A comment I left in someone else's journal that I want to put in mine

[xiphias]

So, one of the people on my friends list was in a discussion on someone else's journal, about the nature of religion, and was mentioning the discussion, and I figured I should jump in and offer my 2 cents. And as long as I offered them there, I figured I could offer them here.

(As it turned out, my input wasn't actually useful, because people just sort of ignored it and said, "Well, despite all historical evidence and theological study which shows that I'm wrong, I still think I'm right." I eventually had to say, "Oh yeah? Well, YOUR definition of religion is WRONG, and mine is RIGHT, and I know this because people pay me $90 a week to teach their kids what religion is." I hate using "arguments from authority." I just kinda got frustrated. . . )

I was pointed toward this discussion by jehanna, as this is a subject we've talked about before, and, as a Hebrew School teacher, this is one of the things which I teach.

Throughout history, there have been several "sea changes" in the idea of what constitutes a religion, which makes the definition difficult, since there remain religions which were created and continue to exist under previous definitions.

The earliest definition of religion of which I am aware (and that doesn't meant it's the earliest -- just that it's the earliest I've personally studied) could be defined as "a collection of tribal beliefs, taboos, and rituals personal to and particular to a specific tribe and location."

If you are a member of the tribe, living in an area, you have specific tribal identifiers and customs which you share. If someone else marries into your tribe, that person adopts your identifiers and customs.

If you conquer another area, you bring your gods with you. If you are conquered and become part of another culture, you adopt those gods, customs, taboos, and beliefs.

There can be synthesis and syncretism, absorbing and integrating other subcultures, making a larger religion, but your fundamental ideas of gods, and religions, being localized and personal are the earliest forms that I've studied.

The first sea-change happens around the mid-sixth century BCE, in several places around the globe. Before that point, you did have some theologians who were considering the notion of syncretism, and wondering whether gods, localized and personal, could all be projections and expressions of some form of uber-god. Both Hindu and Greek philosophers and theologians had considered this notion, but it wasn't a major part of day-to-day religious belief or experience -- while it was a notion that theologians and scholars might have played with, your average guy-on-the-street wouldn't be familiar with it, and would have just had his or her localized, personal, and familial gods.

Around the mid-sixth century BCE, that began to change. The Buddha started teaching a set of philosophies and beliefs that were universal. At the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, the Hebrews, scattered throughout the Babylonian Empire, redefined their localized god of the Ark of the Covenant to be a universal god, who could be worshiped from anywhere in the world, and who, in fact, had dominion over the entire world, thereby changing their existing Hebrew/Israelite religion into something new called Judaism.. And, in the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism taught of a universal creator god, Ahura Mazda, opposed by a god of evil, Ahriman, who created all things in the universe and had dominion over all things.

These religions, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism brought forth the ideas of universal religions, religions that could be followed from anywhere in the world by any people, regardless of tribal affiliation, family, or location. Add to this the philosophical schools of Confucianism and Taoism, and, fifty or a hundred years later, the flowering of Greek philosophy which also brought forth the ideas of unknowable universal gods of which the known gods were syncretic projections (a variation of this teaching is what Socrates was executed for), and you have a huge, amazing shift in the concepts of what gods are, and what religion is.

One obvious change is that you now have the ability to have missionaries. Now that you've decoupled the notion of "religion" from the notions of "place" and "tribe", you have the ability to have people go out and tell other people about your religion, and see if you can't convince them to be part of your religion. That wasn't possible before, and the ability to have large-scale syncretic religions, I think, allowed for the creation of more culturally-homogeneous larger empires.

The next major change happened with Jesus, or, rather, with Paul.

Paul's innovation was to create a kind of religion decoupled not only from "place" and "tribe", but also from "culture", "taboo", and "ritual" (although ritual was put back later by other people). And to add in a new component to replace them: "belief".

Each religion which has been created since Paul has, so far, more-or-less followed this model: it's a system of belief, in which the IMPORTANT thing is "how you believe", which has certain rituals and behaviors associated with it, but those behaviors and rituals are PART of the religions rather than BEING the religion. Each (major) religion created since Paul has not been restricted to a tribe, or to a culture. At least officially.

