yourself, ‘God’ doesn’t need to exist externally independently of you. If this is indeed a correct reading of your view, it’s one that very much interests me. Too many people, myself included at times, focus on the existence of God, rather than the idea of God.
What would you call Plato’s Acadamy and the countless millions who’ve tried to live the examined life as per Socrates’ example?? (Don’t worry about answering that…)
It seems your method of classification involves both intra- and extra-textual conditions to be met before the text can be called religious. All I require is the depiction of a character, while anything outside the text, i.e., what society does with it or what its cultural impact is, has nothing to do with its religious status. Or perhaps, to be more precise, to me a text is religious when it inspires someone to model their life off of the character exhibited, so I suppose I do have an extra-textual requirement!!
So maybe that’s the crux of what separates us: To me the cultural impact of a religion can be as modest as one person following its way. I don’t require X temples or Y devotees to a text before that text can be called religious. One believer is enough…
Exactly. To me a God existing externally and indepedently of us is a useless hypothesis (unless, of course, you’re interested in interminable argument!). I think the point is for us to follow God’s way, not for us to believe there is in fact a God out there directing events. In other words our judgment should not be applied to the question of God’s existence but the righteousness of God’s way of life and whether it makes sense for us and the circumstances we face.
Jesus, I think, is the perfect example of this… i.e., he’s God, but at the same time he’s man… Through Jesus we know God, not because he has crazy super powers, but because he lives a life of service to his fellows (which IMO is the life God shows us).
I’m interested in what you mean by this, i.e., believed vs impressioned?
Yeah, I realized I pinned this down into a hind-sight only perspective, which isn’t an accurate look from all angles actually.
What I mean is that the requirements I laid out work great for looking back in time and seeing what was religious in a given culture, but it doesn’t satisfy your question about what can be religious text.
To answer that, I can state the following:
To create a religious text, one must answer one simple question:
What is the justification for man’s suffering, what do you pose as the compensation for this, what is my hope for living any further through this suffering, and what or who can I turn to for access to attempt to gain control or sense of this chaotic approach of suffering and reward that I cannot predict nor ever personally control?
That is what every religious text addresses; regardless of how, they all address those issues.
If the text does not address each and every one of them, I would not say that it is religious.
I see religious text as writing, similarly to how you do; slightly different, but close enough.
And I believe that a person can choose to adhere to any religious doctrine, theology, or ideology that they wish to.
However, where I think we part ways is that you seem to be accepting the idea itself as far enough.
Meaning, that accepting it as a guidance and that it is only literature is far enough for religious value in your mind.
For me, however, once the doctrine, theology, ideology is determined (even if hybrid), then it is dire that one must choose to believe it as a truth with the total of their conviction.
The conviction is the driving force that will cause the life to adhere to the ideals of the religion and it’s moral and ethical constructs towards others and within one self.
To me, simply accepting something as religion for moral guidance, but negating it’s character’s/subjects as truth negates the effects of it being a religion, which religion has the power of conviction and compelling.
Otherwise, it is philosophy, which can be adhered, but will never generate a conviction of devotion to the degree that religion can.
That devotional conviction, once again, is the key difference in my mind.
Whatever you choose to believe in, believe in it wholly, devoutly, and reverently.
So basically life is suffering and religion is a coping mechanism?
You know, I quite like this. Life, by its very nature, is decadent. Suffering is indeed inextricable from the life process and so it makes sense for us to develop something, let’s call it religion, to help us cope.
But something is nagging at me, and I think it has to do with my personal bias… i.e., When I think religion I tend to think Judeo-Christian to the neglect of everything else religious! So I have a feeling that what you say here is an accurate description of this particular religion (which is why I find it so praiseworthy), but I wonder if it’s appropriate for all religions…
If I could try and dismantle your ‘essence of the religious’ I see it (with a bit of a stretch) consisting in two components:
Statement(s) of fact about life. i.e., Life is suffering in this case.
Statement(s) that flesh out the meaning of life given the fact(s) of life. i.e., Life is suffering. Now what do we do?
I take your answer to this bolded question to be: Keep on living because there is a system of compensation and justification…
To recapitulate,
Stumps: Life is suffering. We should press on for reasons X,Y,Z (where X,Y,Z are defining of the religion).
Aly: Life is A,B,C. We should respond with X,Y,Z (where A,B,C and X,Y,Z are defining of the religion).
Is that fair?
