posted
We all know that many 'Christian' festivals and customs were actually taken over wholesale from older, pagan religions. My question is, just how deliberate was this on the Church's part? Consider Christmas, for example. Did the Popes intentionally set out to take over the midwinter festival; was it something that happened at the level of the individual priest, who needed something fun to compete with his local pagans; or was it a 'grassroots' initiative, as people burned bonfires anyway and just dropped the sacrifices?
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So Christmas isn't really all about Jesus? Yay now I can celebrate Christmas without having those mean people telling me I abosolutly shouldn't since I'm not Christian. I like Chriatmas Posts: 315 | Registered: Jun 2002
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Well, if you want to celebrate the 'original' Christmas, you should probably hang nine men (foreign slaves for preference), nine dogs, and nine bulls in honour of Odin. Oh, and nine horses. That's how they did it in Sweden, and who are we to object? But really, midwinter is a perfectly good secular festival; why should the Christians have all the fun? Let 'em eat fish.
@adam613 : Certainly all religions do this; my questions was, how consciously do they do it? Do they sit down and deliberately design a religion that won't be too different from what's already around? Are they unconsciously influenced by what they know? Or is it a case of attracting followers who drag along baggage from their old temple?
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adam613: Could you give me exact passages? Or are you refering to the entire idea of God creating the world?
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Its worth noting that the whole separating thing is extremely reminiscent of Mesopotamian mythology surrounding the creation of the world.
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However, I think you'll find that the water god was rarely victorious in such stories. The storm god was victorious. The water god, when the water was even given a name, was who/what was divided to make the heaven and earth (for instance, Tiamat).
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It makes the conversion of "pagan" faiths easier if you have similar parallels the sheep can flock to and embrace.
Just different enough to matter, similar enough to be comforting.
I think there have been academic articles published on the theft (absorption?) of foreign faiths to be incorporated into the larger to facilitate the indoctrination of the soon-to-be-faithful, but I can't quote one off-hand.
A similar phenomenon is the adapting of or blending of faiths to make a variant religion - Saints and voodoo leap to mind.
posted
I know from what I was told by a Muslim friend of mine that they accept all the other big monotheist religions that were before them with "slight modifications" (or what they consider as such). To give an example: Jesus was a prophet, but NOT God. They have just "improved" those religions with a new set of revelations.
I also saw a documentary about how Christians treated sex throughout history. How they first opposed sex outside marriage because the pagans allowed it. How they at one time wanted to ban marriage too since it was a pagan ritual. Question: If they banned all sex, how did they expect humans as a species to continue existing?! I guess there was something I didn't catch in the documentary... Anyway, after the problems caused by the idea of banning marriage they adopted it as a ritual in strict correlation with God and the church... All these "evolutions" and "creations" of different religions are part of what makes me stay away from any particular one. I guess I'll just wait until I'm dead to draw the conclusion... Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote: All these "evolutions" and "creations" of different religions are part of what makes me stay away from any particular one
AMEN, brother Corwin. Preach on. Many religions' faults and inconsistincies come from the ad-hoc agglommeration of ideas, rituals, and beliefs from predating religions. It makes the whole thing smack of marketing, to me.
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Trevor, what Christians are you talking about?! I'm quite sure that Orthodox Christians say that Jesus was "both man and God", but I might be mistaking... Anyway, what I'm sure about it that they believe that he was born from a virgin, thus the :direct: intervention of God in his birth is clear for them, while Muslims say he was a normal man and just happened to be in relation to God - and thus a prophet.
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The beliefs of Roman Catholics and many mainstream Protestant denominations can be summed up by the Nicene Creed:
quote: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. AMEN.
quote: I don't think Christians believe Jesus was/is God
UMMM, what about the Holy Trinity? Most mainstream Christian religions believe in this, ASFAIK. A great example of what I was saying: by adding Christ (and the holy ghost) as divine beings to the Jewish religion, it went from strict monotheism to whatever you call trinitarian/monotheism.
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TMedina: there're significantly variant versions, but the largest versions of Christianity (Catholicism, Eastern/Russian Orthodoxy, most Protestants) believe Jesus was God.
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Going a little bit in this direction: A.C.Clarke has a similar opinion reflected in his SF books. Several times he forsees an end to all religions, most of the time due to contact with much more advanced alien races...
And one other think I'll say for the first and probably the last time: I was VERY dissapointed when I found out that Card is actually a Mormon... I held in me the belief that he's someone Ender-like in this matter... Silly me... I wonder if Frank Herbert believed in God?!?! Ph.K.Dick had a "revelation", but he was also ready to admit it very well might have been just an illusion, a trick of his mind...