The problem is, of course, that we humans evolved as tribal creatures. Thus, even though new religions like Christianity and Islam have no racial or tribal component, we still assign racial and tribal identifications to them. You say "Muslim", and most people think "Arab", even though there's no such connection in the religion.

So, those are three models of religion that have existed: the "tribal/cultural/personal" model, the "universal/cultural/ritual" model, and the "universal/belief" model.

It's important to note that these models all flow into one another, without any hard dividing lines -- and that none of them are extinct. Religions built on each of these models exist today.

And that's one of the problems that, for instance, Christians and Muslims have in understanding other religions. They are looking at other religions from their framework, and therefore totally misunderstand religions built on other frameworks.

Comments

[rosefox]

That's very interesting and useful for developing fictional belief systems. Thank you!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Can I assume that you've read papersky's "King's Peace/King's Name" books?

Because that is a book in which you have a religious conflict between localized/place-centric religion and universal religion. With, of course, all the gods in question being active in the world.

One of the bits which I love about that is that one of the ways that this is rectified is that at least some of the localized gods begin worshipping the larger, universal god. . .

[rosefox]

I haven't, actually. I'll look them up in my Copious Free Time (tm).

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

If you've ever wanted to see what a good Arthurian pastiche looks like, you want to read them.

[rosefox]

Good to know. *)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I got this from a couple of odd places, actually -- one is that in Greece now, a lot of Greek gods are around as saints. They never had a Reformation in the Orthodox church, so you get St Dionysos, and if you ask formally it's some old dead bishop but you get folk stories about him inventing wine. And some friends are I were talking about this -- St Paraskevi is Aphrodite, and St Nikolas is Poseidon and so on, and I thought well, obviously, St Paul converted them.

This comes especially easily as a thought if you're familiar with the Irish stories about St Patrick converting various entities from Celtic stories -- though my absolute favourite one is about Ossian, come back from fairyland listening to St Patrick and saying yes, OK, yes, Jesus, yes, sins, OK, saviour, God, yes, Heaven, Hell, OK, yes, but what about Finn, who died before you brought this message? And St Patrick says well, Finn's in Hell. And Ossian says "I'd rather be in Hell with Finn than in Heaven without him," and gets off his magic horse and crumbles to dust.

I really admire the seventh century monks for writing that one down.

And incidentally -- people tend to write a lot of crap about historical polytheism without spending two seconds looking at how Hinduism works. And RPG religion systems drive me mad where you have a pantheon and you have to *believe* in only one god, because the people writing it have started off with their heads so deeply inside Christianity they can't see anything else.

[zdenka]

That bit about Greek Orthodox saints is fascinating. And yes, that Ossian story is way cool.

An aside

[mopti.livejournal.com]

I would be more familiar with the name Oisín. When I was in college I was a member of the mountaineering club, and on one hike as we entered a valley (beneath Kippure), the leader mentioned that this was the valley in which Oisín had let his foot touch the ground. (I must check if that location is referred to in any published source.)

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Just on a quick note for current D&D (which was a big offender in previous incarnations), characters are encouraged to worship a whole pantheon. They may have one particular patron deity, but there's still the pantheon. Belief in the other deities isn't usually in doubt when there are religious miracle-workers. It does make poly-pantheism kind of interesting, actually... (is it a different god, or one who just uses several different names?)

[kyra-ojosverdes.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I found this very useful. It helped some stuff about which I've been thinking for some time coalesce into an "OH!" Which is great. :-)

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

And yet there are still groups like the Parsis out there, with a strict set of racial guidelines to who can be a member.

The Parsis are, of course, dwindling.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And the Zoroastrians, too. Same issue.

[cheshyre]

Alas Freddie Mercury...

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Same people. Different name.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Whups. Silly me.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh, another thing related to that that I didn't mention -- groups can switch back to earlier forms, as well.

