The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

@Charles: I understand that you don't want religion to be some sort of exclusive club with all the gate-keeping and the problems that come with it, but if you do that I think term "religion" will just loses a lot of its value as a category. Not to mention, at that point, why even bother calling yourself a Catholic, Christian, Muslim, and so on? All religions are practically one giant incoherent mess at that point. Religion has a dogma to follow and is a completely prescriptive belief system. It's some sort of exclusive club whether you like it or not.

RE: Atheistic Christian: I'm pretty sure that those people don't believe in God, but believe or admire Jesus as some sort of great man. The same way a lot of atheists can claim that Buddhism and Confucianism are atheistic religions. I personally think it's stupid and kinda missing the point of atheism, but atheism don't have a dogma to follow and is a completely non-prescriptive belief system, so what can I say about it other than ehh... and asking: "Why do you even bother becoming an atheist?"

It's not even a belief system. There just isn't any divinity for you. That's it.

Saying Confucianism and Buddhism are atheistic misses a lot of the context surrounding those religions.

Edited by TerminusEst on Oct 30th 2018 at 1:11:38 AM

From my talks with Rationalists, atheism isn't any form of religious belief whatsoever but simply a lack of belief.

You can absolutely 100% be behind a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist behavioral rule system but just not believe in God.

Mind you, Susan Blackmoore and Sam Harris kind of irritate me with their "we're totally atheists but buy our books on Buddhist techniques divorced of the religious elements" stance.

But I am a Hypocrite with how Mindfulness....really ticks me off and I'm not even Buddhist.

About Christian atheists... you can believe that a guy called Joshua ben Joseph was a carpenter with some superlatives advanced humanist views for his time and which you fully integrate into your day-to-day morality and that, yes, you'd consider him the messiah Judaism badly needed, but didn't want.

Without seeing him as a son of a god which, of course, doesn't exist. After all, we only have second and third hand accounts of the things he said and did, all put through cultural lenses.

That's how that works.

The thing there is that unlike the Beta Israel, who are just straight up victims of racism because they're black, the Samaritans legitimately are not Jews.

As in: Not only do the Jews not consider Samaritans Jews, but the Samaritans themselves don't consider themselves Jews. Samaritans are ethnically Hebrew, indigenous to Canaan and inheritors of the original Hebrew faith alongside the Jews, but the split between them and Judaism is specifically related to the splitting off of the (northern) Kingdom of Israel (whose population became the Samaritans) from the (southern) Kingdom of Judah, the latter of which gave its name to Judaism.

It's incredibly impolite to call Samaritanism a branch of Judaism, because to say that would be to imply that Judaism is the 'true' version of the Hebrew faith and Samaritanism is just an off-shoot thereof, when in reality both are equally valid (except, of course, to each other) versions of the Hebrew faith.

So Samaritans aren't unjustly getting their 'true Judaism' denied, they're getting their rights as part of the indigenous population of Israel (to the point of being responsible for the very flippin' name of the country) squashed because their ancient religious rival is in power now and the Hebrew faith has become so interwoven with Judaism in the eyes of non-Hebrews that no one knows enough about them to recognise how fucking terrible that is.

There is such a thing as an "atheistic religion", and Bhuddism (or at least certain forms of it) would be an example of such. A religion doesn't necessarily require a god.

As for Atheistic Christianity: There is definitely a lot of people who think Jesus Was Way Cool or even that the Church is a positive good even if they aren't believers in God (I typically refer to them as "Cultural Christians"). However I would, almost axiomatically, declare them not Christians. They're non-Christians who think Christ or Christianity has had a good effect on the world. That isn't the same thing as being Christian.

Sadly, these days 'Culturally Christian' is also just short hand for 'Islamophobe'.

I don't think you can call Buddhism an atheistic religion. It's a proper religion with dogma to follow, completely prescriptive belief system, and a divine figure. Remember Buddhism and a lot of Asian religions can indeed come off as just some sort of spiritualism stuff to non-Asians, but it isn't.

@Robrecht: Part of why I'm rather cynical of such groups, personally. I view them as being the opposite of the God Before Dogma Doctrine (or rather "God Before Church Legalism"). Without God you're just stuck with old traditions that aren't necessarily good by themselves.

This isn't entirely set in stone. A person can be enlightened even without knowledge of the Dharma even if it is very rare.

As with everything, depends on what branch you look at even then, devil is in the details.