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Note that this is not just philosophical musings of no importance: thousands were killed in the middle ages for denying the trinity.
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Trevor, I don't know about Herbert. Which Clarke books are you thinking of? Childhood's End? I haven't read that since I was a kid and cannot remember it. Dick, though a very talented writer, went a little nuts towards the end of his life.
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Yeah, that's another thing that bothers me about religions. If you preach an idea and it's used for a bad cause, I say assume your responsibility. Not that the idea is wrong, but that your teachings might have caused that. All those wars started in the name of one religion or another, all the tortures, are said :not to be in the spirit of the religion: but they nonetheless happened under the influence of those religions. Applied communism was bad in Russia and eastern Europe. Why not applied religion?! I think I'll stop now before completely derailing this thread...
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Morbo, it was I, your "brother" who asked about Herbert!
As for A.C.Clarke books: yes Childhood's End is one of them, The Fountains of Paradise is another. I've read many others but not all of them recently, I might be missing some.
Dick was a LOT nuts. It's strange, I usually like what's rational, but I still consider all the crazy stuff in Dick's novels/stories as excellent writing. I guess I'd like a magical world too, even if I don't believe in one... :sigh:
Dag, no matter how much I try, I don't get your questions... All those negations really trouble me... Card IS a Mormon, right?! Ender-like, for me, means that he wouldn't believe in God as reflected by any religion. It means being too rational to believe everything taught by any single religious system. If you want you can restate your question and if I didn't answer it I'll try to do it again.
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You pretty much answered it. I just meant why you thought Ender's personality is incompatible with being religious. Certainly, he believes in God (he outright states this at one point).
I am confused as to why you think rationality is opposed to religion, though.
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Rationality is opposed to faith in the unproveable, or at least has cognitive dissonance with it. And most religions are based on faith.
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"Some religious denominations adhere to Christian scripture and identify themselves emphatically as Christians, but reject the Nicene Creed as an error or a misinterpretation, and also reject the more recent Lausanne Covenant that affirms the Creed. As a result, many other Christians regard these sects as not being Christian at all. Such sects include Arianism, Mormonism, and Seventh-day Adventists. However, most non-Christians generally regard these sects as being Christian because of their beliefs in Jesus and in most or all of the New Testament.
In modern interfaith relations, there have been many heated clashes between Nicene and non-Nicene sectarians over the definition of Christianity, and of what constitutes a Christian. In the some countries (such as the United States), this has led to litigation with charges and counter-charges over this very theological issue, involving allegations as wide-ranging as slander, perjury, discrimination, and breach of contract. In ancient times, these issues were largely set aside by the annihilation of the contemporary Arianist sect. In modern times, relations between evangelists of Nicene and newer non-Nicene sects are generally cold, and at times outwardly hostile as well."
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Dag, Ender believes in God?! Where is it said? Anyway, I'm not saying that rational means that you cannot believe in God, if you look again at my previous post I said "God as reflected by any religion", which is a difference. I can believe in God and still not belong to a religion, right? If I think that for me, the :most probable: theory is that a God created the Universe - and I saw a very interesting idea of how that could happen in Greg Bear's Eternity - I might say I "believe" in God. But not in all those teachings of any particular religion.
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quote:Rationality is opposed to faith in the unproveable, or at least has cognitive dissonance with it. And most religions are based on faith.
True, at the most basic level. But the presence of rational thinking in someone cannot be used as an indicator that that person does not possess faith in something unprovable.
posted
OK, Corwin, then I'm wondering what in Ender's behavior caused you to think his thought processes incompatible with faith in a particular religion?
quote: Rationality is opposed to faith in the unproveable
Rational thinking also says you're never right. You can be surely wrong, but never 100% right. So if you go deep enough, "I know" just means "I believe it is so, because all I could get out of previous experiences proves me right". However, a future experience can invalidate my knowledge... So what do I :really: know?!
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I think it's mistaken to think that the Catholic church (note that I'm using the term Catholic and not Christian, because that's really what we're discussing in this thread) sat down and decided to invent Christmas and picked out some ideas to co-opt from "the pagans" to make it more palatable.
The time scale and variety of cultures we're taking into account here is huge. Folk traditions and holidays don't just happen, and in Europe, Christmas is nowhere near being a standard holiday. The Catholic church existed in many different cultures and lands and converts were coming from many different "pagan" traditions. The Norse celebration of the winter solstice was an entirely different event from the Celtic observance or the Germanic observance or the Gallic observance. Similarly, the Catholic church in Ireland and the Holy Roman Empire and Spain was adapted to local culture and custom. Spanish Catholicism is also quite different than Mexican Catholicism because the people in the Americas had existing cultures that incorporated the new doctrines and created a very distinct church.