Judaism, under the Roman Empire was a expanding proselytising religion, based on the ritual/univeral model. Under the Caliphate, the Islamic rulers saw, reasonably enough, a competing proselytising as a potential threat. So Judaism changed, partially at least, back into a primarily tribal religion. Still universal and not place-based, but it switched back into a tribal form, specifically to make it less threatening to our Islamic overlords (did I say "overlords?" I meant "protectors.")

[zdenka]

That's interesting; I'd always assumed that proselytization was just not a part of Judaism, and so now I'm curious. Can you say more about that?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. The proselytizing tradition started in Christianity with Paul didn't come out of nowhere -- that was part of Judaism at the time. I don't think it was ever as central to Judaism as "bringing the message" is to some branches of Christianity, but it was there from the Diaspora to the Caliphate, with, I get the impression, its peak during the Roman era.

Um.

Dunno what else to say. You've got bunches of stories in the Talmud about various rabbis talking to Roman matrons or various kings or whatever and converting them; the Hillel and Shammai story about "tell me the Torah while I stand on one foot and I'll become Jewish" is a story about converting someone. . .

[goljerp]

Actually, it's not just Islam that caused Judiasm to drop the proselytizing bit; after Christianity assimilated the Roman empire, they passed laws (um, of Constantine? Brain is a bit dead at the moment) which ensured that Jews had a right to exist, but of course as an object lesson ("See, look at these miserable people who won't listen to the TRUTH staring 'em in the face."). Letting them convert others was definitely not part of that plan, and was not encouraged. As time went on and the Jews persisted in not converting (and the "second coming" persisted in not happening), the Christian laws concerning Jews became more and more restrictive. Meanwhile, there were areas of the Muslim world where the clear laws about Jews, the status thereof, were ignored (at least to a certain extent). (See: Al-Andalus, aka Spain) (Please don't tell Prof. Mark Cohen, one of the cited authors in the wikipedia article, that my memory is so foggy. I really did listen in his class, but it was several years ago and I am running a fever.)

[yardlong.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. Very helpful.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Oh, that makes a lot of sense and crystallises some vague thinks I'd had but got lost with, thankyou. You're a very clear, logical teacher, btw :)

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

So what was the opposing argument? Because I see this as a "well yeah" thing. I remember a professor of mine in undergrad talking about how Jonah was a sign of the shift from place-based to universal - the idea that a) you can't run away, you can't go outside god's jurisdiction, and b) god is god of Niniveh too.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"Naw; religion has to be based on belief and can't be part of cultural membership. Because I don't think it can be."

[redbird]

I think that shows not only that the person is looking at a limited set of religions, but has a limited view of how people approach even those religions: "Catholic" and "Protestant" in Northern Ireland are ethnicity as well as ritual or belief, and there are plenty of people in the world who define themselves as Christian, not because of belief or current practice, but because their parents were Christian and had them baptized, and maybe because that's the default of what they expect people to be if they aren't explicitly and actively of some other religion.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right. It was a very frustrating discussion for just that reason.

I have my own background in various types of study relating to this, and they did the same thing to me they did to xiphias. "Your evidence is irrelevant, because it doesn't match my stated opinion". I should mention that the determined know-nothings are all tech-heads, none of whom have done any real academic or theological study of religion. Why ask the question when you think you already know the answer?

[redbird]

This is another case where my liberal education is standing me in good stead, I think. I haven't done what I'd consider real academic or theological study of religion (one undergraduate course on Japanese religion, most of which I've now forgotten, because it looked like an easy course my last semester when I needed the credit for graduation). But I read books, on all sorts of things, and I talk to people, and even listen to them.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Nicely done. Thanks for posting it.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the explaination of how religion changed over the years. I was unaware of the radical change to how religion was done that was introduced by Paul. It definately clarifies some things in my eyes, and gives me a better understanding of why some people try to force their religion down others throats unnecessarily.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Paul doesn't come out of nowhere, obviously -- the Essene sect to which John the Baptist belonged had some of it. But he definitely crystalized and really solidified and clarified the ideas.

A Potted History of Religion!

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about these issues recently, so for that reason plus all the others, thank you for posting this.

*saves this*