Edited by TerminusEst on Oct 30th 2018 at 1:38:41 AM

One thing I frequently run into is people who assume religion is automatically old fashioned and atheism is automatically progressive.

Which is not remotely true.

I think I mentioned earlier I had a feminist friend who was all eager to abandon her fundamentalist upbringing and join atheism for its progressiveness. She had a very very unpleasant experience at her first Rationalist gathering where she was repeatedly sexually harassed, insulted, and treated like shit—also got exposed to a lot of Islamophobe "scientifically justified" racism and approval of their destruction. Because no group has a monopoly on Straw Misogynist and racist assholes.

Re:

Thanks for the information on Samaritans! That is fascinating.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 30th 2018 at 1:40:54 AM

If I remember correctly Unitarians rejected the Trinity, divinity of Jesus, and didn’t believe in Original Sin.

Edited by megaeliz on Oct 30th 2018 at 5:41:52 AM

The ones around me also believed that all paths to god were true and not just their one, alongside this they did readings from a multitude of holy texts (instead of just the bible) and were very early to allow female and gay priests.

Thanks you. Buddhism have a massive amount of lore that can't be ignored. There actual gods there.

And yeah, the West should be ashamed for treating buddhism as "secular religion!".

A fair amount of Non-Catholics do it too.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 30th 2018 at 7:46:50 AM

Well there's certain branches where the gods are creation of the mind. But that ignores the fact consciousness and individuality as a whole are not necessarily real either.

My favorites personally. Is easy move from a regular religion to one of those. It helps to realize that technically, even you aren't "you" but rather a collection of factors. Which in a sense, makes gods "exist" in some ways.

Is Mind Screw, but is funny to work with.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 30th 2018 at 8:00:27 AM

@Kazuya Prota & @Steam Knight:

I should note that by "atheistic religion" I don't mean secular, materialistic, or disorganized-indeed, that's actually my point. It's a completely "proper" religion in every way, just lacking "gods" in the western sense of the term (or at least, most branches of it do).

A "secular religion" is something of a contradiction of terms IMO-even more so than "atheistic religion" (at least depending on how we define religion). I do find the term useful, however, to describe traditions/ideologies/etc that have the trappings of religion despite not being precisely a religion. Very strong nationalism, for example, isn't a religion per se but can take on a lot of religious trappings.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Oct 30th 2018 at 6:18:11 AM

But Buddhism has gods. They're closer to politheist than to monotheist and it don't put at them at the exact center of life, but they're still gods. And of course, Buddha worship was and is a vital part of many branches.

It depends on what branch of Buddhism you follow and what you qualify as gods.

As stated, some Buddhist branches don't believe in gods as anything but Tulpas created from your mind and imagined into existence to help you along your spiritual journey.

Which doesn't necessarily include you existing.

Buddhism doesn’t have Gods in the Western Sense. A better word would probably be deity.

In Mahayana Buddhism, Bodhisattvas are considered to be beings that are deadicated to helping all sentient beings reach Buddhahood, and are often prayed to, but aren’t considered to be all powerful Gods.

I supposed it'd be a good time to ask what, if any, is the difference between a god, a deity and a divinity?

Well even Christianity has spirits both helpful and malign of various power levels.

They're angels and demons.

You're just not supposed to think of them as gods despite fulfilling the role in most respects.

Plus saints can and do fulfill a role similar to certain other religions ascended figures.

So, the Church of Satan is suing The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for the use of their Baphomet design.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/satanic-temple-threatens-legal-action-statue-chilling-adventures-of-sabrina

I'm going to go with the Church of the Night (Sabrina's fictional religion) here because Baphomet is a pre-existing fake demon used to rob and murder the Knights Templar in the name of God. The Church of Satan tries to have it both ways as a corporation and a religion (due to it being a very successful business as well as a tax exempt form of political protest). I have no more respect for them using that dual role than I do for evangelical Christian megachurches or Scientology. Pick one or the other.

Speaking of Baphomet, I wonder if there was any confusion about the Dragon Big Good Bahamut in the Satanic D&D Panic of the eighties.

(FYI - that's currently a plotline on Riverdale)

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 30th 2018 at 7:54:15 AM

The statue is copyrighted. And the show's statue looks almost identical to theirs.

Yes, because it's a statue of Baphomet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet

To use an analogy, that's like copyrighting an image of Cthulhu made in 2018.

Or, a statue of Jesus.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 30th 2018 at 7:52:58 AM