I'm not saying this to attack the solidarity of the Catholic religion - indeed, it is one of the most consistant religions in the world, holding to original organization and lines of authority so well. But I think we can all agree that Christian holidays difffer in their observance in different Catholic societies.
In some cases, maybe local priests really pressed the co-opting of pagan festivals because their parishoners adhered strongly to centuries-old traditions, but I imagine in other places, only the date of midwinter remained as a vestige of old practices and new Bible-based observances were readily adopted.
We also have to remember that this all occured during a period of history from which we have very little documentation, so the conclusions we draw about attitudes and intents can be speculative and circumstantial at the very best.
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Dag, please tell me where is it said that Ender believes in God. I wasn't asking a rhetorical question, I honestly didn't find something like that in the Ender series.
quote: what in Ender's behavior caused you to think his thought processes incompatible with faith in a particular religion?
Well, let's see. First, if I remember correctly, he really does not belong to a religion. This either indicates: - insufficient knowledge in order to make a choice; that might be it since at one point he says that if he were to belong to any religion he would belong to the "Children of the..."-something religion. (I have a huge blank in my memory here, what's it called like?! Am I completely off?! And I've read most of the books in Romanian, and I don't even recall the Romanian version... ) The problem with this is: why wouldn't he seek this knowledge?! What kept it from seeking it? - sufficient knowledge: he doesn't see any religion that does not in some way differ to what he can believe as TRUE.
I hope I'm making sense here. Any other interpretation?
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quote:Dag, please tell me where is it said that Ender believes in God.
Can't remember which book, but when he's trying to get Novhina to come back to him, he says something to the effect of, "I most certainly do to believe in God." I'm sure someone here can elaborate off the top of their head.
As to your interpretation, I think it's certainly a possibility. But he was raised by parents who had publicly renounced their religion in a secular environment, entirely so after age 6. After that, he purposely kept himself aloof from the world except for his sister raised in much the same environment.
posted
Oh, ok, yeah, there's the passage when he says he would go in that church - whose name is... (help me out here) - but I don't remember him actually saying he believes in God... This will just give me an excuse to read them again! In the meantime if somebody has the book near him - I think it was Xenocide, as at the end of Speaker for the Dead they were just getting together - please try to find that passage. It's when Novinha says she knows that he was not to blaim about Quim's death.
As for the second part: of course education plays an important role, and he was left with no religious education, but wouldn't he search afterwards?! At all?! (I just love how we're talking about a fictional character ) I would. In fact, I did, I looked not for a religion, but to see how one religion or another could get me closer to the truth. Not very hard though, but I'm not the intelligent person Ender is (supposed to be). And didn't find anything that would suit my purpose.
And of course, there's another explanation: I so much identified with Ender that I also transfered him my own beliefs...
Edit: Morbo, you are forgiven! Go and sin no more! (Sorry, I couldn't let it pass )
posted
Hmm - I did not know that. I honestly thought "most" Christians believed that Jesus and God were two seperate entities, although God did have some hand (or other body part) in his Creation.
Ah well - another oddity to try and wrap my head around.
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Trevor: You live, you learn! I had most of my religious education from my mother's parents who are both very religious. My parents, on the other hand, are quite non-religious, though I'm not 100% sure about my mother. They're physics teachers, that might have something to do with it... Or not... Anyway, they did not try to involve me in anything related to religion, and I didn't do it on my own, so this is how I turned out! Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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"But the presence of rational thinking in someone cannot be used as an indicator that that person does not possess faith in something unprovable."
*grin* We've had this conversation, Dag. And while it's a sore spot with you, the simple fact is that there has to be a line drawn at some point between rational observation and irrational belief. If, for example, I believe in government-sponsored black helicopters or giant purple pandas who separated the earth from the waters before mankind walked the planet, I should not be insulted if people question my rationality -- no matter how much personal (and, sadly, unverifiable) experience I might have with these topics. It might FRUSTRATE me to not be believed when I tell people I was abducted by aliens and forced for seven years to service the evil robot that they sent down to replace Antonin Scalia, even if I remember the whole thing clearly -- but I should know better than to expect them to believe me, or even to take me seriously.
Our society is very charitable to the superstitious, because we recognize that sometimes the truth is unprovable. But society is charitable that way; it's not an inherent right.
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Tom, you're whole second paragraph was wonderful, but absolutely irelevant to what I said.
Take a closer look - I said the presence of rational thought/behavior in someone does not preclude the presence of faith in the unknown. In this context, it means if person A espouse views based on tangible evidence and logical reasoning, person A may or may not possess other views based on faith. There's not enough data to know.
