Is everything a religion?

[Proteus_MST]

-Proteus

According to the Koran, Allah doesn't understand the Trinity. What do you say about Islam?

I say similar things as about christianity and judaism

But I should start with the beginning:
The big advantage of Islam, of course is, that its holy book actually was written during the lifetime of its prophet.
Which actually leaves not so much guesswork about its intentions (still enough to let muslims have a Diaspora and split into the 2 large sects the Shia and Sunni)
Cannot say the same of Judaism and Christianity.
The books of the christian bible only ere created after the death of its prophet and many important customs (and especially the split with Judaism) developed when Jesus was already dead.
Similary the most holy book in Judaism, the Torah (i.e. the 5 boks of Moses) reportedly have (according to bible science) undergone several periods of editing, many of them probably in order to turn YHWH from a god within a Pantheon (who also had a wife, Asherah) into a single god without any gods besides himm an to let it appar as if the history of polytheism didn't exist in judaic faith.

But:
It is a fact that Islam bases its roots on Judaism and Christianity.
The whole religion is mostly a mix of Muhammeds ideas of Judaism and Christianity, mixed with local traditions/customs of the tribes he lived wth.

Therefore, due to its fundament of course, it shares the same problems as Judaism and Christianity and it would be an idiocy if someone would claim that islam is more "divine" or more "true" than christianity or judaism

So, IMHO all 3 religions of the book share the same problem/s


As for trinity ... well, the idea of trinity is something that doesn't seem to be shared among all sects of early (and current) christianity. In early christianity there coexisted different forms oof belief with regards to the god, holy spirit, Jesus ... and it wasn't until the 4th century, that all forms of belieef that aberred from trinity were considered anathema.
Also, Judaism (as mother religion) doesn't have any form of trinitarian belief.
Therefore I cannot say that the trinitarian belief system (of most of current christianity) makes it "more" divine than judaism (or islam) (although, of course, the trinitarian belief makes it stand out from the the other 2 religions)

[Elok]

I think (tentatively here, mostly "thinking out loud") that the modern West is really exceptional in postulating religious belief, and metaphysical opinion in general, into effective irrelevance. I can't think offhand of a premodern community in which the individual conscience was completely "free." Religious belief, practice and ritual are/were usually the glue that held the community together from Japan to France to Tenochtitlan. Even in cosmopolitan Rome, pagan sacrifices were an important part of "civic religion." Albeit increasingly irrelevant once the Empire got so huge that Emperor worship was mostly a token gesture done to signal loyalty to some distant weirdo 99.5% of the population would never even see. Which is why Christianity was so valuable as a unifying force, etc., that's pretty standard textbook-talk. At the same time, however, local cults were deeply enmeshed with community life; festival followed festival for thousands of years, only switching the occasion from Zeus or Dionysius to Jesus and various saints.

Then came Protestantism.

Protestantism is weird. Rituals are superstitions, there are no real authorities or hierarchies, it's all about "your personal relationship," and even references to correct praxis are suspect since it's all supposed to be by faith. Which is not to say that Protestants can't have community, but the communities are by nature unstable (there are few mechanisms to keep people in it) and deprecated by comparison to their role in most traditional religions. A lady at my work was frustrated recently; her husband was getting baptized in some Protestant denomination, and her Catholic mother-in-law acted like it was the end of the world. She (my coworker) couldn't fathom why her MIL was so upset, and neither could my Baptist boss. As I understand it, they don't think of baptism as joining a group so much as a gesture symbolizing a renewed commitment to Jesus, with the specific denomination doing the baptism more or less irrelevant. Meanwhile, the MIL's frustration seemed perfectly reasonable to me; her boy was by implication insulting her, their common heritage, and their whole community. "But she hardly ever goes to church anyway." Irrelevant. It's about community. He abandoned the tribe!

America is hyper-Protestant. The whole modern West, in general, is hyper-Protestant. We can all believe whatever we want, with the proviso that it's not allowed to touch the exterior world in any way. This. Is. Weird. It's not how religion historically functioned, but it's been going on so long that most people don't even think about it. Is it so strange that we become so passionately attached to any number of little self-chosen communities, after the manner of religious belief, now that we have effectively denied the right of religion to do what it always did? And then we use "religion" as a discrediting slur, to show that the belief or practice has no validity outside individual opinion.

