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Any distinction is likely only about 500 years old at most. Though I do very much dislike the term "religion" for interpreting history as it connotes so much th

• dotancohen 2y ago
  When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people that are curious and critical. Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in how the world works?
  • lazide 2y ago
    No major world religion I’m aware of is all that friendly to anyone who disagrees with the answer once ‘given’. Which doesn’t go well with ‘critical’. Some will flat out kill you for disagreeing, in fact.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • LinuxBender 2y ago
      I am not an expert in this area but I think one has to go further back in time before religions were weaponized, censored, intentionally mistranslated, edited and otherwise tainted by kings and emperors. One example might be Gnosticism [1] not the modern version. There are probably better examples from earlier times of antiquity but again I am not an expert in this area. I would wager someone here may be knowledgeable in this area. Perhaps some religions around the time period of the Mycenaean period or other periods where people may have partaken in mind expanding substances as a matter of religious or cult practice? Or perhaps theories around psychedelic drugs used in the Eleusinian Mysteries? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
      • lazide 2y ago
        Uh, when ‘further back’ has religion not been weaponized? Every major religion in recorded history, and all the ones I’m aware of from prehistory, have some history of violence. Even Buddhism. This is one of those ‘false ideal past’ things.
        • bobthepanda 2y ago
          Buddhism has ongoing violence, today, if you count the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
        • LinuxBender 2y ago
          I should have been more clear. When I say weaponized I meant to manipulate societies and control peoples traditions, compliance with governments and less to do with wars, crusades, jihads and the like. This seems to fluctuate throughout history but then again I am not an expert on this topic. Dominance of the patriarchy vs the sacred feminine and such... I am probably still being too vague.
          • lazide 2y ago
            What do you think religion is exactly? At least organized religion. You can draw lines of causation back and forth between those two (or three) big things pretty much arbitrarily depending on the specific circumstances.
      • o11c 2y ago
        The problem with Gnosticism is that it was highly prone to people inventing their own fanfiction that completely contradicted the canonical source material (and a warning against this exact thing is in the source itself). Of course, this doesn't stop the same from applying to "mainstream" denominations too.
        • AStonesThrow 2y ago
          Around 2002, I asked a Dominican friar if it was true that The Matrix films were promoting Gnosticism. He said that I could find Gnosticism just about anywhere, if I looked closely enough. Pair that with Modernism, and you've got a recipe for some slippery definitions of "truth".
    • detourdog 2y ago
      Maybe but I’m not sure it has to do with religion. This type of behavior is generally only a sub-group of any believers.
      • lazide 2y ago
        Have you even met religious people?! I’m not saying everyone is violent. But the core tenet of every religion I’m aware of is believing in it without meaningfully diverting from its core tenets. That’s pretty fundamental. Otherwise, pretty much every religion says they aren’t a part of it anymore. Sometimes that has serious consequences for them. Several of the large religions have ‘you can’t leave’ clauses, either de facto or de jure. And if the core tenets get ‘influenced’ to violence, then that is what also happens.
        • detourdog 2y ago
          I’m really afraid that everything you mention is pretty general and not my experience.
          • lazide 2y ago
            Care to be specific then?
            • detourdog 2y ago
              I can only speak for one religion it has authorities that are well studied and can be consulted. These authorities are only as influential as the congregation that supports them. The story goes that the Egyptian hieroglyph for the Israelites is the translated to the land without a ruler. The idea was that they self organized around texts.
        • Nathanba 2y ago
          Religion is just a form of trained education, you see the same type of belief in people who were educated in schools. People who go through such targetted training are inherently going to believe that the training had some kind of purpose and made it unnecessary to reevaluate it every single time it's brought up. After all what's the point of training if you have to question it all day. This is why you see so many people in society fairly blindly parrotting "I believe in science!" and you think they mean: oh you believe in the scientific method, truth above all else, etc. But no, they mean that they were trained to believe in this particular thing that the tribe thinks is important and they kinda got the gist of it during training.