You go on to say some things of interest in your next post…
To me adhering to the moral guidelines of a religion is a testament to our conviction. i.e., There is no conviction unless we live the life, and the conviction to live it is paramount. In other words we must believe that life is as the religion says and that the way of life the religion proposes is the appropriate response to life’s conditions. We must have strong enough convictions, i.e., enough belief in the truth of this, to live it… That’s all that matters.
However you keep mentioning the truth of the religion’s characters/subjects… I can only take this to mean we must accept the real life existence of, for example, God, that there must be a God out there that matches the character portrayed in Scripture. In other words the text must correspond to ontological and/or historical fact. You’re right that we disagree in this regard!
So it seems you’re saying if we don’t believe Jesus really turned water into wine, i.e., if we don’t believe he had supernatural powers, then the Christian text would just be
But what is this devotion but that of a devotion inspired by fear and trembling before insurmountable power? It seems this devotion you speak of is like the devotion of a slave to their master, or a subject to a king… It feels coerced or almost forced, as in I better be devoted to this otherwise I’m gonna get f’ed up!
It seems more meaningful if we live the life because of its own worth, not because we believe some ontological powerhouse requires it of us…
It works for any religion.
Religions are not made for shits and giggles.
They attempt to relieve man’s condition in some fashion or another; regardless how pretty or ugly the portrayal.
shrug It’s not exactly mine, it’s what I’ve noticed is the constant among man; therefore I hold it as such, yes.
I don’t like the wording…maybe I’m pickey.
But I rather like:
Life involves suffering, which appears to be unjust. We should live life, however, not consumed by this appearance of injustice and suffering for reasons X, Y, Z (where X, Y, Z are driving theological outlooks on life of a religion.)
To me…these are the same thing.
Look at what I wrote again…
I believe the conviction is needed to produce what you want to occur out of a naturally good state.
Meaning, you would have man inherently desire to adhere in action and life to any creed they thought held good merit.
However, man has shown that he will not easily do this; man is a lazy animal.
Religion, however, compells convicition, and conviction will generate the results that you admire; adhereing to the conduct in action and life.
They have to be considered as real in some regard, however this is done by the person.
The reason is that their placement is a metaphorical personification of the forces of the metaphysical reality that man cannot comprehend, but is accepting, through the religious theology, must exist.
For instance, if one holds that there is a force that counters all of the suffering with good, then one would need to believe that force actually exists and not hold it as only a fictional character. If they hold it as just a fictional character, then the conviction that there is any hope against the suffering is completely lost.
It would be like a Buddhist not believing in reincarnation but counting on that reincarnation for justification for moral guidance…it doesn’t hold up.
The acceptance does not need to be purely literal, but the belief in the entities or forces is paramount in at least the metaphorical representation of an actual existence of some entity or force that does exist in the metaphysical universe.
For instance, if one believes in Karma, then one may not believe everything as literal about Karma that is outlined in the religion about Karma, but they do need to at least believe in the essence of Karma as a force.
If not, and they just adhere to the moral guidance, then they are not practicing the religion at all, and in my opinion, they are waisting their time.
No it’s not.
Believing in a power higher than oneself has always been for one reason; a hope that a portion of that control can be man’s control by proxy of their metaphysical agent.
Karma, reincarnation, Jesus, Thor, Zeus, Pharo-Gods, etc…
All of these are metaphysical agents that man attempts to pleed to for the agent to be on the pleeing man’s side and grant something to that man.
It is a way of reaching beyond the uncontrolable chaos of suffering and finding a resource that is believed will allow for some form of control in the chaos of the suffering.
This is also why the afterlife began to contain “heaven’s”. What wasn’t finished being “rewarded” on earth where it was thought should have been, and therefore didn’t make sense to the logic of the cosmic justification, a “heaven” can correct and reward in the afterlife.
The Egyptian’s, if one considers, are the first large group of this idea as the Pharo’s die and cross to the other side where they will correct all yet uncorrected injustices for their people, but only if the people bury them properly; again…a plee for control by proxy is done; this time in mumification and buryial rights.
Another function that is not fear is simply humility.
All forces and entities stand to remind man that there are forces in the universe so great that man has absolutely no control over them, and must turn to a larger force than himself for help against such forces.
This is humbling to man.
This is why it is always considered a corrupt or perverted idea when, in these stories, man attempts to harness any of these great forces for themselves, or imagine themselves to be as great as these forces.
Again, this is why it is paramount to my opinion, that one believes in their religions forces/entities in some fashion as a reality.
In my particular religion (if it can be called such!) all I really depend on is humanity itself and its potential for love (where love is a certain type of action).