[Elok]

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/

A meditation on transhumanism, Christianity, and how each has cribbed and will crib from the other. Author seems a touch morbidly excitable, but aren't we all?

[Proteus_MST]

I have to admit that such an extremist transhumanist position like Kurzweils definitely turns (hi version of) transhumanism into some kind of pseudo religion.

Especially considering that such an idea like resurrecting his dead father, just from his memorabilia and his DNA, safely can be rejected by any person who knows about neuroscience and computer science (despite the fact that SciFi already has played with the idea .... for example in the BSG-Spinoff Caprica, where Computer-Genius Zoey creates the AI Zoey-A, just from the ssortd colection of memorabilia/records of hersef)

There are so many events, especially in younger years, that go unrecorded and unmentioned, but still have a profound impact unto orur later selfes, that it surely can be assumed that only n in situ scan of all neural synaptic connections and their strength may have a chance of creating something that has (in its behavior) a close resemblance to our own behavior

[Elok]

I'm deeply skeptical of the whole idea that you can create something that functions like a human with nonhuman structure. And of the whole idea that hard limits of mortality can be escaped. We have, in essence, an immensely complex machine that runs day and night for roughly seventy years, the last forty or so in continuing decay, under optimal conditions. All scientific progress to date has tweaked the upper limit of those seventy years gradually upwards, but without halting the decay process. I suppose you could see exponential growth in longevity/durability AND exponential growth in complexity/performance, but there's going to be a hard limit to both, the two are to some extent contradictory, and we're approaching the limits of what the biosphere can sustain with rootstock humanity, let alone the intense resource requirements of an artificial lifeform.

[Kidlicious]

I think (tentatively here, mostly "thinking out loud") that the modern West is really exceptional in postulating religious belief, and metaphysical opinion in general, into effective irrelevance. I can't think offhand of a premodern community in which the individual conscience was completely "free." Religious belief, practice and ritual are/were usually the glue that held the community together from Japan to France to Tenochtitlan. Even in cosmopolitan Rome, pagan sacrifices were an important part of "civic religion." Albeit increasingly irrelevant once the Empire got so huge that Emperor worship was mostly a token gesture done to signal loyalty to some distant weirdo 99.5% of the population would never even see. Which is why Christianity was so valuable as a unifying force, etc., that's pretty standard textbook-talk. At the same time, however, local cults were deeply enmeshed with community life; festival followed festival for thousands of years, only switching the occasion from Zeus or Dionysius to Jesus and various saints.

Then came Protestantism.

Protestantism is weird. Rituals are superstitions, there are no real authorities or hierarchies, it's all about "your personal relationship," and even references to correct praxis are suspect since it's all supposed to be by faith. Which is not to say that Protestants can't have community, but the communities are by nature unstable (there are few mechanisms to keep people in it) and deprecated by comparison to their role in most traditional religions. A lady at my work was frustrated recently; her husband was getting baptized in some Protestant denomination, and her Catholic mother-in-law acted like it was the end of the world. She (my coworker) couldn't fathom why her MIL was so upset, and neither could my Baptist boss. As I understand it, they don't think of baptism as joining a group so much as a gesture symbolizing a renewed commitment to Jesus, with the specific denomination doing the baptism more or less irrelevant. Meanwhile, the MIL's frustration seemed perfectly reasonable to me; her boy was by implication insulting her, their common heritage, and their whole community. "But she hardly ever goes to church anyway." Irrelevant. It's about community. He abandoned the tribe!

America is hyper-Protestant. The whole modern West, in general, is hyper-Protestant. We can all believe whatever we want, with the proviso that it's not allowed to touch the exterior world in any way. This. Is. Weird. It's not how religion historically functioned, but it's been going on so long that most people don't even think about it. Is it so strange that we become so passionately attached to any number of little self-chosen communities, after the manner of religious belief, now that we have effectively denied the right of religion to do what it always did? And then we use "religion" as a discrediting slur, to show that the belief or practice has no validity outside individual opinion.

