mindstalk | (Reply)

This post is going to feel like a weird role reversal of us, and possibly I'll find that I've overly simplified or stereotyped or completely misunderstood your position. Be kind!

To me, your comments sound like, paraphrased into my own words: "I respect various religions, and value studying them for their commentary on human life, or for useful ways of living life, and don't insult them by getting hung up on their truth value."

Now, I'm happy to engage in cultural appropriation and miscegenation, even without respecting the source I'm stealing from. And maybe I'm projecting the whole 'respect' thing onto you -- but you do prefer agnostic to atheist, and you're more UU than I am, so I fill in somewhat from observed UU behavior.

But "after all, it's not a work of God, it's a work of Man" seems to be begging the very question under debate. (And a statement which sounds more atheist than agnostic in certainty.) Religions don't consider themselves the work of Man, but the work of God! The Christian martyrs didn't die for a better way of community or even stuff like loving your neighbor, they died for the salvation of their eternal souls. They may not even have had texts yet to take literally, but they had core supernatural beliefs which continue to be key to Christianity. Orthodox Jews will defend the beliefs that God appeared to Moses, and then to the entire Hebrew people, and that the laws they follow are literally the commands of God to his chosen people. Muslims will defend that Gabriel dictated to Mohammed; Hindus have their own claims to revelation. These aren't literalist freaks, but the historical mainstream of what their religion is based on. Without the truth of the Resurrection, or the dictation, a lot of them feel, reasonably, that there'd be no point to their religion, nice cultural practices notwithstanding. And certainly no point to their having suffered, or killed, for those practices.

I study other religions for fun, out of curiosity. I can imagine plundering from them too. And I'd say "it's the work of Man", but I'm the unabashed 'atheist'. And I know that they, or lots of them, would say "no it's not, by God!" (very crucial comma there) Seeing *you* casually throw out that line makes me think one of us is missing something, though I really don't know who.