Believing human beings exist isn’t quite the same as believing God exists or karma exists, and love, which would be my religious “force”, is more of a potentiality than an actuality… (Mind you it could and has been actual, but it’s not a necessity or anything like that.)
So if I read God/Jesus as a loving character, not that they necessarily existed but only that the love they exhibit could exist through each of us, and that this is what the religion calls for, even if you disagree with this reading would you accept this as a valid religion given what you say?
I have considered the assumptions of theism and find them to be unsupportable. I also have long studied a cosmology completely independent of a god that makes perfect sense to me and provides an adequate explanation for life (with no conflict when it comes to reason and logic, btw) as well as moral principles that provide meaning to my daily existence.
So I wouldn’t say that I’m open to there being a god, or that I think it’s unreasonable for me to be so.
Precisely. I am the same way. So I have no problem saying, “I don’t believe in God/gods/yada-yada.” We both have a firm position. Granted, if I were conclusively shown wrong, I would reverse my stance on that issue, and I imagine you would too. But I don’t see that happening I don’t know about you (though I imagine you are in a similar boat), but my cosmology and moral principles that provide meaning to my daily existence positively preclude a god from existing. If one does, my system largely falls apart. After all, if a god were to exist, it would probably be a very big deal. The sort of god a cosmological system is based off of anyway. God doesn’t enter into my equations at all.
But that makes sense because we have fleshed out cosmological systems. When someone is agnostic on the issue of divinity, their cosmologies are almost always vague and ill-formed, making them unassailable. Unless the “no comment” is a veiled endorsement of a nontheistic system. When Master Esai said he had no opinion of Buddhas past, present, or future but he knew that cows exist, he was explicitly creating a nontheistic system. They simply weren’t important and can be dismissed.
It is a little more complicated when things like Judeo-Christian style monotheism gets thrown in. You can’t just ‘dismiss’ their God and say “no comment” because, well, if he were real it would be a big deal. So you can either say, “Yeah, I basically think that is correct” and go down one of those roads or say, “No, I do not think that is correct” and go down one of those roads. And I think that has to happen whenever that challenge is presented to an individual. This can usually be done with a simple, “No thank you.”
Design God as the God of love; even if a metaphorical representation of the force of Love, or the metaphysical commanding of Love (whatever force exists that pulls such force if such exists), and assume it to have the power to empower man with the will to Love, revere it (“God”) for it’s ability to empower man with the good of Love…the potential of what can be done, and seek it as a proxy agent by which the counter-love (whatever you describe that is) is curbed against by the force of Love being actualized.
Do this, and you have a religion.
But you must believe the proxy agent to hold power for the force you are interested in.
Oh…and yes…for those reading and considering…patriotism works the same way as what I just described.
A belief in a larger force (the nation) that is assumed to have the power to provide “X”, and/or curb “Y” and is entrusted by the individual with belief that the individual will enjoy reward through control by proxy of the nation’s greatness.
The only difference is that patriotism places faith in a construct that is tangibly ran and accomplished by man openly, and religion is assumed to be that which is beyond any number of man’s control.
And for the record…I do consider conspiracies like “The New World Order” or “Them” as near-religions as they have no actual tangible control by any number of man openly.
Academically, the separator of conspiracy groups and religions is intent of organization of the ideologies; paranoia vs. attempt at comprehending justifications of reality as it is.
This is a tough paragraph to follow (namely the bit after the ‘…’) but I’m pretty confident a literary character on its own, i.e., without a real counterpart, can “empower man with the will to love” (where by ‘empower’ I simply mean it can solicit or inspire a loving response from man…).
However in your discussion of patriotism you say:
I’ve gotten this sense before, that to you religion deals with things outside man’s control. So since I think each of us has complete control over whether our actions are loving, i.e., since I make no supernatural appeals, it seems that according to you my thinking isn’t religious! Perhaps it is just philosophy as you say, which has been a worry of mine for some time since honestly, I can’t distinguish my line of thinking from ethics!
I’m totally on board with atheists and/or anti-religionists in their resistance to anything supernatural. I don’t want to incorporate anything in my thinking unless it is concrete!