    • debit-freak 2y ago
      > No major world religion I’m aware of is all that friendly to anyone who disagrees with the answer once ‘given’ Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism—particularly zen buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam. Of course, this comes back to what you consider a "religion". If you're looking for something like the catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural to be dismissive of anything other than what you already believe in as you presume that other people even care what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your opinion is entirely beside the point.
      • lazide 2y ago
        How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists? Though in both cases, would the unacceptable idea not be ‘there is one objective view of reality’, and anyone holding such a view highly unlikely to be considered an adherent?
        • debit-freak 2y ago
          > How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists? Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future. > there is one objective view of reality Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair. For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.
  • BurningFrog 2y ago
    I suspect it's what someone who claims to be a knowledge authority comes up with when everyone asks how the world was created. I mean, if you're that guy, you can't just say you don't know!
    • debit-freak 2y ago
      The costs of propagating such a text are significant enough this act implies serious buy-in from the community (if only its ruling class).
  • debit-freak 2y ago
    > Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in how the world works? I absolutely agree! Although in the context of authorship during exile I'd hazard a guess that there was some motive of community cohesion and development. > When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people that are curious and critical. I hear a far more ambiguous term, and the term will have different connotations if you ask a catholic vs a protestant vs jewish person vs a sunni vs a sufi vs an atheist, &c. I have no clue how others perceive the term, but I sense that it's a rough match at best and completely nonsensical at worse. But broader than that, our (i.e. those of us in the western tradition) entire conceptions about interpreting metaphysical/ontological language have been shaped by western religious conflict and an impossible to enumerate number of people being very, obviously, proudly incoherent, preserved in writing at massive, massive cost. The terms we use—faith, belief, god(s), spirit, afterlife, heaven/hell, sin, evil, guilt, salvation, &c—are difficult to detach from the above conflict and often have zero parallel in the metaphysics of people outside this culture. This also results in people not realizing how much they've internalized the connotations of what might be basic descriptive words for common internal phenomena outside of the framing of religous rhetoric—for instance, you often see atheists proudly rejecting the concepts of faith and belief entirely, unaware that their own worldviews are formed around confidence about metaphysical concepts formed on less-than-certain grounds. as Hume would point out, and as should not be a surprise to anyone who identifies as an empiricist—we all have faith or belief that the sun will rise tomorrow without any line of reasoning to allow us to find deductive, 100%, absolute certainty in this. After all you never know when a pulsar might just completely obliterate our solar system, or that the laws of physics won't arbitrarily change. This might seem facetious until you realize that language only binds to reality in terms of personal confidence that these words are actually descriptive, regardless to what extent this is actually relevant to reality wrt established inductive reasoning. Meanwhile, if you go back far enough, or even just speak in another language that hasn't marinated in christianized latin for millennia, "gods" and "spirits" might as well just be code for "unknown force that drives the mechanisms of the world and human relations". Anthropomorphization of these forces is a social process that allows people to reason about these concepts in abstract ways. Atheism in this context wouldn't necessarily mean you're rejecting a "sky wizard who wants you to deny evolution" (for a particularly facetious example); such beliefs might be perceived closer to a person abandoning the sole basis people had for reasoning about the world without providing an alternative other than "skepticism" (particularly in the case of Socrates, whose actual worldview we have very scant knowledge of). It takes a lot of time, resources, and pain for people to create concepts we take for granted today—even things like "truth" and "encoding words and numbers to strings of symbols we can algorithmically reason about" had to be invented. Of course this would have been bootstrapped on whatever reasonable substrate was available, if only for the sole purpose of communicating your reasoning to others. Naturally this is just my 2¢.
• detourdog 2y ago
  I’m only familiar with the Abrahamic strain of religion. I usually don’t recognize other people’s description of this religion. I have always assumed that it was the King James Bible that established the “modern” of religion and has distorted its emphasis. The distortion is so intense that it doesn’t usually make sense to even point out the misunderstanding.
  • detourdog 2y ago
    I generally never mention downvotes but I really wish whoever has different ideas share them. This domain of human inquiry is definitely large enough for all ideas and I find the downvotes on this comment anti-social not because they have other ideas but their inability to articulate them.