For example, if I had never posted anything about religion on this board, you would have no basis for knowing if I had faith or not.
posted
Ah. So you're not saying that your statement was reflexive? That you were merely asserting that the existence of rationality does not deny faith, but not necessarily that the existence of faith does not deny rationality?
quote:Rationality is opposed to faith in the unproveable, or at least has cognitive dissonance with it. And most religions are based on faith.
I disagree with the definition of rationality that you're implying here. A large chunk of rationality deals with conditions where uncertainly (i.e. the fundamental thing is unprovable) exists. It is not rational to deny faith in much the same way that it is not rational for someone who is blind to deny that colors exist.
There are at least two cases where faith is made necessary by a rational system: 1) those in which rationality doesn't apply, such as choosing values and 2) those in which rationality either has no or inadequate information to work from.
For some reason, this reminds me of the frequent misquote "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." that leaves out the very important opening "A foolish ". Rationality is opposed to blind faith and to faith that is misapplied into those things that rationality covers (like evolution or cosmology), but it is not opposed to faith in total.
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posted
And it's pretty arrogant to think that some people think entirely rationally. Sure, some are more rational than others but we all build worldviews based on our concept of a situation, which may or may not have any basis in fact. Every facet of our life is a construct in our mind based on experience. Even Stephen Hawking has irrational beliefs because it's impossible for one person to have a complete enough understanding of the world to be entirely rational. We're human beings - not robots.
I happen to view my own religious lifestyle as an extremely positivistic choice. I don't claim to understand the mechanism behind it all, but I base my faith in the power of the Spirit and the truth of the Gospel on past experiences I've had with repeatable results. You may not agree with my basic axioms, but you can't really accuse my faith of being contrary to reason when it is precisely because of past experience that has statistically shown my religious beliefs to be true that I continue to believe them.
This is where my ignorance of philosophy shows through, and I shall leave the actual mechanics of what I'm trying to argue to those who are more adept and educated than I.
posted
KoM, My guess is that your question isn't answerable as an either/or proposition. I'd suggest that it may have been a bit of both. Some local priests adapted native observances as a matter of expediency and perceived an increase in participation. Once the Church became aware of the power of this (perversion) it was a short step to applying it system wide. In essence then the Church would, most likely, had to have seen the efficacy of morphing on a regional level before the Church superiors would have felt secure in making those type of sweeping changes.
However, Card had Ender give a very Mormon-centric monologue in 'Xenocide,' when he and Wan Mu were speaking about Starways Congress and the Gods of Path. The gist of Ender's speech is something like, 'A true God does not keep people ignorant; a true God teaches His creations to be His equal.'
The idea of aiua is VERY Mormon; and the scene in 'Children of the Mind' where the mother-trees bloom is heavily reminiscent of Lehi's vision of the tree of life from the Book of Mormon, complete with white fruit.
And the Catholic sympathies in the last three books of the Ender saga can hardly be denied. Although Esteban and Pelegrino are complete nuisances in 'Speaker for the Dead,' in Xenocide, they show their mettle-- especially Esteban. You don't get much more Christ-like than Esteban's martydom within Warmaker. . . I mean come on, what does Card have to do, smack you with a crucifix? Note also, the scene where Ela and Quara pray before the shrine of Os Venerados.
The Ender saga is full of Card's religion-- you just have to know where to look.
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"you can't really accuse my faith of being contrary to reason when it is precisely because of past experience that has statistically shown my religious beliefs to be true that I continue to believe them"
Annie, I'm afraid that I've got to challenge the word "statistically" in that sentence, but I'll otherwise leave it alone. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Ah. So you're not saying that your statement was reflexive? That you were merely asserting that the existence of rationality does not deny faith, but not necessarily that the existence of faith does not deny rationality?
That statement wasn't reflexive, no. However, given the premise, "There is at least one member of the set of persons exhibiting rational thinking who also exhibits faith," then it is necessarily true that "There is at least one member of the set of persons exhibiting faith who also exhibits rational thinking."
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Anyway, after the problems caused by the idea of banning marriage they adopted it as a ritual in strict correlation with God and the church... All these "evolutions" and "creations" of different religions are part of what makes me stay away from any particular one. I guess I'll just wait until I'm dead to draw the conclusion... ![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
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who asked about Herbert!![[Frown]](frown.gif)
) The problem with this is: why wouldn't he seek this knowledge?! What kept it from seeking it?![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
This will just give me an excuse to read them again! In the meantime if somebody has the book near him - I think it was Xenocide, as at the end of Speaker for the Dead they were just getting together - please try to find that passage. It's when Novinha says she knows that he was not to blaim about Quim's death.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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