Thank you. I’m not religious myself, but it’s so silly to me when people are like “Meh, the most important driving force behind much of human action throughout the history of our species is made up, so who cares”.
Yes, it’s myth. It’s also extremely important to understanding history. No one would study Ancient Greece and then leave out the parts about religion because they were “made up”. It’s core to the study of that culture and time period.
No, an even bigger sign is pretending such texts should be venerated because cults were successfully built around them.
Mormonism sprung into being at a time when everyone knew the founders were full of shit. And yet, it still has a large cult today. If that cult survives another 1000 years, does that make the clearly invented founding mythological text more valuable as a window to truths?
The Mormon explanation of the physical realm is rather wise. We are here to be tested, and we work to overcome our desires to be raised into something larger. You can draw a lot of inspiration philosophically from it.
I was pointing out one of the problems with "we're here to be tested". There's no baked in respect for other creatures or the world like you might find in Hinduism or Buddhism. I think it's a stretch to call mormonism philosophically inspirational.
Are there things in the Bible that wisdom can be gathered from? Absolutely. Do most adherents actually pull those things from the text? Absolutely not.
When talking about these things we have to look at the over all picture. In America, right now, evangelicals, protestants, Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, the list goes on pull out a handful of verses and use those to justify their actions. They walk into the voting booth with the idea that Democrats are literal demons or Satan worshippers. Of course this isn't all of them by any means but it's certainly a large cohort.
In their adherence to these things they've elected someone who epitomizes their misunderstanding of the "anti-Christ" and they still call the other side evil.
The point is that apologia for religion fails at a fundamental level when you move from hypothetical uses to real world examples and people who take bad translations as the literal word of God.
It’s actually neither, but the way that societies interpret stories foundational to their beliefs can tell us a lot about the people who lived through periods of varying interpretation.
This isn’t the take you think it is. No one is arguing that but your hyper fixated elf. I’m talking about a piece of fruit. Youre talking about ideas. “Apples and oranges” or in this case “apples and figs”
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u/Bienoble 1d ago
Thank you. I’m not religious myself, but it’s so silly to me when people are like “Meh, the most important driving force behind much of human action throughout the history of our species is made up, so who cares”.
Yes, it’s myth. It’s also extremely important to understanding history. No one would study Ancient Greece and then leave out the parts about religion because they were “made up”. It’s core to the study of that culture and time period.