Of course Protestantism had an authority, God. If you don't have a personal relationship with God, and you don't have faith in God, then you have built your foundation on the sand. No one cares about tradition. It IS superstition.

[Kidlicious]

I say similar things as about christianity and judaism

But I should start with the beginning:
The big advantage of Islam, of course is, that its holy book actually was written during the lifetime of its prophet.
Which actually leaves not so much guesswork about its intentions (still enough to let muslims have a Diaspora and split into the 2 large sects the Shia and Sunni)
Cannot say the same of Judaism and Christianity.
The books of the christian bible only ere created after the death of its prophet and many important customs (and especially the split with Judaism) developed when Jesus was already dead.
Similary the most holy book in Judaism, the Torah (i.e. the 5 boks of Moses) reportedly have (according to bible science) undergone several periods of editing, many of them probably in order to turn YHWH from a god within a Pantheon (who also had a wife, Asherah) into a single god without any gods besides himm an to let it appar as if the history of polytheism didn't exist in judaic faith.

But:
It is a fact that Islam bases its roots on Judaism and Christianity.
The whole religion is mostly a mix of Muhammeds ideas of Judaism and Christianity, mixed with local traditions/customs of the tribes he lived wth.

Therefore, due to its fundament of course, it shares the same problems as Judaism and Christianity and it would be an idiocy if someone would claim that islam is more "divine" or more "true" than christianity or judaism

So, IMHO all 3 religions of the book share the same problem/s


As for trinity ... well, the idea of trinity is something that doesn't seem to be shared among all sects of early (and current) christianity. In early christianity there coexisted different forms oof belief with regards to the god, holy spirit, Jesus ... and it wasn't until the 4th century, that all forms of belieef that aberred from trinity were considered anathema.
Also, Judaism (as mother religion) doesn't have any form of trinitarian belief.
Therefore I cannot say that the trinitarian belief system (of most of current christianity) makes it "more" divine than judaism (or islam) (although, of course, the trinitarian belief makes it stand out from the the other 2 religions)

I don't think you understand the problem. It's not that Muslims don't believe in the Trinity. It's that what Mohammed wrote, that ALLAH told him about the Trinity, demonstrates the fact that if ALLAH really told him that then ALLAH doesn't understand the Trinity.

The fact that Jesus didn't write the gospels isn't a problem at all. Writing the gospels doesn't prove anything. Being resurrected proves that he is the Son of God.

The thing about Islam is muslims always have to be winning. If the lose they can say Allah made an Illusion and that he is really winning, but why would he have to do that. Why would God have to fool people to win?

[grumbler]

I say similar things as about christianity and judaism

But I should start with the beginning:
The big advantage of Islam, of course is, that its holy book actually was written during the lifetime of its prophet.

This is not true, BTW. The Koran was written after Mohammed's death. Not generations later, like the Gospels, but Mohammed never saw the text (let alone the Hadith, which are essentially anecdotes about Mohammed and mostly came out over a hundred years after his death).

Which actually leaves not so much guesswork about its intentions (still enough to let muslims have a Diaspora and split into the 2 large sects the Shia and Sunni)

There is still a lot of guesswork about its intentions. The difference between the treatment of women in the Koran, the Hadith, and codified Sharia are very stark - the further you get from the actual word of Mohammed, the worse women's status becomes. The Shia/Sunni split is more political than theological, and Islam never had a diaspora - it spread through conversion, not transplantation.

But:
It is a fact that Islam bases its roots on Judaism and Christianity.
The whole religion is mostly a mix of Muhammeds ideas of Judaism and Christianity, mixed with local traditions/customs of the tribes he lived wth.

Therefore, due to its fundament of course, it shares the same problems as Judaism and Christianity and it would be an idiocy if someone would claim that islam is more "divine" or more "true" than christianity or judaism

I'm not sure where you are going with this argument. Islam doesn't say that it is more true than Judaism or Christianity, just that it is more recent and so reflects a more complete view of God's will. All that God said in the earlier religions is still true (if God did indeed say it, which they deny in terms of Jesus claiming divinity), it is simply incomplete.