HOWEVER, this raises something that’s been on my mind through this discussion…
As much as I don’t want to make supernatural appeals I am very interested in potentialities… Namely I think religion is concerned with what could be… (Not in what ‘is’ or what ‘was’ or what ‘will’ be…)
In other words, to me religion isn’t metaphysical, historical or eschatological, but rather it’s, well, I’m not sure what field of study would cover this! I’m sure there’s a proper name, I just don’t know it (perhaps it is eschatology so long as we remove the necessity!). In Scripture what could be goes by the name the Kingdom of God or Heaven or the New Jerusalem, but again, I see these potentialities as completely within the control of man… i.e., they don’t rely on any supernatural powerhouse to take care of the business outside human control…
These potentialities, to refer back to something I said earlier, are more precisely what solicits or inspires a loving response from man… i.e., It is because of the products of a life of love that we love… It is because of what would be if we loved that we love…
However, to link this back to your thinking: Whether we love is completely within our control. Whether we are loved in return is outside our control…
What I mean to say here is that these potentialities (i.e., Heaven) are beyond our individual control (since our love alone can’t bring them into being) but they are within humanity’s control (since to put it simply they refer to the state where everyone loves…).
I think this successfully evades supernatural appeal, but perhaps it still isn’t properly religion according to your framework… (I guess that’s my question to you: Is it?)
Sorry if that’s confusing and if I seem to be jumping around a lot…
(I’ll stick to this part until you say you actually want me to respond to the other parts)
Humanity is too large of a construct for the individual to actually tangibly rely on as a realistic force, but it is relied on to fail and succeed at the same rate that has occurred throughout time without much movement toward one way or the other.
As such, it’s not within the expected human psyche to hold much faith in the power of humanity as a proxy to a force of that persons interest (in your case, Love; do you actually expect humanity to push Love forward with the ability to one day defeat anti-love?)
The supernatural is that which is just believed to be capable of doing that which humanity cannot, and more importantly, grant the ability to an individual that which the individual does not believe is within their personal power without the supernatural proxy.
Belief is extremely powerful.
Thought is extremely provoking.
You have to figure out if you want Love to be powerful or provocative; force, or shock.
Jesus’ death as a religion is a powerful force of salvation capable of empowering great acts in men by man considering the level of compassion in Jesus as a sacrifice.
Jesus’ death as a principle rebellion in philosophy is a provoking idea capable of causing man to examine the relations between the ideologies of Jesus contrast to the ideals of the culture he was a part of, and how such philosophies may or may not be sound.
A way of thinking of this specific example is, either a stranger just dove in front of the bus to save your life because he loved you, or he just dove in front of the bus because he lived by a principle philosophy in action.
Examining both separately and what effects it would have on your psyche; the force (first) is more impactful (and confusing…why did he?), while the thought (second) is quizzical and possibly futile.
But a nation state isn’t? (As per your patriotism example…)
Expect? Of course not. Desire? Yes. It is my desire for every human being to practice love in their life. But I am realistic and as such realize the improbability of such an occurrence.
So while I agree expectation influences popular faith (which is what I take you to be saying), IMO those who only have faith in what they expect to be the case have a very weak faith! The miraculousness of Jesus’ life, for example, is that he blows away all expectation when he does what he does… And that’s just it: I can collapse this back down to the individual level and say it is just as unexpected to see love practiced there as it is to see it practiced across humanity as a whole…
In other words love is unexpected at any level, and this indeed disinclines people toward it. But more importantly it is desirable at all levels (at least to me), and this is what I think should fuel our faith in it and/or our conviction to live lovingly. (I leave it to everyone else to determine the desirability of love on their own…)
Can’t I have both? I’ve already admitted the shock value of love in the sense it blows away expectations. But I also think it is provocative in the sense it is desirable, in that the desirability of love provokes us to love.
Once provoked to love, i.e., once we actually love, then love becomes powerful, i.e., a force in the world that does real work. This is obviously my ultimate desire… i.e., I want nothing more than for love to cease being shocking, i.e., for love to become an expected, reliable, constant force in the world…
(I think humanity needs to be primed. i.e., We need to add a little love to get the love flowing. I want nothing more than for love to start flowing out of control, i.e., for humanity to be gushing!)
I think I take this in a different way than you intend though since I’m having trouble connecting this quote with your example… In both cases the action/end result is the same: the man saved me from the bus. I don’t care, really, what his motivations were, i.e., if it was because he loved me in particular or believed in practicing love in general. In the end, when he practiced love in general it led to his loving me in particular. Conversely if he keeps practicing love in particular, then he ends up loving in general, no? i.e., his particular actions go to show what his principles are?
I don’t care if particular actions are the result of a general principle or if a general principle is evinced by particular actions. All that matters to me is the action itself…
But I’m open to clarification!
