What Do Religions Tell Us About the Cultures that Created Them?


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DennisWisconsin is offline DennisWisconsin Post #1  July 2,2009, 7:28am
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I am most familiar with Christianity and so I start here. God is given all manner of human qualities.

God is vengeful.
God is not forgiving until Christ died on the cross.
God needs to be thanked... constantly.
God is jealous.

It would seem that the culture that created this God was fearful of the weather...

Buddhism seems to center more on making yourself at peace with yourself and nature...
 
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TaoShaffer is offline TaoShaffer Post #2  July 2,2009, 4:52pm
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I've been trying to think of a proper response to this topic for a few days now.

At first I wanted to address the question: Can a religion demonstrate the deeper mentality of the people that afford it power?

But I just ran into nature vs nurture.

Then I asked: Can a people be anthropologically studied via their fabrication of a deity?

But that question didn't work either. Because you just can't make aspersions like that.

So I will state my opinion on why religion was good, but is no longer need.

Religion offered a common ground that crossed borders and acted as a unifying force in terms of morals and beliefs. Gods tend to be vengeful because Humans are weak and need a constant threat of repercussions in order to do the right thing.

Religion offered a framework for people to homogenize in culture and that was good. But now we have a speed of information that's unheard of. Cultural change is already so quick its difficult to keep up with.

--Tao
 
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DennisWisconsin is offline DennisWisconsin Post #3  July 3,2009, 9:19am
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In spite of the road blocks you ran into I think it is possible to gleen some information from these religions. Yes of course it would be mostly conjecture...

Perhaps religion tells us more about the times than about the culture...

From total ignorance of nature, to magic, to somebody had to create all this!

When we advance to the point of creating life (I guess we are pretty much already there) what will we be thinking? We are the Gods? We are the universe observing/discovering itself?
 
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TaoShaffer is offline TaoShaffer Post #4  July 3,2009, 5:12pm
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DennisWisconsin wrote :
In spite of the road blocks you ran into I think it is possible to gleen some information from these religions. Yes of course it would be mostly conjecture...
I've always held that religion is a thing made up by the human mind to assuage feelings created by the most illogical parts of the human psyche. So it would be incredibly difficult to study something like this unless we had the original group that came up with it.

In addition most religions have been around millennia which means they have accreted writings and rituals over a millennia. Some of these writings and rituals were taken from other religions, in the case of Christianity, in a sort of chameleon way, in order to bring the populous away from old ideas.

And then you have to realize that religion doesn't stay in one place, it spreads. Christianity itself started in the southern parts of the Roman Empire and spread into Europe. So there is no one people to study.

Overall there is just no way to approach the problem you have put forward.

--Tao
 
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