As for trinity ... well, the idea of trinity is something that doesn't seem to be shared among all sects of early (and current) christianity. In early christianity there coexisted different forms oof belief with regards to the god, holy spirit, Jesus ... and it wasn't until the 4th century, that all forms of belieef that aberred from trinity were considered anathema.
Also, Judaism (as mother religion) doesn't have any form of trinitarian belief.
Therefore I cannot say that the trinitarian belief system (of most of current christianity) makes it "more" divine than judaism (or islam) (although, of course, the trinitarian belief makes it stand out from the the other 2 religions)

I think the reason that no one actually understands trinity as proposed by the Christians is that it is a nonsense dodge obviously whipped up by some religious zealot who thought he could have his cake and eat it, too. I mean, as a nonsensical concept that has to be accepted because That's What The Religion Is About, it's certainly not as "out there" as "the Jaguar God will swallow the world if we don't sacrifice humans," but it's definitely, as you note, more "out there" than anything in Islam or Judaism (or Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc).

[grumbler]

I think (tentatively here, mostly "thinking out loud") that the modern West is really exceptional in postulating religious belief, and metaphysical opinion in general, into effective irrelevance. I can't think offhand of a premodern community in which the individual conscience was completely "free." Religious belief, practice and ritual are/were usually the glue that held the community together from Japan to France to Tenochtitlan. Even in cosmopolitan Rome, pagan sacrifices were an important part of "civic religion." Albeit increasingly irrelevant once the Empire got so huge that Emperor worship was mostly a token gesture done to signal loyalty to some distant weirdo 99.5% of the population would never even see. Which is why Christianity was so valuable as a unifying force, etc., that's pretty standard textbook-talk. At the same time, however, local cults were deeply enmeshed with community life; festival followed festival for thousands of years, only switching the occasion from Zeus or Dionysius to Jesus and various saints.

Then came Protestantism.

Protestantism is weird. Rituals are superstitions, there are no real authorities or hierarchies, it's all about "your personal relationship," and even references to correct praxis are suspect since it's all supposed to be by faith. Which is not to say that Protestants can't have community, but the communities are by nature unstable (there are few mechanisms to keep people in it) and deprecated by comparison to their role in most traditional religions. A lady at my work was frustrated recently; her husband was getting baptized in some Protestant denomination, and her Catholic mother-in-law acted like it was the end of the world. She (my coworker) couldn't fathom why her MIL was so upset, and neither could my Baptist boss. As I understand it, they don't think of baptism as joining a group so much as a gesture symbolizing a renewed commitment to Jesus, with the specific denomination doing the baptism more or less irrelevant. Meanwhile, the MIL's frustration seemed perfectly reasonable to me; her boy was by implication insulting her, their common heritage, and their whole community. "But she hardly ever goes to church anyway." Irrelevant. It's about community. He abandoned the tribe!

America is hyper-Protestant. The whole modern West, in general, is hyper-Protestant. We can all believe whatever we want, with the proviso that it's not allowed to touch the exterior world in any way. This. Is. Weird. It's not how religion historically functioned, but it's been going on so long that most people don't even think about it. Is it so strange that we become so passionately attached to any number of little self-chosen communities, after the manner of religious belief, now that we have effectively denied the right of religion to do what it always did? And then we use "religion" as a discrediting slur, to show that the belief or practice has no validity outside individual opinion.

What you describe here is simply the phenomenon of religion losing its status as the source of received (= all, back in the day) wisdom. Mankind has more ways of transmitting wisdom than by rote through a class (the priests) selected for their ability to pass down that wisdom without change. It's not the Protestants that "wrecked religion," it was the printing press. Once people started thinking for themselves, religion lost it's hold and became just another part of one's identity, rather than the defining element of one's identity. Nowadays, it is people like the MiL, who think that religion defines everything, who are weird. Better communications are just going to accelerate the trend towards people wanting their religions to fit their needs (and abandoning religion altogether if they see no need for it).

However, I think that you are wrong to use religion as "a discrediting slur, to show that the belief or practice has no validity outside individual opinion." It is true that one's own religious beliefs do not necessarily convey validity of those beliefs to others, but that's no slur: it is true of pretty much everything in a society of free thinkers.

[Jon Miller]

This is not true, BTW. The Koran was written after Mohammed's death. Not generations later, like the Gospels, but Mohammed never saw the text (let alone the Hadith, which are essentially anecdotes about Mohammed and mostly came out over a hundred years after his death).

I just want to point out that what you are giving a wrong implication here.

Scholars date the Gospels from 60-95 AD (including atheists and the most critical of scholars), with the earliest physical copies that we still have in our libraries dating to 125-150 AD. Note that people regularly lived more than 70 years during this period; like in most of earth's history people often died at birth or in childhood but could live to old age if there was no plague/etc.

It is true that 30 years is considered a 'generation' and so your statement is technically true but 'during the lifetime of eyewitnesses' is just as true for the Gospels as the Koran (even if the Gospels were written in the second 'generation' while the Koran was written in the first 'generation').

JM
(a reminder about 'old age' https://www.brlsi.org/events-proceed...ceedings/25020 " from about the 1st century BC, the age of 60 or 65 was frequently mentioned as the threshold of old age, which is not dissimilar to the present time." )
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...nt_manuscripts )

[Berzerker]

gospels were recorded when the disciples were dying out and because Jesus hadn't returned

[ZEE]

I have read every single word in this thrade, and as an impartial observer, I can say with confidence that Kidicious is flat out embarrassing all of your asses on this topic. I urge you all to open your minds and re-read soem of Kidicious' poasts.

Only then will you understand.

[Kidlicious]

This is not true, BTW. The Koran was written after Mohammed's death. Not generations later, like the Gospels, but Mohammed never saw the text (let alone the Hadith, which are essentially anecdotes about Mohammed and mostly came out over a hundred years after his death).



There is still a lot of guesswork about its intentions. The difference between the treatment of women in the Koran, the Hadith, and codified Sharia are very stark - the further you get from the actual word of Mohammed, the worse women's status becomes. The Shia/Sunni split is more political than theological, and Islam never had a diaspora - it spread through conversion, not transplantation.



I'm not sure where you are going with this argument. Islam doesn't say that it is more true than Judaism or Christianity, just that it is more recent and so reflects a more complete view of God's will. All that God said in the earlier religions is still true (if God did indeed say it, which they deny in terms of Jesus claiming divinity), it is simply incomplete.



I think the reason that no one actually understands trinity as proposed by the Christians is that it is a nonsense dodge obviously whipped up by some religious zealot who thought he could have his cake and eat it, too. I mean, as a nonsensical concept that has to be accepted because That's What The Religion Is About, it's certainly not as "out there" as "the Jaguar God will swallow the world if we don't sacrifice humans," but it's definitely, as you note, more "out there" than anything in Islam or Judaism (or Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc).

Many non-Christians understand the Trinity. Nonsense is your Christaphobic post.

[grumbler]

Many non-Christians understand the Trinity. Nonsense is your Christaphobic post.

Actually, none of them do, because it is a logical impossibility. The claim that Christians "understand the trinity" is the original Fake News.

The Trinitarian view that it is possible to have "one God in three Divine Persons" is manifestly a humbug. Because if Jesus is god, then he made no sacrifice and his "resurrection" was not a triumph over death, but just an immortal god being immortal. If he was a man who suffered, died, and resurrected, then he cannot be a god consubstantial with the other two (for they would have existed before he did). You cannot logically divide an apple into three parts, call each part a complete apple, and also insist that the original apple is also complete.

[Elok]

Grumbler, other parts of the world (outside of the West) have had the printing press for some time without adopting our mentality. Of course, they've also had Protestantism, but I'd argue that it hasn't played as central a role. But China, for example, has only started to atomize recently. Now, the issue may be technological, in that modern technologies smash up communities by making populations more fluid. But the "thinking for themselves"? Religious diversity, and controversy, were common as dirt for a long, long, long time before printing presses came along.

Incidentally, Muslims believe their religion was the original form of monotheism, not an update. Abraham was originally a Muslim, the story goes, but the truth was garbled in transmission and contaminated by polytheism. Muhammad simply restored the original truth.